The year 1928 ended with three professional murders—if blasting a man with shotguns then breaking him with baseball bats could be called professional.
The first to go was Big Tim Murphy. Murphy was the cleverest man to die since Dean O’Banion was killed in his flower shop. Murphy died on his front lawn late one evening. He’d been listening to the radio broadcast of the Democratic Convention in Houston. Someone rang the doorbell. Murphy didn’t live to hear Al Smith accept the nomination.
The next to go was Tony Lombardo. Capone had installed Lombardo as president of the Unione Siciliane, then had him change the Unione’s name to the Italo-American National Union. Lombardo had the bad luck of being alive and in office when Capone had Frankie Yale killed in New York. Yale’s people—aided by brothers named Aiello, who’d tried to kill Capone and failed—waited two months, then killed Lombardo during rush hour in the Loop. Lombardo had been walking to a restaurant, accompanied by a bodyguard and a man who wasn’t as good a friend as Lombardo thought. Lombardo went down with two bullets behind his left ear.
The last to die was a well-to-do sewer contractor named Ole Scully. Scully had been baptized “Oliverio Scalzetti.” Scully’s new name and his own hard work had made him rich. When Scully’s godson was kidnapped and held for ransom by an old-fashioned Black Hand extortionist named Angelo Petitti, Scully testified against him before a grand jury. Petitti’s men caught Scully having drinks with three of his friends after a funeral. The place where they were drinking was a speakeasy patronized by sewer contractors who were all from the same town in Italy. Scully tried to escape, but shotguns took him down. He may or may not have been alive when Petitti’s men broke his skull and obliterated his face. Scully’s friends were lined up, facing the wall, then beaten senseless. Police were able to identify Scully only because they found a subpoena in his pocket. Petitti’s kidnapping and extortion trial had begun that morning. Scully was to have been the prosecution’s principal witness, the next day.
BIG TIM
Mount Tennes, the telegraph “Gambling King” of Chicago, had been Tim Murphy’s mentor. Tennes’s first telegraph switchboard—located in a train station in Forest Park—received race results from tracks in Illinois, Kentucky, and New York. Tennes had a monopoly on that information. In return for 50 percent of the profits, Tennes’s operators sent the results by “race wire” to hundreds of bookie joints, gambling parlors, and pool halls all over the city. Since Tennes and the professionals who subscribed to his wire knew race results before most other gamblers placed their bets, Tennes and his clients grew rich and then they grew richer. “Big money from inside information” was the lesson Tim learned from Tennes.
Big Tim was a genial man—tall, handsome, open-faced, well spoken. Big Tim was everyone’s friend. After his time with Tennes, Tim went into politics and then into “union organizing.” First, Tim got himself elected to the state legislature from the working-class, Irish Catholic Fourth Ward (“Elect Big Tim—he’s a cousin of mine” was his slogan), then he made a deal with an important man, an organizer at the American Federation of Labor. With the federation’s blessings, Tim organized gas station attendants, then garbage collectors, then street sweepers. Strikes, wage increases, and higher union dues followed. Tim kept a percentage of everything. An ordinary man would have been content to take his cut every month, but Tim was too restless, too imaginative, and too greedy to sit back and let the small change roll in.
In 1920, Tim organized his first mail robbery. In 1921, he organized his second. The first robbery was clever. Understated, elegant. Bloodless. The second was all that—and more. As witty an undertaking as O’Banion’s changing barrels of whiskey into barrels of water. A robbery as smooth as a card trick.
Murphy’s 1920 Pullman robbery began when two informants told him about a phone conversation they’d overheard. The head cashier of the Pullman Trust and Savings Bank had called the Merchants Loan and Trust Bank in Chicago to request a transfer of $125,000. (All amounts cited in this chapter would be worth ten times as much today.) The cash was to be sent by insured, registered mail, in two locked letter sacks. The sacks would be on the Illinois Central’s afternoon local, due to arrive in Pullman at 2:02 on August 30.
When the 2:02 pulled into the station, a bank messenger named Minsch was waiting on the platform. He signed for the letter sacks. He tossed them onto a mail chute. Three boys with a cart knew they could earn a quarter by loading whatever Minsch tossed down the chute, then pushing it over to his car. The boys were waiting, but this time they had trouble lifting the sacks. Two men who had been standing nearby, waiting for someone, noticed the boys and walked over to help. The men picked up the sacks. “Where you boys want them?” The boys pointed at Minsch’s car. The men carried the bags over. The boys followed them with their pushcart. The men passed Minsch’s car and kept walking. They threw the sacks into the backseat of another car, got in, then drove away. One of the men was Big Tim; the other was Tim’s partner, Vincent Cosmano.
