Detective Pasquale “Patsy” Pappano spent twenty-seven years with the department, retiring in 1944. “I’ve had my fill of pounding pavements and chasing criminals,” he explained. “I feel I’ve earned a good, long rest—and I intend to take one.” The Italian American cop was sixty-seven when he died after a short illness on January 31, 1960. “Patsy’s unique qualifications and reputation often induced police of other cities to ask for a loan of his services on tough cases,” reporter Kenneth Nichols recalled. “The hard shell he showed toward the lawless was just that—a shell. He was a kindly, good-natured man, a trencherman who could make a plate of Italian food vanish as a magician does a rabbit.”
During his first decade on the force, Stephen McGowan was shot three times and dodged at least another dozen bullets. In 1929, he helped capture gangster Pretty Boy Floyd, who was hiding under a bed at a Lodi Street home. He was promoted to lieutenant in 1930 and captain in 1942. McGowan loved being a policeman and refused to retire. “What would I do?” he said. “Sit in a rocking chair on my front porch? Everything that is dear to me is here in Akron and at the police station.” He had nearly forty-five years of service when he died of a heart attack behind the wheel of his cruiser on February 23, 1963. He was seventy-nine.
Unlike McGowan, Detective Will McDonnell had no qualms about dying on his front porch. After nineteen years of service, the detective retired on pension in May 1932, still carrying two slugs in his body from the 1919 shootout. “I’ve had enough excitement to last me a long time,” he once told a reporter. McDonnell died of a heart attack on August 30, 1953, on a porch swing at his Gale Street home. He was seventy-two.
Louis Hunt turned five years old the day his father, Joseph Hunt, a rookie officer, died on January 12, 1918. “I’ll grow up and I’ll be a cop—a good cop like my daddy,” the little boy vowed during the funeral. In 1938, Louis took the civil service exam and joined the force a year later at age twenty-seven. “My father never had a chance,” he explained. “I want to take up where he left off.” Somewhat surprisingly, his widowed mother, Adale, was in favor of the move. “It’s a dangerous life, but a good policeman is a fine citizen,” she told a reporter. The younger Hunt served thirty-three years on the force, working in the traffic division, vice squad, patrol division and communications before retiring as a sergeant in January 1974. “I’ve enjoyed working as a policeman,” Hunt said. He was seventy-eight when he died on May 25, 1991.
Judge Ervin D. Fritch retired in February 1943 after more than twenty-eight years on the Summit County Common Pleas bench. More than four hundred attended an Akron Bar Association banquet honoring him as “the best trial judge the county ever had.” In 1957, Fritch created a fund at the University of Akron that awards annual scholarships to students based on academics, financial need, moral character and ability. “No judge in our history has exceeded Judge Fritch in judicial interest, judicial temperament, judicial ability and the courage to meet the issues of the day,” retired Firestone executive Joseph Thomas noted in October 1963 during Fritch’s ninetieth birthday celebration. Fritch, a small man with a big brain, died on March 24, 1969, at age ninety-five.
Judge William J. Ahern Jr., who presided over the Peter Cafarelli and Vincenzo Damico cases, served a decade on the Summit County Common Pleas bench before stepping down in May 1923. He was only thirty-eight years old when he died unexpectedly on July 21, 1924, of heart failure after a lengthy battle with pneumonia. Judge Lionel S. Pardee, who succeeded Ahern, cried when he heard the news. “It is too bad that a young man with such a brilliant future had to die,” Pardee said. “Judge Ahern will be missed very much. He was a good friend of mine, and I always found him honest, courageous and a worker.”
Cletus G. Roetzel served two terms as Summit County prosecutor before resuming his law practice in Akron. In 1949, Pope Pius XII named Roetzel a Knight of the Order of St. Gregory the Great. He was the senior partner at Roetzel and Andress, a law firm that bears his name, when he died on October 15, 1973, at age eighty-four. He had served in leadership positions at the Akron Art Institute, Akron Bar Association, Catholic Service League, St. Thomas Hospital and the University of Akron. “The life he helped breathe into these institutions is his proud and continuing legacy to Akron,” the Beacon Journal eulogized.
