By Richard O Jones
Following the showdown in the streets of Cincinnati when Hamilton County Detective Dutch Schaffer put down the city of Hamilton’s chief gangster Fat Wrassman, the Little Chicago gangster war seemed to die down, but there still remained two big loose ends: Raymond “Crane Neck” Nugent, a star gangland machine gunner alleged by some to have been the trigger at Symmes Corner, and Robert “Foxy Bob” Zwick, who narrowly escaped death at that hit. Each had been individually implicated in numerous crimes, but before they started shooting at each other worked together on several jobs and both were wanted for the murder of Robert Andres, who was found in a burned-out Venice barbecue shack the day before he was to appear as a witness to the murder of College Hill Marshal Peter Dumele at the Pelican Cafe.
There was a $5,000 reward for Zwick and two warrants for the murders of both Dumele and Andres. The gangster underworld knew Zwick as a double-crosser and hi-jacker, the murderer of George Murphy and Jack Parker, and the intended target when Joe was assassinated at Symmes Corner. With Parker in the grave, Breck Lutes and Todd Messner in prison, and Rodney Ford executed, Bob Zwick was the only gangster from the Pelican Cafe caper still in the wind.
Zwick had quit his job as a boiler operator in a Cincinnati factory in 1921 to go into the burgeoning illegal liquor trade. He was once before the victim of an attempted assassination when in 1927 a car chased his through the streets of Norwood, overtook him and fired five shots, twice hitting Zwick. His car ran over a curb and into a house. He was in the hospital for several weeks under guard as he struggled to live, several times on the verge of death, and managed to escape their watch when he had healed. On another occasion, he was driving a car on Cheviot Pike after a night at a roadhouse taking three men and four women home. The car went off a 75-foot cliff killing four and three severely injuring three. Foxy Bob Zwick alone walked away from the wreckage.
Under the wing of his girlfriend “Dago Rose” Meyers, Zwick managed to escape the immediate heat in Hamilton after the Symmes Corner hit to Newport, where the city physician treated his wounds and saved a dangling finger while amputating another. Meyers had formerly been Todd Messner’s girlfriend, but took up with Zwick shortly after the Pelican Cafe caper. They lived together in Hamilton until shortly before the Andres murder.
The press took to calling him “The Fox” or “Foxy Bob” Zwick or “The Phantom Firebrand” as he managed to elude police for nearly four years. Detective Schaefer would later recall at least six occasions when Zwick eluded arrest by mere minutes. He was in the car when co-conspirator Rodney Ford was arrested, but disappeared from the scene as if by magic. In his career of crime, he had racked up a record that, while not as spectacular as Crane Neck Nugent, who was one of the seven machine gunners dressed as police at the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, his tally included at least a half dozen murders and a score of bank robberies in addition to his bootlegging activities.
It would come out at his trial that shortly after the Symmes Corner hit, Zwick found a new partner in Allen “Smokey Joe” Scherer, and they lived together in a house in Dayton where they started building a new gang for bank robberies. They robbed banks in Somerville, Germantown, and Phillipsburg in addition to thriving in the liquor trade. They moved around to a score of different addresses in Florida, Michigan, and Ohio, using different names everywhere they went, but kept the rent paid on the Knecht Drive apartment in Dayton, where neighbors would later recall how he would stand in the yard to talk with neighbors and passers-by, not at all like a man wanted for two murders. Some neighbors even went on fishing trips with him to Florida, unaware that he was on the down-low.
It was Toledo, Ohio’s “Hoodlum Squad” that finally got the drop on Zwick and Meyers after they had been there for nearly two months. But it wasn’t easy. For two days, they kept eyes on an automobile believed to belong to the phantom gangster, and on January 8, 1933, they spotted it parked outside a Toledo restaurant at Erie and Cherry streets. Rookie patrolman Jay McGuire stood guard duty while five members of the Hoodlum Squad took dinner at a nearby hotel.
About one o’clock in the morning, Zwick and Dago Rose approached the automobile. Zwick was putting the key in the lock when McGuire stepped out of the darkness and put his gun in Zwick’s ribs, told the couple they were both under arrest. He gave Zwick a pat-down and did not find a weapon, but he did not search Meyers. As he was marching them to a police call box, Meyers slipped Zwick a .38 that she had in her purse.
“Zwick spun like a top and fired five shots at me,” McGuire would testify. “I was shot by the third or fourth shot. He started to run. I fired three shots in all. He took a tumble and shouted, ‘I’m hit! Run, Rose, run!’”
While Rose made her escape, Zwick took a bullet in the arm, but continued to run–straight toward the five detectives emerging from the restaurant after hearing the shots. The detectives opened fire and Zwick fell to the sidewalk, bullets piercing his jaw and cheek. The police swarmed on him, one detective hitting Zwick with the butt of his revolver to knock him all the way down while another kicked Zwick’s gun out of his hand. He was still conscious when he heard one of the detectives say, “He’s a goner. I shot him in the noodle.”
At the Lucas County Hospital, Zwick first gave his name as Ray Keller. When reminded of his tattoos, he soon realized the jig was up and admitted his identity.
