Edward Scales was arrested and photographed as a suspect in a hold-up that took place a few days before Christmas in 1934. He was released without charge but enjoyed only a month of freedom before returning to jail when a bank robbery that he had been planning for months went badly wrong. Edward had a long association with the New Castle police, to whom he was better known by his street name, Jack of Diamonds. […]
The arresting officer wrote “This man is a roller of drunks” on the file card as Vincent DeLillo was photographed in the police station and charged with picking the pockets of citizens incapacitated through liquor. That night in 1937, Vincent was almost exactly halfway through his life. Up to that point, he had been charged with possession of illegal alcohol during prohibition, rape and fornication (not guilty of the former; guilty of the latter), robbery (multiple […]
Earl Phillips was married by twenty, separated by twenty-one and divorced by twenty-three. In February 1959 he and Jim Nelson were fined $10 after they were found drunk, stripped to the waist and fighting on East Washington street at 4 o’clock in the morning; in April 1959 he was beaten by three unidentified men on Kurtz street, near the Morella dairy bar; and in March 1961 he was involved in a fist fight with Patsy […]
Two days after Thanksgiving, 1941, George Velky forged four checks amounting to $64, with which he bought paint, wall paper and groceries from stores on North Mill street. His choice of alias— George Belky—proved insufficient to keep him out of jail. Four months later, his wife—her walls still in need of fresh paint and paper—obtained a divorce, which was soon followed by an announcement of her engagement to a young airman named Herbert Hribar, to […]
Robert Cole and Wayne Shotzbarger pulled a gun on Benny Panella as he sat in his car in an alley off West Washington street around 10 o’clock one Saturday night and told him to drive them to south New Castle, where they put him out of the car and drove off. When they were out of sight, they turned around and headed north, skirting the town on their way to New Wilmington. They stopped at […]
The Falls family had farmed the north hill since the beginning of the 19th century. As the town’s population grew in the prosperous decades up to the 1930s, they sold off portions of their farm to developers and, by the time that a boy named Bill Harlan had his mug shot taken in 1933, the open pasture above New Castle had been transformed into a well-off residential area with spacious streets lined with the sturdy […]
In the early hours of the fourth of July, 1941, a few young men—Alexander Aldan, Paul Voland and the Haza brothers, George and Phillip—took a bomb that they had made out of an old shell casing, gun powder, rags and clay and placed it against the back wall of the Victory cafe in Wampum, a few miles south of New Castle. When it exploded, it shattered the windows in the rear of the restaurant and […]
A year or two after the accident that burned the skin on his face that hadn’t been covered by a protective mask—the details of which are unknown—Victor Whipkey and his friends, Fay Marks and Joseph Pehak, ran low on gas as they passed through New Castle on a long road trip from their hometown of Mammoth, in Westmoreland county, to Ravenna, Ohio. They pulled into the E&W service station on Grant street and had the […]
In 1936, George Agnew was arrested for passing a bad check to a woman on the corner of Bridge and Shenango streets. He gave a false name—Sam Stein—but was recognised by an officer who remembered him from an extortion case in 1931. In February of that year, two years before the repeal of prohibition, state police officers had raided the home of Anna Aceta, on South Mercer street, on a liquor warrant. The woman surprised […]
The Canteen, at 30 South Mercer street, was a downtown bar with a dance floor that featured round and square dancing, with music by local bands like Chuck McFarland and his Original Castleites. One November night in 1938, the management ejected John Zuzow for fighting. John continued fighting in the street, biting several passers-by. When three policemen arrived on the scene, he bit them, too. In police court the next morning, John said he had […]
Small Town Noir 