Mafia Cop Killers in Akron

by Mark J. Price

When Roetzel called his first witness to testify, it was like a bolt of lightning hit the defense table. Convicted murderer Frank Mazzano, the protégé of the Furnace Street gangster, casually walked past the open-jawed defendant and took a seat on the stand. Mazzano, who barely made a peep during his own trial, was about to sing like a canary. As Roetzel later explained:

  Mazzano summoned me to the county jail the day after his conviction and told me he wanted to go on the stand and tell the whole truth. I told him I could promise him nothing and that if he confessed he would be doing so upon his own responsibility. He insisted and said that he had killed Richards, that the jury’s verdict was just, that he knew he must die in the electric chair for his crime, and that he hoped for no reward for telling the truth…and that he wanted to relieve his mind of the awful weight of the crime he was carrying.

  Borgia tried to make eye contact with Mazzano, but the kid wouldn’t look his way. Through the aid of interpreter Tony Jordan, Mazzano told the prosecution that Borgia had tricked him into not testifying in the first trial. Now condemned to execution, he had nothing to lose. “He told me not to tell anything,” Mazzano testified. “That it would be better for me. The night before I was going to go on the witness stand in my own case, Rosario told me not to go and that they wouldn’t send me to the electric chair. So I didn’t testify. He told me, too, not to testify against him and he would get me lawyers to appeal my case.”

  As Borgia grew visibly agitated at the defense table, Mazzano spilled the beans. He explained how he shot Mansfield white slaver Carlo Bocaro at Borgia’s command because the Akron gang leader didn’t like him. He noted that Borgia also “had it in for” Sicilian rival Frank Bellini, the original target on the night Richards was shot. “Rosario wanted Bellini killed because they were bad friends,” Mazzano testified. The gang was considering hunting down Bellini at his North Howard Street home in the middle of the night early March 12 when the officer got in the way.

  In a matter-of-fact manner that chilled listeners, Mazzano described the cop’s slaying as nonchalantly as if he were describing what he had for breakfast that morning. He, Borgia and Paul Chiavaro had just turned the corner from Exchange Street to Main Street when the patrolman surprised them at Kaiser Alley, he said:

  There the policeman stopped us. He called “Hands up.” He had a mace in his hands. First, Richards started to search Borgia. Borgia caught Richards by the arm and twisted it behind the policeman’s back. Borgia then called to me, “Shoot him. If he finds the gun on us, we will all go to the electric chair.”

  Then I shot. The first two shots didn’t hit the policeman. One of them almost hit Rosario in the head. He yelled at me, “What’s the matter with you? Can’t you shoot straight? Are you trying to shoot me?”

  Chiavaro said “Go ahead and shoot. I’m watching. No one is looking.” Rosario had told Chiavaro to “Stand watch.” Then I took my gun in both hands and I shot Richards and hit him. Borgia left go of him then.

  The prosecutor introduced as evidence the mangled .38-caliber revolver that had been found along the streetcar tracks near the scene of the deadly shooting. “Did you ever have that gun in your possession?” Roetzel said.

  “Yes, that is the gun Rosario gave me,” Mazzano replied. “That is the gun I shot the officer with.”

  With Mazzano on the stand, the sensationalistic Akron Press had a field day in describing Borgia’s reactions to the squealing backstabber. The newspaper painted a grotesque picture of a guilty man cornered like a rat: “His skin, usually an olive hue, was pasty. His face was a bluish-gray, resembling the color of wood ashes. His lips, dry and parched, were drawn back from his teeth in a snarl. His eyes narrowed to mere slits and his fingers twitched nervously.”

  Borgia wore a frozen smile as his rival Bellini took the stand to corroborate Mazzano’s story. The businessman said that he and Borgia had feuded for years, and he didn’t buy it when the gangster called him to the Furnace Street pool hall with a peace offering. “It is lucky for Bellini that the gang didn’t find him the night Richards was murdered or he would not have been here to testify in this case,” Assistant Prosecutor Charles P. Kennedy told the packed courtroom.

  Gang leader Rosario Borgia didn’t fire a single shot against Akron police and fully expected to be cleared of murder charges. Courtesy of Akron Police Museum.

