Word: petrillo
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Philadelphia judge & jury last week awarded the electric chair to Herman Petrillo, 40, spaghetti salesman and "brains" of a murder-for-insurance syndicate alleged to have done away with four victims of arsenic poisoning on whose lives they had insurance (TIME, Feb. 13). After hearing the verdict, Herman Petrillo tried to slug the jury's forewoman, was dragged cursing from the courtroom. Judge Harry S. McDevitt ordered the arrest of Paul Petrillo (cousin) and the widow of a poisonee (two other widows were already in custody), and investigators began exhuming 70 bodies in graveyards of Pennsylvania, New Jersey...
When George Meyers of Lakewood, N. J. one day last year asked a Philadelphia friend for $25 to use in his upholstery-cleaning business, the friend introduced him to Herman Petrillo. Mr. Petrillo had a better idea. He would give George Meyers some big money "-$500 real or $2.500 counterfeit"-if only he would see that one Ferdinand Alfonsi met an accidental death. Cleaner Meyers told his story to the Secret Service, was hired as an informer. Last week he told his findings in a Philadelphia court, where Mr. Petrillo and two women were on trial for running a racket...
Ferdinand Alfonsi did die, of arsenic poisoning. So did one Philip Ingrao, 18. So, the Government contended, did at least ten other Philadelphians, whose grasping relatives had insured them for a total of nearly $100,000, and given Herman Petrillo the job of making the policies pay out. Thoroughly professional, Mr. Petrillo, said witnesses, shopped around for cheap killers, worked not only with arsenic but with sandbags, faked hit-&-run accidents, a lead pipe so ingeniously designed that it could bash in a skull to look as if the victim had fallen downstairs...
...past three years, phonograph manufacturers estimate that the boom will continue for 18 months, during which they will market 100,000 more. Because a saloonkeeper with a record machine does not require the services of even a beery "professor" at a piano, Chicago Musicians' Boss James C. ("Mussolini") Petrillo, in order to manufacture work for musicians, forbade his unionists to make any more recordings (TIME, Jan. 4). And haggard President Joseph N. Weber of the American Federation of Musicians has threatened a national musicians' strike if record and radio people do not do something about unemployed...
Because radio transcriptions, records and sound tracks make their continuous work unnecessary, 11,000 musicians are permanently unemployed and many more suffer, but not in silence, sporadic layoffs. Long an opponent of "canned" music, author of the first ban on recordings without union sanction was James C. Petrillo, surly boss of the Chicago branch of the American Federation of Musicians. Petrillo's ban lost Chicago musicians $125,000 worth of record and radio dates, but it made Petrillo a Labor hero (TIME, Jan. 4). That he would urge national adoption of the record ban was a foregone conclusion...