Wanted

It was one of those things I didn't realize was no longer there until I read about it in an Op-Ed piece last week in the Wall Street Journal: There are no more Wanted Posters/Notices in the post office.

That's probably one of the things most people will tell you they never knew were once in the post office. Or can tell you they never looked through the Wanted Posters. Well, I knew they were once there, and I did look.

It was probably in the '60s when I was a very young and callow fellow and watching oodles of television and taking in way too many episodes of The Untouchables staring Robert Stack.

That was the weekly dramatization of the career of Elliot Ness and how the lawman from Indiana came to Chicago and cleaned up the mob there dominated by Al Capone, and his ace lieutenant and cousin Frank Nitti.

Of course they made a very good movie about Elliot staring Kevin Costner and Sean Connery, who stole the movie and got himself an Academy Award for supporting actor. Connery was everyone's favorite that year. A gruff Irish accent and some good lines about what to bring to a fight earned him the Oscar.

I was watching so much of  The Untouchables that my parents were getting worried that I was becoming unduly fascinated with gangsters when they found a paperback book I had hidden under my mattress that was filled with chapters on all the gangsters of the era. Or where the prisons were when they were convicted. I could have done well with that Jeopardy category if Alex was around then. It didn't matter that I didn't want to be a gangster. or act like one, my folks were worried. The book disappeared.

By parents weren't completely worried about me. At some function my father attended he brought home an autographed glossy photo signed by Robert Stack that showed the cast of The Untouchables in their TV set office.

The term Untouchable took on a different meaning when Barney's the men's store on 17th Street and Seventh started an advertising campaign that let you enter the store and get a lapel button you could wear that said "Just Looking." Until the campaign, Barney's had a policy of assigning you a salesperson as soon as you walked in the door.

One lunch hour myself and two friends from work tested the new campaign and were presented with JUST LOOKING buttons to wear when we entered the store. As we came down the stairs to the floor for suits unhappy salesmen looked up and grumbled, "Oh, here come The Untouchables." And all we did that afternoon was look.

As a kid, I just had a healthy sense of curiosity that lead me to check out the wanted posters in a corner of the main post office on Main Street off Sanford Avenue in Flushing. The building is still there, a grand, brick columned structure decked out with a stately marble lobby. A true Middle America-Washington D.C. looking building .

There on a pair of metal loops were pages of I guess the 10 Most Wanted (maybe more) people as determined by the FBI. I turned the pages and read of guys who were mostly wanted for robbing banks or armored cars. I don't remember any names, but no one seemed local. They all seemed to be wanted in Kansas City. I knew I was never going to use the images in the hopes of catching one of those guys. Hell, they didn't even live nearby. Boring.

None of this curiosity gave me any incentive to become a gangster, or a member of law enforcement, although my last employment saw me writing programs for a health insurer and then a consulting company for detecting health insurance fraud—an activity I never attributed to anything having to do with turning the pages of wanted posters.

I don't know what image Arnold Shuster was looking at of Willie the Sutton when he pressed clothes in the back of his father's Brooklyn dry cleaning store in the '50s. But it paid off. Sort of.

Arnold recognized Willie on the subway and followed him outside and got the attention of the police. who arrested Willie, while trying to take credit for the pinch themselves. Willie had been leaving under the radar in Staten Island after his last prison escape. There was a reward, and Arnold's father insisted Arnold get it. Well, he did get it, but it wasn't money.

In that era they printed your home address in the newspaper when there was a crime event to report. Thus, it was known to the world where Arnold lived as he was murdered outside his Brooklyn apartment supposedly on the order of Albert Anastasia, a Godfather of the time. In Albert's mind, "snitches" weren't to be rewarded, even if they civilians. 

Anyone raised on TV westerns knows all about Wanted Posters. Drawings of those unshaven bad guys were in every town that had a wooden sidewalk, hitching posts, and of course a barber, hotel saloon, and sheriff's office. And of course there was no more famous wanted man than Jesse James.

These Wanted Posters always carried an amount for the reward. Generally, the desperado was wanted "dead or alive." The posters were so much part of Western life that they made a TV series, Wanted Dead or Alive starring Steve McQueen. The series ran from 1958-1961 and to my amazement, was a spin off of a series starring Robert Culp, Trackdown, 1957-1959, something I never saw.

The nostalgia for wanted posters was written by Bob Greene in the WSJ Op-Ed piece of November 29, 2022. The piece, titled Wanted: The World's Sweetest Grandma, points out the post office now carries merchandise. Envelopes, shipping supplies, gift card and greeting cards "perfect for mailing to the world's greatest grandma."

I have a friend who asked me where could be buy business size envelopes.  Used to be Woolworths. Stationery stores have disappeared since Office Max and Staples. I told him to go to the post office.  

Of course the world have gone digital. Paper is no longer the medium used to get someone's attention. The FBI now has a Twitter and Instagram account for its 10 most-wanted list. It is coyly pointed out that the bureau's Twitter account has 146,000 followers, while Taylor Swift has 92 million. Never find you can't get tickets to see her.

But the all-time best wanted poster was the one they used in Times Square asking for information on the whereabouts of Whitey Bulger, the leader of Boston's Winter Hill gang who's been on the lamb for over 16 years. Lot of supposed Whitey sightings, but no Whitey. Where's Waldo? Where's Whitey?

As a kid I always heard that if you stood in front of Hotalings newsstand that sold all the out-of-town newspapers you would eventually see someone you knew. Times Square has been called The Cross Road of the World.

Hotalings is long gone, having succumbed to the Internet, but Times Square is still Times Square, filled with people from all over who pass through it.

The movie The Departed, starring Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon was a slight reference to Whitey's hold on the Boston area, and Black Mass, starring Johnny Depp also took its turn as bringing Whitey's life to the silver screen.

Through a hair dresser for Whitey's wife, Whitey was fairly quickly identified as living in a condo in California with $822,000 stuffed be hind the sheetrock. Whitey was convicted, sent to prison, then was fatally beaten by inmates at a prison he has just been transferred to. 

It was always alleged that Whitey's elusiveness was attributed to the FBI who gave him a bit of a pass because be informed on others. The prisoners at the prison Whitey had been transferred to after a few years in the first prison didn't like "rats," those who aided law enforcement in the capture and conviction of like-minded criminal. Hence the fatal beating.

The best part of the Op-Ed piece was learning that there is a book kept at the post office that if you ask for it will be of the Most Wanted. I've never been in line that was held up because some soul asked for this book.

Thank goodness. I'd want to kill them and get added to the list.

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