There were four guys in the car, one little guy and three big ones. The short guy was John “Little Herbie” Mansour, a five-foot-four 42-year-old ex-con from Brooklyn. Mansour was already wanted by the cops in New York and needed the job to go smoothly and to get out of this town without a whole lot of trouble. Salvatore Bunopane was also from Brooklyn - a big guy who was brought in to literally do heavy lifting. Buonpane was described in a Richmond newspaper as, “swarthy and hatchet-faced” and, according to the cops, the 30-year-old had multiple convictions and only spent four years outside a prison since leaving an orphanage at age sixteen. Al Yesbick, a 37-year-old Princess Anne County restaurant owner, was the third guy. Al was said to have been in on the planning from the beginning. Alfred Helal was the fourth guy in the car, a balding, stocky ex-car dealer and former Brooklyn cab driver who now ran a used car lot on North Lombardy Street. The car the four guys were in was parked in the dark in the alley behind Earl Armentrout’s house.
Earl Armentrout was a connected kind of guy; it was just
that nobody who knew him was saying who or what Earl was connected with. Richmond,
after all, was not the kind of place where organized crime seemed to exist. Sure,
there had been a black market during the war, and there were some whorehouses
and card games and gambling and sometimes guys went to jail, but Richmond was
largely diverted by racial issues and the exploding suburbs in the late 1950s. Organized
crime was something you read about in Life magazine that involved
Italians and Yankees. The fact that the official name of Armentrout’s place on
North Third was the “Newspaper Workers Pastime and Social Club” hints at the cozy
relationship between Earl and the Richmond press corps, which helped keep his
name out of the news.
The genial Earl Armentrout, (1895-1957), Richmond News-Leader, July 22, 1957.
That deference was extended by the Richmond Police, too. Police Chief Dewey Garton said obliquely that Armentrout “had a reputation for being in gambling circles.” The gambler and his “club” at 118 North Third Street attracted little attention from the cops. The attitude toward Earl Armentrout went far beyond the usual bounds of Richmond’s finely-developed sense of self-preservation through propriety to the point it hinted at corruption and collusion of the kind only associated with big city crime.
Armentrout had been in the business for thirty years, but the
only accusation of criminality was eight years before when the Alcoholic
Beverage Board refused to renew a beer license for Armentrout’s club because of
accusations of gambling. The same article about the license was careful to note
there was no record of Armentrout, a Richmond native, having ever been
arrested. Captain D. W. Duling, Chief of the Richmond Police Vice Squad, said
his men had investigated Armentrout’s club several times but since all the guys
up there were playing only for chips and not cash, no laws were broken. Armentrout
even left the front door on North Third Street unguarded and told the cops to
“come up any time,” said Captain Duling.
Armentrout, his wife Priscilla (who everyone called
“Sissie”), and her father lived in a substantial brick home at 4210 Monument
Avenue, an address reflecting both Earl’s economic and social status. July 1957
had been a tough month for Earl as his mother died only a couple of weeks earlier,
so the couple’s weekly ritual of going to a restaurant on Sunday evenings was a
welcome diversion for Earl and Sissie on the night of July 21st. Leaving
her father, W. L. Cassada, at home to watch TV, the Armentrouts went out into
the warm Richmond evening anticipating a nice meal in an air-conditioned restaurant.
The Armentrout home on Monument Avenue, Richmond News-Leader, July 22, 1957.
The guys all knew somebody in Earl’s line of business didn’t follow usual banking habits and was bound to have a lot of cash on hand. The story was that there was $200,000 upstairs in Earl’s safe just waiting for four smart guys and about fifteen minutes to grab it - in and out. The guys in the car were also obviously familiar with Earl and Sissie’s Sunday evening routine, and as soon as the couple left the house, one of the guys rang the front doorbell. When Cassada answered, all four forced their way past him and into the Armentrout home. They knew the safe was on the second floor of the house, so the plan was to first tie up the old man. Mansour would guard him while the other three carried the safe out the back to the alley and put it in the waiting car. The elderly Cassada was easily overpowered by the four men and left on the floor, tied up and blindfolded. Mansour stood over him with a pistol in his hand and keeping an eye out the window toward Monument Avenue. Buonpane, Yesbick, and Helal ransacked the house, grabbed the 380-lb. safe and wrestled it down the stairs and to the back of the house.
Imagine the look of horror and surprise on Mansour’s face
when, in addition to the sound of cursing and grunting and the safe thumping
across the floor, he heard a sound he would remember his entire life: a key in
the front door lock. The Armentrouts had come home early. Earl pushed the door
open and stepped inside ahead of his wife. Immediately, Mansour rushed toward
the front door, brushing past Sissie Armentrout as she stood frozen in fright. “Duck,
Sissie, duck!” Earl shouted and four gunshots were heard. Earl slid down the
wall and Mansour ran across the yard, down Monument Avenue, rounded the corner,
and jumped in the car in the alley behind the house. The three guys with the
safe fled out the back door as soon as they heard gunfire. The safe (which contained
less than $100) was abandoned, unopened, on the Armentrout’s kitchen floor.