Former prosecutor and assistant prosecutor Charles P. Kennedy, who helped Roetzel convict the Furnace Street gang, formed the Ormsby & Kennedy law firm and was elected president of the Akron Bar Association in 1928. The group saluted him in 1960 for serving fifty-four years as an attorney. He died on March 26, 1965, at age eighty-one in his home in Sarasota, Florida.
Rosario Borgia’s defense attorney, Abram E. Bernsteen, enjoyed many victories after that infamous loss. President Warren G. Harding nominated him in 1923 as U.S. attorney for the northern district of Ohio, and he served until 1929. Bernsteen finally moved out of his parents’ home and married his assistant, Irene Nungesser. He gave serious consideration to running for governor in 1928 but thought better of it. Bernsteen died on April 5, 1957, of a heart attack at the Cleveland Clinic. He was eighty.
Barberton attorney Stephen C. Miller, who assisted Bernsteen with the Borgia case, barely outlasted the Furnace Street gang. Regarded as a brilliant legal mind, Miller practiced law for more than three decades before dying of diabetes on October 9, 1923, at age sixty.
Attorney Seney A. Decker did not pay a political price for mishandling the stay of execution for Pasquale Biondo in 1918. The following year, he was elected Barberton mayor and served two terms. He also was the first president of Barberton Kiwanis and Barberton Eagles. Decker was found dead in his bed of an apparent heart attack at age sixty-one on December 30, 1936.
Frank Mazzano’s defense attorney Orlando Wilcox served as Cuyahoga Falls city solicitor and director of Cuyahoga Falls Savings Bank and the Falls Savings & Loan Association. He died on January 17, 1932, at age eighty after suffering a stroke. “He was thorough as an advocate, wise as a counselor, always respected as an antagonist, and not infrequently to be feared,” attorneys C.T. Grant, W.E. Slabaugh and Harvey Musser noted in a prepared statement mourning the loss of their colleague.
Amos H. “Tiny” Englebeck, Wilcox’s assistant in the Mazzano case, went on to serve as chairman of the Republican Executive Committee and president of the Summit County Board of Health. He was monarch of Yusef-Khan Grotto, potentate of Tadmor Temple, sovereign grand inspector general of Ohio and grand high priest of the Royal Arch Masons. After he died on September 11, 1952, at age sixty-six, local Masons honored his memory by naming the Amos H. Englebeck Lodge after him.
Reverend Francis Louis Kelly, Ohio Penitentiary chaplain for more than twenty-five years, retired in 1927 and died on February 10, 1932, at age eighty at the Dominican Fathers’ Home for the Aged in Minneapolis.
Cleveland attorney Benjamin D. Nicola, legal counsel for Lorenzo Biondo, practiced law for sixty years. He was named U.S. commissioner in 1930, appointed Cuyahoga County Common Pleas judge in 1948 and retired in 1964 at age eighty-five. He died on March 21, 1970, at age ninety-one in Aurora in Portage County.
Convicted murderer Lorenzo Biondo, alias James Palmieri, was sentenced to life in prison for the 1918 slayings of Joe Hunt and Edward Costigan, but it didn’t work out that way. In a shocking turn of events, Governor George White commuted the sentence on May 25, 1934, for reasons that remain mysterious. Biondo, age thirty-five, was freed from the Ohio Penitentiary, placed on the Italian ocean liner SS Rex in New York and ordered never to return to the United States. Former judge Ervin D. Fritch and former prosecutor Cletus G. Roetzel weren’t informed of the parole and didn’t find out for several years. “The police department would certainly have left no stone unturned to keep Biondo in prison if it had had any knowledge of the parole move,” Detective Inspector Verne Cross fumed in 1938. A free man, Biondo returned to his native land just before World War II engulfed Europe. His final fate remains unknown to this day.
Anthony Manfriedo wasn’t as lucky.
Sentenced to life in prison at age twenty-one for being the lookout when Costigan and Hunt were slain, Manfriedo was locked up and forgotten for nearly fifty years. Beacon Journal reporter Carl J. Peterson found him in 1965 at the London Correctional Institution. Manfriedo, age seventy, a prison nurse for two decades, had just requested parole for the fifth time. “I’m not getting any younger and I don’t want to die in prison,” he told the reporter. “I want to enjoy a freedom that I have had so little of in my lifetime.” Manfriedo was apologetic for his role in the killings. “It was my own fault,” he explained. “I was a young kid. Just got here in this country and didn’t think. I’m not mad at anybody now. I don’t think I have an enemy in the world.”