  Although there were dozens of witnesses yet to testify, defense attorneys A.E. Bernsteen and Stephen C. Miller knew they were already in trouble. They tried poking holes in the testimony of Mazzano, Bellini and other witnesses, questioning the accuracy of their memories, but the testifiers stuck to their stories. The defense had no choice but to put Borgia on the stand and hope that the jurors believed him.

  On May 16, Borgia took the stand before a hushed courtroom. He said it was true that he carried a gun, but he said it was because he feared that Bellini would try to kill him. He admitted that he was with Mazzano and Chiavaro on the night that Richards was gunned down, but he testified that he parted company with them before the shooting. Prosecutor Roetzel pounced on the alibi like a hungry cat on a fat mouse. In a heated exchange, the two men duked it out in court.

  Borgia: “When we went around the corner on Main Street, we walked a little ways and then Frank Mazzano stopped. ‘Well,’ Mazzano said, ‘I live south. I must leave you here and go back. I must go to bed.’ So I shook hands with him and started north.”

  Roetzel: “And where was Paul?”

  Borgia: “I think he was with Mazzano saying good night. I didn’t look. And then I…”

  Roetzel: “Although you knew Paul lived on Furnace Street and would walk north, too, you walked off without him?”

  Borgia: “Yes. When I got almost to the alley, a man came out and went past me.”

  Roetzel “A policeman?”

  Borgia: “I didn’t know. I couldn’t see. He went too fast and then in a minute I heard shots. Bang! Bang! Bang! And then I threw my gun into the doorway and walked back to the Buchtel and went to bed.”

  Roetzel: “You didn’t see the shooting then?”

  Borgia: “No, I never turned around. I didn’t know who was shot. I was afraid they might catch me with a gun on me and think I did it, so I threw my gun away.”

  Escorted back to jail after testifying, Borgia exploded in rage. “I was there when Frank Mazzano shot the policeman, but I didn’t have anything to do with it,” he told New York detective Michael Fiaschetti. “The whole thing is a frame-up on me by those Sicilians. I’m a Calabrian. If I’m convicted and sent to my death, it will be because those crooks were able to make the jury believe their lies.”

  During closing arguments, Assistant Prosecutor Kennedy told jurors, “If you decide that Rosario Borgia is guilty of first-degree murder, then you must vote for that verdict regardless of consequences. For if Borgia is found guilty of a crime which may cause him to lose his life, it will not be the jury, the prosecutor, the judge or the state which has passed that sentence upon him. It is his own deeds which will have condemned him.”

  Defense attorney Steve Miller countered that Borgia was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. “We are not here to rob the electric chair and we are not here to kidnap anyone from the penitentiary,” he told jurors. “We are not here to protect anyone guilty of the murder of Richards. The state has had its vengeance in the conviction of Mazzano. I could talk a week in behalf of Borgia because I believe he is innocent of the crime charged.”

  The jury began deliberations at 4:25 p.m. on Friday and broke for dinner at 7:30 p.m. before reconvening at 9:00 p.m. Borgia went back to his cell, put on his nightclothes and went to bed, thinking no news was good news. Sheriff Corey arrived at Borgia’s cell at 10:30 p.m. and told him, “The jury has agreed on a verdict.”

  As the boss was led away, Mazzano mused in his cell, “Here’s where Rosie gets his.”

  The courtroom was filling back up when Borgia arrived. Defense attorney A.E. Bernsteen had gone home for the night, leaving Miller in charg
e as assistant.

  “Have you reached a conclusion?” Judge Fritch asked the jury.

  “We have,” foreman Charles Currie said.

  Borgia scanned the faces of the jury for a hint as Currie read the verdict at 11:10 p.m.: “We, the jury in this case, being duly impaneled and sworn to well and truly try[,] and true deliverance make between the state of Ohio and the prisoner at the bar, Russell Berg alias Rosario Borgia, do find that the prisoner at the bar is guilty of murder in the first degree as charged in the indictment, and thereupon said defendant is ordered into the custody of the sheriff to await sentence.”

  “What does it mean?” Borgia asked his attorney.

  “Death chair,” Miller replied.

