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Chicopee Mass.

The 1919 Christmas Eve Massacre and the Mobster Who Got Away With Murder

On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in 1919 a tidal wave of patients began showing up at the hospitals in Western Massachusetts and Connecticut. They suffered from delusions and blindness, and in some cases they had already died. Joseph Kania of Chicopee Falls, Mass., was one victim of the Christmas Eve massacre.

On Christmas Eve, Kania finished a shift at the tire plant and, on his way home, stopped into the American House for a drink. In World War I, wartime restrictions on alcohol had stopped the sale of anything but extremely weak booze. Nationally, Prohibition loomed. Word spread through town that a batch of good whiskey imported from France had arrived in the Connecticut River Valley.

The Christmas Eve Massacre

Brooklyn Eagle headlines decried the lack of punishment for mobster John Romanelli, perpetrator of the Christmas Eve massacre.

Kania, a husband and father of two, was among dozens of people lured into local taverns for a snort – perhaps their last before Prohibition. But what they thought was fancy French whiskey was actually wood alcohol shipped to the state by a gang of New York mobsters from the Italian section of Brooklyn.

John Romanelli, the “king” or “mayor” of Brooklyn’s Little Italy, was an undertaker. He had connections throughout the community. Police suspected that he might be the man to go to if a gang killed an enemy and wanted the body disposed of without too much fuss. He would, in 1928, conduct the spectacular funeral for his nephew Michael Abbatemarco, a gangster and bootlegger gunned down in a mob war.

John Romanelli

Romanelli generally managed to keep a low profile. The one occasion when he drew attention to himself came in 1915, when he and his gang attacked a rival undertaker. They fought over who would bury an eight-year-old boy who drowned in a canal accident.

In the 1915 brawl, which police broke up, Romanelli suffered a bullet wound. He received a fine for illegally carrying a weapon. His rival undertaker wound up dead.

Step forward to 1919 and Romanelli wanted a piece of the bootleg liquor business about to explode. As an undertaker he had access to wood alcohol, an ingredient in embalming fluid. He knew of a shipment in a New York warehouse, headed to Europe.

Wood alcohol (methanol) is a chemical cousin to grain alcohol, with an important distinction. People drink grain alcohol in spirits. Wood alcohol is poisonous.

Christmas Eve Massacre

Romanelli and a group of accomplices sneaked into the warehouse on December 20 and hauled away two barrels of wood alcohol. Working in a garage with the help of a local druggist, they drained the barrels into whiskey casks. They refilled the original barrels with water and replaced them at the warehouse for shipment. Then the men added color to the wood alcohol, to make the clear liquid look like whiskey, and poured it off into bottles with fake labels.

The bottles were then shipped to Hartford and made their way up the Connecticut River Valley. It didn’t take long before the trouble started. Men who drank the phony whiskey were turning up dead in their beds.

Dying patients crowded into the Connecticut River Valley’s hospital emergency rooms. They vomited, went blind and suffered delusions, paralysis and agonizing pain. Some arrived already dead.

In Connecticut, 13 died in Hartford, two in Meriden and two in Thompsonville. The death toll was higher in Massachusetts. At least 45 died in Chicopee, 10 in Holyoke, three in Hadley and one in Greenfield.

Others, who drank less of the stuff, survived but were sickened. The word spread rapidly about where the liquor had come from and who distributed it.

When police caught up with one of Romanelli’s accomplices, he begged them to arrest him. “I’m glad you got me,” he said. “For God’s sake don’t send me to Connecticut. I am an innocent man…it would mean certain death.”

Red-Handed

Police arrested Romanelli in New York, caught red handed with some of the stolen alcohol. Prosecutors charged him with grand larceny. Police waited for a New York case of poisoning to surface so he could be charged with murder, but it never emerged. All the known victims of the Christmas Eve massacre lived in Connecticut or Massachusetts.

It’s not clear how many people died from the phony whiskey. Some accounts said 97, while others said well over a hundred. Many more suffered injuries, but survived. In Massachusetts and Connecticut, prosecutors brought charges of murder. The states, though, had weak extradition laws at the time, and Romanelli cooled his heals in a New York jail.

