When he was nineteen, in 1930, Hugh Berger was the leader of a gang of youths who were arrested in Pittsburgh and charged with fifty-six counts of robbery, larceny, pointing firearms and carrying concealed weapons. Hugh spent ten years in the state penitentiary at Bellefonte. After his release in the spring of 1940, he ended up in New Castle, where he met two local men—Kalim George, who had just been paroled from the Western penitentiary following a three-to-six year sentence for sodomy, and James Ross, who had beaten an assault-and-robbery charge the year before. A new A&P supermarket had opened up on South Mercer street, and they decided to rob it.

Around four o’clock on a Sunday morning in August, Hugh and Kalim pried open a door into the furnace room at the rear of the A&P building, leaving James Ross outside as a lookout. They took $34 in quarters and dimes from the cash register and filled twelve sacks with food, cigarettes and candy. Just before dawn, as they were getting ready to leave, two police officers broke down the front door.

Hugh and Kalim ran to the rear of the store. One officer fired a shot and Kalim ducked behind a counter, where he hid until he was captured. Hugh stuffed his .32 revolver into a pile of canteloupes and hid under a table. He, too, was found and taken out to the street, where he saw James Ross handcuffed to a patrol car.

At the station, Hugh learned that the police had been tipped off about the robbery. He blamed Kalim. He told him that he would kill him with an ice pick when they got to jail. It turned out he was wrong. In court, Hugh got nine to nineteen years and Kalim got eight to sixteen years. James Ross was tried separately, and his sentence was not reported in the papers.

As soon as Hugh was admitted to the Western penitentiary, he wrote to the courthouse in New Castle requesting copies of the indictments brought against him, the true bills and grand jury subpoenas, the commitment from the city police jail to the county jail, the dispositions, the commitments to the penitentiary, the trial testimony and the claim of the A&P store. After studying the paperwork for two years, he found what seemed to be an inaccuracy. The indictment said that he had robbed a store that was owned by A&P but he had discovered that A&P merely occupied the building, which was owned by somebody else. Hugh wrote to the district attorney, saying that the error invalidated his conviction. The judge examined the evidence, announced that the arguments were “of the most captious and technical kind” and threw out the appeal.

Hugh was paroled in 1948 but, after another burglary conviction, he was sent back to the Western penitentiary to serve the rest of his sentence. He was over fifty when he was released, having spent only a few months out of jail since his arrest in 1930. He died in Pittsburgh in 1995, at the age of eighty-four.