  THE GANG’S ALL HERE

  Rosario Borgia, Akron underworld czar, sputtered in disbelief after the verdict. “That was a hell of a jury!” he cried while being led back to his cell. “And that lawyer didn’t try to defend me.” Thinking it over, he muttered, “I suppose those Italians, those Sicilians, are satisfied now. They got me where they want me.” Borgia’s wife, Filomena, who hadn’t visited the jail in ten days, sent a fruit basket to her husband on the day after he was convicted. “To hell with this stuff,” he told a deputy. “Tell my wife to come to the jail to see me.” When she arrived, the couple quarreled. “Take me out of here immediately,” she told a jailer.

  After a day to calm down, Borgia began to regain his swagger. “Why should I be afraid if I have lost the case?” he told a jailer. “I’ll get a new trial. I got lots of money and I can get more.” His lawyers filed a motion for a new trial, complaining, among other things, that the case should have been heard in a different county and that jurors should have been sequestered. Judge Ervin D. Fritch swatted away the motion.

  Only a handful of spectators attended the hearing on Saturday, May 25, 1918, where Fritch sentenced Borgia to die in the electric chair. Asked if he wanted to make a statement for the record, Borgia merely sulked, “I have nothing to say.” He returned to his cell to await the trip to the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus.

  Later that day, Akron’s Italians celebrated the third anniversary of their native country’s entry into the Great War. Businesses closed early so everyone could attend a grand parade featuring musicians, floats, banners and a procession of two thousand Italian Americans. They marched from North Howard Street to Exchange Street and back, passing the county jail, where Borgia no doubt was still muttering.

  Following the murder trials in Akron, the Furnace Street gang was sentenced to the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

  With Borgia’s conviction, public interest waned in the Furnace Street gang, but there were still four more trials scheduled that summer. Next up for Judge Fritch was Pasquale Biondo, charged in the January 10 murder of Patrolman Edward Costigan. Although Biondo had signed a confession, he claimed he only did it because New York detective Michael Fiaschetti had tricked him into believing he’d get a lighter sentence.

  The court appointed Seney A. Decker and Carl Myers to serve as Biondo’s defense. “While I do not care for the task which has been assigned to me and did not solicit it, as an officer of the court, I feel it my duty to do the utmost for the defendant,” Decker announced. “He is entitled to a fair and impartial trial under the rules of the evidence.” However, in his opening statement June 13, Decker admitted that he and Myers were not familiar with the case but hoped to prove that the crime was not “a free act of a free agent.”

  Prosecutor Cletus Roetzel introduced Biondo’s confession of killing the “Red Policeman” for $150 under Borgia’s command. “You kill him or I’ll kill you,” Biondo quoted Borgia as saying. The state questioned dozens of witnesses, but Biondo’s own words probably were sufficient for a conviction during the climate of the time. As Assistant Prosecutor Charles P. Kennedy told jurors in his closing argument:

  If you let a man who has committed a crime like this one go unpunished, if you give a recommendation of mercy to a man who for $150 crept up silently behind a man whose very name he did not know and shot him down like a dog, a man who had done him no harm, then I say to you that you will have the thieves, thugs and murderers flocking into Akron as a fertile field for their crimes.

  The trial wrapped up in five days, and the jury deliberated only seventeen minutes before reaching a verdict. Biondo was found guilty of murder and sentenced to die in the electric chair. “I don’t care,” he told a jailer, adding facetiously, “I should worry.” Oh, but he did care. On July 4, the convicted killer tried to escape from the county jail.

  He and three other inmates overpowered Deputy John W. McCaslin in the shower room, and Biondo seized the officer’s gun and shot William F. Lowe, a trusty, in the abdomen when he tried to intervene. After a frantic search, Biondo couldn’t find the keys, though, and surrendered when Deputy Scott Ingerton pointed a gun at him and ordered him to surrender. Fortunately, the bullet missed Lowe’s stomach and liver, and he survived the shooting. Biondo was thrown back into his cell to await the trip to Columbus.

  Paul Chiavaro was the next gang member to be tried before Judge Fritch. Detective Harry Welch always suspected that Chiavaro was the killer of Guy Norris, the first victim of the gangland war, but he could never pin it on him. Instead, Chiavaro was charged in the March murder of Gethin Richards, even though the gangster had only served as a lookout.

