Alan Hynd - Authentic Cases From the Files of Alan Hynd

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.

The Witch had a fishmonger named Luigi Primavera. It was the same evil story all over again, with Paul Petrillo romanc-ing the wife and Little Herman Petrillo standing in for the doomed man. But this time there was a new twist. Doctor Bolber, warming up to his work, decided to take a more personal hand in mat-ters. “I’m going to kill this man Primavera personally,” he in-formed the Petrillo cousins

“How, Doc?” asked Little Herman. “I’m going to run over him with an automobile,” said the faith healer. So one rainy day, while Primavera was hawking fish on a lonely street in South Philly, Doctor Bolber, at the wheel of a car with a souped-up motor and fake license plates, waited until the victim left his wagon to knock on some doors. Then the doctor stepped on the gas, ran up on a sidewalk and sent poor Primavera and his fish flying.

Late that night, the doctor sat in his office reading the early editions of the morning papers. The papers carried the story of the hit-and-runner who had killed the fishmonger. Some people living on the street where the fatality had occurred had told the cops that the driver of the car, whose description fitted that of Bolber, had apparently been deliberate in run-ning Primavera down.

The faith healer sat in his office most of that night, drinking and thinking. Just as daylight was peeping through the blinds in his office he reached a momentous decision. Henceforth he would eschew accidental deaths in favor of natural ones. True, a natural death paid only half the insurance money that a double indemnity one did, but it was less likely to excite sus-picion.

Next Doctor Bolber was visited by an inspiration that was to prove a bright milestone in the history of premeditated homicide. He decided that a canvas bag, filled with about twenty pounds of sand, would, if brought down properly on a man’s head, render the victim temporarily unconscious. Repeated ad-ditional blows would induce a cerebral hemorrhage and a sand bag would leave no outward traces of having been applied.

Doctor Bolber’s sandbag technique proved just as success-ful as he predicted it would be. For three solid years, from 1934 to 1937, Paul and Little Herman Petrillo, working stealthily under the faith healer’s supervision, traveled through-out the Quaker City, respectively romancing wives and sand-bagging sleeping husbands. And by now, a new twist had been added. With the assistance of The Witch in North Philly, some of the recent widows were now being primped for re-marriage…with the intention of taking out new insurance policies on their new husbands and then arranging for their lucrative demise.

The Witch proved to be a most valuable scout for the satanic doctor.

By January of 1937, some five years after Mrs. Anthony Giacobbe had first appeared in Doctor Bolber’s crummy office asking for some saltpeter for her errant spouse, the faith healer had given the nod for an estimated fifty killings. By now Bolber’s faded-red brick home at the corner of Ninth Street and Moyamensing Avenue had taken on a new look by an expensive mid-town decorating outfit.

The Petrillo boys were also doing splendidly at the bank and chasing around town in expensive automobiles. The Witch, who was a baseball fan devoted to the fortunes of the local Philadelphia Athletics, was to be seen regu-larly in a field box at Shibe Park, eating hot dogs by the half dozen, spilling mustard on expensive satin dresses, and invok-ing the wrath of the nether regions on the players of visiting clubs.

Everybody was fat and rich. But were they happy? You’re damned right they were!

So far as the Philadelphia Police Department went, Doctor Bolber might very well have still been sitting there in his office in South Philly for several decades beyond the Thirties, giving the lethal nod to the Petrillo boys. Only one cop in the entire department — a smart and honest dick by the name of Sam Ricardo — got a whiff of what was going on.

Ricardo, like Doctor Bolber, was a fellow who kept an ear to the ground. Thus, in the early months of 1937, he heard the first faint rumbles of a murder-for-insurance ring at work. Ricardo didn’t hear any names, just that there were, and had been for some time, some not-so-brotherly goings on in the City of Brotherly Love.

Detective Ricardo went to his superiors and asked to be as-signed to investigate the rumors he had heard. His superiors looked at Ricardo as if the man were not quite bright. So Ricardo was assigned to some pedestrian investigations while Doctor Bolber continued on his satanic way.