Read original...Otto Guendal awoke on Jan. 30, 1926, and found a window jimmied at his home on 91st Ave. in Woodhaven, Queens.
Nothing but his radio was missing.
Guendal proved to be the first victim of one of the more eccentric crime sprees in New York history. Over the following two months, a fleet-footed housebreaker paid late-night visits to 29 of Guendal's neighbors in Woodhaven and Richmond Hill. If they owned a radio, they awoke to find it gone.
In that era, a radio receiver was considered as essential as an icebox. New York had become a broadcasting center, with such stations as WJZ, WNY and, at 660 AM, WEAF, the NBC flagship. The number of stations nationally exploded from 26 in 1923 to nearly 600 a year later.
Radios were pricey - up to $250 for deluxe models at a time when a working man earned $100 a month. But they were flying off the shelves - and out windows in the arms of a burglar.
Cops got a first look at the human crime wave on Feb. 26, when Queens Patrolman Jacob Biegel saw a young man toting a radio from a home on 95th St.
The burglar pulled a gun, shot Biegel in the leg, and sprinted away like a jackrabbit, despite his cargo of a 15-pound radio.
By wounding a cop, the break-in artist made the newspaper front pages as "the Radio Burglar."
Scrutiny did not hinder his work. He hit a new house nearly every night as Police Commissioner George McLaughlin fumed. He ordered extra patrol cars to the area and goaded his minions to find the man.
They found him, all right.
At 3 a.m. on March 25, Herbert Horscroft reported an intruder at his 78th St. home. Queens Patrolman Arthur Kenny arrived in the backyard as a man casually strolled out the back door.
The man told Kenny he was the homeowner, then pulled a Smith & Wesson revolver and shot the cop in the neck. He sprinted off, leaving another patrolman, Frank Donnelly, in his dust. Three blocks away, the Radio Burglar stepped out of a shadow and shot his winded pursuer in the shoulder.
Commissioner McLaughlin flooded the neighborhood with 500 extra cops. One of them, Detective Charles McCarthy, stopped a suspicious young man he saw walking on 87th Ave. at 2 a.m. on April 6.
"I'm legitimate," the man said. "Toole, from the gas company."
He flipped open a wallet, and as McCarthy reached for it, the man pulled a gun and shot him in the shoulder. Two fellow detectives lost another footrace to the Radio Burglar.
Patrolman Kenny, the burglar's first shooting victim, died just hours after McCarthy was shot. The radio thief now had the homicide squad on his tail.
The wallet gave police their first lead. It was stolen, but inside they found two pawn tickets signed by George Ebert of Flushing. Ebert wasn't the Radio Burglar, but he told cops that a juvenile crime pal he bunked with at the Elmira Reformatory had made a bad habit of using his name.
That man was Paul Hilton, 27, of the Bowery. Born in Brooklyn, he was orphaned and spent his life in one form of custody or another, including the Catholic Protectory, Elmira and in prison on Blackwell's Island and in Rhode Island.
Detectives found Hilton's mugshot in the NYPD Rogues Gallery, and the cops wounded by the Radio Burglar confirmed they were the same man.
Cops nabbed him with a break as odd as the radio crime spree itself.
Detectives had learned that Hilton was a baseball fanatic. He was a star third-baseman on prison teams, and he sometimes used the alias Frank Merriwell, a crime-solving hero ballplayer from dime novels.
On a hunch, detectives staked out the Polo Grounds in Manhattan on April 13 for the season opener between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Robins.
Detectives James Pike and William Jackson were waiting when Hilton stepped off the elevated train outside the ballpark. He reached for his Smith & Wesson, but the cops were quicker with their blackjacks.
When he came to, Hilton was asked why he stole radios.
"I like music," he replied.
There was another explanation. Hilton had an agreement with the owner of a 14th St. radio shop who bought and resold the hot items. The Radio Burglar groused that the shop owner was a crook.
"He'd gimme six bucks for a radio worth a hundred," he said.
Such comments raised questions about the burglar's wits.
"He is obviously a mental defective," said one newspaper. "He has a peculiarly flat face with an unusually broad nose, and a sullen, defiant look in his eyes. Well developed physically, with a strong and wiry build, he appears little better than an animal mentally, although he has criminal cunning and courage."
Analysts prodded his mind and judged him cognizant of right and wrong.
The Long Island City Courthouse was surrounded by New York's most athletic police officers for Hilton's murder trial after he bragged that he could outrun any cop in the world.
The proceedings were finished in three days. Defense Attorney William Ryan called no witnesses, arguing Patrolman Kenny died of hospital negligence, not the neck wound. But the jury convicted Hilton of murder, and Judge Frank Abel condemned him to die. He was rushed to Sing Sing in a screaming police motorcade moments after sentencing.
Nine months later, on Feb. 17, 1927, the Radio Burglar made his final escape - in the electric chair.
