Small Town Noir

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. He ran gambling joints and unlicensed Negro clubs on the south side before the first world war. In 1921, to avoid jail, he assisted prohibition agents in a bootlegging case by buying a $1.25 bottle of raisin jack from a speakeasy run by a man named Nicholas Chikota and taking it to the district attorney, who used it as justification for a raid. After Edward testified at Chikota’s trial, the DA acknowledged that, although it was unfortunate that the state had had to rely on such a disreputable character, it was impossible not to. “I cannot go to the speakeasies to secure evidence,” he told the jury. “And neither can the county detective, as they would immediately become dry at our approach. It often happens that the only ones who can secure the evidence have been law breakers themselves.”

The jury accepted Edward’s testimony, and found Chikota guilty.

Edward’s co-operation with the law gave him no immunity from police interference in his business, and he was fined several times in the years following the trial for allowing “African golf”—dice games, such as craps—to be played on his premises.

In 1925, during a quarrel over a woman, Edward pulled out a pistol and shot at a man named Ben Higgins, who collapsed and was taken to hospital. He died ten days later. Edward was charged with murder and held in jail for three months until the date of his trial. A conviction seemed certain until the doctors who examined Higgins’s body told the court that Higgins died of pneumonia and pleurisy and that his body showed no signs of ever having been shot. None of Edward’s bullets had hit their target. Higgins had merely passed out from fright when Edward fired at him, and his death the following week had been unrelated to the events of that day, a fact of which the prosecution had been unaware until the day of the trial. The judge instructed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty, and Edward was released.

Edward stayed away from the courts until 1931, when he “attempted to seduce” Eleanor Wagner, a ten-year-old girl who lived on Mahoning avenue, and was given a two-to-four year sentence for assault and battery with intent to commit rape.

Edward turned forty in jail. After his release, he did some numbers running and got a job in a saloon in Youngstown, where he met a middle-aged Lawrence county businessman and poultry fancier, Homer Chrisner, who planned the disastrous bank raid that led him straight back to jail.

Homer Chrisner’s mug shot and the conclusion of Edward’s story are here.

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 times), auto theft and resisting arrest.

After 1937, he kept away from the police for more than a decade. He wasn’t arrested again until 1952, by which time he had become a prescription drug addict and petty thief. He and a juvenile were caught stealing a box of candy from the back of a truck, but Vincent’s sentence was suspended so that he could go to the federal hospital at Lexington, Kentucky, for the narcotics cure. The treatment was not a success. Two years later, Vincent was charged with larceny and forgery after he stole a doctor’s prescription book and forged his signature in order to buy narcotics from a pharmacist. A few years after that, Vincent was arrested in his home just ten minutes after he broke into a pharmacy on North Mill street and stole eight bottles of medicine and some hypodermic needles.

Vincent voluntarily submitted to another course of treatment at the federal hospital in Kentucky, but absconded within a month and returned to New Castle, where he was arrested a few days later in a south side drugstore.

The judge told Vincent that by absconding he had violated the terms of his suspended sentence and he would be sent to the Western penitentiary. Vincent begged to be sent back to hospital and said he would kill himself rather than go to prison. That night, Vincent broke a light bulb in his cell in the city jail and used the shards to slash the back of his neck and his wrists. A doctor was called to treat his wounds and he was taken to the penitentiary the next morning. He survived his sentence and came home to New Castle in the mid-1960s.

In August 1971, Vincent’s neighbors on Sciota street called the police to say they hadn’t seen him for some time. Vincent was found in his home, where he had died of a heart attack five days before. He was sixty-seven years old.

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 DeFrank in Dempsey’s bar on East Washington street.

The incident involving assault and battery that resulted in his mug shot being taken in 1958, when he was twenty-four, is not recorded.

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 whom she remained married for the rest of her life, raising a son who would become a record-breaking high-school athlete and, eventually, managing director of the European wing of one of America’s largest telecommunications companies.

George was released from prison but lasted only a short while before he was arrested for forging checks in Lorain, Ohio, and received two to four years in the state penitentiary. Upon his release, he resorted once again to forgery, and was imprisoned a few years later by a court in Mercer County, where he had tried to pass a bad check under the name George Stanko. He was thirty years old. There is no further record of his life.

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 filling station on the corner of New Castle street and Neshannock avenue and ordered five gallons of gasoline, then followed the attendant inside, telling him they wanted to buy some cigarettes. Robert drew his pistol and pointed it at the attendant while Shotzbarger filled a bag with the money from the till, which came to $23.75.

