Tag Archives: illegal drugs

Portrait of a Drug Dealer

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Portrait of a Drug Dealer

The first hint of trouble came when Elmer Tuttle deserted from the army. He’d enlisted in his home state of New York for a three-year stretch on September 14, 1901. He made it through just over a year and a half, deserting on April 2, 1902. Captured six months later, he was dishonorably discharged.

Four years later, while working as a bartender at the Lehigh Valley Hotel, he stole $65 from his employer, William Edwards. William had grown to trust “Bob” as Elmer was then known, and left him in charge for a few days while he went to the races in Ithaca. When he returned, both “Bob” and the cash from the previous three days’ sales had disappeared.

At his trial it came out that “Bob” had worked with a female accomplice who had posed as Edwards’ wife and she was the person who’d actually made off with the money. This made it problematic to prove the charge of grand larceny against him. Along with the fact that Elmer had a wife and baby at home, the court decided to let him to plead guilty to petty larceny. He served just a few months in jail.

jamesville pen

By April 1910 he’d been convicted of burglary and was housed in the Onondaga County Penitentiary in Jamesville, courtesy of the taxpayers of the State of New York. Now 30 years old, Elmer was listed on the federal census as being on his second marriage. Perhaps as a joke he told the census taker that his father, William, was born in France. In reality William Tuttle was a native New Yorker who was born in the tiny village of Walton and traced his ancestry back to the American Revolution.

Soon Elmer was on the loose again. He left his calling card (literally) in a ball of discarded clothing after robbing some much nicer clothes than those he’d been wearing from the lakeside cottage of H.C. Raymond in Penn Yan, New York. He was never arrested for this crime.

A few years later Elmer moved to Binghampton with his wife, Gertrude Bertha Rowley. What happened to his previous wife and his child is anyone’s guess. Gertrude’s father, Daniel, was a Civil War veteran who’d served honorably as a private in the 86th NY Infantry — the storied “Steuben Rangers.” Dan had seen action at many of the prominent battles of the war. What he thought of his daughter marrying an ex-con who’d been dishonorably discharged is not hard to fathom.

Elmer was arrested for selling morphine and heroin and was given a one-year stint, again in the prison at Onondaga, in 1914. While he was in prison (and possibly earlier) Gertrude was turning tricks for a living. She was arrested on November 6, 1914 for robbing a customer of a large roll of cash. The police believed the man might have been drugged before he was robbed. Gertrude was allowed to plead guilty to public intoxication and sentenced to 59 days in jail.

Elmer Tuttle_back

When he got out of prison, Elmer went back to selling drugs. According to the information on the back of his photo, by March 1915 he’d been convicted again and was serving time in Auburn Prison. His photo doesn’t look like a mugshot, so evidently the police confiscated a studio portrait he’d had taken, made some notes on the back and kept it for reference.

Around the time Elmer was incarcerated at Auburn, Gertrude was arrested for stealing a watch and chain from a “Mr. Moore” — likely a client — at a boarding house. The following year she got a six-month sentence at the Onondaga Penitentiary for vagrancy after she was arrested while working as a prostitute at a disorderly house in Binghamton. Later that same year she was jailed for six months for robbing one of her clients in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

The fact that Gertrude often robbed her clients is an indication that she may have been addicted to drugs and needed more money than she could earn by sex work alone.

Given his life style and incarcerations, it will come as no surprise that Elmer didn’t live to be an old man. He died on September 11, 1919 of tuberculosis in Scranton. His death certificate lists his profession as “drug clerk,” which begs the question of whether or not he was selling drugs legally by then. (My guess is he was not). His family made sure he got a nice funeral and a decent burial.

Gertrude continued to work in prostitution for a number of years after her husband’s death. She was charged with running a disorderly house in Scranton in May 1927 and she was arrested for soliciting and sentenced to jail in September 1930. By 1940, when she was 58 years old, she had no profession and was living in the tiny town of Osceola, Pennsylvania, with her widowed mother. This is where she died, aged 85, on April 15, 1973.

Featured photo: A studio photographic portrait of Elmer Tuttle that was used by police as a mugshot. Collection of the author

Davidson_978-1-4766-8254-9

I’m very pleased to announce that my biography of the infamous criminal, Sophie Lyons, will be released soon. The research and writing of the book took about two years, but I think it was worth it!

Knock-out Drops

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If you watched the second episode of The Alienist on TNT recently, you may have wondered about the harrowing experience of John Moore (played by Luke Evans) after knock-out drops were put in his drink.