He complained bitterly that the police destroyed his undertaking business. They framed him for the Christmas Eve massacre, he insisted. But no one bought his act. He received a sentence of three to seven years in Sing Sing prison for larceny.

Sing Sing prison in 1913

Two Years

But what of all the dead men left in the wake of his crimes? He could never be brought to justice from New York. The court did convict Carmine Lizenziata, the Romanelli associate who actually drove the liquor over the state line. He received a sentence for 18 years in prison. But he fled the country for Italy.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, claimed they couldn’t touch Romanelli for the murders. The mob kingpin left prison after serving just two years for the Christmas Eve massacre. The prosecutor then described the conundrum. Extradition, he said, was only used for people who committed a crime and then fled the state.

“A man may stand within the confines of one state and fire a cannon into another, killing a thousand persons, without laying himself liable to extradition to the state in which the deaths actually occurred,” the prosecutor explained.

“This is exactly what happened in the Romanelli case, except that the Brooklyn killers used alcohol instead of a cannon.”

This story about the Christmas Eve massacre was updated in 2022.

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How the Polish Immigrants Came to New England

Before Polish immigrants arrived in New England they had already made it to the Jamestown colony in Virginia as craftsmen.

John Evanowski, Polish immigrant, at the Fafnir Bearing Co. in New Britain. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Over the centuries Polish immigrants came to New England in waves, the first from 1870 to 1914, the second after World War II and the third following Polish independence in 1989. By 1900, 9.3 percent of Polish immigrants in the United States lived in New England. That number increased to 10.9 percent in 1930. Only the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic states attracted more Polish immigrants.

Today, Massachusetts and Connecticut rank 10^th and 11^th in total population of people with Polish ancestry. Connecticut has the third densest population of Polish-Americans in the country, with 8.85 percent, behind Wisconsin and Michigan.

Poles have been soldiers and journalists, farmers and factory workers, priests and rabbis, entrepreneurs and entertainers. Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Kazimierz Pulaski were heroes of the American Revolution. Igor Sikorsky, who had Russian and Polish parentage, built a helicopter factory in Connecticut. Martha Stewart, nee Kostyra, built a business empire.

Some of New England’s most prominent politicians have Polish ancestry: Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, the late U.S. Secretary of State Ed Muskie and U.S. senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders. Red Sox icon Carl Yasztremski grew up on a potato farm and spoke fluent Polish, while the New England Patriots’ former stars Stephen Gostowksi and Rob Gronkowski claim Polish ancestors. Paul Newman was part Polish; so is Steven Tyler, Aerosmith vocalist.

The 1st Wave of Polish Immigrants

Philip Sowa. Photo couresty Library of Congress.

Philip Sowa. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Most Polish-Americans are descended from the first wave of immigrants, when an estimated 1.5 million fled poverty and starvation in Germany, Russia and Galicia. People called them the za chlebem, or ‘for bread’ immigrants, because most had neither money nor land. A large number were Jewish, escaping persecution.

They came to New England to work in the factories, primarily textile mills. They came in family groups and settled in neighborhoods with large Slavic populations. In Lawrence, Mass., for example, Polish immigrants arrived en masse at the turn of the 20^th century.

Around 1912, Michael and Jadwiga Narkiewicz emigrated from Wilno, Poland, and settled in Westminster, Vt., where they ran a dairy farm. Then the paper mills came to Bellows Falls, and the Narkiewiczs followed.

Polish-American Club, Bellows Falls, Vt.

In 1903, 600 Polish immigrants lived in Lawrence, Mass. That number more than tripled in seven years, to 2,100. They mostly worked in woolen and worsted goods manufacturing. Two years later, Polish women working at the Everett Mill shut down their looms and started the Bread and Roses strike.

The Mills

When strikes in New Bedford’s cotton mills in 1894 and 1898 caused many workers to leave, Polish workers replaced them, though not as strike breakers. By 1910 several thousand Poles worked in the New Bedford mills — and they were still arriving.

