The Jeremiah Bennett Clan:
The Days of the Desperados

One morning in 1876, a Ridgefield man was sitting in a dining room of a Philadelphia hotel and was served a cup of coffee. As the man picked up a silver spoon to stir some sugar into his coffee, he did a double take. The spoon bore the man’s own name.

He sought out the hotel manager who explained that he had just recently purchased a group of similar spoons from a Philadelphia man.

That evening the Ridgefielder received a letter from home, saying that his house had been recently burglarized and that suspects in the case had been caught. Found in the possession of the thieves was a letter from their brother in Philadelphia, reporting “Goods received all right and disposed of.”

The Ridgefield visitor was just one of dozens of victims of  “the notorious Bennett family,” a Ridgefield clan that became the center of a sensational 19th Century crime spree that made hundreds of headlines in newspapers throughout the Northeast. 

 Despite their ancient and respectable roots, members of the Jerry Bennett family were accused of breaking into houses, businesses, and even train stations, generating “terror” in the hearts of townspeople while amassing a trove of stolen goods in their house and barn on Silver Spring Road.

It was a tale of bold crimes and strange events like no other in Ridgefield’s three centuries.

Jeremiah and Adeline Bennett and five of their sons lived in a small house a quarter mile south of the West Lane Schoolhouse in the mid-19th Century. By the time the crime spree was over, Jerry, Adeline, and four of their eight children had been arrested and jailed. Three Bennetts wound up spending years in prison.

Born in Ridgefield in 1821, Jerry Bennett was descended from the same family that had come from Fairfield to Ridgefield in 1721 and settled what is now the Bennett’s Farm region of town. His great grandfather, Trowbridge, fought in the Revolution and his father, Daniel, served in the War of 1812. By 1850, he had a small, 25-acre farm adjoining the south side of his father’s spread.

Jerry seemed like just another Ridgefield farmer. Like many other residents of the West Lane district, he made extra money as a shoemaker, a trade his father also engaged in. He seemed a conscientious citizen — in 1855, he found a stray horse, “blind of the left eye, lame on the right fore leg,” and paid for an ad in the Norwalk Gazette to find the owner. 

In July 1869 his wife Adeline, a year older than he, won three prizes in the Ridgefield Floral Society’s exhibit, including $2 first place awards for Best Bouquet of Mixed Flowers and Best Collection of Pot Plants.  Other winners were well-placed women in Ridgefield’s small-town society.

Signs that something was amiss about  Jerry Bennett first appeared, not in the dozens of newspapers that would later cover his exploits, but in the diary of a neighborhood farmer. 

Jared Nash, who lived on Silver Spring Road about a mile south of the Bennetts, kept a record of his daily life and on Feb. 8, 1865, he wrote down that  his constable father, Charles Nash,  had “to go up to court tomorrow to take up J. Bennett for cutting hooppoles.” Bennett had apparently been arrested for sneaking onto someone’s property, cutting down and stealing young trees to turn into  hoop poles. The sticks were sold for a variety of purposes, including making barrels and fashionable women’s skirts. 

Ten years later, all hell broke loose.

On July 21, 1876, Jerry Bennett, then 47, was arrested along with his wife, Adeline, 48, and two sons, James Mortimer, 18, and Francis “Frank” Bennett, 16. They were all charged with being involved in the rash of burglaries and larcenies that had been occurring in recent months.

However,  two other sons — George, 23, and Arthur, 20 — had escaped arrest and were believed hiding somewhere deep in the Silver Spring Swamp.  The Ridgefield Press, founded only a year and a half earlier, covered the arrests in a lengthy story under the biggest headline it had ever printed: 

A CENTENNIAL 

BURGLAR HUNT 

It was, of course, the year of the nation’s 100th birthday, though one would be hard-pressed to explain how that fact related to the Bennett gang.

“Citizens Turn Out in a Body and Search an Extensive Swamp for the Desperadoes,” the headline continued. 

The story explained that “for several years our village has suffered severely from burglars. Houses were entered both day and night, [and] robbed. Every one looked with suspicion toward a certain family but none dared to accuse.” 

However, The Press continued, “during the past year robberies have been almost [a] daily occurrence. People began to talk publicly about certain parties and express their opinions more freely. Several fruitless attempts were made to ferret out the rendezvous of the burglars.”

As “things were coming to a crisis, spies were sent to watch Mr. Jeremiah Bennett’s house and ascertain the hiding place of his sons who lived in the woods. For a while, all efforts were unsuccessful; but finally a cave was discovered. Nothing by way of proof was found.”

A local “Anti-Thieving Association” was formed and offered a $50 reward. That sparked the interest of a detective from New York State, and his investigations led to the arrests of Jerry, Adeline and the two sons. But it was George and Arthur Bennett who, with their father, were suspected of being the main culprits. 

That Sunday, the day after the arrests, “nearly every able-bodied man” in Ridgefield responded to a call from Ridgefield Constable John Gilbert to mount a massive search of Silver Spring Swamp for George and Arthur. 

“Guns were aplenty, pistols numerous,” The Press said. “It was a motley but courageous crowd.”

The search began around 5 o’clock Sunday afternoon. “The ‘chosen brave’ entered, determined to succeed or perish… Now and then a false alarm was given which caused no little excitement. At every sound, each one grasped his firepiece more firmly and peered into the bushes.”