The attendant called the police as soon as the men had driven away. They were spotted shortly afterwards, heading down the North Jefferson street hill into New Castle. Motor police forced the car to the side of the street just after it crossed the Shenango river, heading west out of town. Robert tossed the pistol out of the window as the police approached. After the men were taken to the station, the police returned to the scene to look for the gun, but it had vanished. “We want the person who picked up the revolver to bring it to state motor police headquarters,” an officer told the press. But no one ever did.

Robert and Shotzbarger were sentenced to a year in the Allegheny County workhouse for armed robbery and larceny of an auto, but served only half their time before they were paroled.

Robert and his three brothers joined the army in 1942. Robert spent the war as a personnel clerk in a succession of army air force bases in New Mexico and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. Only one brother was sent overseas: Daniel, who was lamed by a German sniper in France. After the war, Jack, the oldest brother, ran a service station on Moravia street (“Cole’s—We skin our prices, not our customers!”) until October 1960, when he shot himself in the head with a semi-automatic rifle.

Robert moved to Lake Worth, Florida. He died there in 1976, in a head-on automobile crash.

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 mansions of industrialists and the elegant homes of bankers, businessmen and white-collar professionals—and of Bill’s family, who lived in a newly built timber house on Meyer avenue.

The Harlans were an even older local family than the Falls, having arrived in the area in the 1790s, when they founded the village of Harlansburg, just east of the small settlement at the junction of the Shenango and the Neshannock creek that was to become the city of New Castle. By the 1930s, the Harlans—Bill’s father, uncles and cousins—owned several businesses in town and were comfortably settled among the quality up on the north hill.

Highland avenue was the main spine of the north hill district, crossing the most moneyed streets on the way out of town. Two widowed sisters, Beulah Phillips and Mellie Julian, lived in a large house at 1503 Highland avenue, and another sister, Goldie Ingels, lived around the corner on Euclid avenue. On 13th January 1933, when the widows were wintering in California, Goldie Ingels passed by their house and noticed that some of the blinds were down, which they hadn’t been a couple of days previously. Letting herself in through the kitchen door, she found that the house had been ransacked. Furniture was overturned, rugs were awry and the contents of the drawers were scattered around the rooms.

The thieves had evidently taken their time as they went through the house, methodically checking for valuables and making off with a dozen pearl handled knives; two triangle clocks; several rugs, large and small; two hunting rifles; two fishing poles; two men’s overcoats and one man’s suit; a seal skin coat; some dresses; two hundred pieces of silverware; linen sheets; two small lamps; three suitcases; one bureau toilet set; several decks of cards; and some memorandum pads.

Based on the thoroughness of the job the police declared that the house had been targeted by a gang of professional thieves, but they were wrong. When the burglars gave themselves up two weeks later, they turned out to be a group of boys who lived in nearby streets, the youngest of whom was the sixteen-year-old Bill Harlan.

Bill and his friend, George Hawk, had broken into the house one night during the first week of the widows’ absence and stolen some small objects. The next night, they returned with some other boys, and together they set about stealing as much as they could carry off.

The boys were all good students from well-off north hill families, and they apologised for the theft and promised to give back everything they had taken. Naturally, their punishment was light—probation for three years, and costs.

Within two months, Bill Harlan was in custody again. He had broken into a little cottage along the Neshannock creek, the home of Tullie Caiazza, an insurance salesman and local baseball coach, and stolen some fishing tackle, a rifle and a mounted deer head. While he was awaiting trial, it emerged that he had also recently held up a Mercer hardware store and made off with guns, ammunition and ether.

Once again, the court was sympathetic, and Bill was paroled for one year. However, only a few months later, he took part in an armed robbery at the Hutchinson inn, on the New Wilmington road. He fled to California and was apprehended in Los Angeles, where he unsuccessfully resisted extradition to Pennsylvania.

Back in New Castle, the judge told Bill that anyone who committed so serious a crime while on parole should expect to be sent to jail, no matter how young they were. However, in recognition of his previous good behaviour—and, no doubt, the position of the Harlans among the families on the north hill—the court was disposed to give him one more chance to reform, and he was sent instead to the industrial school at Huntingdon.

Seven years later, only a few days after the attack on Pearl harbor, Bill enlisted in the national guard. There is no further trace of him until his death in July 1997, in Sandusky, Ohio.