Polish immigrants had large families, and the children often went to work in factories at a young age. Social reformer Lewis Hine photographed 14-year-old Philip Sowa at the Shoe Mill in Fall River, Mass., where he had applied to be a doffer. “Liked to go to school,” Hine noted in a caption to the 1916 photograph.

Another crusading photographer, unknown, photographed the overcrowded home of cotton mill workers in the Olneyville section of Providence. “Eight persons live in these three small rooms, three of them are boarders,” noted the photographer. “Inner bed-rooms are 9 x 8 feet, the largest room 12 x 12 feet. 23 Chaffee Street, Polish People. Property owned by the mill.”

Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Thousands of Poles came to Massachusetts to work in mills in Springfield, Chicopee and Holyoke. Many saved their earnings from factory work and bought cheap, abandoned farms in the Connecticut River Valley. They moved into old colonial homes and transformed the land viewed as useless into thriving onion and tobacco farms.

A Cold Welcome

They weren’t always welcome. A novel published in 1913, called The Invaders, described how people of English ancestry reacted to the newcomers. So did a 1933 article in New England Magazine titled The Pole In The Land Of The Puritan:

In the smiling country along the Connecticut river and included within Massachusetts, there was three decades ago possibly the most distinctive survival of early New England Puritan life. The first Poles came in the early eighties; many of them were attracted by glowing reports of returning Jews, who told of a land of boundless freedom and countless dollars. Soon the descendents of the Pynchons and the Chapins were marvelling at the expressionless Slavic faces, which looked as if flattened against a board at birth; at stunted figures that bespoke grinding toil; at the masculine forms of the women, that told of field-work beside brother and husband and domestic animal. To-day the Polish tide, swelled by continuous immigration and prolific births, is steadily rising in this old Yankee community. The Massachusetts section of the valley is the home of twelve to fifteen thousand of these aliens.

Catholics and Jews

Many of the Polish farmers were Jewish and settled on abandoned farms in Connecticut with the help of Jewish relief societies. Many Jewish families who fled persecution in Poland dreamed of owning a small farm. They ended up, though, in tenements on New York’s Lower East Side.

Those who made it out of the tenements tended to settle on Connecticut farms near other Jewish farmers, in Colchester, Norwich, East Haddam and Newtown.

A Polish immigrant couple, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Lyman, on their tobacco farm near Windsor Locks, Conn.

Many other Polish immigrants belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. In 1889, Fr. Franciszek Chalupka founded a Polish-American parish in Webster, Mass., the first in New England. The parishioners of St. Joseph Parish raised money to pay for his seminary tuition. He later founded St. Stanislaus Parish in Chicopee.

Poles and other immigrant groups suffered high unemployment after the 1893 financial panic. Father Chalupka visited wealthy people door-to-door asking for money to buy food and coal. He is remembered today for saving the Polish immigrants of Chicopee.

The 2nd Wave

World War II created the second wave of Polish immigrants who escaped ethnic cleansing by Germany and Russia. Many Poles died in German concentration camps or Russian massacres. The Soviet government also deported millions of Poles to Siberia and other remote regions of the empire.

Between World War II and 1968, 140,000 Poles came to the United States. Poles escaping repression in Europe came from diverse backgrounds and social classes. Most, however, left their home for political rather than economic reasons. A good percentage belonged to the middle- and upper-middle-classes in Poland.

The bulk of the second wave of Polish immigrants arrived between 1948 and 1952. Some were former soldiers, some were relatives of Poles already living here and some arrived under the Displaced Persons Act.

When they arrived in the United States, they tended to seek white-collar and professional jobs.

Today there are 78 Polish-American parishes in New England, mostly in the Springfield-Hartford-Worcester area, but also in Boston, Fall River, and Manchester, N.H. Three dozen Roman Catholic churches in New England offer Mass in Polish.