Alas, when the hunters emerged from the swamp near sunset, “no one had discovered the slightest trace of the thieves. Our ‘chosen brave’ were in a pitiful plight. Some of them had been immersed in slough holes, others had been lacerated by briars and thorns.”

Meanwhile, a search of the Bennett house and barn had uncovered “large quantities of stolen goods,” reported the Hartford Courant. They included “accordions, fiddles, watches, finger-rings, bracelets, diamond pins, boxes of perfumery, guns, gold and silver thimbles, watch-chains, clothing, handkerchiefs, and several other things of value. One accordion was found in a stone pot in the milk-room, and the other and the box of perfumery were found in a box of bran up stairs.”

On Monday townspeople showed up to claim many of the recovered goods, including representatives of the Bailey and Gage Store (now the Aldrich Museum’s upstairs offices) who later went so far as to get local legislators to file a bill in the State Legislature, compensating them for their losses.

Jerry and Adeline, with sons Mortimer and Francis, were arraigned in Danbury that day and held in jail under bonds totalling $4,800 — nearly $120,000 today. All pleaded not guilty.

In court Jerry proposed something rather unusual. He would help in the capture of George and Arthur because “he felt sure their appearance would clear him,”  The Press reported. 

The capture would happen in a rather odd way. 

“The constable was to take Mortimer down to the edge of the swamp, where the other sons were supposed to be concealed, and he was to whistle them out,” The Press revealed. 

“The ‘chosen brave’ were again called for, and with alacrity did they respond. Sixty long minutes were spent on the edge of that swamp with nothing to relieve the monotony but Mortimer’s decoying whistle. It was no use; those boys were not to be whistled from their haunts. They knew the ‘chosen brave’ were lying in the bushes.”

Newspapers far and wide reported the goings on in Ridgefield, often rather colorfully. An account in the Washington (D.C.) Evening Star described the “two more sons still at large, but a force of men are looking for them, and have driven them into an almost impenetrable swamp southwest of the village where it is believed the brothers have a burrow.”

By Wednesday that week in August, people who lived along the fringes of Silver Spring Swamp were reporting chickens stolen, potatoes dug up and even cows milked by unknown hands. Then someone said he’d spotted George and Arthur. 

Constable Gilbert organized yet another hunt, this one more massive than the first.

“Every man that could be found was notified and requested to put in an appearance at the West Lane School House on Thursday morning at 8 o’clock to receive orders and information of the plan of operations,” The Press reported.

By 9 a.m. between 300 and 400 men — including contingents from Wilton and South Salem — had gathered at the corner near the schoolhouse. 

“Each man carried at least one fire-piece — and such a variety!” the newspaper exclaimed. “Some were armed with weapons that did service — and from their appearance, plenty of it — during the Revolutionary War!”

Under Constable Gilbert’s leadership, the mob — members spaced four feet apart — entered the north end of the swamp and began to move south.

It was no easy trek. “Before they had advanced one rod, Constable Gilbert sunk into the mud so deep that the top button of his vest only was visible,” The Press said. 

Others had similar problems but the searchers pressed on  through muck and thick underbrush. 

“They had gone but a short distance when a trail was discovered which led to a place where the fugitives had done their cooking. By and by, a valise was found and passed from one to the other until it reached the margin. It contained nothing, but was recognized as being one of the three taken from Wilton station.”

After four hours of searching, “it was evident that they had evacuated that swamp. The woods were then searched, but with the same result. Many of the scouts were getting tired and hungry, and the search was for the time relinquished.”

About 100 searchers remained, however, and after lunch looked for the caves that the boys had occupied. “Three caves were found which showed signs of recent habitation,” The Press said. “They were all small — the largest one being about eight feet long, four feet wide, and five feet high. After this examination, further search was abandoned.” 

“The boys”  remained on the loose and still very active.

On Thursday,  Aug. 10, they were spotted with stolen butter and a kettle along the tracks near the Cannon Station in Wilton. They dropped the goods and fled into the woods.

On Friday,  they broke into Elmer Olmsted’s shirt factory in Wilton and stole all the cash. “Mr. Olmsted pursued them, armed with a seven shooter, and they dropped their plunder,” reported The Courant. “He had a good chance to fire at them, but was afraid to do so.” 

The Courant added with some apparent amazement, “It is reported that on Tuesday night, they visited a hotel in Danbury and called for Schenck beer. They were recognized, but allowed to depart in peace.”

 The following Monday night, they broke into the Bailey and Gage Store once again. First they first stole a ladder from the King estate barn across Main Street. They used the ladder to reach a second-story window at the north end of the store where they removed a pane of glass to gain entry — why they bothered with a difficult, second-story entrance when there were plenty of first-floor windows is unclear. They stole guns, ammunition, knives, and cigars, as well as gold pens, gloves, clothing, pocket-books, and even perfume.

The fledgling Ridgefield Press attempted to express the community’s outrage and frustration. “Is it not in the power of the authorities to discover the guilty parties and bring them to trial and well-deserved punishment, thus putting a stop to such nefarious proceedings, of which there have been too many recently in this vicinity?” the  newspaper asked on Aug. 16.