Former Akron gangster Tony Manfriedo is happy to be a free man after receiving a state pardon in 1965 following nearly fifty years in prison. From the Akron Beacon Journal.
On November 22, 1965, Governor James Rhodes pardoned Manfriedo and expunged his criminal record. “I never thought this day would come,” Manfriedo said. “I hope all the time. I never give up hope.” Roetzel, the former prosecutor, and Fritch, the former judge, had recommended parole as early as 1950, to no avail. “I think it’s a good idea,” Roetzel said. “Actually, it should have been done earlier. I’m a very firm believer in comparative justice. It’s disturbing to me when one man gets a severe penalty and another, under similar circumstances, gets a lighter penalty.” Judge Fritch added, “I feel Manfriedo deserved to be freed. He’s the last of the Borgia gang left. I think he was in prison too long as it is.”
A gray-haired, bespectacled Manfriedo returned to Akron for a visit on Tuesday, November 30, and was amazed with what he saw. “This not the same city,” the Sicilian native told reporter Carl J. Peterson in broken English. “I never believe Akron look like this!” One of the few places that looked familiar was the Goodrich plant, where he worked in 1917 before falling in with the wrong crowd. “I don’t know anyone here anymore,” Manfriedo shrugged. “It’s been too long.”
Manfriedo returned to Columbus and found a job at a nursing home. His left eye had to be surgically removed in 1967 because of a tumor, but in his last known interview at seventy-two, he told a reporter, “I would rather be a free man with one eye—and enjoy this good fresh air—than be in the prison with both eyes.”
Appendix
NEVER FORGET
Over the past century, the list has grown. Twenty more names have joined the Akron honor roll since police officers Guy Norris, Edward J. Costigan, Joseph H. Hunt, Gethin H. Richards and George Werne were murdered from 1917 to 1919 in the performance of their duties.
Shootings, car crashes, fatal heart attacks and a drowning have claimed the lives of Akron officers as they worked to protect and serve their community. They were husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, nephews, boyfriends, neighbors, buddies—a solid line of blue that stretches out to infinity. Their sacrifices will be remembered long after they are gone.
In 1961, U.S. Representative George P. Miller, a Democrat from California, and U.S. Senator J. Glenn Beall, a Republican from Maryland, co-sponsored a joint resolution to designate May 15 as Peace Officers Memorial Day. The week on which the date occurs was christened “Police Week.” “The many thousands of American men and women engaged in the profession of law enforcement have too long been without proper recognition for their efforts,” Miller announced. “This law will provide an opportunity for focusing national attention upon the accomplishments of this vitally important group of professional people who have dedicated their lives to preserving the property and safety of the American people.”
President John F. Kennedy signed the proclamation on April 10, 1962, “in recognition of the contributions the police officers of America have made to our civilization through their dedicated and selfless efforts in enforcing our laws.” Kennedy called on the American public and all patriotic, civic and educational organizations to observe Police Week “with appropriate ceremonies in which all of our people may join in commemorating police officers, past and present, who by their faithful and loyal devotion to their responsibilities have rendered a dedicated service to their communities and, in so doing, have established for themselves an enviable and enduring reputation for preserving the rights and security of all citizens.”
The commemoration began small in Akron. The police department put up a photo display of the fallen officers, who then numbered twelve, in a large window at O’Neil’s department store in downtown Akron. Officers wore white shirts with black bands on their badges in memory of their brethren. Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 laid a wreath on a plaque in the lobby of the police station. The lodge concluded the week with a covered dish dinner at Carter Park in Tallmadge.
Year by year, the commemoration grew. It became more of a public wake than a private grieving. Survivors and descendants of the late officers were invited to attend the services and speak about their loved ones. Crowds have gathered every year since. “The reason we hold this every year is to give a solemn reminder to the public that the men are out every day of the year and hour of the day protecting them and putting their lives on the line,” Chief Harry Whiddon said in 1968.
