Crime and Punishment #49

In this hard-boiled tale, a low-level crook learns the brutal cost of speaking up when he gets shortchanged by Vince Tola in a high-stakes dice game—a grievance that lands him squarely in the crosshairs of the Tola mob. When he foolishly brings his complaint to Pete Tola, the mob boss's brother, seeking justice, he discovers that loyalty to family trumps fairness in the underworld. As the saying goes in gangland, some debts aren't settled with money.

Joel Farnum leaves the reformatory hoping to go straight, but gets drawn into a criminal scheme by the hardened Cy Hecht and his mother, who use young men to pull robberies to fund their parties. When Joel proves reluctant to participate in armed holdups, Cy manipulates him into proving his courage by joining a job that goes dangerously wrong. Chief of Police Warren Standing picks up the trail of the criminals and sets a trap to catch them red-handed.

When Red Mollison's crime empire starts hemorrhaging secrets to his rival Boss Magnus, he suspects a rat in his organization—but the leak runs deeper than anyone imagines. As Bernie cooks up a prank hijacking scheme with help from the seemingly reliable informant Louie, Red begins piecing together clues that point to someone dangerously close to him. This true crime story, from the pages of Crime and Punishment #49, reveals how one careless detail unravels everything Red thought he knew about loyalty.

In 1948 Cleveland, Bill Scanlon's loyalty to his best friend Murray Caspar becomes a catastrophe when Murray commits a robbery and murder at a drugstore—and Bill, refusing to betray him to the police, takes the fall. After five brutal years in prison, Bill is released, only to discover the truth about Murray's betrayal and the life it cost him.