Someone squealed. A grand jury indicted both men. Murphy needed money for lawyers. He decided to rob another mail train to get it.
This time, Murphy bribed a mail clerk in Indianapolis named Teter. Teter had worked for the post office for twelve years. He sorted mail on a train—Train 31, the Monon—that ran between Indianapolis and Chicago, then back again. Teter had been a steady, well-respected, hardworking employee. Then he got sick. The post office laid him off. When Teter worked, he earned $90 a month but he hadn’t worked for three months. He needed money for food, for rent, for doctors.
Murphy was sympathetic. He cracked the seal on a bottle of scotch, poured Teter a drink, poured one for himself. “You’ve been in the service of the government for a hell of a long time,” Murphy said. “You’ve given it the best years of your life; now your health is broken. They ought to pension you. I need money and so do you. Come along with me and give me a tip—just a tip, that’s all I want—and I’ll lay $10,000 in front of you.”1
Teter refused. “I’d always been on the level and didn’t want to go crooked. But Murphy kept arguing. He told me I wasn’t taking a chance.”2
“There ain’t nobody in this job that can double cross you,” Murphy said. “If they do, I’ve got enough to hang the lot. If they squeal, I’ve got friends that’ll bump them off and they know it. You won’t have to figure in the job at all. All I want is the tip on when they ship the coin.”3
“The coin” Murphy wanted was a weekly shipment of cash and government bonds—Liberty Bonds—shipped in locked, “red stripe” registered mail sacks that went, by train, Train 31 in fact, from the Federal Reserve in Chicago to a Federal Reserve member bank in Indianapolis. During the twelve years Teter had sorted mail on the Monon, millions of dollars had passed through his hands. Teter knew that the shipments happened on Wednesdays, but he’d just returned to work; he wasn’t certain when on Wednesdays the money traveled. “I’ll give you $200 just to come to Chicago and go to the depot with me,” Murphy said.4 Teter had another drink. He agreed.
On March 22, Teter and Murphy, Murphy’s partner, Cosmano, Murphy’s longtime driver, Ed Guerin, and three other men walked into a soft drink parlor across from the Dearborn Station on Polk Street. Two of the men with Murphy were brothers—Frank and Peter Gusenberg—the pair who later shot up “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn while he was standing in a phone booth. The third man was a two-hundred-pound giant named “Fat Mike” Corrozzo. Murphy, Cosmano, and Teter sat at a table, facing the street. Guerin, Fat Mike, and the Gusenbergs sat at another, watching them.
Mail trucks, baggage trucks, parcel and delivery trucks came and went. Then a mail truck with #4212 stenciled on it pulled up to the loading platform. Teter nodded at Murphy. Teter nodded again when the first redstriped, locked canvas mail sack landed on the loading dock. Murphy and Cosmano looked at their watches: three o’clock, Train 31, the Monon, the money train for Indianapolis, was loading coin.
On April 6, Murphy’s crew did the job:
First Guerin stole a car. Not just any car. A big, black, high-powered Cadillac. Not just any Cadillac, big or black, but a Cadillac that belonged to a particular man—a rich man who’d made a name for himself by posting big rewards for crooks.
Guerin drove the car to a garage behind a grocery store. Murphy and the rest of the men were waiting. The crew climbed in; Murphy stayed behind. The grocery store would be their rendezvous after the robbery.
Three blocks from the depot, the Cadillac pulled over, and Teter climbed out. His job was to walk over to Clark and Polk. No rush. Just walk over there, then wait. Stand in the corner. When the mail truck with the money in it passed by, all Teter had to do was raise his hat. As simple as that.
There was an empty lot across the street from the station. Next door was a printing plant. Guys who worked there liked to play ball in the lot on their breaks.
Guerin parked the Cadillac in an alley; the crew climbed out. They had a bat and a ball. They had gloves. They started a game. It was two o’clock.
At four-thirty Teter raised his hat.
