After his conviction and fine, Lagarenne immediately applied for a pardon from Governor Smith. A letter on his behalf read that Lagarenne “has an exceptionally fine record for bravery and valor.” Lagarenne was reinstated at the level of sergeant. In 1920, he was given a temporary assignment as detective “to duty in office of the District Attorney.” He was made a lieutenant in 1921 and a captain in 1929. In 1938, he made full inspector, with acting deputy chief inspector to follow in 1939. In 1942, he became the highest-ranking police official in the Brooklyn West Bureau. He was a member of the Police Honor Legion and the Saint George Society. He died in 1949. His son, Lawrence, became a prominent attorney.
JOHN SNOWDEN
After John Snowden was hanged in 1919 for the death of Lottie Mae Brandon, his story continued to haunt the neighborhood he had lived in. For years, people told of the skies darkening on the day an innocent man was hanged. Snowden’s niece Hazel knew about him because of the photograph her father kept alongside a newspaper report of his death. “I would come into my father’s room every day and read that story and look at his picture,” Hazel Snowden said. “He didn’t have to tell me a word. It just burned into me.”
Hazel, along with other like-minded Baltimore residents, began a grassroots effort to clear Snowden’s name. A private investigator named Tim Turner, his interest piqued by newspaper reports, reexamined the case and concluded that the evidence did not add up to Snowden as the killer. No bloodstains were found anywhere else in the house but on the bed and no murder weapon was ever retrieved. In 2000, after a ten-year crusade, petitioners swayed Maryland Governor Parris Glendening that Snowden’s execution had been a “possible miscarriage of justice.” After much deliberation, the governor concluded that “while it is impossible at this late date to establish his guilt or innocence, there is substantial doubt that justice was served by his hanging.” Governor Glendening granted Snowden clemency. “It’s a long time, but it’s so good to see justice has been done,” said Hazel Snowden. Carlotte Wotring, the seventy-five-year-old niece of Lottie May Brandon, was stunned. “They didn’t have DNA back then,” she said, “but I’ll bet you anything he had lots of scratches on him. My aunt fought for her life.” Snowden’s grave is now marked by a golden plaque commemorating his clemency.
ANTOINETTE TOLLA
Antoinette Tolla was the last woman New Jersey ever sentenced to die by hanging. Immediately after her commutation, she was removed to the State Prison at Trenton, where she served out her sentence. During that time, she learned English so well that she conversed fluently on the day of her release, when Grace appeared in a car to accompany her home. Antoinette moved to Crystal Street in Brooklyn with her family. She was naturalized in 1927 as a U.S. citizen.
At the time of the commutation, the Cincinnati Post offered Grace a bonus of two thousand dollars for her services to Antoinette. Grace instructed the Post to place the money in trust for Antoinette. When she was released, a representative of the paper gave her the money. Near the end of her own career, Grace thought of her fondly.
As I look back over thirty years to the na?ve world in which Antoinette Tolla’s tragedy was enacted, I find the circumstances almost incredible. Here was a poor immigrant woman who had been treated with as little consideration, almost, as a slave before some medieval tribunal. Evidence in her case had been so badly bungled that a gun, and even the autopsy surgeon’s report, had failed to be properly included in the record. The woman’s testimony in court had been translated poorly beyond recognition.
Antoinette Tolla lives today. After thirty years, in unfailing gratitude and friendship, she still comes to see me occasionally and never forgets to bring some small, hand-made gift. She is a grandmother, for her two daughters have long since married. Obscure though she may be, she is a useful and admirable citizen. I never think of her but with a feeling of gratitude, myself, that it was given me to save this life that would otherwise have been so indifferently lost.
DOCTOR DEVIL
On January 12, 1906, Dr. Emmet Cooper Dent, “Doctor Devil,” died suddenly of heart failure, two months after deporting the Romanik family.
SOPHIE IRENE LOEB
Sophie Irene Loeb worked in many arenas of urban reform during the course of her life. In 1917, she served as the first woman strike mediator, settling a complicated taxicab strike in seven hours. During these same years, she worked on a commission to codify child welfare legislation in New York State. She believed that if any child failed to receive proper food and clothing, “the Government must stand in place of his parents.” In 1924, she helped to found the Child Welfare Committee of America and coined its motto “Not charity, but a chance for every child.” She reported for many years at the Evening World, wrote books, and publicly engaged the Palestine question. When she died of cancer on January 18, 1929, at age fifty-two, she was praised as “one of America’s most distinguished public servants, an indefatigable worker.”
EDWARD SWANN
Edward Swann was district attorney of New York City until 1921. He ran for the New York Supreme Court in 1920 but lost, spurned by Tammany bosses who wanted him out. Swann was later accused of fraud by James A. Delehanty of the Court of General Sessions. Delehanty alleged that Swann had mysteriously dismissed several major indictments of Bowery criminals “without any real investigation of the case and without any witnesses.” Swann responded by pointing out that Delehanty was going to be a Republican candidate for DA the following year. Swann died on September 19, 1945. Before he finally left office, Swann summed up his role as district attorney in New York City:
There is an epidemic of crime. Why? Some say it is due to the war—that the spirit of unrest and consequent disorder always follow wars. Perhaps in part that was the cause for the initiation of a crime wave spreading over the country. It is not the cause for the continuance and increase of crime. The chief cause of the continuance and increase of crime is imitation.
HUMBERTO PIERINI
The onetime worker at Sunny Side who helped Grace expose its practice of bringing Italian immigrants across the Atlantic for contract work later patented a mousetrap. The device would lure its prey across a plank only to drop the mouse into a small container of water to drown. The Pierini trap was patented on June 20, 1922.
JOSEPH GRIGG