Winded from the chase, Mazzano and Chiavaro surrendered. LeDoux discovered .38 bullets in Mazzano’s pocket and a loaded revolver that Chiavaro had tossed along the tracks. Wunderly caught up to the group and took custody of the suspects, saying, “OK, they’re our babies now.”
Downtown Akron bustles at night in this 1917 postcard of North Main Street. This view is looking north from the Buchtel Hotel. Author’s collection.
Akron’s old police station is pictured at South High Street and Quarry Street (now Bowery) in this 1911 postcard. Author’s collection.
The Akron officer called for the patrol wagon and loaded the men into it, stopping Mazzano when he tried to use a seat cushion to rub gunpowder residue from his hands. The young, sullen hoodlum later asked to use a washroom at the police station but was rebuffed. He initially denied being the gunman, claiming that “Joe Belo” shot the officer. Technically, that was true because Belo was his alias. Officers found his mangled .38 revolver, apparently run over by a streetcar, in a gutter near the scene of the shooting, and a .32-caliber Colt in the doorway of the Hosfield & Rinker clothing store on South Main.
“I was sitting in the chief’s office talking to Mazzano when they brought in the gun that the car had run over and put in on the chief’s desk,” Italian American private detective George Martino later testified. “I pointed to the gun, which was a Colt .38 police special and said to Mazzano ‘Is this the one you had?’ Mazzano answered ‘yes.’”
Officer Joe Petras transported Mazzano and Chiavaro to Peoples Hospital (known today at Akron General Medical Center) and marched them into the operating room, where Patrolman Gethin Richards was waiting. The wounded officer looked carefully at the two downcast men standing at the foot of his bed.
“That is the fellow who shot me,” Richards said, pointing to Mazzano. “And that other one was with him. There was another one. Still bigger than either of these.”
Ducking in and out of doorways, Rosario Borgia escaped detection as he scurried toward the Buchtel Hotel at South Main and East Mill Street in downtown Akron. It was five long blocks from the scene of the officer’s shooting, but he managed to sneak back to the room he had reserved two nights earlier. Samuel Holbrook, night clerk at the Buchtel, saw Borgia arrive around 1:30 a.m. and go straight to his room but didn’t think anything of it. Borgia often stayed at the hotel on nights when he didn’t feel like going back to his wife in Barberton.
The gangster must have breathed a sigh of relief when he closed the door behind him. Gaining confidence with each tick of the clock, he turned off the lights and climbed into bed. Surely he had gotten away with it. About two hours later, he heard a loud, insistent knock on the door.
“Open up or I’ll break in,” demanded Detective Edward J. McDonnell, the kid brother of Patrolman Will McDonnell. He and Patrolman Verne Cross had checked the front desk around 3:30 a.m. to see if anyone had arrived after 1:00 a.m. The hulking Borgia, the only latecomer, opened the door and feigned ignorance when asked about the shooting. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
Detectives Eddie McDonnell and Pasquale “Patsy” Pappano attend the 1931 funeral of Captain Frank B. McGuire at St. Sebastian Church. From the Akron Beacon Journal.
Cool as a cucumber, Borgia identified himself as Russel Berg and insisted that he had dined at a chop suey restaurant around 10:00 p.m. and taken a walk to get some fresh air, but he didn’t know anything about an officer being shot. When the officers escorted the suspect to headquarters for further questioning, Detective Harry Welch casually shredded the man’s alias, noting, “Hello, Rosario. Haven’t seen you recently.”
Steadfastly denying any involvement in the attack on Richards, Borgia was taken to the city jail, where he was reunited with Mazzano and Chiavaro, along with Salvatore Bambolo, who was being held as a material witness. The sleepless men exchanged words in Italian and waited to see what would happen next.
Across town, police woke up the relatives of Gethin Richards and rushed them to Peoples Hospital. Sergeant Marvin Galloway, who spent the predawn hours quizzing the wounded officer about the shooting, was present when the cop’s brother Jack Richards arrived.
Gangster Paul Chiavaro used dum-dum bullets coated with oil of garlic to make the flesh blister. Courtesy of Akron Police Museum.
“They’ve got me at last,” Gethin Richards said. “You’ll look after my two little girls, won’t you, Jack?”
“You bet I will,” the teary-eyed brother replied.