Apparently to avoid the increasing heat in and about Ridgefield, the Bennett brothers then headed west to the Hudson River Valley. However, they were tracked down and, on Monday, Aug. 21,  Arthur gave up — in a rather bizarre fashion.  Another member of the Bennett family, Henry Bennett, 28, a brother who lived in Peekskill, N.Y.,  and was five years older than Arthur, handed Arthur over to a Peekskill police officer, stating “that he brought him there for the purpose of giving him into custody and claiming the reward of $100,” The Press reported. “Arthur made no objection to the arrest and quietly accompanied the officer.”

It sounded as if Arthur had had enough of being on the run. He knew the rest of the family was in trouble, and may have believed that he would be able to help financially by letting brother Henry collect the reward money for his capture.

Peekskill authorities telegraphed Constable J.H. Barlow in Ridgefield who came and took Arthur to the Bridgeport Jail.

Then, the following day, George Bennett was spotted at Fort Montgomery, a village across the Hudson River  from Poughkeepsie, where he was peddling “small notions and passing by the name of Smith.” He had camped at Cronk’s Cove, along the edge of the river, and was expected there again that night. Constables and local officers set up an ambush and captured him at the cove when he arrived. He was rowed across the Hudson, taken to Peekskill down river, and then to Bridgeport Jail.

All six Bennett suspects were behind bars in Bridgeport. 

Justice was more swift in those days, and the trials took place in early September.

“They are very respectable looking people, and are the last who would be suspected of crime,” said a brief account of the proceedings in the Bridgeport Standard.

A jury found half the clan guilty of burglary and theft. Jerry Bennett got five years in the state prison, and George and Arthur each got 15 years. 

The jury found Adeline not guilty, saying that “she acted jointly with and under the influence of her husband, and that the criminal intent was lacking.” James Mortimer was found guilty on a single count, but since the goods were valued at less than $15, he escaped a prison sentence. Charges against Francis were nolled (not prosecuted), perhaps because he was only 16 years old.

Although free again, Adeline and her two sons were still in trouble. Many claims were being filed against the Bennetts’ property in an attempt to recoup losses suffered by people who were burglarized and whose goods had been fenced. 

Indeed, two weeks after the trial, Henry Bennett appeared before the Ridgefield Board of Selectmen, seeking the $100 reward for turning in his brother. “He satisfied the authorities as to the correctness of his claim, and they paid him the money,”  The Press said. Henry probably used the reward — worth nearly $2,500 today — to help his mother and brothers who were in dire financial straits.

By January, Probate Judge Hiram K. Scott had declared Jeremiah Bennett an “insolvent and assigned debtor” and that anyone with claims against the Bennett estate had three months to file a notice with the court. To pay off at least some of the debts, the property was sold.

The three convicts were all sent to the state prison at Wethersfield, a sprawling complex that held nearly 500 prisoners. The 1880 census reveals a somewhat touching situation, however:  Both Jerry and George, father and son, were working together in the prison’s shoe shop.

By 1886, the New Haven Register was reporting that George had undergone treatment for “very peculiar delusions.” One of them was that “at night he could pass out through the keyhole in his cell and go anywhere in the state, but that the moment anyone to whom he appeared touched his body, he would disappear and instantly be back in his cell at the prison.”

The Register said “he would not, when examined, hear any disbelief of this notion  and offered to prove his story by appearing some night to Dr. Packard or Dr. Root.”

The doctors eventually used “a most plausible reasoning” to finally convince George that what he experienced was a delusion.

Arthur Bennett was apparently a model prisoner and in July 1888, was paroled by the Board of Pardons. “Arthur, in his statement before the board, said he pleaded guilty to save his father,” reported the Waterbury Evening Democrat. The paper added that the prisoner “shows the effects of his long imprisonment.”

Arthur indicated he would probably join his mother, Adeline, who was then living in Philadelphia. After the trial and loss of the family farm, Adeline may have gone to Philadelphia to live with her oldest son, Seth, who was a shoemaker in that city. It may have been Seth who had sold the spoons to the hotel operator, perhaps unaware that they were stolen.

It is not known whether Jerry and Adeline ever saw one another after the trial. Sometime after he was released from prison around 1881, Jerry Bennett went to live with yet another son, John S. Bennett, a shoemaker, and his family, in Syracuse, N.Y. In the 1900 census, Jeremiah Bennett was described as a widower and a shoemaker. 

A year later, Jerry died in Syracuse at the age of 80.

Whatever happened to Adeline and her sons has not been discovered. All quickly left Ridgefield — either as prisoners or as debtors — and probably would have liked to forget their old home town and what happened here in 1876. The townspeople likely felt the same way about them.

David Dann,

Newlyweds In The Tombs

The story of David Dann and his wife, Susan, reads like an episode from Upstairs Downstairs, Downton Abbey or some other Edwardian melodrama. Susan, a maid in the home of a rich New York City banker, was accused by her employer of thievery, and thanks to incompetent police, she and David were both thrown into Manhattan’s notorious “Tombs” prison, eventually rescued by a wealthy lawyer and future candidate for governor of Connecticut.

David Dann was born on a Ridgefield farm in 1873, a son of Levi Dann, who was a Civil War veteran and well-respected local citizen. In the summer of 1895, a young Irish woman named Susan Lyons was visiting in Ridgefield and met David, then working as a house painter. They fell in love and David followed Susie to New York City where she worked as a servant in the Broad Street home of Maurice B. Wormser, a prominent Manhattan banker. They were married soon after but kept their marriage secret, an arrangement that contributed to their arrest.

