AMERICAN CRIME WAVE

Southland Times, Issue 19939, 4 August 1926, Page 12

AMERICAN CRIME WAVE

NEW YORK TERRORISED. RECRUDESCENCE OF MURDERS. BOLD DAYLIGHT ROBBERIES. San Francisco, June 16. After national police had fondly suspected that they had relieved the chief American cities of the crime wave which has for several months made life in the centres of population dangerous, a recrudescence of murders and bold daylight robberies all over the country caused alarm and renewed efforts were put forth by the authorities to endeavour to stem the sensational criminal exploits which once more were terrorising the country. It was in New York that the daring thugs initiated the new crime wave, and a successful campaign of murders, payroll robberies and assaults on innocent citizens—believed to be waged by an aim of thugs operating under direction of one master mind—marked the end of the second week in June, the country’s principal city being terrorised in a fashion hitherto unknown. One man and one woman were killed, a second woman was seriously wounded by revolver fire, two men were beaten into insensibility, and two watchmen were bound and threatened with death in four hold-ups which netted a total loot of 38,000 dollars to the unknown desperadoes who successfully escaped. While hundreds of persons were passing through the wholesale district on West Thirteenth Street at noon on the Saturday, four well-dressed men in their early twenties drove up to the Sungrow Sills Company and walked briskly into the main office. Miss Josephine Difore, a twenty-year-old clerk, stepped forward and asked pleasantly: “Who do you wish to see?” Miss Difore did not put her hands up, and instead she tried to bar the way to the safe. The bandit fired and Miss Difore fell to the floor dead, shot through the heart. Sam Winterbottom a gray-haired office assistant, leaped forward, and a second pistol fired. Winterbottom fell dead, shot through the head. A fusillade of shot followed and Miss Elisabeth Schwemacker, a clerk, fell after being seriously wounded in the hip. SCARED FROM SAFE. The four men then ran into the safe and were tugging at an inner door when men from the rear of the building rushed in. The robbers hurried out and fled in their waiting motor car, leaving a payroll of thousands of dollars lying behind the safe's inner door.

This was the climax of the day’s atrocities, which began before dawn. Watchman Henry McCormick was making the rounds in the building of the Rural New Yorker on West Thirteenth Street at three o’clock in the morning when three men with handkerchiefs over their faces, leaped from behind a bookcase, pushed revolvers against his breast and whispered. “Sit down in that chair, we’ll kill you if you make a .sound.” A moment later McCormick was bound by rope to the chair, and later he said he was told: “We don’t want to kill you—you are an old man, but which one of these three safes holds the pay roll?”

McCormick did not know, so the robbers opened two of them and took out 5000 dollars in cash and 30,000 dollars in securities. They were working on the third safe with an electric drill when they became frightened and fled with their loot. Then McCormick’s cries brought aid and he was liberated. An hour and a half later four men entered the office of the Kirsch Mineral Water Company, in Brooklyn, bound the watchman in the same manner and stole a 11000 dollar payroll from the strong box. At eleven o’clock that same morning five men held up Nathan Wasserman, a Brooklyn plumbing contractor, and his assistant as they stepped from an automobile with the week’s payroll. The bandits seized the 1900 dollars in a satchel, took 2500 dollars of personal jewellery from Wasserman in view of passers-by, and then escaped. CRIMES NATION-WIDE. A large number of other sensational robberies occurred the same day in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angles and San Francisco, and at Oakland, in California, a city of some 400,000 population, while hundreds of persons passed by, two bandits “kidnapped” a man in his automobile in the centre of the downtown district, compelled him to drive them through the crowded city streets, and then robbed him of payroll cash amounting to more than a thousand dollars. The victim was J. Wendall Howe, a clerk employed by the Cobbledick-Kibble Glass Company, of Oakland. Sent to obtain money to pay off the company’s employees, Howe parked his car on Broadway, near Fourteenth Street, and entered the Central Bank at that comer, which is one of the busiest parts in the city. When he returned to his car with the money in a canvas bag two men were waiting beside the machine. Both drew revolvers which they concealed from passers-by. Theratening to kill Howe if he raised an outcry, one man forced him into the driver’s seat and sat beside him, while the other climbed into the rear of the automobile.

Then, pressing their revolvers to his side, they commanded him to drive to Ninth and Madison Streets. There, after inspecting the bag and assuring themselves it contained money, the men jumped from the ear and ordered Howe to drive away. Howe told the police he drove two blocks and then returned to the scene of the robbery and followed the robbers for several blocks until he lost them in a congestion of traffic at Thirteenth and Alice Streets. He. was unable to obtain the license number of the bandit machine.

Cracksmen in San Francisco cut their way into the jewellery shop of David Behrend and, Sons, 2205, Market Street, early the same morning, blew open the safe and stole diamonds and jewellery worth 12,000 dollars.

A hole eighteen inches square was sawed through the wall of the adjoining building in an alley of Sanchez Street, and the thieves gained entrance there, knocking off the safe combination and putting in a charge of explosive, with which they blew open the door. In all these robberies not a angle arrest was made.