Toledo police called Cincinnati and told Dutch Schaefer that he could have him as soon as he wanted him. As the detective caught the next train from Cincinnati to pick up the man he’d been chasing since Easter 1928, Zwick declared to a reporter, “I have never killed anyone. All that stuff is bunk. If I’d done all the jobs they said I did, I’d be a millionaire… I ain’t been in Hamilton since 1929 and then I just passed through there. Any idea that I hung out in that town is just a lot of bunk.”
On Valentine’s Day, Dago Rose Meyers gave herself up to Hamilton County Sheriff Asa Butterfield, saying “I give myself up because I love Bob and don’t want anyone to get the idea that I am out trying to line up a gang to put the fear into witnesses at his trial.” Meyers was under indictment for harboring a fugitive, her former boyfriend Todd Messner, who earned a life sentence in the Dumele case. She would get a one-to-twenty year sentence.
Hamilton and Butler County officials did not try to stop the return of Bob Zwick to Hamilton County as they had the best case against him. Said Butler County Coroner Edward Cook, “It is difficult to prove anything on Zwick in connection with the Butler County cases, although we are positive he was the killer.”
Hamilton County prosecutor Louis J. Schneider opted to try Zwick for the murder of Robert Andres first instead of the Dumele murder for which one man had already be executed and two others given life terms. Andres was the lead witness in Bob Ford’s trial, but the night before he was to testify, Andres went missing and his body, burned beyond recognition, discovered in the ashes of a barbeque stand near Venice, identified only by his belt buck and a key found in the ruins.
Zwick’s week-long trial for the murder in Hamilton County court was rife with dramatic moments. A total of eighteen deputy sheriffs were assigned to the courtroom, five of them in the immediate proximity of the defendant. The evidence was all circumstantial, but some of the most compelling testimony against Zwick came from Smokey Joe Scherer, who said that during a hunting trip, Zwick confessed to him that he killed Andres. They were discussing a possible new gang member when Zwick said he was not worried that the prospect would put them “in the grease with the law.”
Scherer testified, “Before that will be done, he said he would take him out and cut his tongue out and set fire to his body same as he did to Bob Andres.”
When detective Schaefer testified, the prosecutor laid out an arsenal of machine guns, shotguns, and pistols on the evidence table.
The man at whose hand was laid murders and brazen robberies in the past few years appeared anything but hard-boiled during the trial. On the contrary, tears came to his eyes during the testimony of Rose Meyers and his mother. His own testimony was delivered facing the jury close so that he could be heard between the clenched teeth and bandages resulting from the Toledo affray. When he came to the story of the killing of Turkey Joe Jacobs and his narrow escape, he buried his head in his hands, and as the tears flowed from his eyes. He asked the court for a moment to recover. Twice during his testimony, in fact, was court adjourned because he was so overcome with emotion, but he continued a general denial of ever having killed anyone or participating in any bank robberies or the raid on the Pelican Cafe. Nor, he testified, did he know anything about the murder of Jack Parker and the shooting of Bob Kolker, two of the many crimes and eight murders generally attributed to Zwick.
His main defense was that it was a case of mistaken identity, that he was being confused with another gangster by the name of Herbert “Murphy” Moore. Because one juror stubbornly held out for a second-degree murder verdict, they reached a compromise that saved him from the electric chair: Guilty of first degree murder, but with mercy. He received a life sentence.
With the last of Dumele’s killers behind bars, the man who broke the case, Detective Joe Schaefer, died at his home just after Christmas, 1933, from pneumonia and complications from a broken foot. Schaefer had been a member of the Cincinnati Police Department since 1899, earned the rank of detective ten years later. In 1927, he became special investigator for the Charles P. Taft, Hamilton County prosecutor, and was at the forefront of the fight against the Prohibition gangsters of Southwest Ohio.
Raymond “Crane Neck” Nugent, acquitted of the murder of Hamilton cafe operator Bob Schief in 1925 and who went on to become one of the most notorious machine gunners in the Midwest, left the area for good following the Symmes Corner incident and moved around between Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, and Miami, Florida, where he had his last run-in with the law when he was arrested March 1930 at a speakeasy under the name of Morris. He was reported staying in a mansion owned by Al Capone.
Even though there were warrants against Nugent for murder in both Cincinnati and Toledo, there was a mix-up in communication and before the policed arrived from Ohio to collect him, a judge accepted a $10,000 cash bond and released Nugent so that he could make an appearance in extradition court. Nugent pulled the $10,000 from his wallet. He never made that promised appearance, nor was he ever seen again. There are several theories as to what happened to him, one favorite being that Al Capone had regarded him as a risk after the Miami affair and some of his pals walked him into the Everglades to feed the gators. A less romantic speculation is that he was one of several gangster bodies found floating in the Detroit River and never identified.
Nugent was not declared officially dead until 1952 after a court action by his widow trying to claim his $1,500 World War I veteran’s death benefit. Mrs. Nugent said when she applied for the benefit that on April 11, 1930, she was living in Chicago and visiting Cincinnati when she received an anonymous telephone call saying, “He’s dead. You better pack up and go home.”