Moore, a newspaper crime illustrator and friend of the alienist, Dr. Lazlo Kreizler, takes a trip alone to the “boy whorehouse” in lower Manhattan, where Giorgio Santorelli, the teenage victim whose brutal murder Kreizler is investigating, worked before his death. He hopes to interview Giorgio’s employers and coworkers in an effort to prove his detective skills to Kreizler. However he gets more than he bargained for when the bartender spikes his drink with a powder. The episode ends with Moore falling paralyzed on a bed, unable to move or speak, as the brothel’s young male prostitutes swarm over him.

Is there any truth to this part of the plotline in the show? Did bartenders actually spike their patrons’ drinks with paralytic drugs?

Crooked bartenders did, in fact, spike drinks with knock-out drops or powders (probably chloral hydrate) during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, usually for the purpose of robbing the victim. A case in point is a bartender named Dennis Houlihan, also known as “Happy Hooligan” and “Knock out” who was active in Fort Wayne, Indiana in August 1901.

Dennis, an Irishman with a florid complexion, was described in the news as a “grafter, dispenser of knock-out drugs and all round thing man.” He worked as a bartender at the Shamrock Saloon, a tavern owned by a man named Jack Cain. Dennis was arrested on suspicion of having robbed a Shamrock customer named Thomas Otis of $17. However Thomas, who’d had plenty to drink, along with possibly a bit of the old knock-out powder, wasn’t able to say for certain where his money went missing, so the case against Dennis was dismissed.

Police were informed that Dennis and Jack previously ran a notorious “joint” in Cleveland, where sailors were regularly given knock-out drops and robbed of their cash. Unwilling to let Dennis off scott-free, they immediately rearrested him for “flim flamming” a man out of a twenty-dollar bill at a different bar. This time the charges stuck and “Knock out” got what was described as the stiffest sentence ever handed out in Fort Wayne — $200 and six months in the workhouse. If unable to pay the fine, which is quite likely, he would be the guest of the Fort Wayne police for a whopping 495 days.

Police suspected Dennis might move his operations elsewhere, so they shared his details with police detective bureaus in other cities. The card that survived is from St. Paul, Minnesota.

Dennis Houlihan_back

A final story about Dennis appeared in an Indianapolis newspaper in 1907, after he was arrested for knocking down a drunken friend, stealing the man’s watch and pawning it. Initially he denied the accusation but later he admitted his guilt. “A man will do anything when drunk,” he commented, “even to his best friend.” As John Moore discovers in The Alienist, a sober bartender’s enemy may suffer the most severe consequences of all.

Featured photos: Dennis Houlihan’s mugshots from his Bertillon card dated August 12, 1901. Collection of the author.

Mistaken

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Mistaken

LOS ANGELES, May 11. — Carl York, 22-year-old police informer who was shot down by detectives through “mistake,” died today in General hospital. He succumbed to five bullet wounds while police sought to link him with a series of recent filling station robberies. They claimed nine attendants identified the youth as one of two bandits who staged a series of recent spectacular raids in which attendants were kidnapped.

York denied any complicity in the robberies.

— San Bernardino Sun, May 12, 1935

Carl York, a police informer, and W.L. Lanier, a narcotics squad detective with the LAPD, mounted the rickety stairs to the second floor door of a cheap Los Angeles rooming house during the early hours of the morning on May 8, 1935. Carl and Lanier didn’t know it, but three LAPD robbery squad detectives were staked out in a “bandit trap” near the bottom of the stairs outside the house, waiting for the occupants to return. The detectives had already searched inside the house, where they’d found a handgun and a small amount of narcotics.

“We’re police officers, hands up!” came the command from below as Carl and Lanier moved towards the door. Carl’s hand moved towards his hip pocket and the officers on the ground floor opened fire. Lanier wasn’t hit but Carl slumped over, seriously wounded. Lanier shone his flashlight in the direction of the gunfire. Recognizing one of the shooters as a fellow officer, he identified himself and ordered them to stop firing.

shooting photo

The Los Angeles Times, May 10, 1935.

Carl didn’t have a weapon. He was taken to the prison ward of Los Angeles General Hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries three days later. He left a wife and small daughter in Denver, Colorado.

Carl York not a mugshot

The Los Angeles Times, May 10, 1935

News reports described Carl as both an “undercover agent” and a “police informer” who was engaged in a narcotics investigation when he was shot by mistake. Both the LAPD narcotics and robbery squads were involved in separate investigations that brought them to the rooming house on the morning that Carl was shot. Each squad was unaware of what the other was doing.

The police claimed witnesses identified Carl as one of two men who carried out a series of raids in which parking lot attendants and vehicle owners were carjacked at gunpoint, robbed of small amounts of cash and kidnapped. Over the course of four days in April 1935, the bandits struck 12 times. The culprits drove the stolen cars, sometimes with the victim inside, through the city at high speeds. They’d abandon one car and steal another one. The victims were frightened, but not injured, though one man was thrown from his vehicle while it was moving and another was forced to hand over most of his clothing before being released from his car semi-nude.

