CRIME: Robber’s Den

Cabmen who motored Carl Rettich around Providence, R. I. thought he was a rich doctor or lawyer. He was a personable man—tall, robust, black-haired, elegantly dressed. Only his eyes, cold and unsmiling as a cat’s, were discomforting. But most of downtown Providence thought him a “swell fellow.” He had a fine seashore house on nearby Warwick Neck, a spacious Dutch Colonial mansion with weather-stained shingles and white columns only a field away from the estate of Rhode Island’s rich U. S. Senator Peter Goelet Gerry. Also nearby was the swank yacht-going Warwick Country Club, to which belong John D. Rockefeller Jr., Harold S. Vanderbilt, many another bigwig. Senator Gerry and club members often graced Neighbor Rettich’s lawn parties with their presence.

Few weeks ago one Herbert Hyman Hornstein, highbrowed Brown University graduate in the class of 1932, was arrested in Los Angeles. He had passed a $20 bill recognized as part of $129,000 stolen from a U.S. mail truck in Fall River, Mass, last Jan. 23. Herbert Hornstein’s talk set U.S. postal inspectors on the trail of Carl Rettich and his suave, handsome henchman, Andino Merola. One day last fortnight they followed the pair from Providence to Worcester, Mass., lost them there. That night Andino Merola’s corpse was found filled with bullets beside a road near Wrentham, Mass. Next day postal inspectors and Providence police descended on Carl Rettich’s big house on Warwick Neck, arrested his father, his sister & brother-in-law. Then they proceeded to make some discoveries which left Senator Gerry and Warwick Country Clubbers gaping.

When customs agents boarded Bootlegger Carl Rettich’s yacht Prudence in Boston harbor three years ago. they searched in vain for contraband until one chanced to unscrew an electric light bulb. At once panels slid back, revealing thousands of dollars worth of liquor. In Rettich’s Warwick house the raiders scraped some whitewash off a brick pillar in the cellar, found and turned a key. A great slab of concrete rose quietly out of the floor, opening the way to a subcellar. Steps led from the subcellar to a huge vault in which were found three machine guns, 25 Winchester rifles, pistols, much ammunition.

Under a flagstone walk the searchers found a metal box containing some $9,000 of the Fall River robbery cash, plus a sugar bag crammed with nickels. On the walls of the hidden vault they found stains which looked like blood. From under the veranda they raked some bones which they thought were human. Under the kitchen floor they found $10,000 more of the Fall River money.

Carl Rettich gave himself up early last week. With the arrest of the chief and 20-odd henchmen, authorities felt that the solution of the Fall River case was only a beginning. They planned to prosecute Rettich first under the “Lindbergh Law” for enticing Andino Merola across a State line to his death. But first they expected him to tell something about the disappearance in 1933 of his onetime ‘legging partner. Danny Walsh, who, rumor said, had been stood in a tub of cement until it dried, then tossed into Narragansett Bay. Perhaps he could explain, too, what happened to “Legs” Carella, whose body was found wrapped up in burlap with feet hacked off, gold tooth knocked out, scars sliced away. Most hopeful were they of pinning on the Rettich gang the great $428,000 armored truck robbery in Brooklyn last summer (TIME, Sept. 3), Day by day grew the list of crimes of which the gang was suspected: a mail truck robbery of $100,000 in Warren, Ohio; another of $51,000 in Butler, Pa.; an American Railway Express truck robbery of $10,000 in Perth Amboy, N. J.; three Massachusetts bank robberies totaling $51,500; a $200,000 jewel robbery in Magnolia. Mass, last summer; the O’Connell kidnapping in Albany in 1933; the disappearance of New York’s Judge Crater five years ago.

For crime addicts, much of the grue went out of the case when a State chemist reported that the vault stains had not been made by blood, that the bones were from roast beef and had probably been dragged under the veranda by a dog.