Prescription: Murder! Volume 1: Authentic Cases From the Files of Alan Hynd (2 page)

“But I don’t care,” said Mrs. Giacobbe. “I’ve met somebody else.”

“And you’re in love with him?”

“Yes.”

Bolber sat in his office half the night writing a dramatic act, complete with instructions for gestures, by which Petrillo was to propose marriage to Mrs. Giacobbe. Next day, after Giacobbe, the marked man, was away at business, Petrillo called on the wife. On bended knee, he professed his undying love for the lady.

“Let’s get married and run away some-wheres,” he said, beating his chest.

“But what about my husband?” asked Mrs. Giacobbe.

“Something could happen to him.”

Mrs. Giacobbe had never thought of such a happy eventu-ality.

“What could happen?” She asked.

“We could take all his clothes off when he comes home drunk some night and he could get pneumonia from layin’ there naked with the cold wind blowin’ right on him.”

A few nights later Bolber was sitting in his office listening to Petrillo relating the happy developments.

“Giacobbe didn’t go to work today,” the tailor was telling the faith healer. “Me and his wife stripped him when he come home drunk last night. He woke up with an awful cold this morning.”

Mrs. Giacobbe had gotten her husband thoroughly starched again that night.

“So we stripped him again a little while ago,” Petrillo went on. “The weatherman says it’s gonna be down to ten above tonight. When Giacobbe wakes up tomorrow morning he ought to be practical blue.”

The next night Petrillo reported to Bolber that Giacobbe had contracted pneumonia. The family doctor had been called and had prescribed two kinds of liquid medicine.

“Good,” said the faith healer. “Tell Mrs. Giacobbe to come around with that medicine.”

The patient quickly began to come apart at the seams. The bona fide doctor wasn’t surprised.

“Your husband was a heavy drinker,” he explained sadly to Mrs. Giacobbe. “Heavy drinkers often fail to survive pneumonia.”

“My poor Antonio,” said Mrs. Giacobbe, warming up to the idea of an early widowhood.

After the funeral, Bolber sent for the widow. There would be a fee, he explained, for his doctoring up that medicine, a fee of half that insurance money. Mrs. Giacobbe, not too bright and happy to be rid of her faithless spouse so that she could marry the ardent tailor, willingly forked over the five grand in cash.

It wasn’t long before Mrs. Giacobbe appeared in Bolber’s office greatly distraught. Petrillo had banked his romantic fires. The doctor made a ticking sound and shook his head sadly. The male animal was an unpredictable beast. There was nothing, he feared, he could do to help the lady.

One night, after office hours, the faith healer suggested to Petrillo that they get busy on another husband. Where, Petrillo asked, would they find a man carrying enough in-surance to make the enterprise worthwhile?

“We’ll insure somebody ourselves,” said Bolber. The doctor had already been thinking about his own patients. He went to his card file and selected one.

“Now here’s a woman named Lorenzo whose husband is a roofer. We could insure the husband for say $10,000, with double indemnity in case of an accident, and then get him pushed off a roof.”

How, Petrillo inquired, would they get Lorenzo insured without his knowing it? And who would push him off the roof? Bolber ignored the questions.

“Your cousin,” he said to Petrillo. “The one that was pinched a couple of years ago for counterfeiting.”

“Oh, you mean Little Herman. Herman Petrillo.”

“That’s the fellow. He used to be an amateur actor, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, before the Secret Service pinched him for that bum money. He used to act in church plays.”

“What’s he doing now?”

“He’s a spaghetti salesman.”

“Get him here,” said the faith healer.

Herman Petrillo, the once-and-future counterfeiter, was a foxy-looking toy man given to loud checked suits and overcoats with belts in the back. Doctor Bolber decided that Little Herman would blend perfectly into his scheme. Bolber explained to Little Herman that he was to pose as Lorenzo, the roofer, in taking out an insurance policy. Then, after the policy was issued, Herman would shove the real Lorenzo off a roof. Little Herman, a real stinker, was simply mad about the plot.

Paul Petrillo, carefully coached by Bolber, assumed the role of a canvasser and called at Lorenzo’s home one day when Lorenzo was up on a roof in a distant part of the city. A few weeks after laying the groundwork, Paul asked Mrs. Lorenzo if she would marry him.

The lady said she would be glad to except that she was already married.

“But supposin’ something should happen to your husband,” said Petrillo.