Carl York mugshot

News photo mugshot of Carl York, May 9, 1935. Collection of the author.

The L.A. coroner ordered an inquest into Carl’s death. The verdict was “justifiable homicide” — an accidental and unintentional shooting by the officers. The Municipal League demanded an inquiry into Carl’s shooting, but nothing came of that.

After Carl’s death, four men reported to be Carl’s criminal associates were charged with robbery and conspiracy to rob but there’s no evidence that they were ever tried or sentenced to prison.

Then in June 1937, a series of kidnap robberies that were eerily similar to the crimes of April 1935 occurred in Bakersfield, California, 115 miles north of Los Angeles. Los Angeles residents Moran Pierce and Charles W. Taylor, both aged 23, committed the crimes.

Armed with automatic pistols, Pierce and Taylor staged their first holdup at El Tejon garage. They stopped E.W. Stevenson of Burlingame, as he drove into the garage in a big Packard, and subsequently held up Henry Lopez, garage attendant. Both Stevenson and Lopez were taken out on the Edison Highway, obliged to get out of the car and were strapped to the fence with belts.

 

Pierce and Taylor returned to Bakersfield and held up H.R. Thompson, operator of a Richfield service station, at Twenty-first Street and Golden State Highway. They abandoned their stolen automobile after this holdup and returned to their hotel.

—The Bakersfield Californian, June 15, 1937

Pierce and Taylor were captured in their flophouse the morning after the crime spree during a search of all the rooming houses in the vicinity. The two men admitted to the Bakersfield kidnap robberies, along with some other burglaries. They also told police they pulled two service station kidnap robberies in Los Angeles a few days before the Bakersfield crimes. Both got life sentences, with Pierce heading to Folsom State Prison and Taylor going to San Quentin.

No photo of Taylor was located, however Pierce and Carl bear a resemblance to each other. It’s plausible that Carl was mistaken for Pierce who, along with Taylor, committed the Los Angeles kidnap robberies in April 1935. Then the pair laid low for a while only to reappear and commit similar crimes in Bakersfield. If so, Carl was telling the truth when he said he had nothing to do with the kidnap robberies. After death he was vilified as a criminal when perhaps all he’d done was help the police with their narcotics investigation.

Featured photo: Moran Pierce (left) in his Folsom prison photo, collection of the California State Archives. Carl York (right) in a news photo mugshot, collection of the author.

Cupid Pleaded

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Cupid Pleaded

Joseph Kanefsky_back_markedPauline Wernovsky had been waiting a long time to marry her sweetheart. In fact she’d been waiting two and a half years for her fiancée, Joseph Kanefsky, to get out of Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia and he’d finally been released after serving time for burglary. But on January 20, 1937, he and two prisoners and their girlfriends were charged with smuggling narcotics into the prison. Instead of marrying Pauline it looked like Kanefsky was headed back to the slammer.

Judge Parry, however, was sympathetic to Pauline plight. The persuasive young woman told him she would personally make sure her fiancée stayed straight, so he allowed Kanefsky to sign a $2000 bond, gave him two years probation and the couple were married before a magistrate then and there. As one newspaper put it, “Cupid pleaded successfully in Philadelphia Quarter Sessions Court for Joseph Kanefsky.”

The other four people arrested for dope smuggling were convicted of the charge.

Kanefsky, alias Joe Neff, has a self-assured look in his mugshot. His stylish hat is tipped at a rakish angle and his yellow-blue eyes have an intense gaze. He has just a hint of a smile playing on his lips. It’s as though he already knows that his pretty, dark-haired girlfriend is going to play the judge for a chump — his freedom to follow.

Two and a half years later, in September 1939, Pauline and Joe were in front of a different judge, charged with illegal possession and use of narcotics. They were arrested while sitting in an automobile parked on a Philadelphia street and detectives testified they found a hypodermic needle and morphine in the car. Having previously played Joe’s “get out of jail free” card, both were sentenced to the Philadelphia House of Correction.

In May 1944 Kanefsky was in trouble again when he was caught trying to use prescription blanks stolen from a South Philadelphia physician’s office to obtain narcotics. He was charged with forgery and drug addiction.

Joe’s final reported arrest came on September 21, 1951 in New York City.

The detectives said they had spent some time watching him stroll along Broadway looking for customers. They said that when he was arrested a man who was walking along with him escaped.

— The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 22, 1951

Detectives found $329, a capsule of opium and 15 envelopes of heroin in Joseph Kanefsky’s pockets. He was charged him with possession and suspicion of selling illegal drugs.

Featured photo: Philadelphia Bureau of Police mugshot of Joseph Kanefsky taken on January 20, 1937. Collection of the author.