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 “upset tinsels throughout the room”.

All four were charged with malicious mischief by use of explosives and were each ordered to pay a $25 fine and $9 to cover the damage. The New Castle News offered no explanation of the men’s actions. Perhaps there was none.

Six years later, Alexander and his wife, Helen, had a baby boy, Alexander, Jr, who died in the New Castle hospital before they could take him home. Not long after—a few years before they divorced—they had another child, a daughter named Sharon. She was twenty-eight years old when she died in a car crash in Beaver county.

Alexander lived alone in West Pittsburg until he died in 1987, at the age of sixty-six.

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 clerk fill up their Ford with eleven gallons of gasoline. Then, having no money, they drove off without paying for it.

The clerk called the police, who stopped the car on the State street hill. A search uncovered a loaded .38 revolver in the glove compartment and several shells in the pockets of Marks’ coat. They arrested the three boys on a charge of being suspicious characters.

In court, Marks claimed he had traded a hunter’s knife to Victor for the revolver. Victor said that he had been given the gun by Marks’ grandfather. The court had no interest in their explanations, and fined them all $10 for failing to pay for the gasoline, in default of which they were sentenced to sixty days in the county jail. Marks was given a further four months in jail for carrying a revolver without a licence.

Victor enlisted in the army the following year, and was promoted to sergeant in September, 1943. He died in Davenport, Iowa, on 15 July, 1993, at the age of seventy-two.

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 them by complaining that she’d already paid protection money to the police and saying that they ought to leave her alone.

After an investigation, George and four other men, including Robert Glass, a deputy constable who ran a paint shop in Ellwood City, were arrested and charged with extortion, blackmail and conspiracy to cheat and defraud.

George and Robert’s plan had been straightforward. On December 11, 1930, George’s nephew, Harry, knocked on Mrs Aceta’s door and asked if she had anything to drink. She took him inside and sold him a pint of whiskey. As soon as the money changed hands, George, Glass and two other men burst in, shouting, “Police! This house is under arrest!” They showed Mrs Aceta and her son and daughter some papers, which they said were a search warrant.

Harry Agnew pretended not to know them. He demanded to know what was going on, before falling silent when Glass found the whiskey bottle hidden in his coat. Glass handed a gun and blackjack to George Agnew, saying, “If they get hard, you know what to do”, and the men proceeded to search the house, finding more liquor.

Glass told Mrs Aceta that she could either go to jail or pay an immediate fine of $100 or so. Mrs Aceta gave him everything she had on her—$26. The men drove her to her eldest son’s house, where she borrowed $7 more. The next day, Mrs Aceta got $80 from her sister and gave it to the men when they stopped off at the house. As she handed over the four $20 bills, her daughter asked to see the search warrant. “We don’t have it with us,” Glass said. “Then let me see your badge,” she said, and Glass showed her his deputy constable’s badge, which struck the girl as odd, as the other men had called him “sergeant” throughout the raid, but she said nothing—until the night the house was raided by the genuine state police.

All five men were found guilty. George and the other civilians were fined $25 and given two months in the county jail. Robert Glass was fined $500 and sentenced to a year in the Allegheny workhouse, because of the abuse of his badge. Anna Aceta, the woman who had helped to bring the corrupt official to justice, was found guilty of the illegal sale of liquor, fined $100 and paroled for two years.

When George was arrested in for passing a bad check, in 1936, he was sixty-one years old. There is no record of the outcome of the case.

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 been drinking and couldn’t remember what he’d done. James Fink, presiding, declared, “So long as I am the acting mayor of the city, anyone who interferes with or attacks a policeman may expect to pay a salty fine or undergo imprisonment.” True to his word, he fined John $25. As John was only twenty, Fink also ordered that the manager of the Canteen be questioned about serving liquor to minors.

After John was sentenced, it emerged that he was on parole for a series of crimes that he had committed on 13th May that year, a day on which he had stolen a car, burgled a store on Long avenue and violently resisted arrest. He was returned to jail.

There was no report of his release, and he appeared only two more times in the New Castle News: once, in 1945, when he was sent to jail for a month on charges of assault and battery, drunkenness and disorderly conduct at the home of his father-in-law, George Shellog; and another time, in 1947, when he was fined $10 for fighting with LeRoy and Thomas Neely on Croton avenue.

John died in New Castle on 13 August, 2000, at the age of eighty-two.