The men threw down their gloves and pulled out revolvers. They charged the loading dock. “Throw up your hands,” they shouted at the men on the platform.5 One of the Gusenbergs pointed his gun at the driver of the mail truck. “Toss out the registered mail!” The sacks were too heavy to lift. The driver and the bank clerk who rode with him kicked the bags out the back of the truck. Fat Mike lifted the biggest sack, and carried it in one hand, across the street. The Gusenbergs grabbed two more mailbags and followed him. Guerin was waiting. The Cadillac roared off.
A cop on the corner of Federal and Taylor knew something was wrong as soon as he saw the car. He fired two shots at it, then it was gone. It had taken two minutes to steal $380,000.
Murphy was back at the grocery store. “Eddie,” he said to Guerin, “take the car and ditch it somewhere out of the neighborhood. The rest of you, beat it. Come around tonight and we’ll make the split.” As the men were leaving, Murphy spoke to Guerin. “Eddie,” he said, “you don’t need to worry about your end. I’ll see you’re taken care of.”6
Teter was the first to be arrested and the first to confess. Guerin was the second. Teter confessed because—he said—late one night, alone in his cell, he heard another man weeping. “I got down on my knees,” Teter said, “and gave myself to God. . . . Next day, I told the Warden to send for the postal inspectors. . . . I was ready to plead guilty.”7
Guerin talked because Big Tim never did look out for him. A week went by before Murphy contacted him. He handed Guerin an envelope with $2,000 in it. “You’ve got ten more grand coming as soon as I can cash the bonds.” Guerin believed him. “I didn’t know at the time,” Guerin said, “that the grab amounted to $380,000. I thought $2,000 was pretty good profit for an afternoon’s work. . . . Two or three days later, I ran into Cosmano and asked him what he got. He said $20,000 in cash. That made me sore.”8
By then, Teter had confessed. A judge issued a search warrant for the house where Murphy’s father-in-law lived. Postal inspectors found a trunk in the attic. It was so heavy—so full of cash and bonds—that it took four men to haul it out. As soon as Guerin read about the trunk in the papers, he called the police. “I knew Tim had double crossed me—and all the rest of us.”9
The trunk had $112,000 in it. The bills were new. The Federal Reserve had a list of their serial numbers. Those serial numbers, plus the two confessions, sent Murphy to Leavenworth for four years. A judge issued search warrants for four of Tim’s safety deposit boxes as well as the house where he’d lived before the Pullman robbery in 1920. Police never found anything. Which is why, when Tim was released in 1926, as genial as ever, there were more than a few people, outside the law, who held grudges against him.
Tim was an optimist. He thought he could take up where he’d left off. Maybe not mail robbery, but labor organizing. Tim tried organizing tire dealers; when that didn’t work, he tried jelly manufacturers. After that, he tried gasoline dealers, then cookie jobbers, then garage workers. No go.
Tim wasn’t discouraged. There was money to be made, and Tim was the man to make it. He floated a scheme to start banana plantations in Texas. He came up with the idea of a new kind of grocery wagon—fleets of them, in fact. Stocked with everything a modern homemaker might need. Talk about convenience! No need to go to the butcher shop, then the fruit stand, then the baker. No need to go anywhere! Tim’s wagons would come to the little ladies! Grocery stores on wheels! No one was interested.
Tim kept trying. He loved a challenge. How about a dog track? How about a travel agency? Not your old-fashioned kind of travel agency. No sir! Tim’s new agency would sell one ticket—a universal ticket—good for travel anywhere, at any time, anywhere in the world. No luck.
Three weeks before Tim died, he hit on a sure thing: he’d take over the Cleaners and Dyers Union. The union had 10,000 members. Each and every one of them paid $2 a month dues. All Tim had to do was get himself elected president.
Maybe Tim had been away too long. Maybe he was too optimistic, or too greedy, or too desperate. The Cleaners and Dyers had long ago attracted some very serious people. People who worked for Al Capone. The union didn’t need a new president.
Police sent eight squads of detectives to Tim’s house after he was shot. Detectives searched the yard, questioned a few neighbors. Police never arrested anyone. Tim was a great guy. He had a lot of enemies. He’d be missed.