A twelve-ton granite marker became a focal point of the annual event in 1997 after the FOP raised $50,000 to place a monument in front of the Harold J. Stubbs Justice Center on South High Street in downtown Akron. The justice center was built on the site of the old Summit County Jail, where the Furnace Street gang spent many an uncomfortable night.
More than one thousand people attended the dedication ceremony on May 13, 1997, where a black tablet was unveiled with the etched names of Akron’s fallen officers. The honor roll, adjacent to a granite FOP star, rests on a gray granite base measuring twelve feet wide and ten inches thick. “We can only hope and pray that no more names will be added to this honor roll on the tablet,” Mayor Don Plusquellic told the assembly.
But something seemed missing. Chief Michael T. Matulavich proposed adding an eternal flame to the monument in July 2001 after seeing one at a police memorial service in Ottawa, Canada. The Fraternal Order of Police embraced the idea and raised $25,000 for the addition. Nearly 2,000 people, including 750 motorcyclists, attended the lighting ceremony on July 14, 2002.
Retired Akron officer Jonathan “Russ” Long, who was paralyzed following a 1991 crash in a high-speed chase on Hazel Street, delivered an Olympic torch in his wheelchair to JaRae Shaw, age twenty-four, the daughter of officer Ben J. Franklin, who suffered a fatal heart attack on January 10, 1992, while breaking up a fight and making an arrest. She lifted the torch and lit the eternal flame in front of a large granite plaque that read, “NEVER FORGET.” “It means the world to me to be able to pay tribute to my father and the other officers who gave their lives,” she told the Akron Beacon Journal.
Patrolman Ed Costigan is buried next to his mother at St. Vincent Cemetery in Akron. Their graves no longer appear to be marked in the heavily vandalized cemetery. Photo by Mark J. Price.
Patrolman Guy Norris is buried with his wife, Hulda, at Mount Peace Cemetery in Akron. No one was ever charged in his killing. Photo by Mark J. Price.
Patrolman Gethin Richards is buried with his wife, Frieda, at Mount Peace Cemetery in Akron. Photo by Mark J. Price.
Patrolman Joseph Hunt is buried with his wife, Adale, at Holy Cross Cemetery in Akron. Photo by Mark J. Price.
Patrolman George Werne is buried with his wife, Anna, at Holy Cross Cemetery in Akron. Photo by Mark J. Price.
Addressing the crowd, Chief Matulavich noted, “This eternal flame is not Akron’s flame. It is to honor every law enforcement officer who has lost his life across this country.”
The Akron police memorial is dedicated in May 1997 in front of the Harold J. Stubbs Justice Center in downtown Akron. Sadly, the honor roll has grown longer since the dedication. From the Akron Beacon Journal.
Paul Hlynsky, president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, explained, “This project represents a bond between the police dep
artment and the community. It reflects that we all care, we all stick together, and we all want to make sure these officers are always remembered for the sacrifices that they made.”
The torch has been glowing ever since. It costs more than $2,500 a year to maintain the eternal flame, which is powered by natural gas. It flickers night and day, sunshine and rain, catching the attention of motorists and pedestrians along South High Street.
Sadly, Russ Long’s name was engraved on the monument after he died at age fifty-one on August 15, 2013, from complications from the injuries in his 1991 crash. Officer Justin R. Winebrenner, age thirty-two, joined the honor roll after he was shot to death on November 16, 2014, during a struggle with an armed man at an East Market Street pub. The community can only hope and pray that he will be the last.
The Akron Police Museum, which opened in the late 1960s, offers a repository of crime fighting memorabilia on the mezzanine level of the Harold K. Stubbs Justice Center at 217 South High Street. Among its exhibits are vintage photographs, news clippings, police uniforms, badges, patches, nightsticks, lie detectors, gambling machines, a 1965 Harley-Davidson motorcycle and the original 1916 headstone of Chief Hughlin H. Harrison. A glass case contains a shelf crowded with an assortment of confiscated weapons, including the revolver that Frank Mazzano used to shoot Patrolman Gethin Richards.
Mafia Cop Killers in Akron Page 10