On the evening of Saturday, Jan. 18, 1896, Maurice Wormser played host to his brother and his brother’s wife. Around 10 p.m., as the couple was about to depart, the brother asked to see an evening newspaper, which was in the dining room. 

“I went into the room to get it and found the silverware drawer open,” Wormser later testified in court. “I thought nothing in particular of this, but then at 10:45 two servants saw Susan Dann, who was known as Lyons, a waitress in our employ, in the dining room with a big tray of silver, which she was sorting over. The house was then locked up and the burglar alarm set.” The two servants were named Amelia and Minnie.

At 8:30 the next morning, Susan Dann reported to Wormser that the silver had been stolen. “She said she discovered this when she had returned from mass,” Wormser testified.

However, the cook, a Mrs. Ebert, had told Wormser that Susan was seen admitting the baker at 7:45 a.m. and had also been seen at 7:15 in her nightclothes when Mrs. Ebert had dealt with the milkman. That prompted Wormser to question Susan about how she could have had time to go to mass.

“She admitted that she had not been to mass, but said that she had an appointment to meet a man. After some further questions, she said the man was her husband, although we thought until then that she was a single woman. She stated that she was married a week ago last Sunday in the Dominican Church.”

Since Susan Dann was the last one reported seen with the silverware, and the doors were locked overnight, suspicion pointed to her. However, she denied having taken anything. “I put the silver away, as I always did, on Saturday night,” she told a newspaper reporter. “And when I missed it on Sunday morning, I reported it at once to Mr. Wormser.”

She admitted lying about going to mass, however, and had instead gone for a walk with her husband. She said lied because she did not want Wormser to know she was married until her husband had found work in the city, in case she might lose her job.

“I know they say the house was locked, and that the basement gate was fastened,” she said. But when she returned from her early morning meeting with her husband, she found the gate open. “And that was not the first time I have found it open,” she said.

She also told a New York Herald reporter that Amelia’s and Minnie’s statements that she was handling the silver late Saturday evening were false.

Adding to the suspicion surrounding the Danns was the fact that Nellie Lyons, Susan’s sister, visited the Wormser house Saturday evening. Nellie at first denied she had been there, but later admitted she had indeed paid a visit to her sister.

A police captain named Casey of the East Sixty Seventh Street station house headed the investigation. He told a reporter for the Herald on Jan. 23 he was “confident he had arrested the persons concerned in the robbery.”

The police suspected the Danns in part because of the lies Susan and Nellie told. Detectives used Amelia, the servant, to identify Nellie Lyons as the woman who visited the house Saturday and, Amelia maintained, several times in recent months. 

Both Susan and David were taken to the precinct station house where they were questioned and eventually arrested, and sent to the city prison, known as The Tombs (today’s city prison, the fourth edition of the facility, is still nicknamed The Tombs). Because Nellie had lied about being at Wormser’s Saturday, police arrested her on a charge of complicity in the theft. However, police also suspected her because the house in which she worked as a cook had been robbed by a masked man several weeks earlier after the owner had been put to sleep with chloroform.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Ebert, the Wormser cook, identified David Dann as a man who had come to the house about 10 days earlier. Posing as a plumber, she said, he went through various rooms in the place. Though nothing was taken, it was just one more alleged event that was suspicious.

Captain Casey told a Herald reporter that “he had been looking up Dann’s record, and it was anything but satisfactory in Ridgefield. He has been shifting about from place to place in this city, apparently trying to get work.” He maintained that the silver had not been pawned and that “his men would discover it in the possession of the confederates.”

Alas for Casey, that never happened.

Word of the arrests quickly reached David’s hometown. “It is said in Ridgefield by a good many people that David Dann, who has been under arrest in New York with his wife on a grave criminal charge, has always appeared to be a quiet, inoffensive young man, and people here cannot believe that he would go wrong,” the Ridgefield Press reported.

Levi Dann, David’s father, quickly began seeking support for his son and daughter in law. A Catholic, he approached Father Richard Shortell, popular pastor of St. Mary’s Parish, who helped gather statements about David’s character. 

Levi also knew Melbert B. Cary Sr., a prominent New York City attorney who had palatial

residence in Ridgefield. Levi approached Cary about helping his son. Cary immediately wired Father Shortell, saying the imprisonment was “an outrage,” and maintaining he would procure David’s release as soon as possible.

Melbert Brinckerhoff Cary was a good man to have on your side. A Princeton graduate who practiced law with a leading Manhattan firm, Cary was also a writer, whose books included The Connecticut Constitution (1900) and The Woman Without A Country. In 1902, Cary ran for Connecticut governor on the Democratic ticket—he had been chairman of the Democratic State Central Committee for several years. He lost to a Meriden Republican, but remained a power in Connecticut politics as well as influential in Ridgefield goings on. He died in 1946 at the age of 93; at the time he was the oldest living Princeton alumnus.

Levi collected a large number of testimonials from Ridgefielders, endorsing his son’s good character, and turned them over to Cary. “Mr. Cary was zealous in his endeavor to free these innocent persons,” the Press said.