ANTHONY LOMBARDO
The news about Frankie Yale reached Chicago quickly. Early in July, people began leaving Little Italy; whole families fled like war refugees. People knew—blood for blood. What had happened in Brooklyn would happen in Chicago. “For Rent” signs began appearing in places that had been settled, cheek-to-jowl, for as long as anyone could remember. Alky cookers closed their stills; fewer people walked the streets; mothers kept their children close. The nuns at St. Philip’s noticed something unusual when school opened in September: they had two hundred fewer children in their classes. The teachers at Jenner Elementary noticed it too: they had four hundred fewer students than before. Outsiders who came and went from the district noticed something peculiar: one by one, every butcher shop began to close. People who knew—and were willing to talk—said it was because all the butchers came from the same village—from Bagheria. The butchers knew something very bad was about to happen.
That “something” had begun in 1925, when Mike Genna died, kicking and cursing, after his shootout with police. Until then, the Gennas, the Terrible Gennas, had controlled Little Italy like dukes. Everyone in the Twelfth Ward, civilian or policeman, worked for the Gennas—cooked alcohol for them or took money from them. After Mike Genna died—and after Torrio and Capone raised money to have Anselmi and Scalise acquitted—a struggle began.
Capone believed he had the right to bestow the district on a man of his own choosing. Capone decided Anthony Lombardo—a sugar wholesaler, a commodities dealer, a man of probity—would take over the Gennas’ stills.
Five brothers—the Aiellos—disagreed. Joseph, the eldest, was their leader. Joseph knew that Lombardo’s effort to broker a truce with Hymie Weiss had been a charade. Tony Lombardo wasn’t his own man: he was Al Capone’s dog. Dog and master ate from the same bowl. Let them eat, thought Joseph. He’d poison them both.
Joseph kidnapped the chef of the Bella Napoli (Diamond Joe’s restaurant), where Capone and Lombardo liked to eat. Aiello offered the cook $35,000 to poison his two most important customers.10 Poison them with prussic acid. One drop in each of their soup bowls. The scent of bitter almonds. Both men, dead. Take the money and kill them, said Aiello. Don’t take the money and die. The cook took the money—and told Capone. Capone sent a crew of machine gunners to Aiello’s store on West Division. They fired two hundred rounds into Joseph’s shop as a warning.
Joseph persisted.
He imported two assassins from St. Louis. He offered them $50,000—twenty-five for Lombardo; twenty-five for Capone. The only people who died were the assassins. Capone’s people dumped them near Melrose Park.
In 1926, Capone had had Hymie Weiss killed in an ambush. Aiello decided to use Capone’s methods against him and Lombardo. He set up a machine-gun nest across from Lombardo’s home on Washington Boulevard.11 Capone’s people found out. They informed the police. The police raided the post and arrested the gunmen.
Aiello tried once more. This time, he stationed machine gunners in a hotel across from a cigar store on South Clark Street. First Ward politicians and big-time crooks—Capone himself—used the place as a rendezvous.12 Capone’s people found out again. They called the police. This time, though, they told the police to arrest Aiello and hold him for questioning. Hold him, they said, until they got there.
The police did almost everything right. Except they released Aiello just as Capone’s gunmen arrived at the station. To avoid embarrassment—an assassination in the lobby, a gunfight on the front steps—the police locked everyone up. Aiello in one cell; Capone’s men in another. Aiello pleaded for his life. Capone’s men told him he was a dead man, walking.13 Aiello’s lawyer got him out before Capone’s lawyers did the same thing for their clients. Joseph asked the police for protection. The police made him an offer—leave town now and live. Go to New York, they said. Then leave the country.
That night, Joseph and two of his brothers left the city. They reached New York, then kept going. They stopped when they got to Trenton. They set up shop. They and Frankie Yale became the very best of friends. Which is why, when Yale was killed in Brooklyn, Joseph and his brothers decided to return the favor; they sent four men to Chicago to kill Lombardo.
In Little Italy, the Feast of Our Lady of Loreto had begun. In good times, crowds filled the streets. This time, there were more people in the parade than on the sidewalks, watching them. There were paper garlands and lanterns, fried cakes and grilled sausages—but few people to enjoy them. Those who were out walked quickly and averted their eyes. There was one banner, though, that everyone saw, that everyone noticed. It hung above the doors of the church of San Fillippo Benzi, above its parish hall:
FRATELLI
PER RISPETTO A DIO IN CUI, CREDETE
PER ONORE DELLA PATRIA E DELLA UMANITA
PREGATE
PERCHE CESSI. L’LNDEGNA STRAGE
CHE DISONORA IL NOME ITALIANO
DINANZI AL MONDO CIVILE
“BROTHERS!” it read. “For the respect of your American country and humanity—PRAY that this ferocious manslaughter which disgraces the Italian name before the civilized world may come to an end.”
