Lou Miskinis got drunk and started fighting with Harry Hetrick and his wife on West Long avenue. Harry’s leg was in a cast. He broke a crutch over Lou’s head. Lou struggled with the police but was taken to the hospital for a deep cut to his scalp. He spent the night in jail and was released the next day. There is no further record of his life, until his death, in 1979, at the age […]
Last week, after I published a mug shot story about a New Castle businessman who ran a beach resort on a stretch of the Neshannock behind the paper mill’s dam, a long-time reader of the site who happens to be a film maker in Hollywood met an actor with family connections to the area. The actor has a career stretching back decades, with roles in Starsky and Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, L.A. Law and ER, and his […]
Hear what a former New Castle chief of police thinks about the Small Town Noir mug shots. Find out more at: unbound.co.uk/small-town-noir More than a hundred stories of small-time true crime from New Castle PA will be featured in the Small Town Noir book. To support the book, and receive a copy when it’s published, go to the publisher’s website. Please do! And spread the word!
Find out more at: unbound.co.uk/small-town-noir I was amazed by Ross Paswell’s life when I first researched his mug shot. He was arrested for highway robbery in 1945 and spent most of the next 10 years in jail, much of the time in solitary. By the 60s, he was something of a local political radical and, in the 70s, he became an inspirational penal reform campaigner whose work was recognised by the state. I met Ross’s son, […]
Vincent Carbeau would have been a well known figure around New Castle, but his photograph won’t appear in the Small Town Noir book (please click that link and pledge to buy a copy, or there won’t be any such book!), simply because he had the misfortune to be booked in another town: Mansfield, Ohio. His mug shot, therefore, bears the stamp of another police department and I’m too much of a purist to allow it to […]
More than one New Castle local has told me that they think the town looks like something out of a zombie apocalypse movie. That’s not fair at all but, walking down certain desolate streets in the unluckiest neighbourhoods, you can see what they mean. (Photograph by Jeremy Michael Cohen) What’s more, the area has a genuine and quite major connection to modern-day zombie culture, which comes up in the story behind the mug shot […]
The crowdfunding campaign for the Small Town Noir book continues! If you haven’t been to the book’s page on the publisher’s website yet, please have a look. Also, please consider sharing the page with anyone who might be interested in making the book a reality (and owning a copy themselves, of course). The more people know about it, the more likely it is to happen! Here’s the link again: https://unbound.co.uk/books/small-town-noir §§§ Larry Cardwell, an ordinary […]
The crowdfunding campaign for the Small Town Noir book continues! If you haven’t been to the book’s page on the publisher’s website yet, please have a look. Also, please consider sharing the page with anyone who might be interested in making the book a reality (and owning a copy themselves, of course). The more people know about it, the more likely it is to happen! Here’s the link again: https://unbound.co.uk/books/small-town-noir While the campaign is on, I’ll […]
Ernest Fickle roomed in Harry Perrine’s home on County Line street for a while in 1939. Early in 1940, he and a couple of other men broke in and stole $250-worth of tools. Ernest sold them in Youngstown. The police traced them back to him and he was fined $25 Ernest was arrested twice in the fifties for intoxication and disorderly conduct. One time, he was found begging in the Castleton hotel lobby. In 1958, […]
This post will remain at the top of the page while the book campaign is underway — scroll down for more recent updates! NEWS! For a long time, I’ve wanted to produce a book of New Castle mug shots — a handsomely designed hardcover book that would properly memorialise the people whose lives I’ve written about and the troubled town I’ve become fascinated by. That might be about to happen. Publishers have always told me that […]
Small Town Noir 