Cary told the Times on Jan. 31, “I have gone through the evidence … and the only way it connects Susie Dann with the silver is through the fact that she had charge of it. The only way her husband is connected with it is through the fact that the morning after the robbery, he walked with her in public for an hour. The only connection made between Miss Lyons and the Wormser house is through her visit there the night the theft was committed. Yet our clients were kept in jail ten days. It was simply an outrage.”

After those 10 days under arrest, the three suspects were “liberated from the Tombs,” as the Press put it. A grand jury found no evidence to support the arrest of the three.

“The prisoners report the most abusive treatment from the detectives, and say they were placed in the same cells with the foulest criminals,” the Press said. “Every conceivable effort was made to extort a confession, and the unfortunate victims were subjected to all sorts of indignities.”

After their release, Susie Dann discussed her treatment with a reporter from the New York Times, who described her as “a tall, comely young woman, with a slight Irish accent.” 

The Sunday she reported the missing silver, she said, she went to the police station where “Capt. Casey asked me all kinds of questions. He asked me why I had not said anything about being married, and I said it was because my husband was out of work, and I did not want to lose my place until he got work. Then he asked me if I was really married. He also asked me a great many other insulting questions.”

That night she went to her husband’s boarding house room, where “detectives kept coming around and asking me to tell them where the silver was.”

Then, on Tuesday night, “Detective Herlihy came up and told me my sister was drunk down in the police court, and that she had said I stole the silver and had told where half of it was. They took my husband and me down to the station that night, and said we wouldn’t be detained, and when they got us there, they locked us up. Detectives and the matron came to me about every fifteen minutes and kept asking me insulting questions and telling me I was lying and try to make me confess that I was a thief.

“After our arrest Detective Herlihy went up to my husband’s boarding house and told Mrs. Knott [the landlady] that Mr. Wormser would give her $20,000 if she would tell where the silver was.”

Susie also described her and her sister’s experience in the Tombs. “They put us in with the lowest kind of women. We heard things that were terrible to us, and were compelled to associate with women who were awful. They said things that men would not say.”

Melbert Cary not only got the Danns freed from prison, but also sued Susie’s employer. Cary blamed Wormser for convincing the police that she should be arrested. He sought $20,000 damages (around $575,000 today) for each of the three people imprisoned. 

It seems unlikely, however, that much if any money was awarded; perhaps there was an out-of-court settlement for a small amount. Four years later, David Dann was working as a janitor. By 1910, he was painting houses in Rye, a town in lower Westchester County, New York, where he and Susan rented a house. They had four children by then. 

In 1916, the Danns were back in Manhattan, where David was still painting houses. But in 1918, when he filled out his military draft information, he was in a New York City hospital, suffering from tuberculosis. A month later, David Dann was dead, only 45 years old. — From "Wicked Ridgefield" by Jack Sanders, © 2016, The History Press

Sam and Joseph Farruggio:
The Murderous Brothers

The early 1930s was a wild time on the national scene. Prohibition had created crimes and criminals, murders were commonplace and the Depression was sparking social unrest.
Involved in all of these problems were three brothers—Sam, Joseph and Calogero Farruggio—who spent their childhood in Ridgefield. 

In May 1934, two of the brothers made big news: “Desperate Man Hunt Centers in Ridgefield for Alleged Murderers of New York Cop,” screamed the front-page headline in the May 10 Ridgefield Press. In the New York Times, it was “2 Fanatics Named as Police Slayers.” 

On their way to burn down a church, Sam and Joseph Farruggio had shot and killed a New York City policeman and a passerby, and seriously wounded another officer.

The shootings occurred on Friday, May 4, around 3 a.m., when the Farruggios were stopped by Patrolmen Lawrence Ward and William Brennan as the brothers were walking on East 101st Street in Harlem. One brother was carrying a two-gallon can of gasoline.

The two were on their way to “burn the first Roman Catholic Church they came to,” police said.

When the patrolmen tried to question the pair, they ran into a building at 322 East 101st Street where they lived with their other brother, Calogero, and “their aged mother.” Calogero was on the stoop, and Officer Brennan held him outside the building while Officer Ward chased the other two brothers. 

A shot rang out. Ward was hit in the shoulder and fell backward down a staircase, breaking his back. He died shortly afterward. 

Brennan released Calogero and chased Sam and Joseph up the stairs, over a rooftop, onto

another building, down more stairs, out a door, and down a street. The Farruggios began shooting; one bullet hit and killed bystander Ernest Krahenbuehl, whom the brothers apparently mistook for a detective, and another shot felled Officer Brennan, who was seriously injured but survived.

Sam and Joseph escaped, prompting the manhunt in New York City and Fairfield County. Calogero was held in jail as a material witness.

Hundreds attended the funeral of Officer Ward, who had been married only three weeks earlier. The Times described his widow weeping as the coffin was carried into the church, and the police band played “Nearer My God to Thee.”

The Press story reported that two New York detectives were working with Lt. Leo F. Carroll, head of the state police in Ridgefield, in trying to track down the brothers. The two were “well known to Lt. Carroll” and were “said to be religious and social fanatics.” The Times quoted New York Police captain Edward Mullins of the homicide squad as saying they were “inflamed by Communist literature and atheist pamphlets.”

Captain Mullins said, “It was plain from Calogero’s story that the brothers were obsessed with the idea that they were haunted by ‘evil spirits’ and that the only way they could rid themselves of the spirits would be by setting fire to a church—any church.”