Anthony Lombardo didn’t see the parade or the banner. He was downtown in his office, the office of the Italo-American Union, in the Hartford building, on South Dearborn, in the Loop. The only formal appointment Lombardo had that day was to hear the petition of a man named Ranieri—a sewer contractor whose son had been kidnapped and was being held for ransom. The kidnappers wanted $60,000 for the boy. Ranieri wanted Lombardo to negotiate with them. Of course, Lombardo knew the kidnapper: an extortionist named Petitti. Petitti would settle for less than what he asked. Doing Ranieri a favor wouldn’t be difficult—but it was all very tiresome.
At four-thirty Lombardo decided to go out for lunch. Get some food in his stomach before Ranieri began his weeping and moaning. Joseph Ferraro and Joseph Lolordo went with him. Ferraro was a bodyguard. Lolordo was a friend.
The sidewalks and the streets were crowded with people. Lombardo’s office was next door to the Hamilton Club, across the street from the Union Trust Bank. A fine address. Three blocks from City Hall. One block from what Chicago liked to call “The World’s Busiest Corner.”14
On the corner across from Lombardo’s office was the Boston Store, a department store famous for its size and promotions. On that day, the store was installing an airplane—a mail plane—in its sixth-floor showroom. The plane hung, suspended from cables, attached to a crane, which was guiding it, nose first, through the store’s upper windows. Down below, the crowd stopped to watch. Ferraro, Lolordo, and Lombardo stood and watched along with everyone else. “Would you look at that thing!” were Lombardo’s last words.
The men the Aiellos sent used dumdum .45s—a good choice for shooters who wanted their slugs to spread out and stay inside their target. Ferraro was shot twice in the back; Lombardo twice in the head. Lolordo didn’t have a mark on him. (Lolordo died four months later, just after New Year’s, while he was having dinner in his own home. His dinner guests shot him eleven times in the head, neck, and shoulders, while he was raising his glass to toast their health.)
Ferraro lived for two days after he was shot. He refused to answer any questions. The only thing police knew for certain was that Ferraro wasn’t his real name. The only address they had for him was Capone’s old headquarters in Cicero, the Hawthorne Hotel. (Capone had just moved to the Lexington Hotel at Twenty-second and Michigan in Chicago.) Rumors, not evidence, connected Ferraro to only one crime: the shotgun assassination of Ben Newmark, one of Mr. Crowe’s investigators. (Newmark had been the man who’d interrogated—and broken—Harvey Church.)
Capone sent an enormous heart of red roses to Lombardo’s funeral. At the center of the heart, white carnations spelled out the words “My Pal.” Thirty of Capone’s bodyguards, some in cars, some on foot, stood watch at Lombardo’s house. The ones in cars wrapped their machine guns in brown paper and lay them at their feet. Eventually, Capone came to pay his respects. Police investigators watched the crowd and wrote down the license plate of every car they saw. Albert Anselmi and John Scalise made an appearance. So did Machine Gun Jack McGurn; so did Mops Volpe, an old friend of the late Diamond Joe.
The front of Lombardo’s house was draped with garlands. Banners of flowers spelled his name. Hundreds of people filled the street to watch. The cortege assembled: twenty cars of flowers; pallbearers dressed in tuxedos; a parade of mourners in Cadillacs and Lincolns and Chryslers, two miles long. At Mount Carmel, a quartet sang “Nearer My God to Thee.” Lombardo’s casket was carried into a mausoleum. The church refused him consecrated ground.
Reporters were permitted to gather around Capone. “Honest,” Capone said, “it’s all a puzzle to me. Tony and Frankie Yale were good friends. . . . I don’t know who killed either of them. . . . It all seems to me like a dream. “15
OLE SCULLY
Two men kidnapped Billy Ranieri while he was playing kick-the-can all by himself, in the school yard across from his home. Billy was ten years old, but he was small for his age, and frail. Little Billy. The men hit him in the head, threw him onto the floor of their car, kicked him until he stopped moving. They drove him to a farm run by a family named Cappellano. The Cappellanos locked Billy in a room.