“Like what?” asked the seduced wife.

“Like him fallin’ off a roof.” Mrs. Lorenzo, who caught on quickly, liked the idea. Now Doctor Bolber instructed Little Herman to telephone to the Philadelphia offices of the Prudential Insurance Com-pany, palm himself off as Lorenzo, and ask that a salesman come to the Lorenzo home the next day at noon, when the real Lorenzo would be up on a roof somewhere.

When the salesman called, there was Mrs. Lorenzo, the faithless wife, and Little Herman, the stand-in husband, look-ing for all the world like what they weren’t, applying for a $10,000 policy with double indemnity for accidental death. And they had cash in hand to pay for the first quarterly premium.

A Prudential doctor called the following day, found Her-man to be a sound actuarial risk, and in due time the policies arrived in the mail. Mrs. Lorenzo intercepted them. Doctor Bolber began to follow the real Lorenzo around, the better to spot some plausible way of striking up an acquaint-anceship with the man. He fell into conversation with the roofer in a bar one night. Thus he discovered that Lorenzo was mad for dirty French post cards. Doctor Bolber acquired a supply of the French art and gave the stuff to Little Herman. Late one afternoon Little Herman buttonholed Lorenzo when the marked man came down off a roof and sold him some cards.

“Get a hold of me any time you got more of this stuff,” Lorenzo told Herman. Doctor Bolber, too cagey to be hasty, allowed a few months to elapse before giving Little Herman the nod to take care of Lorenzo. But finally Little Herman appeared on a roof that Lorenzo was repairing solo. He had a new batch of French post cards for the roofer.

“Gee,” said Lorenzo, “these are pippins. How much?”

The question was to remain unanswered. Little Herman, looking around to make sure nobody was observing him, gave the ac-tuarial risk a shove and in a twinkling Lorenzo was plunging eight stories to the street.

Six months passed before Doctor Bolber summoned Little Herman again. “You ever go fishin’?” Bolber asked.

No, Little Herman didn’t know anything about fishing.

Bolber told him to bone up on the sport and to buy himself some tackle.

“We’ve found a man by the name of Fierenza who got $5,000 in double indemnity already,” the faith healer said. “He fishes every Saturday afternoon in the Schuylkill River. Your cousin is going to make love to his wife.”

One fine Saturday afternoon, when Fierenza was about to go out in a rented rowboat, who just happened along but Lit-tle Herman. Actor that he was, Little Herman, carrying bait and tackle and wearing hip boots and a battered hat bright with artificial flies, looked more like a fisherman than a real fisherman.

“You goin’ out in that there boat alone?” Little Herman asked Fierenza.

“Yeah,” said Fierenza. “How about me and you sharin’ the boat and we’ll split the expense,” suggested Little Herman. The diminutive fiend patted his hip pocket. “I got a bottle with me, too.”

Out on the water, in a sheltered cover where nobody could see them, Little Herman asked Fierenza if he could swim.

“No,” said Fierenza.

“Not a stroke?”

“Look,” said Fierenza, “if I went overboard I’d be drowned.”

“Hey,” said Little Herman a few sips of booze later, pointing to something behind Fierenza. “What’s that?”

“What’s what?”

“There.
Behind
you!” Fierenza turned and there was a shove, a scream and a splash.

Little Herman, who could swim better than a lot of fish, dived off the other side of the boat. Then, good and wet, he climbed back in the boat again and rowed ashore. There he acted the role of a heart-broken friend.

“It’s all my fault,” he said. “I should have saved him.”

With three victims, Giacobbe, the dry-goods merchant, Lorenzo, the roofer, and Fierenza, the fisherman, disposed of within a year and a half, for an over-all take of $25,000, Doc-tor Bolber saw nothing ahead but a golden future. Many of the immigrant women who would be there clients had burdensome abusive husbands with whom they had been stuck with back in Italy. Since most were practicing Catholics, divorce was not an option. Thus Bolber and his two associates were selling a product that had a certain appeal. Similarly, most people in South Philadelphia knew better than to go to the police.

“There’s no telling,” Bolber said to the Petrillo cousins while the three sat around the faith healer’s office over a jug of Chianti one night in the summer of 1933, “where a thing like this could end. Why, we could establish branches all over the country—like Household Finance.”