Police were checking out the pair’s former haunts in both Ridgefield and Bridgeport. They were aided by information provided by Calogero, whom detectives described as “dull-eyed and not overly bright.”

Some six months later, on January 18, 1935, two New York City transit policemen picked up “several suspicious-appearing individuals on the Astoria elevated line,” the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported on January 20. They included the Farruggios, who were “carrying brown paper bags which, they said, contained bread....As they were led to a patrol wagon by Patrolman Thomas Connors, they ripped the bags open, and drew revolvers from them. Firing away, they fled down a Brooklyn street. Police returned the fire and the pair dropped. They were taken to St. Johns Hospital, where they died.”

The Eagle’s account was buried at the end of a long story that recounted six murders and shootings over the previous day or two in New York City.

The origin of the Farruggio brothers (also spelled Farruggia) is unclear. The Times said they were the only surviving offspring in a family that once numbered 24 children and that they came from “a remote corner” of Sicily. Citing Connecticut State Police, the Times said they had entered the country without passports.

However, in Ridgefield Town Hall are birth records that indicate the Farruggios were both born in Ridgefield—Salvatore “Sam” Farruggio in 1913 and his brother Giuseppe Liopoldo “Joseph” Farruggio three years later. They were listed as the sixth and seventh children of Calogero and Cyrenna Norata Farruggio, who, the records said, had come to this country from Parma, Italy. Calogero, the father, was listed on both birth certificates as a laborer.

Adding to the mystery is the fact that the birth records appear to have been supplied by the Connecticut State Police sometime after Sam and Joseph were killed. What’s more, the birth years appear to conflict with the ages published in the Times, which had said Sam was forty and Joseph forty-two.

State police described Joseph as a “transient factory worker who settled down in Ridgefield as a small-time merchant and bootlegger” who had operated “an alcohol cutting plant.” Salvatore, they said, “is a similar cut from the same cheese. He beat the war cloud out of Italy.”

The Times said that Joseph and Salvatore had been arrested in Ridgefield in 1931 on a charge of receiving stolen goods and were sentenced to one to three years in state prison. “Their Ridgefield job was bad,” Captain Mullins said. “It wasn’t professional. They’re not too sharp. It was the only crime on their record.”

After they moved to New York City, police said, the brothers eked out a living peddling hot dogs from a hand cart along Third Avenue. Calogero did most of the work, with Sam and Joseph helping out.

“They seldom made more than 35 or 50 cents a day,” the Times quoted police as saying. —from “Wicked Ridgefield,” The History Press, 2016.

George Scalise: 

The Swaggering Gangster

An old Ridgefield mansion that’s now home to Catholic priests was once the country house of a noted racketeer who stole huge amounts of money from the people he was supposed to serve.

George Scalise was one of New York City’s top mobsters when he had the misfortune to run up against a soon-to-be Ridgefielder, who exposed his misdeeds, and a soon-to-be U.S. presidential candidate, who successfully prosecuted him. 

Scalise wound up in jail and columnist Westbrook Pegler wound up with a Pulitzer Prize.

George “Poker Face” Scalise was born in Italy in 1896,  grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., and became a U.S. citizen in 1911. When he was 21 and registering for the draft in World War I, he filled out his form and claimed an exemption from the draft on the grounds he was an “ex convict.”

According to one historian, Scalise began his criminal career as a pimp, but soon moved into the lucrative field of union management. By 1933, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office was investigating Scalise for threatening businessmen; by then he was the president of Local 1 of the Car Washers and Polishers Union. 

He soon became closely associated with mobsters Dutch Schultz and Al Capone and moved on to larger jobs. By the late 1930s, Scalise was the “swaggering president of the Building Service Employees’ International Union,” as one New York newspaper put it. 

He was arrested in 1940 by the crusading district attorney Thomas E. Dewey, later governor of New York and the 1944 and 1948 GOP presidential candidate. He was charged with extorting $100,000 from hotels and contracting firms his union members worked for. ($100,000 then would be about $1.6 million today.) But the arrest came only after Pegler had exposed Scalise in a series of anti-racketeering newspaper columns that won him the Pulitzer. 

In the 1930s, Scalise bought an estate on Tackora Trail overlooking Lake Mamanasco as a weekend retreat, calling it Villa Scalise.  In a 1940 column, Pegler described how Scalise had acquired the 27-room mansion, apparently with union funds. He added, “A remarkable proportion of Mr. Scalise’s fellow officers of the union have criminal records, and he reached the presidency by

private arrangement with the officers and without any vote, direct or indirect, of the rank and file chambermaids, charwomen, window cleaners, janitors and other toilers.”  The columnist also noted that just across North Salem Road from his Ridgefield mansion was the town poorhouse.

(Pegler moved to Ridgefield a year later, buying a 100-acre estate on Old Stagecoach Road. The often-caustic columnist lived here until 1948.)

Scalise was convicted of stealing union funds and sentenced to 10 to 20 years in Sing Sing. He got out long before the maximum time, however, and by the early 1950s was back in trouble as secretary-treasurer of Distillery Rectifying and Wine Workers Union. He pleaded guilty in 1955 to accepting insurance contract bribes and kickbacks amounting to a half million dollars.  

