The murder ring leaders knew that insurance companies don't investigate little policies, and that arsenic can fool the best doctors, and on this knowledge they carried out the greatest mass murder plot in American history.
First indication of the existence of the murder-for-insurance ring came to light two years ago in Brooklyn when John Cacapardo, 28, arrested on a charge of murdering his sweetheart, Molly Starace, told his lawyer that his uncle, Paul Petrillo, the South Philadelphia tailor, was a "witch-doctor," and leader in the murder plot; that uncle had offered him a job as executioner, and had told Molly Starage that she could kill her stepfather for insurance; and that his uncle and the murder ring often killed people for insurance.
Police and Leo Healy, the lawyer appointed by the court to defend Cacapardo, laughed at him. Caca-pardo said he had gone to her house to protect her from Paul Petrillo, whom he found there; that an argument and a fight took place and that Molly Starace was killed when a gun was discharged accidentally. Healy discounted the Cacaparo's story, and said he could save him from the electric chair by pleading guilty to a crime of passion. Healy did save his client from the chair, and Caca-pardo got thirty years in Sing Sing.
The next indication came when George Neumeyer, an unemployed upholsterer sent to prison in De-aware, and who developed a new cleaning fluid for upholstery, went to see Paul Petrillo on June 27, 1938, to borrow $25 to market the fluid after a fellow-convict had given him Petrillo's name and address. Petrillo sent Neumeyer to see his cousin, Herman Petrillo. Herman asked him many questions about his past, then told him how he could make $500. Petrillo said that Ferdinand Alfonsi, a W.P.A. worker, had been a pro-sporous cement contractor when he married, but that his young wife, Stella, was tired of him. Neumeyer would hit him on the head with a lead pipe, and would get $500 in real money, or $2,500 counterfé Neumeyer told the story to William Landvoigt, at the United States Secret Service headquarters.
Landvoigt, who had been watch-forfeiting, assigned Secret Service agent Stanley Phillips to work on the case, and put Neumeyer on the government payroll as an informer.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.