Ruth Snyder, the first woman to die in the electric chair, once lived in this Queens Village home, where she killed her husband. Tribune photo by Ira Cohen

• Dateline, Queens Village: March 20, 1927, 93-27 222nd St.
Murder One

Ruth Snyder tried nine times to kill her husband, Albert. She poisoned him, fed him mercury tablets – but both only made Albert “feel better.”

Snyder eventually hooked-up with a girdle salesman from New Jersey, who she blamed when cops found Albert in bed at home, his nostrils stuffed with chloroform-soaked cotton, his throat in a garrote of picture wire.

Their trial in the Long Island City courthouse was dubbed “The Dumbbell Murder” by the media, but Snyder and Judd Gray were convicted – and sentenced to death.

Ruth Snyder was the first woman to die in the electric chair. Caught by a hidden camera, Snyder’s execution was splashed on a front page, under the word “DEAD.”

• Dateline, Kew Gardens: July, 1965, 150-22 72nd St.
Mother Murder

Everyone agreed she was a knockout.

Alice Crimmins went through boyfriends like most people go through toothpaste, detectives said. She could have been an actress, model or climbed to a position of wealth and prominence.
Just two things stood in her way, prosecutors would charge. That’s why her two young children turned up dead.

Crimmins was first convicted in the deaths of Missy, four, and Edmund, five, and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. After an appeal, she was granted a new trial – and served only five years in the death of her daughter.

On her release in September 1977, Crimmins married one of her wealthy ex-lovers. She was last seen sailing from a Long Island marina on a yacht – bearing the name of her murdered daughter.

This sign hanging in the window of the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park shows how the neighborhood felt about mobster John Gotti – a convicted killer. Tribune photo by Ira Cohen

• Dateline: Ozone Park, 98-08 101st Ave.
Queens Capo

To thousands of Queens residents, John Gotti was a neighborhood hero who lit up the streets outside the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club each July 4 with a massive – and very illegal – fireworks display.
To the feds and local law enforcement, Gotti was a thug, a murderer and thief who patted kids on the head – then wiped out mobsters on a whim.

Gotti was jailed in 1992 for the 1985 murder of mob rival Paul Castellano and on assorted racketeering charges. He died of throat cancer in a federal lockup in 2003, and was laid to rest in a Queens cemetery dubbed the “Last Stop for the Mob.”

• Dateline: Howard Beach, 160-11 85th St.
Neighbor Nightmare

John Gotti, reputed Boss of Bosses, aka the “Teflon Don” and “Dapper Don,” lived with his family in a modest two-story home in Howard Beach.

The house boasts an enormous satellite dish on the roof, lots of security cameras and drawn curtains.

It’s not a pretty house, as houses go, but the neighbors don’t complain. The Gotti family doesn’t react to well to criticism – or accidents involving their neighbors.

Ask the family of John Favara, who, in 1980, accidentally ran over Gotti’s 12-year-old son, Frank.

Shortly thereafter, Gotti’s wife, Victoria, grabbed a baseball bat and bashed Favara’s head with it. Several months later, eyewitnesses at a Queens diner told police they saw two men shove Favara into the back seat of a black car in the diner parking lot. Favara was never seen again.

Gotti and his wife had nothing to do with it, of course. They were vacationing in Florida at the time.

• Dateline: Kennedy Airport, Dec. 11, 1978, Building 261
Lufthansa Freight Terminal

They were the “Goodfellas” of the big-screen. They pulled off the $6 million Lufthansa Airlines heist at JFK Airport – the biggest theft in U.S. history. Then the Goodfellas dropped like flies.

Witnesses vanished, 15 wise guys who were in on the job disappeared. Bloodied bodies showed up all over Queens – bodies of wise guys who couldn’t tow the mob line.

Enter Henry Hill – a Queens boy who grew up in the mob, and feared becoming its next victim. Hill grew a beard, spilled his guts to prosecutors and went into the witness protection plan.

Jimmy “The Gent” Burke, the heist mastermind, was never charged in the heist. The cash and jewels stolen from Lufthansa were never recovered.

Rookie cop Eddie Byrnes was shot five times in the head and killed during a hit at this location that was ordered by a jailed drug lord. Tribune photo by Ira Cohen

Dateline: South Jamaica, Feb. 26, 1988, Inwood Street and 107th Ave.
Death of a “Rookie”

The other cops called him “Rookie.” He was just four days past his 22nd birthday when he sat guarding the home of a man who witnessed and reported drug dealing on his block.

P.O. Eddie Byrne was alone in a patrol car on the frigid night of Feb. 26, 1988 when the face of a crack head appeared at his passenger window. “Aggghh,” the face screamed. Byrne reached for his holstered gun. He never got a chance to use it.

Another crack head, standing at the driver’s side window of the patrol car, held a nickel-plated revolver – eight inches from Byrne’s head.

Five shots tore through the young cop’s head, and Eddie Byrne was dead – executed on the orders of an imprisoned drug lord.
More than a thousand cops hit the streets of South Jamaica in search of Byrne’s assassins. More than $20,000 was offered for the capture of the crack heads.

Police arrested Todd Scott, Scott Cobb, Philip “Marshal” Copeland and David McClary, all charged with orchestrating and carrying-out Byrne’s murder. The four low-level drug players were members of the “Bebos,” a violent drug crew hired by Howard “Pappy” Mason for jailed drug kingpin Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols. The cops also busted open Mason’s multi-million dollar crack ring. All were sentenced to life in prison.

More important, cops said, they had proved that “Fat Cat” wanted his crew to deliver a dead cop. And they did.