New Britain’s Little Poland

Many of New England’s Polish neighborhoods have disappeared as Poles assimilated quickly. Not so New Britain’s Little Poland, a thriving ethnic community in central Connecticut. The neighborhood retained its Polish character since it started in 1890. The third wave of immigrants came to New Britain after Polish independence in 1989.

Polish-Americans from nearby towns in Connecticut bolster Little Poland’s population of 30,000. They can spend a day doing business completely in Polish, shopping, buying an airline ticket, getting a home loan, taking dance or driving lessons and ordering dinner. On weekends, thousands attend Mass at Sacred Heart Church.

On the last Sunday in April, Little Poland is thronged with visitors to the Little Poland Festival on Broad Street. It features crafts vendors from around New England, food and a live stage with folk dancing and live bands.

This story about Polish immigrants was updated in 2023.

Image: Polish and American flag By Elevatorrailfan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41217488.

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The Unknown Kid Who Created the Concord Minute Man

In 1873 an unknown, 23-year-old college dropout got the commission to create a monument to the Minute Man who let go of his plow to fight at North Bridge in Concord, Mass., on April 19, 1775.

The Minute Man

The 100^th anniversary of the shot heard ‘round the world was only two years away. The citizens of Concord wanted to honor the farmers and tradesmen who battled professional British soldiers.

So they decided to award the commission to Daniel Chester French, who had never executed a full-size statue. They had their reasons. His father was well-connected in town, and he had taken art lessons from Louisa May Alcott’s artistic little sister May. She vouched for his talent.

Connections

Daniel Chester French, 1902.

Daniel Chester French was born April 20, 1850 in Exeter, N.H., the scion of an old and well-to-do New England family. His father, Henry Flagg French was a lawyer, judge and, later, assistant U.S. Treasury Secretary. He was also an avid horticulturist who wrote a book about farm drainage and served as the first president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College (now University of Massachusetts) at Amherst.

In 1867, Henry Flagg French moved his family to Concord, Mass., where he befriended two neighbors: philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson and writer Louisa May Alcott. Young Daniel didn’t care for school. He preferred to explore the outdoors with his good friend William Brewster, later a famed ornithologist. He liked to make figures of animals from wood, gypsum and even turnips.

Another neighbor, May Alcott, Louisa’s sister, was an artist as well as the model for Amy in Little Women. Impressed by young Daniel Chester French’s work, she encouraged him to keep at it. She also gave him drawing lessons, modeling clay and sculptor’s tools.

The Minute Man

French dropped out of MIT after a year, having flunked algebra, chemistry and physics. He then moved to New York to study with two famous artists, John Quincy Adams Ward and William Rimmer. He didn’t like city life, though, and returned home to Concord.

At 20, he arrived just in time. He was asked to submit a model for a statue of a Minute Man to commemorate the centennial of the Battles of Concord and Lexington. He got the commission in 1873, but it was an unusual one. Instead of receiving a fee, he would be reimbursed for his studio, tools and materials.

The Boston Athenaeum and the neighbors supplied models. French studied a plaster cast of the classic Roman statue Apollo Belvedere at the Athenaeum for his composition. He studied his neighbors for facial expression and realistic detail. The neighbors also supplied him with antique Minute Man clothing and a Colonial musket, powder horn and plow.

The Ames Foundry in Chicopee, Mass., cast the sculpture in bronze from confiscated Civil War cannons. They pronounced it the best casting they’d ever done. It was called ‘one of the strongest, most spirited pieces of work ever made by so young an artist.’

The statue was an instant hit. It still stands today by the Old North Bridge where 500 militiamen defeated three companies of British troops.

More Commissions

Helped by his father’s position at the Treasury, French received commissions for works on government buildings over the next 14 years. His career got a jumpstart in 1893 when he sculpted the giant Statue of the Republic for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He topped off his career with his masterpiece, the Lincoln Memorial.

