Last summer I inadvertently stumbled upon a story about organized crime in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Since August, I have been poring through archival records, historical newspapers, and interviewing the descendants and extended kin of people involved in Pittsburgh’s gambling and bootlegging rackets between 1920 and 1980. As I work my way through this research I will be posting stories in this space: #Mobsburgh.
The first #Mobsburgh story begins far away from Pittsburgh in the U.S. 301 and U.S. 1 highway corridors between Richmond, Virginia, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1933 and 1934, a loosely organized crew committed a string of robberies and murders. They were called the “Tri-State Gang” for the territory (Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia) where they operated.
Pittsburgh was a bit far afield for the gang, best known for hijacking cigarette trucks out of North Carolina and for robbing postal facilities in Washington, D.C., and Richmond. Yet, their crime spree extended to Pittsburgh in 1934 when the body of one of the gang members was found behind an apartment building in the city’s emerging Jewish neighborhood, Squirrel Hill.
Wendover Apartments, Squirrel Hill, December 2019.
The Baltimore evening Sun, May 23, 1934. Source: newspapers.com
Morris Kauffman had been on several of the Tri-State Gang‘s most notorious heists, including the March 8, 1934 murder of Ewell Huband, a 46-year-old delivery truck driver. Huband and his partner, Benjamin Meade, were doing a pickup for the Federal Reserve Bank at Richmond’s Broad Street Station. Four members of the Tri-State Gang — Walter Legenza, Robert Mais, William “Big George” Phillips, and Kauffman — ambushed the truck intent on stealing its contents. Before leaving with sacks of what turned out to be worthless paper, Legenza shot and killed Huband.
Anthony “Tony the Stinger” Cugino. Source: phillygangsters.com.
A massive manhunt ensued. The killing solidified the gang’s nickname as the “Dillingers of the East” and it panicked some of the leaders known for tying up loose ends with bullets to the head. Killing their confederates, whether they were gangmembers or the women who traveled with the gang, was a hallmark attributed to the gang’s enforcer, Anthony “Tony the Stinger” Cugino. Legenza, one of the gang’s leaders, enthusiastically emulated Cugino’s lead by killing and attempting to kill multiple people, including Huband and others. His run (along with Mais’s) ended in 1935 in Virginia’s electric chair following a widely publicized escape from Richmond’s city jail with Mais and a search that covered the entire eastern United States.
Born in Philadelphia in 1898, Cugino was a ruthless killer whom police believed murdered at least 10 people between 1920 and 1935, including a Philadelphia police officer.
Salvatore Serpa was a longtime Cugino accomplice and he was one of the victims attributed to the killer. According to Richmond author Selden Richardson,
“Tony the Stinger got his nickname from his well-deserved reputation for killing those who posed a danger, even a perceived danger, to the gang, a policy of protection that extended to his fellow gang members.” (Richardson, The Tri-State Gang in Richmond)
Morris Kauffman was 34 years old when he became one of the gang’s loose ends after the Huband murder. Kauffman was a career criminal from Philadelphia who made a name for himself toting a Thompson sub-machine gun while committing robberies. He used the alias “Jack Klein” and he had checked into a hotel in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood under that name.
Morris Kauffman mugshot published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 24, 1934. Source: newspapers.com.
Kauffman met his fate in the spring of 1934. It was an intense period of time that provided journalists with a bounty of gangster stories for eager readers following the exploits of such notables as John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde. On May 23, 1934, The Pittsburgh Press front page was full of bold headlines for gangster stories. The biggest story and headline was that Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow had been killed in a Louisiana gunfight with the police. A smaller headline read, “Gang Victim’s Body Found in Squirrel Hill.”
The body of Morris Kauffman, said by police to be a Philadelphia racketeer, was found behind the Wendover Apartments, in an exclusive Squirrel Hill residential district early today.
Apparently the victim of an underworld “ride,” he had been shot twice through the head.
The bullets had seared fingers of his left hand, apparently when he grasped the revolver barrel in an effort to fight off his killers. One of the bullets went completely through his head and then ripped its way through his right hand, which, police believe, he had held near his right temple to ward off blows.
Kauffman’s body was found with an expensive white gold wristwatch still on his wrist and $51 in his pockets, according to multiple newspaper accounts. Robbery was immediately ruled out as a motive for the killing. Fingerprints conclusively identified the body as Kauffman, a well-known gangster.
Covode Street in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, December 2019. Kauffman’s body was found in the area to the right, where the Wendover Apartments (tall building far right) extension was built.
Tony “The Stinger” Cugino was never implicated in Kauffman’s murder. Cugino was captured in 1935 and he hanged himself in a New York City jail cell before he could be brought to trial. Kauffman’s murder, however, bore all of the hallmarks of a Cugino hit.
Cugino tied up some loose ends with another pair of accomplices, Edward Wallace and John Zukorsky. “On November 1, 1933, Wallce and Zukorsky were ‘taken for a ride’ in New Jersey,” the Baltimore Sun reported on September 9,1935. “Wallace was killed outright, but Zukorsky lived long enough to make a statement to police accusing Cugino and Serpa of the double murder.”
Did Tony the Stinger kill Morris Kauffman? And, how/why did Kauffman end up in Squirrel Hill? Those answers probably died with Kauffman, Cugino, and the rest of the Tri-State Gang.
Kauffman’s “ride” ended in a neighborhood that was just starting to emerge as a hotbed of organized crime activity run by immigrant Jews who cut their teeth moving and selling bootleg liquor during Prohibition. Less than a decade after Kauffman’s body was found, Jewish racketeers began relocating from Pittsburgh’s Hill District to Squirrel Hill. They settled in apartment buildings and single-family homes next to merchants, doctors, lawyers, and at least one judge. Except for the occasional police raid, nothing visibly set these middle-class residents from their neighbors.
Squirrel Hill became a center of organized crime activity for the city and the region as gamblers and numbers bankers set up shop there. Stay tuned for the next installment of #Mobsburgh.
Beyond the Page
For more information about the Tri-State Gang, there is an accessible and mostly accurate book about the gang and its run: Richardson, Selden. The Tri-State Gang in Richmond: Murder and Robbery in the Great Depression. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2012. The gang’s exploits yielded many newspaper articles and a few scholars have written brief surveys of the gang, including the curators at the U.S. Postal Museum. Hollywood also hyped the gang with an episode of The Untouchables that aired in 1959 and a 1950 feature-length movie, Highway 301.
© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein
Shortlink for this post: https://wp.me/p1bnGQ-3rk