He was in prison in 1958 when he was on a list of the top mobsters in New York City.

During his “career,” Scalise was suspected in the threatening and killing of various underworld characters, including a New Jersey cohort who had testified against him and was later fed a fatal dose of arsenic with lunch.

Over the years, he was also convicted on various extortion and tax evasion charges.

Under fire in 1940, Scalise sold “Villa Scalise.” It soon became the Mamanasco Lodge, a resort operated by the Hilsenrad family, and by the 1960s, it was owned by the Jesuits, who set up a retreat house there and called it Manresa. Today it’s still a retreat house as well as a Catholic school, operated by the Society of St. Pius X.

George Scalise died quietly on July 25, 1989, in Brooklyn. He was 93. Although The New York Times ran more than 100 stories over the years about his criminal activities, and newspapers nationally had literally thousands of accounts of his crimes, none reported his death. 

By then, the swaggering gangster was a forgotten old man.

Frank Taylor: 

The First Shot

According to his obituary in the Feb. 5, 1931 Press, Frank Taylor was “Ridgefield’s first regular officer” of the law. He may have also been the first one ever to shoot a suspect. 

A native son, Taylor was born in 1860 in the Limestone District and in the late 1890s became “the village night watchman,” a job he held for some 25 years. 

Back then, there was no police department and merchants chipped in for his $100-a-month salary. He would  check their front and back doors each night, and see that other things, such as streetlights, were in order. 

“He was a big man and exhibited a very authoritative appearance,” said Dick Venus in a Dick’s Dispatch column in the 1980s. “He was, however, a very kindly and understanding gentleman.”

And, Venus added, Constable Taylor and his large nightstick were well respected by kids and appreciated by parents. When he approached groups of youngsters at 8 or 9 at night and suggested it was time to head home, “it would have been a very rare occasion if a dissenting opinion was expressed,” Venus wrote. 

But he could also proved capable of handling bigger things and was involved in foiling a burglary of the U.S. Post Office.

One Sunday night in 1903, a trio of men in a wagon drawn by two horses pulled up in front of the post office, then located a few doors north of where Books on the Common is now. Just down the street, in front of the town hall, was Dick Venus’s father, Charles, and four friends, chewing the fat in front of the town hall. They saw the wagon pull up. Here’s how Dick Venus describes what happened, based largely on his father’s eyewitness account:

“One man stayed in the wagon, to hold the horses, and the other two approached the post office door. One carried a large crowbar and it was evident that they were not about to mail that heavy bar.

“The five at the town hall had directed their attention to the activities down the street and when the sound of the front door of the post office being forced reached their ears, they all began to shout for Frank Taylor.

“That exemplary limb of the law had just started his evening tour and had crossed Main Street from the apartment over Bissell’s Drug Store, that he shared with his daughter Mabel and her husband, Mally Knapp.

“Frank was in the driveway between St. Stephen’s Church Parish House and S.D. Keeler’s store (now Deborah Ann’s Sweet Shoppe). Frank hurried to the front of the store, as best he could. He was somewhat impeded by an affliction that caused him to throw his right foot out forward, in a rather awkward manner. This encumbered his stride and earned for Frank the nickname, ‘Steppy.’ It was, however, never used in disrespect.

“Steppy had never really needed to hurry because his very commanding presence generally brought everything else under control, and word of his expert marksmanship was well known to those he must keep in line.

“Frank’s alert mind took in the scene being enacted on the other end of the street, and with his powerful voice, he yelled at the men to halt. Unfortunately for them, these men had not heard of Steppy’s prowess with the weapon that he carried.

“This huge gun was known as a ‘hawg leg’ and was actually a greatly oversized revolver of .45 calibre. It was not as large as the sawed-off rifle carried by Steve McQueen in the movies, but it would remind you of it.

“At any rate, the two men had entered the post office and were not returning and carrying the little safe that probably weighed about 250 pounds. Another command from Frank went unheeded and he drew his long revolver.

“His first shot sounded just as the men had hoisted the safe and were about to lower it carefully into the back of the buckboard. The bullet struck one of the thieves in the leg and caused him to relinquish his hold on the safe, and it went crashing through the floorboards of the wagon, landing in the graveled roadway.

“The wounded thief was hauled up into the wagon. All thoughts of thievery had dissipated as the buckboard and its occupants took off up north Main Street.

“So the thieves got away, but without their loot. The attempted robbery was never solved, but the grand old man had scored again and sleepy little Ridgefield was spared the embarrassment of having its post office safe stolen.”

In the mid-1920s, Frank Taylor was transferred from night duty to become the first daytime patrolman of the village, a job largely devoted to traffic and parking problems. 

For many years he was also active in the fire department, served as a registrar of voters, was chairman of the Democratic Town Committee, and led the local Odd Fellows lodge. 

“Mr. Taylor was kindly and cheery in disposition, always ready to do a good deed or to assist in any good cause,” his obituary said. “Yet he had the courage of his convictions. He never arrived at hasty conclusions in important matters, but carefully weighed the merits or demerits before reaching decisions.”

Leo F. Carroll: 
An Astonishing Leader

Few public servants stand larger in 20^th Century Ridgefield than Leo F. Carroll,  who spent 56 years of his life in public service on five fronts including 34 years in the state police, four years as chairman of the State Liquor Commission, 10 years as first selectman, and six years as a school board member. 