Some of French’s works around New England include:

Equestrian statue of Joseph Hooker

The statue of General Joseph Hooker in front of the Massachusetts Statehouse.
The St. Paul’s School War Memorial, St. Paul’s School, Concord, N.H.
Perkins Memorial
Commodore George H. Perkins monument at the New Hampshire State House.
The Melvin Memorial, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Mass.
The Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Memorial, Cambridge, Mass.
Wendell Phillips in the Boston Public Garden.
Head of Victory, Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, Mass.
George Robert White Memorial
The George Robert White Memorial, Boston, Mass.
The John Harvard Monument, Harvard Yard, Cambridge, Mass.
The Spirit of Life, Paul’s Episcopal Church, Stockbridge, Mass.
“Public Drinking Fountain” (“Chief Konkapot”), the Town Park Village Green in Lee, Mass.

Featured image: Minute_Man_Statue_Lexington_Massachusetts.jpg: w:User:Daderotderivative work: Hohum (talk) – Minute_Man_Statue_Lexington_Massachusetts.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9425447. Perkins Memorial By Marc29th (talk); cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) – I (Marc29th (talk)) created this work entirely by myself., GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16474836. This story was updated in 2022.

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Duryea Bros. Build 1st US Motorcar, Despite Themselves

Frank Duryea and his brother Charles somehow managed to overcome their sibling rivalry to build the first gasoline-powered motorcar in America. Charles came up with the designs, while Frank turned them into reality. Then Charles got mad and went home.

Charles and Frank Duryea and their motorcar

They were born in Illinois, Charles in 1861, Frank in 1869. Charles moved to Washington, D.C., to work on bicycles and his brother followed him. Two moves in two years brought them to Springfield, Mass., where they studied the internal combustion engine at the Springfield public library.

Their first automobile was a buggy with an engine. Charles drew up the designs, found an investor and then stormed back to Illinois. Frank built the motorcar in an old machine shop. Along the way, he contracted typhoid fever, got married and spent much time begging investors for money. The result of his work was crude, but it ran. Frank successfully drove it down the streets of Springfield on Sept. 21, 1893.

The Springfield Morning Union was there to record the moment: Residents in the vicinity of Florence street flocked to the windows yesterday afternoon astonished to see gliding by in the roadway a common top carriage with no shafts and no horse attached. The vehicle is operated by gasoline and is the invention of Erwin Markham and J. F. Duryea… The vehicle, which was operated by Mr. Bemis, started from the corner of Hancock avenue and Spruce street and went up the avenue, up Hancock street and started down Florence street, working finely, but when about half-way down the latter street it stopped short, refusing to move. Investigation showed that the bearing had been worn smooth by the friction and a little water sprinkled upon it put it in running condition again. The rest of the trip was made down Florence and down Spruce street, to the residence of the inventors. They hope to have the vehicle in good working condition soon.

Frank built a second car, and in 1895 entered it in the Thanksgiving Day Chicago-to-Evanston-and-Back race sponsored by The Chicago Times-Herald. He entered the car against three Benzes and two electric cars. Charles helped, taking shortcuts in a horse-drawn sleigh to bring parts for repairs to the car. A snowstorm caused the cars to slide into snow banks and each other. Frank was the only one to finish the 54-mile race, averaging a speed of 5-1/4 miles per hour.

Two months before the race, Charles and Frank formed the first automobile manufacturing company in Chicopee, Mass., and called it the Duryea Motor Wagon Company. They sold 13 of their hand-built motor wagons, but the brothers argued and Charles went home again after three years. It was the first mass-produced car in America, if you could call it that.

Frank joined the Stevens Arms and Tool Company in Chicopee Falls, Mass. In 1904 he organized the Stevens-Duryea company and produced the first six-cylinder car in the U.S. The Stevens-Duryea Model Y and Big Six were popular cars manufactured until 1927. Charles tried various automobile ventures, never made much money at them and ended up as the editor of Automobile Trade Journal. He died Sept. 28, 1938 in Philadelphia.

Unlike his brother, Frank became rich from car making. He retired in 1915, spending his last 54 years semi-retired in Greenwich, Conn. He died in Saybrook, Conn., on Feb. 15, 1967.

With thanks to American Inventors, Entrepreneurs, and Business Visionaries by Charles W. Carey.

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