The alley behind the 4200 block of Monument Avenue. Tire
tracks and thrown gravel here showed police where the getaway car was parked
before it sped away from the shooting.
Armentrout was shot twice in the belly, and when the police arrived,
they immediately sensed that the wounded man knew who his assailants were. While
waiting for the arrival of the rescue squad, Detective Asa Faison bent down and
asked Earl who shot him. Earl said, “It’s all right” twice, and when asked a
third time, responded, “I’ll take care of that,” implying he knew where to get his
revenge.
Earl almost made it to Johnson-Willis hospital, then located on the 2900 block of Kensington Ave. One of the
.32 caliber bullets had clipped an artery, and he bled to death in the
ambulance that rushed him through the dark Richmond streets. Three days later, a
few Richmond police detectives were among the 150 mourners who appeared at Earl
Armentrout’s home for his funeral service on July 24, 1957. The cops were there
just to keep an eye on things, and they were especially interested if suspects from
their files showed up. The first floor of the house was filled with enormous
floral tributes, said the Richmond News-Leader. Earl Armentrout was
buried in his family’s plot in Riverview Cemetery that afternoon.
The graves of Earl Armentrout and his wife, Sissie, in
Riverview Cemetery
The same edition of the Richmond News-Leader that
covered the first news of the Armentrout murder had a smaller article at the
bottom of the page that was a harbinger of a far more sinister criminal
presence in Richmond. The owner of a bar on Lakeside Avenue had been held up the
day before and robbed of $635. The victim told the reporter, “I never saw a gun
but I could tell he meant business.” Leo Coury, the bar owner, went on to
embark on a decades-long career of vice and multiple murders that led to his eventual
addition to the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Richmond’s most famous racketeer, Coury
died far from Lakeside Avenue in San Francisco in 1991, having eluded police
for more than a decade.
Only days after Armentrout’s funeral, Richmond Police Vice
Squad Chief Dan Duling was recalled from his vacation to come back to Richmond in
time for a series of raids on gambling joints in various locations around the
city. Public outcry about illegal gambling was increasing after the Armentrout
shooting, although Chief Duling still maintained that it was all just a local
issue. “Richmond is not a wide-open city,” Duling maintained, “No syndicated
gambling has been called to my attention.” Despite the heat put on Richmond’s
gambling circles, no clues were forthcoming in the Armentrout murder even after
Sissie Armentrout posted a $3000 reward for information. Bulletins describing
the crime were sent out to police departments across the country, and in them
Richmond’s Police Department’s Chief Garton again sounded oddly deferential to
the memory of Earl Armentrout, blandly describing the murder victim as a man
“who operated a chartered club for the past several years and was well known to
the sporting element.”
John “Little Herbie” Mansour and Salvatore “Sal” Buonpane, Richmond Times-Dispatch, June 11, 1959.
A break in the Armentrout murder didn’t come until two years
later. The cops never identified the informant who contacted Richmond vice
squad detective A. B. Cole, but on the front page of the Richmond News-Leader on April 6, 1959, a headline read, “N.Y. Thug is Indicted in
Armentrout Case.” Mansour wasn’t hard to find as he was already in jail in New
York for assault and robbery charges. The cops said he had a fat FBI file and
had done time in places like Sing Sing and Alcatraz. On the strength of their
informant’s information, the three Richmond cops who flew to New York to pick
up Mansour filed a detainer for Buonpane while they were there.
Mansour, now back in Richmond and sitting in the Virginia
Penitentiary awaiting trial, must have thought that Buonpane was the rat who
had caused all four guys to be named by the cops. They were all equally in
serious trouble as Virginia law was such that each of them could have been
eligible for a death sentence because someone was murdered in the commission of
a burglary.
Buonpane was still at large on June 9, 1959, when a guy approached him on a Brooklyn Street and shot him in the face with a small caliber pistol, sending Sal to the hospital for twelve days. His assailant was none other than Chaffie Monsour, John’s brother. The cops picked up Chaffie, but Buonpane prudently refused to identify him as the guy who shot him and they had to dismiss the charges against Chaffie Monsour. After he was well enough from his gunshot wound enough to travel, a trio of cops went to New York and collected Buonpane, brought him back to Richmond, and threw him in the dreadful temporary jail which was a former shipping warehouse at the Richmond Intermediate Terminal. The Shockoe Examiner recently explored this little-known facet of Richmond history HERE.
