Thursday, December 12, 2013

STILL MORE NEW YORK CRIME PHOTOS

Can you take a few more crime photos? I warn you, it's grim stuff, not for the faint of heart.


We'll start with a crook being transported by the police. He hides his face from the photographer, no doubt because he doesn't want his mother to see the photo in the paper.


Above, Brooklyn teenagers reveal the armor they tried to wear to a rumble.


Above, a homicide victim...killed in his own apartment by a shot through the window. The picture was taken in 1925. 


Across town another man was murdered, also in his own home. Police always take at least one photo from directly above a corpse in the belief that this conveys more information than any other kind of shot. 


Maybe one of the murder victims was killed by one of these men (above). They're professional hitmen. Here they clown around for the camera, maybe in the belief that their lawyer will get them off. In this case they were wrong.


In 1960 John Favara (above, left), a neighbor and friend of mobster John Gotti (above, right), accidentally ran over and killed Gotti's twelve year-old son. A few months later Favara was kidnapped and "chainsawed" to death.


Yikes! A convict's bleak funeral in the mudflats.


Above, another hoodlum being transported by the police. The guy looks contemplative, as if he can see a vision of the horror awaiting awaiting him in prison. Imagine it...years away from the rest of the world, locked up in a cage with violent crazies.


Pictures of criminals were hard to get in the 19th Century. They just wouldn't sit still.


Flashbulb photography changed all that. Here's (above) the wife and child of the man who kidnapped Lindberg's baby. This was taken the day after his execution.

Probably newspapers can't run this kind of picture in our day. In my opinion that's a mistake. The news is made more exciting by pictures like this.


Was this a crime? Maybe it was just an accident. Imagine being a policeman and having to see things like this day in and day out.


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These photos were sampled from two interesting books: "Shots in the Dark" by Gail Buckland and Harold Evans, and "New York Noir."


2 comments:

Unknown said...

Really really gritty. The photographs themselves are well done but a lot of the subject matter itself is really morbid.

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Roberto: I'm surprised that the negatives of the post made more of an impression than what was good about it.

I wasn't trying to gross any one out. I was trying to make a poetic point about the contrasts we witness in life. It's a thought that comes off like a cliche when put into words but is poignant when done in pictures.