Lung cancer had finally finished the job Al Capone botched.ĭrive around Dayton now and you won't catch the slightest whiff of those days when a celebrity gangster set the town afire with gossip and headlines. He was shipped to the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kan., without a squawk.Ī month later, he was dead.
#DIED IN OBSCURITY TRIAL#
He told Patricoff he was disappointed, but that the trial had been fair. But their denunciations were as weightless as dust. Patricoff and the lawyers for Fouts and Summers attacked Foster, a life-long jailbird who was serving time in Indiana for assaulting a cop.
"I got my orders to do my work and not say anything, or I would have been knocked in the head with a sledgehammer," he said.
They put the money into baskets they had stolen from a nearby grocery store.įoster said he came across Summers stuffing money into his clothes during the robbery. The gang tore out the safe deposit boxes, opening them with a sledgehammer, punch and screwdriver.
#DIED IN OBSCURITY CRACKED#
Al Fouts - the Dayton crook who had been convicted with Moran and Summers for the barkeeper's robbery - cracked the vault. He said he and Moran acted as lookouts when the gang broke into the Citizens State Bank in Ansonia. That approach gave Patricoff little ammunition when Roy Montgomery Foster took the stand.įoster had been in Moran's bank-and-bar-robbing syndicate, and laid out the plot for the jurors. He told Patricoff to base his argument on the claim that he hadn't been given a speedy trial, and therefore, should face no trial at all. He didn't want to talk about the facts of the case, saying there was nothing to the charges. Moran was little help in his own defense. Though Moran was indigent, he promised Patricoff $10,000, implying, perhaps, that he could still access his ill-gotten cash. Patricoff was a tough-talking, bespectacled criminal law specialist who enjoyed mixing with society's lower elements - as long as he was paid. He couldn't afford a lawyer, so the judge appointed Jack Patricoff to defend him. A man who died of an alcohol-related illness near the White House in December had papers that identified him as Dorsey Masterson, but neither advocates nor police know if he has any relatives.Moran, a one-time millionaire, was broke after a decade in the slammer, and his wife was long gone. "If you die of exposure, there is no perpetrator."Įven when the dead person has identification, the job seldom is simple. "If they're homeless, they're at the bottom of the list," Fennelly said. On the police side, the task of identifying the homeless who die falls to homicide detectives, among the busiest investigators in the department. Joan Alker, a spokeswoman for the National Coalition for the Homeless and a volunteer, said Friday that she planned to canvass the downtown area near 12th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, where one of the dead men was found last week. Sometimes the first clues on the person come from people with whom he or she spent time on the street. Carol Fennelly, of the Community for Creative Non-Violence, said she and her staff also tap into the loose information network among the homeless. In Jones's case, advocates were able to make a tentative identification because she was known around George Washington University, in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood and she often would seek refuge in the hospital's emergency room. The precise ages of Jones, Johnson and a homeless man whose body was found recently floating in the Tidal Basin, for example, are not known. Unless the dead person can be traced by police through fingerprints or identified by relatives or close friends, the chance of getting even a remotely complete biographical sketch is dim. Aside from Jones, the other person to die of exposure was Johnson Griffith, who was found in November near Dupont Circle. Since November, four homeless people have died during cold weather, and the first two have been tentatively identified. Police detectives who try to establish identities of homeless people after their deaths often rely on advocates and shelter workers, to the point of bringing some of them to the morgue to view the bodies. Neither has been identified yet, and the causes of their deaths have not been officially determined, though advocates for the homeless believe the frigid weather played a significant role. The generally anonymous existence of those who live on the streets, they said, creates enormous obstacles when they die.Īttempts to identify two homeless people who died Thursday and Friday began as soon as the bodies were discovered. More than two months after a woman was found dead of exposure near George Washington University Hospital, advocates for the homeless know almost nothing about her except that she called herself Lily Mae Jones.įor advocates, the woman's case illustrates how difficult it is to track down even scant biographical information on the homeless.
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