Mansour must have weighed the odds as his trial for the
murder of Earl Armentrout began on September 3, 1959, and his chances did not
look good. The cops had solid evidence that he was the guy with the gun that
night. Twenty-three guys had been executed in Virginia’s electric chair since
1950, and Mansour must have felt he was going to be the twenty-fourth if he
didn’t make a deal. His trial took only nine minutes, three of which was
testimony by Sissie Armentrout as to the events of the night her husband was
gunned down. The other six minutes were taken up by Mansour pleading guilty and
immediately getting a sentence of life. Under Virginia law, he could be
considered for parole after fifteen years.
Bunopane, with all his years of experience, must have been somewhat of a connoisseur of prisons and did not like the awful conditions of the temporary Richmond jail. He may have been housed in one of the five isolation cells under special secure conditions “for his own safety.” Nevertheless, Bunopane was among four prisoners who assaulted a guard on September 20, 1959, and instigated a riot of more than 40 guys who attempted to break out of the notorious concrete box of a jail, but they were stopped by guards with tear gas guns before they could breach the outer doors. On October 1, after a contentious trial where he pleaded innocent, Bunopane listened impassively as he was sentenced to 20 years for murder.
Helal voluntarily surrendered to the cops in April 1959 and Yesbick turned himself in the following May. Both were out on $5,000 bond that fall, and when Yesbick went to trial, he also took the safe course and entered a plea of guilty. On December 1, 1959, Yesbick received a 20-year sentence with 15 years suspended. The trial of Alfred Helal ended on a curious note as the case against him hinged on the testimony of a former Richmond policeman, Stuart White. White was supposed to have testified that Helal attempted to buy some Richmond Police Department uniforms from him, perhaps as part of an earlier plan to bluff their way into the Armentrout household disguised as cops. It certainly seemed like somebody got to White, a long-distance trucker who left town and could not be found. Due to the absence of this critical witness, the Commonwealth’s Attorney was forced by lack of evidence to drop the charges against Helal, who walked out of Richmond Hustings Court a free man on the afternoon of December 23, 1959.
John Mansour, although incarcerated in the State Penitentiary, was mentioned as a possible mastermind behind a robbery of a gambling club at 2501 West Main Street in May, 1961. Guys with “Northern accents” came upstairs, had everybody in the club strip naked at gunpoint, and robbed them of an unknown amount of money. The robbers were termed “associates” of John Mansour. The manager of the club, Stuart Holzbach, was not too helpful and declined to call the cops at first, saying he was working on solving the robbery himself and made the pecular observation that the robbers were of “Syrian” descent. Holzbach claimed $500 was lost in the robbery, but the cops said the take was closer to $15,000. The supposed connection between Mansour and the guys who knocked over Holzbach’s club was never explained in the press.
Mansour made one more
appearance in the newspaper in 1973. An article by Shelly Rolfe told the story
of an aged convict in the State Penitentiary who had appealed to officials in
the State Department of Corrections to get medical help for a cat named “Little
Bit” that had somehow appeared in the Pen and then had kittens. The
administration responded and a trip to the veternarian was arranged for the cat
and, after treatment, was soon retuned to the prison. Rolfe was interested in
the story of the felon-friendly cat and arranged a visit to Spring Street to
interview the man who neatly signed below his name, “No. 76333, Storeroom
Clerk”. They talked about cats and the response of the prison administration,
but then came around to some personal questions for the prisoner: “Where was he
from? ‘Brooklyn.’ He spoke softly, with a New York City edge in his voice. And
why was he in the penitentiary? Murder. ‘Do you remember the Armentrout case?’ Mansour
spoke matter-of-factly. ‘I’m Little Herbie.’” Fourteen years had passed since
that split second when Mansour saw Earl Armentrout blocking his path out of
that house on Monument Avenue, and there was only one thing to do to clear the
way. In literally a second, in a flash, the lives of all seven people in that
house were changed forever. By 1973, Little Herbie Mansour had plenty of time
to replay that moment.
John “Little Herbie” Mansour, 14 years into a life sentence for the murder of Earl Armentrout. Richmond Times-Dispatch, Sep. 1, 1973.
More research is necessary to discover the ultimate fates of
Mansour, Helal, and Yesbick and how much time they eventually served for their
part in what happened that night in 1957. Salvatore Bunopane died in 1996 at
age 68 and is buried in Reno, Nevada. Hopefully he wasn’t in jail but had gone
into quiet retirement after a life of thuggery, theft, and imprisonment. Maybe,
sitting under an umbrella somewhere in the hot Nevada sun, the aging Sal
Buonpane remembered trying to boost that empty safe in Earl’s house and how it
all came apart with first the sound of Earl’s key in the door and then the
gunshots. Behind his sunglasses, Sal might have blinked a couple of times and
shook his head at the thought of all the days and months and years that one
terrible instant in a house on Monument Avenue cost him.
- Selden
2 comments:
Interesting story - thanks for sharing! Would like to know more about Armentrout's "business dealings."
Exciting times, even given the circumstances of crime/murder!
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