Billy’s father, Frank Ranieri, went to see Angelo Petitti the next day. Frank’s cousin Ole Scully told him to do that. Petitti had been extorting money from Scully—and everyone else Scully knew—for years. Petitti ran a soft drink parlor—but, as a police detective named Burns later testified, there were no bottles of anything, soft or hard, in the place.16 Just Petitti and his notebook, full of names and sums.
Petitti told Frank to go home and wait for a phone call. Frank’s phone rang ten minutes later. “If you want your boy back alive, it’ll cost you $60,000.” Frank went back to see Petitti. To ask for advice. Petitti told him not to come back again unless he had the $60,000 with him. Then what? Then the two of them would go for a little walk. Someone would approach them; Frank would hand the money to the man. Little Billy would come home.
Frank made an appointment to see Tony Lombardo.
Lombardo didn’t live long enough to be of any help, so Frank went back to see Petitti. “I don’t have $60,000,” he said. “How about $5,000?” Petitti glared at him. “What are you bargaining for?” Petitti said. “If you can get $5,000 you can get $7,000.”17
Petitti and Frank made a deal; Frank’s brother, Nick, would come back with $5,000. After Little Billy came home, Petitti would get the other $2,000. Not for Petitti, himself. For the kidnappers.
Frank borrowed the $5,000 from his cousin Ole Scully. Scully went to see the grand jury. He told the jury everything he knew about Petitti. Police arrested Petitti immediately. The next day, when Petitti appeared before Judge Frank Comerford, the judge explained a new fact of life to him: there would be no bail. Petitti would stay in jail until Little Billy came home. Robert Crowe was no longer state’s attorney. The facts of life had changed.
Petitti sent word to the Cappellanos. They took Billy for a ride. They handed him a $10 bill and told him to walk down the road. His father was waiting. Billy wandered around until he found a gas station. The owner called the sheriff.
Judge Comerford ordered Petitti held on the charge of kidnapping for ransom. The Cappellanos were arrested the next day. They said Petitti had forced them to do what they did.
It took three weeks to assemble a jury. Everyone knew jury service in a Black Hand trial could be lethal. Prosecutors asked for the death penalty.
On December 13, as prosecutors were making their opening arguments, Petitti’s men found Scully and killed him. Assistant State’s Attorney Sam Hoffman and Hoffman’s assistant Charles Mueller received death threats. Handwritten notes. Simple, straightforward, ominous. Hoffman sent his wife and children out of town. He and Mueller moved into a hotel. They ate and slept, came and went under guard.
Judge John Swanson was the new state’s attorney. He issued a statement.
“If Scully was murdered because he was a witness in the Ranieri case, I construe it as an open challenge to all law enforcement officials. . . . As public prosecutor of the county, I accept the challenge. “18
The state announced that the Ranieris—father and son—would replace Ole Scully as prosecution witnesses. Frank Ranieri got a letter in the mail: “You better save your money and don’t be crazy. If you do not do it . . . you won’t live to see the end of the trial. We see you every day. You’ll get it soon. Last chance. Remember the boy. “19 Little Billy got a letter of his own. State’s Attorney Swanson ordered fifty police officers to guard the Ranieris, day and night.
The presiding judge, Robert Genzel, was threatened. The note he received was nearly illegible: Quit the trial or die. Genzel ordered bailiffs to search and question all spectators. He issued a statement:
“It is high time that private citizens are protected properly from these undesirable aliens. Something must be done on behalf of our respectable Italians so they may have proper protection from these vicious killers. The federal government must step in to deport these aliens. It is deportation they fear more than penitentiary cells. “20
Three more prosecution witnesses received death threats. Swanson ordered additional police protection for them.
On December 23, prosecutor Hoffman made his closing argument to the jury:
“You men,” he said, “have lived through a terrible drama. . . . If you hadn’t heard the story here, you probably wouldn’t have believed that this kind of thing could happen in this country in 1928.
“You have the opportunity today to make history. For Chicago. For the nation. Some 230 million eyes are watching you men today. “21
The jury deliberated until two-thirty in the morning. Petitti and his lawyers said the kidnappers had forced him to do what he did. He’d only been trying to help. He had kids of his own. He knew what Frank must have been going through.
The jury compromised: Petitti had been guilty of something—but not guilty enough to die. Twenty-five years. Justice was done.