Retriever in Trouble

Noel Charles Scaffa, most famed of U. S. private detectives, specializes not in catching crooks but in retrieving the things they steal. Last week his specialty landed him, a handcuffed prisoner, in a Federal courtroom in Manhattan and in the thick of Federal racket charges.

Detective Scaffa, son of a Sicilian contractor, looks and acts as if he might have been invented by Dashiell Hammett. He is tall and dark, sleek, sad-eyed, softspoken, close-mouthed and elusive. The public has heard that he lives quietly with his mother in The Bronx, takes no interest in women, has never read a detective story in his life. No one except Scaffa knows just how much stolen property he has retrieved. He puts the figure at $1,490,000.

Scaffa started as a Pinkerton office boy in 1914. He worked up to shadowing, then investigating. After seven years he was ready to open a Manhattan agency of his own. Ten years ago fame and trouble came to him hand in hand.

On Sept. 30, 1925 some $600,000 worth of jewelry disappeared from the Manhattan hotel room of Mrs. Jessie Woolworth Donahue, while the daughter of the founder of the 5 & 10-c- store fortune was taking a bath. On Oct. 13 Noel Scaffa walked into police headquarters, laid down a brown paper parcel containing all the jewels. He had got them, he said later, from one Sam Layton in exchange for a $65,000 reward posted by the company with which Mrs. Donahue had insured her jewels. On Oct. 23 Chief Assistant District Attorney Ferdinand Pecora had Scaffa indicted for compounding a felony by allowing "Sam Layton" to escape. The first trial resulted in a hung jury, the second in a directed verdict of acquittal.

Detective Scaffa had, however, learned his lesson. Thereafter police found him friendly, co-operative--in return grew less inquisitive about his methods. He got back $200,000 worth of stolen property for Wanamaker's department store, a $40,000 pearl for Mrs. Joshua S. Cosden, jewels worth $81,000 for Singer Grace Moore, made another retrieve from the famous Sitamore loot. Soon he had 20 operatives working for him, was earning $25,000 per year. Local police were grateful for the effort and embarrassment he saved them. And then, last year, Congress passed the National Stolen Property Act making interstate transportation of stolen goods a Federal offense and giving Department of Justice agents a legal toehold on many big robberies.

In the Miami Biltmore Hotel last January two masked men stripped Mrs. Margaret Hawkesworth Bell, onetime Follies dancer, of jewels insured at $185,000, took watch and cash from her companion Harry Content, 74-year-old Manhattan broker. Two petty thieves were shortly picked up, charged with the crime. For lack of identification one was let off. The other was given a short penitentiary sentence. Meantime Miami's chief of detectives turned up with the jewels, announcing that someone had obligingly tossed them into his automobile.

There the matter might have rested had not the Miami Biltmore's owner, Utilitarian Henry Latham Doherty, remembered the Stolen Property Act. Department of Justice agents reopened the case, got the two thieves sentenced to 25 years in prison. More important, the Miami chief of detectives informed them that it was Noel Scaffa who had delivered the jewels, that a split of the insurance company's $15,000 reward had been planned with a Scaffa operative in for $1,000. A Federal Grand Jury in New York promptly summoned Detective Scaffa for questioning. Chief J. Edgar Hoover let it be known that his Federal Bureau of Investigation was about to crack open a criminal ring which would make the late John Dillinger & gang look like apple-snitchers.

It is more economical for companies like Federal Insurance Co., employing Noel Scaffa, to pay a 10% reward for the return of stolen jewels than to pay the full value to their owners. It is safer and more profitable for thieves to secure that reward than to try to dispose of their loot through "fences." It is also obvious that, as connecting link between complaisant insurance company and eager thief, a detective like Scaffa is in an exceedingly tempting position. How large did Scaffa loom in the current picture?

In Manhattan last week Federal agents suddenly clapped Scaffa into jail on a charge of having violated the Stolen Property Act by transporting the Bell jewels back from New York to Florida after the robbery. Two days later their net widened to include four notorious Broadway characters charged with complicity in the crime. Scaffa's attorney, his mind whirling with headlines about interstate commerce, commenced to argue that the Supreme Court's Schechter decision had invalidated the Stolen Property Act as well as the NIRA. The judge promptly shut him up, fixed Scaffa's bail at $10,000.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.