All through those years, he was a flamboyant, colorful character. And as first selectman he was one of the most accomplished leaders of the town.

Born in 1900 in Bethel, Leo Francis Carroll was one of 13 children raised on a Bethel farm. He was introduced to Ridgefield while in high school, frequently playing the Hamilton High School squads as captain of the Bethel basketball and baseball teams. “I fell in love with the town at first sight,” he once said.

He served in the U.S. Army at the end of World War I and in 1920, became a state Motor Vehicles Department inspector, assigned to the “flying squad” of motorcycle men who spot-checked for defective autos and trucks on the growing network of state highways. Because he was only 20 years old — not yet an adult, “I could catch you, but I couldn’t pinch you,” he recalled in an interview with Marilyn Vencel in 1975. “So I would catch the cars and pull them over for the old men, who were old enough to make the arrests in case of speeding and drunken driving.”

In 1921, he joined the Connecticut State Police, and Trooper Carroll was assigned to the new Ridgefield barracks in what was later the Boland house at 65 West Lane. He eventually bought a house on Wilton Road West and Ridgefield became his home for the rest of his life. 

He was promoted to sergeant in 1927 and two years later became  a lieutenant in command of Troop G in Westport. He continued to rise through the ranks until 1947 when Major Carroll became the executive officer of the entire Connecticut State Police — the highest rank one could reach in civil service.

“I’ve had a tremendous career, a very successful career and if I may tell you this, I never injured one hair on any criminal’s head,” he told interviewer Vencel. During his policing years, he investigated dozens of murders, bank robberies, arsons, and other major crimes. “May I boast a little bit now,” he said.l “You probably never met a boy or a man who has had so many good, big cases to his credit.” (Several of those cases are described in “Wicked Ridgefield,” a new History Press book due out in October 2016.)

In 1953, he was named chairman of the State Liquor Control Commission for four years. 

A Republican, he was not reappointed by Democratic Governor Abraham Ribicoff, and that ended his hope of one day being appointed commander of the state police – a job that had been held by his next-door neighbor on Wilton Road West, John C. Kelly. 

Instead  Carroll ran for first selectman of his hometown. At the 1957 GOP caucus that nominated him, he quoted Mark Twain: “Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” It was typical Carroll. 

Always a colorful personality, he proceeded through a lively 10 years as first selectman for a period when the town doubled in population. During his administration, Ridgebury, Farmingville, Scotland and East Ridge Middle Schools were built and Branchville was started. The Planning (and later Planning and Zoning) Commission, Conservation Commission and Historic District Commission were created; and many hundreds of acres of open space were acquired, including the 570-acre Hemlock Hills and Pine Mountain Preserves in Ridgebury. 

Under Carroll, the number of miles of paved road went from 60 to 120 — Ridgefield, even in the 1950s, had many miles of dirt roads. What’s more, Carroll himself sometimes maintained the town’s roads — he said he thought nothing of grabbing a free highway department truck and plowing the town’s roads “when we had a big, heavy snow storm.”  

Much about town government was modernized during his years in office — at his retirement,  Carroll himself listed 50 major accomplishments of his administration. 

He was famous for his oratory and for the scores of colorful letters and columns he wrote in The Ridgefield Press. 

After he retired as first selectman in 1967, The Press recalled the Twain quotation and observed that “Leo Carroll is a great showman, a sensitive man, a hard worker with an uncanny sense of people, individually and collectively. He is indeed an astonishing man.” 

But his retirement was short-lived; in 1969 he was appointed to a school board vacancy and was later elected to a six-year term that ended in 1975. It was no breeze, either, for Carroll was in the middle of the famous “book burning” controversy in 1973 — he objected to the schools’ use of Eldridge Cleaver’s anti-establishment book, “Soul on Ice,” in a high school elective course on politics. The board was also involved in many school budget and school construction battles during his tenure.

In 1979,  Carroll was named Rotary Citizen of the Year. 

Leo Carroll was a man who always seemed satisfied with his life and his accomplishments. “The only one thing that I should be criticized for is that I don’t like to go away from home,” he told Vencel. “I’ve always loved my home.”

“I like to sleep and I take naps,” he added. “I like good food. I like good people. I have a burning desire to be with decent people.”

He also had a good sense of humor.

Years ago Routes 7 and 35 intersected with a 90-degree junction at which many accidents occurred. Around 1940, Lt. Carroll, who was commanding Troop A in Ridgefield, asked the state highway department to improve the intersection, resulting in a semi-rotary arrangement that lasted until around 1984 when the state returned the T, but this time with traffic lights.  Carroll claimed that the old rotary was “the safest intersection in New England. There hasn’t been a single (serious) accident out there.”

However, the seeming complexity of the traffic circle gave rise to some complaints, most of them half teasing, and the intersection became known as “Carroll’s Folly.”

One day soon after the intersection was completed, the Rev. Hugh Shields, pastor of the First Congregational Church, called  Carroll at the barracks and said: “Lieutenant, I’m up here at 35 and 7, and I don't know which way to go to get to Danbury.”

Carroll, knowing the minister never touched a drop of liquor, replied: “Listen, you sober up and you’ll find your way,” and promptly hung up.

He died in 1985 at the age of 84.