Doctor Bolber, having his ear to the ground, had gotten a rumble about a most remarkable woman in North Philadelphia, a woman named Maria (or Carina) Favato who was known in her own bailiwick as the Witch. The Witch, who was a widow, was in the same profession as Doctor Bolber: faith healing, saltpeter and general mumbo jumbo.

The Witch, who was a widow, was in the business of getting rid of unwanted husbands for wives. Not for insurance money, but just to get rid of the men. This impressed Bolber as a wanton waste of golden opportunity and that was why, on one hot summer night, he journeyed across town to converse with Mrs. Favato.

One look at the Witch convinced Doctor Bolber why she had taken on that appellation. The woman, in her early forties, was strictly out of a bad dream: short, squat, with a hooked nose and a face that reminded Bolber of a batch of fresh dough with two currants for eyes. The Witch, it developed, had heard of Bolber and so, since the two immediately understood each other, they dispensed with the preliminaries and began to talk shop.

What, Bolber inquired, did the Witch use to poison errant husbands?

“Best stuff is arsenic,” said the Witch. “What you usin’?”

“Conium.”

“What that?”

“It’s from the carrot family. It’s also known as hemlock. It’s what they used to poison Socrates with,” Bolber said.

“Who?”

“Socrates.”

“Philadelphia man?” the Witch inquired.

“Not exactly,” said Bolber.

Doctor Bolber asked the Witch if she was married.

“Had five husbands,” said the Witch. “Poisoned three.”

“And did you collect insurance on the ones you poisoned?” Bolber inquired pleasantly.

The Witch nodded. Now Bolber explained how simple it was to collect insur-ance on the husbands of other women. The Witch was fasci-nated and craved details. Bolber supplied them.

“Jesus,” said the Witch. “Look all the money I coulda made if I’d thunk of that.”

Bolber patted the Witch’s hand. “Never mind,” he assured her. “We’ll make up for lost time.”

The Witch went to
her
card file. A hapless janitor named Dominic Petrino emerged from the file as a sound prospect. Petrino’s wife had been buying saltpeter from the Witch for some time without appreciable results. The faith healer explained to the Witch that Paul Petrillo, the wolfish tailor, would romance the janitor’s wife and condi-tion her for the plot. Then Little Herman would pose as the janitor for the benefit of the insurance people and when the real janitor was bumped off the Witch would be cut in on the take.

“Good,” said the Witch. “While you doin’ that I be lookin’ for more husbands.”

After Paul Petrillo had set things up in the Petrino home, Little Herman, the actor, hovered in the wings, ready to go on stage and essay one of his finest roles. One day when the real janitor was at work, Little Herman, dressed like a janitor, and smelling like one, sat around the Petrino flat with the faithless wife when a salesman for the Prudential Life Insurance Company called.

Herman said he would like to take out a $10,000 policy with double indemnity. The salesman, although as fee happy as the average policy peddler, inquired how a janitor could keep up the payments on such a big policy.

Doctor Bolber, the sly one, had prepared well in advance for that very question. He had fixed up a couple of fake bankbooks that made it appear that the janitor had $12,000 in sav-ings.

“Me and my wife here turn over houses,” Little Herman explained, meaning that the couple dabbled in real estate. That made everything all right.

It was two days later, when a doctor for the Prudential called to give the stand-in applicant a physical examination, that Little Herman had a few bad moments. This same doctor had examined Little Herman more than a year before, when Little Herman had posed as the husband of Lorenzo, the doomed roofer.

“Haven’t I seen you someplace before?” asked the doctor.

“Never seen you in my life, Doc,” said Little Herman.

“But I could swear that I’ve examined you for insurance before.”

“You couldn’t of, Doc. I ain’t never taken no out insurance be-fore.” The doctor ascribed the whole thing to a case of mis-taken identity, examined Little Herman, found him a sound actuarial risk, and the policy was issued.

A few months passed. Then Doctor Bolber gave the nod for the end of the real janitor. Petrino worked in a tenement house. The faith healer handed Little Herman a monkey wrench, instructed him to pose as an inspector for the gas company, sneak up behind Petrino when the janitor was at the top of a flight of steep stairs, and crown him with the wrench.

“It’ll look,” Bolber explained, “like that janitor just fell down the stairs and fractured his skull.”

One night, a couple of weeks later, Doctor Bolber again crossed the city to pay another visit to the Witch. He handed her five hundred dollars for her cut of the Petrino take. “Who else you got for us?” he asked.