  In the opening statement on June 28, defense attorney Stephen C. Miller contended that Chiavaro was only a spectator that deadly night and didn’t even belong to the gang. Miller audaciously claimed that his client had merely gone for a late-night stroll with Borgia and the others after meeting them at the Furnace Street pool hall owned by Joe Congena.

  Prosecutor Roetzel painted a grimmer picture, noting that Chiavaro was a hardboiled henchman who liked to use dum-dum bullets to inflict more damage on his victims, and he coated the bullets with oil of garlic to deaden the nerves and blister the skin. In other words, the guy wasn’t exactly a choirboy.

  Prison guards keep close watch on the barred cells of death row inmates at the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus. From the Akron Beacon Journal.

  Convicted killers Borgia and Frank Mazzano were called back to the stand to testify, and they largely repeated their statements from the earlier trials. Chiavaro, who only spoke broken English, took the stand on July 3 and got confused as Roetzel read back the gangster’s confession from earlier that year. When asked if those were his words, Chiavaro said, “I don’t know if I said it or not.” When Roetzel noted that Chiavaro had denied any involvement in the shooting after being arrested, the gangster said, “I was excited. I was excited. My head was mixed. I didn’t know what I was saying.”

  In closing arguments, prosecutors told jurors that even though Chiavaro served as a lookout, he was just as guilty of murder as Mazzano, the triggerman, and Borgia, the man who ordered the killing, because he had aided and abetted the death of Patrolman Richards. Jurors began deliberations at 4:30 p.m. on Friday afternoon and returned a verdict at 11:00 p.m. that night: guilty without recommendation of mercy. Sentenced to death at a July 13 hearing, Chiavaro could only grouse, “I am not to blame.”

  After the Chiavaro trial, Prosecutor Cletus Roetzel got ready for military training at Camp Taylor and turned over the reins to assistants Charles P. Kennedy and William A. Spencer. Meanwhile, Judge William J. Ahern took over for Judge Fritch. Perhaps that’s why the outcomes were so different—or maybe it was because of the defense lawyers.

  Lorenzo Biondo, alias James Palmieri and Jimmy the Bulldog, went on trial August 7 in the January slaying of Patrolman Joe Hunt. He hired Cleveland attorney Benjamin D. Nicola, age thirty-nine, as his defense lawyer, and it was an inspired choice. Nicola was born in Italy in 1879, immigrated to the United States at age nine and grew up in the Tuscarawas County town of Uhrichsville, where his family operated a general store and butcher shop.

  After high school, Nicola studied law at Ohio State University, passed the bar
exam in 1904 and put up a shingle in Cleveland, where he became the first Italian American lawyer in the city’s history. Unlike other attorneys for the Furnace Street gang, Nicola understood the Italian culture and spoke the language.

  His plan of attack in the Biondo trial was to discredit the confession that his client had given to New York detective Michael Fiaschetti after being captured in Brooklyn. In his opening statement, Nicola reminded jurors to keep their minds open because a man was presumed innocent until proven guilty.

  The electric chair awaits the Akron police killers at the Ohio Penitentiary. From the Akron Beacon Journal.

  The defense began to hammer away at Fiaschetti, the cosmopolitan cop described by co-counsel Henry Hagelbarger as “the dressy detective,” “the handy Andy” and “the courthouse favorite.”

  Anthony Manfriedo, who served as the lookout on the night that Costigan and Hunt were slain, took the stand to back up the defense’s contention that he and Lorenzo Biondo signed confessions because Fiaschetti promised them that they would escape the electric chair if they did. “They don’t want you, they want Borgia,” Manfriedo said the detective told them.

  In rebuttal, Kennedy called Fiaschetti to testify about his tactics with Biondo. “All I told him before he made the confession was that Manfriedo had made a true statement and that Mazzano had identified him as the man and that it would be better for him to tell the truth,” he said.

  With the war in Europe dominating headlines, Akron residents showed little interest in the Biondo case. The sweltering courtroom didn’t have air conditioning and sat mostly empty as summer temperatures soared to a record-breaking 104 degrees.

  In closing, Kennedy told jurors that Biondo was nothing but a coward for shooting Hunt in the back: “And what a price for a human life. A man that he did not know and against whom he had no grievance. A paltry $100, which this man Biondo tries now to tell you was forced upon him by Borgia.”