Next, the two bewildered daughters—Marie, age ten, and Violet, age six—were ushered into the room with their grandparents. “He called them to his side and kissed them goodbye,” Galloway later testified.
Richards grew weaker after surgery. By late morning, he drifted in and out of consciousness. No longer able to speak, he answered questions with a nod of his head. Relatives were at his bedside when the thirty-seven-year-old officer died at 12:36 p.m. on Tuesday, March 12. Akron had lost its fourth cop in three months.
Cletus G. Roetzel, twenty-eight, Summit County’s dashing young prosecutor, called for a special grand jury about twenty minutes after Richards died. Recalling the 1900 riot, Chief John Durkin had Sheriff Jim Corey drive Borgia, Mazzano and Chiavaro to the Cuyahoga County Jail in Cleveland for their protection.
More than seven hundred people, including most of the police force, attended the funeral on Friday, March 14, which began at the family’s home on Grant Street and concluded with Masonic rites at Mount Peace Cemetery, where Richards was buried next to his wife, Frieda, a stone’s throw from the fresh grave of Patrolman Costigan. Reverend E.W. Simon of Trinity Lutheran Church officiated. A shield of carnations forming “28,” the officer’s badge number, rested on the casket.
Pedestrians and motorists halted as the hearse passed through downtown Akron. A military band led the procession, followed by sixty officers—including pallbearers Fred Vierick, Edward Hieber, Andrew Croghan, John Duffy, Verne Cross and Marvin Galloway—and then, finally, a parade of automobiles.
“There were tears in the eyes of the onlookers, and a murmured word of sympathy,” the Beacon Journal reported. “Marie, the elder of the two children, wept her eyes red; only six-year-old Violet looked wide-eyed and wondering. In a moment of intense grief, the aged mother-in-law was overheard to murmur, ‘Has God forsaken me?’”
Later that afternoon, a grand jury indicted Borgia, Mazzano and Chiavaro on charges of first-degree murder and carrying concealed weapons. At least a dozen Akron lawyers refused to act as the defense counsel for the suspects, who returned from Cleveland and were arraigned Monday, March 18, before Summit County Common Pleas judge Charles C. Benner. A.C. Bachtel, clerk of courts, read the indictments with the aid of an Italian translator, and all three defendants pleaded not guilty.
Unbeknownst to Borgia and Mazzano, though, Chiavaro had ratted them out in the police interrogation room. After pleading not guilty, he signed a confession in Prosecutor Roetzel’s office with a court stenographer and translator present but no defense lawyer.
“Who shot Richards?” Roetzel asked.
“Mazzano,” Chiavaro said.
“Who else was present?”
“Borgia and myself.”
“Now, in your own words, tell us what happened.”
In a matter-of-fact matter, Chiavaro described the officer’s murder to Roetzel:
As we turned north on Main Street, after rounding the corner on Exchange Street, Richards ran out of the alley. Borgia was in the lead. Richards stopped us. Next to Borgia was Mazzano. I was in the rear. Richards started to search Borgia. His hands were in the air. Mazzano was about 5 feet in the rear. Suddenly, Borgia grabbed Richards’ arms and stepped down. Mazzano had drawn his gun and as Borgia ducked, Mazzano opened fire. As Richards was hit, Borgia tore himself away and ran north on Main Street. Mazzano fired five shots and we ran through the alley and back toward the railroad yards.
The county prosecutor had heard enough. In the event of a c
onviction, he would insist on the electric chair. “It must be either the death penalty or nothing else,” Roetzel told a reporter.
But the three men wouldn’t be tried alone. Patrolman Pasquale “Patsy” Pappano, age twenty-five, an Italian-born cop who had been on the force for only six months, was working the case.
The six-foot, barrel-chested rookie was a native of Roseto Valfortore in Puglia, Italy, who had immigrated to the United States at age eleven. Chief Durkin needed an officer who understood the language and the customs. “The others couldn’t speak Italian and the chief said, ‘We’re having so much trouble with these Borgia boys and others, I want that Pappano boy with me,” Pappano later recalled.
A trusted cop, Pappano cultivated informants who told him that Furnace Street gang members Lorenzo Biondo and Anthony Manfriedo were hiding out in New York City, waiting for the heat to die down in Akron. He took the news to Detective Harry Welch, who contacted Michael Fiaschetti, an Italian-born detective sergeant in the New York Police Department.