In a racial attack that left Queens reeling, a black teen was chased on to the Belt Parkway in Howard Beach by a gang of white teens, where he was hit by a car and killed. Tribune photo by Ira Cohen

• Dateline: Howard Beach, Dec. 20, 1986, 156-71 Cross Bay Blvd.
Murder on the Belt

Michael Griffith, 23, Cedric Sandiford, 36, and Timothy Grimes, all black men, stopped at New Park Pizza that night to call for help when their car broke down on Cross Bay Boulevard.

When the three walked back to the street, a gang of more than a dozen white teens were waiting for them – racial epithets and baseball bats at-hand.

The gang chased Griffith and Sandiford to the edge of the Belt Parkway, where they severely beat Sandiford – then turned to chase Griffith, who tried to escape by jutting through a hole in the highway’s fencing.

Griffith ran into traffic, where he was struck and killed by an oncoming car.

Cops caught 12 members of the gang the next day, including their ‘leader,” Jon Lester, 17.

Four years later, the suspects were sentenced to a variety of jail time. And the words “racial hatred” became embedded in the history of Howard Beach.

• Dateline: Flushing, May 24, 2000, 40-12 Main St.
Mindless Massacre

Madman John Taylor walked into the Wendy’s fast food restaurant with his accomplice, Craig Godineaux, at about 11:30 p.m. where they waited for the store to close while “chatting” with employees.
Taylor, a former store manager, asked to see the current man in charge, and was pointed to Jean Auguste’s basement office.

Moments later, six other employees were called to a basement “meeting” and were herded into a freezer, their hands and mouths covered with duct tape, their heads covered with trash bags.
Taylor shot and killed Auguste first in the robbery-turned-murder. He and Godineaux then summarily shot Anita Smith, Jeremy Mele, Ramon Nazario, Ali Ibadat, Patrick Castro and Ja Quione Johnson execution-style, in the head. They fled with less than $2,000 in cash and coins.

Taylor didn’t count on Castro and Johnson living through the nightmare, but they did – and returned to testify at Taylor’s trial.
Godineaux took a plea and is serving his time upstate – five consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Taylor is awaiting execution at the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York. His appeal is being processed.

• Dateline: Elmhurst, March 11, 1992, 40-12 83rd St.
Editor Execution

Manuel de Dios Unanue, 49, was seated at the end of the bar at Meson Asturias Restaurant talking with friends, when a young Hispanic man walked into the restaurant, eyed de Dios, and walked back to the street.

The man returned moments later with a hood over his head and pumped two rounds into de Dios’ head. The former editor-in-chief at El Diario died instantly, his back to the wall.

An 18-year-old hit man was later arrested and charged with the murder.

Throughout his career, de Dios was an outspoken critic of drug traffickers and kingpins, political corruption and pandering in the U.S. and South America. He came down hard on drug traffickers in Queens in position pieces in El Diario, and subsequent publications of his own.

“It was never a question of how he would die, or if he would die,” friends said. “It was just a matter of when.”

• Dateline: Forest Hills, March 13, 1964, 82-42 Austin St.
Civic Disgrace

Kitty Genovese knew her neighborhood. She managed a bar at night, which left her days free to walk local streets, greeting neighbors with a friendly “Hi.” Not that it did her much good on the last night of her life.

Winston Moseley attacked Kitty Genovese as she walked from her parked car to her apartment.

The knife-wielding stranger hunted down and murdered his prey, stabbing the woman as she screamed for help. Neighbors – 38 of them – heard Kitty’s screams, turned their heads and turned off their lights.

With no one caring, Moseley stabbed Kitty to death.

• Dateline: Queens, July 1976-July 1977
The Devil Made Him Do It

David Berkowitz liked pretty, young women with long hair. He thought the women of Queens were “the prettiest of all.” To kill, that is. Just to kill.
The 24-year-old Yonkers resident claimed a 6,000-year-old demon named Sam spoke to him through a neighbor’s dog – telling him to kill young women.
Berkowitz’ shooting spree arrived in Queens in October 1976, when he ambushed a man and his girlfriend in a parked car at 159th Street and 33rd Avenue in Flushing. He struck again on Nov. 27, 1976, shooting two young women on the porch of a house at 83-21 262nd St. in Bellerose.

But he became a star when he shot and killed two Forest Hills women on Jan. 30, 1977. The media dubbed the gunman the “.44-Caliber Killer.”
Berkowitz attacked for the seventh time in Bayside, outside the Elephas Disco on 211th Street and Northern Boulevard.
The Son of Sam was undone by a parking ticket he was issued at a hydrant near his last attack.
He never went to trial, pleaded guilty instead, and was sentenced to a total of 547 years in jail.

In his seventh Queens attack, Son Of Sam killed a couple outside of Elephas nightclub in Bayside, which is now a Korean restaurant. Tribune photo by Ira Cohen

• Dateline: Bayside, July 18,1992, 39th Avenue and Bell Boulevard
Bouncer, Bully, Cop-Killer

City Housing cop Paul Heidelberger was well-known as a peacemaker – on or off the job. The trait would cost the cop his life
Heidelberger tried to make peace when a fight erupted at T-Birds Lounge on Bell Boulevard. The fight spilled to the street, where Patrick Bannon, a boulevard bar bouncer on steroids, was hit in the head with a bottle.

The blood that poured from Bannon’s wound ran red with rage. Bannon left the scene long enough to grab his car and .9-mm.

Bannon spotted Heidelberger on the street and, believing he threw the bottle that struck him, the Elmhurst resident walked to the cop and pumped round-after-round into Heidelberger’s head. Two other men were struck by the gunfire – one lived, one died.
Bannon is serving 30 years to life at the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York.