Fiaschetti was commander of the “Italian Squad,” a five-man unit of Italian American cops whose mission was to investigate organized crime and bring gangsters to justice. Fiaschetti operated a network of stool pigeons to keep tabs on underworld figures. If those Akron boys were in New York, he could find out.
Manfriedo had a noticeable bullet wound, a memento from when the gang shot, stabbed and threw him over a cliff for refusing to bump off a rival. “Look for the man with a hole in his hand,” Welch wrote.
JUDGMENT DAYS
Summit County judges weren’t exactly lining up to put the Furnace Street gang on trial, but a small man rose to the challenge. Common Pleas judge Ervin D. Fritch, age forty-four, who stood barely five feet tall, agreed to hear the case against Frank Mazzano, the first member of the gang to face trial. “I never did belong to the Society of Scared Rabbits,” Fritch later explained.
Known for his studious mind and acerbic wit, the bespectacled Fritch had deftly swatted away comments about his slight build during four years on the bench. “If I had known you needed to be a big, imposing-looking man to be an attorney, I would never have studied law,” he said.
On the other extreme, Cletus Roetzel was a strapping athlete who had been a star pitcher at Buchtel College. At age twenty-five, he became the youngest prosecutor in Summit County history when voters elected him in 1916. With the nation at war, however, he enlisted in the army in early 1918 and was awaiting military training at Camp Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, when the Mazzano case arrived.
That’s why Roetzel chose his one-term predecessor, Charles P. Kennedy, age thirty-four, to serve as a special assistant. “I shall be very glad to have Kennedy with me in the trial of the case,” Roetzel announced. “We get along well together and the fact that Kennedy was formerly prosecutor will make the work easier.”
The reluctant, court-appointed defense team consisted of Cuyahoga Falls attorney Orlando Wilcox, age sixty-six, former president of the Akron Bar Association, and Akron lawyer Amos H. Englebeck, age thirty-two.
The Summit County Courthouse, where the Furnace Street gang went on trial, still stands today on South High Street in downtown Akron. Author’s collection.
Nearing the end of his career, Wilcox was a folksy counselor known for philosophical musings (“I’ve just decided after a vast amount of study that the rat with the shortest tail is the one who gets through the hole first.”) He served President William McKinley as an assistant U.S. district attorney in the Indian Territory from 1898 to 1900, trying sixty-four murder cases in Muskogee in the future state of Oklahoma. As such, he knew a losing case when he saw one.
Englebeck was an even-keeled attorney with a mirthful side, erupting in booming laughter when he found something funny. A center for the Ohio State football team in 1905–6, he stood six-foot-three and tipped the scales at 265 pounds, earning the ironic nickname “Tiny.” Outside the courtroom, he was an ardent patron of the arts, once explaining, “To this day, the heart has ruled the world, and not the head.”
An overflow crowd, mostly men, attended the opening of the trial Tuesday, April 9, 1918—not even a month after Gethin Richards had been killed. Sheriff Jim Corey escorted a handcuffed Mazzano through the tunnel linking the Summit County Jail to the courthouse in downtown Akron. The trial was held under heavy security, with plainclothes officers mingling with spectators in the second-floor courtroom. The drama soon fizzled as the prosecution and defense wrangled over jury selection for a week. After disqualifying nearly one hundred candidates, the sides finally agreed on a twelve-man panel on April 17.
Judge Fritch told the jurors that he wouldn’t sequester them. Despite the defense’s objections, the jurors could sleep in their own beds and read newspaper articles about the trial, but they shouldn’t speak to anyone about the case or form an opinion until the end.
Mazzano’s legal team barely put up a defense. In opening remarks, Wilcox told the jury that he didn’t even want to be there. “I am not here of my own choosing,” he said. “I’m here because I was appointed to defend by the court. We are here merely to cross-question and to bring to your attention such facts as will aid you in arriving at your final conclusion.”
Fritch ruled that all Italian spectators would be removed from the court during the testimony of Italian witnesses. The judge hoped the maneuver would allow witnesses to speak freely without intimidation, but it alienated the defendant, whose sister and brothers had traveled from New York to attend the proceedings. Sometimes a translator was available for Mazzano, although not always.
Freshly shaven, powdered and primped, Mazzano proved to be a dapper defendant in his neatly pressed suits, checkered vests, floral ties and polished shoes. He occasionally took out his pocket mirror in court to inspect the careful grooming of his thick, black hair. Behind him sat his girlfriend, Zella Fry, who visited him in jail each day after court was adjourned. He enjoyed reading the front-page articles about his case.
Prosecutor Roetzel called more than fifty witnesses in the trial. George Fink described his altercation with the Italians. Sergeant Marvin Galloway choked back tears as he discussed his interview with the dying officer. Jack Richards cried when recalling the hospital visit with his brother. Detective Henry LeDoux told the court how he captured the two suspects along the tracks.
By most accounts, Mazzano seemed bored and showed little emotion throughout the trial. The Akron Press, however, in its typical sensational style, claimed that the Sicilian defendant was on the verge of breaking down when the prosecution displayed the slain officer’s bloodstained clothes in court along with morgue photos. According to the Press, “Frank Mazzano shuddered and his hands twitched nervously in court.…His olive skin grew several shades lighter, his eyelids flickered, he moistened his lips with his tongue and nervously twined and intertwined his fingers.”
In a bit of courtroom theatricality, Roetzel introduced a surprise witness in the case. J. Henry Bair, deputy sheriff at the county jail, testified that Mazzano accidentally incriminated himself that week regarding a key piece of evidence: the green hat found at the scene of the shooting. As Bair testified:
Mazzano had been kicking because we hadn’t given him all his clothes, so I told him I would get them for him. I took him down in the sheriff’s office where I had his handbag with some stuff in it. He looked at that and it wasn’t all. Over on the hat rack was my overcoat and hat, a soft black hat, that green soft hat, and that coat. Mazzano looked over at the rack and said, “That’s my coat and hat, too.” “Are you sure that’s your hat?” I asked him, “Yes, I’m sure. Don’t you think I know my own clothes when I see them? I’ll show you.” And he went over and put the hat on. “There,” he says. “See, it fits.” And he took it off and threw it on the couch.
Summit County Common Pleas judge Ervin Fritch stood barely five feet tall but was a towering presence in local justice. From the Akron Beacon Journal.
Prosecutor Cletus Roetzel led the case against the Furnace
Street gang in 1918. He served two terms before resuming his law practice. From the Akron Beacon Journal.
As if the dying patrolman’s positive identification weren’t enough, Mazzano admitted owning the hat that witnesses found at the crime scene. The vise was slowly tightening, but Mazzano declined to testify. “I’ll not squeal at this stage of the game,” Mazzano told a reporter.
Similarly, fellow gangster Paul Chiavaro was called to the stand, but he wouldn’t testify, despite his earlier signed confession to the prosecutor.
“Who killed Gethin Richards?” Roetzel demanded in court.
“I have nothing to say,” Chiavaro replied. “I don’t know.”
“To refresh your recollection, didn’t you tell me that you saw a gun in Frank Mazzano’s hand and you saw him raise his hand and saw a spurt of flame and heard the report when the policeman was coming towards you?” Roetzel asked.
“I don’t know nothing and I don’t know nobody,” Chiavaro said. Rosario Borgia, also being held at the county jail, had sworn his henchmen to secrecy.
For the defense, Wilcox and Englebeck literally seemed to be going through the motions. They made objections here and there and postulated a nebulous theory about mistaken identity but called no witnesses who could help deflect the prosecution’s constant battering. When closing arguments were made April 23, Englebeck thanked jurors and urged them to keep an open mind and give Mazzano “the benefit of every possible doubt.” Wilcox jolted the courtroom by saying merely, “The defense rests.”
Meanwhile, Kennedy, the assistant prosecutor, delivered an eloquent, impassioned address to the jury, saying it was their duty as American citizens to convict Mazzano. “The time has come that we must show these men who come to this city and this county for the purpose of committing crime and making a living any way except by honest work that we will not tolerate murder,” Kennedy said. “Has human life become so cheap in Summit County that it may be taken with impunity on the slightest excuse or none at all? No, the time has arrived when we must let the word go out through the city, the county, the state and through the country itself that Summit County juries will not allow murderers to be sent to the penitentiary for a few years and then let them out to commit such crimes again.”
Mafia Cop Killers in Akron Page 5