Wanted Comics #19

Hal Moran treats crime like a legitimate business—calculating overhead, managing employees, and reinvesting profits—rising from street-level muscle to running protection rackets and climbing the ranks of organized crime boss Nick Lutzi. But as this true crime story shows, even the slickest criminal accounting can't balance the ledger forever, and by spring 1934, Moran discovers that lawbreaking has a debt no business plan can pay.

Joseph M. Dentico peddles narcotics disguised as hollow pencils, fueling addiction and desperation among his victims—including the very addicts who turn to crime to afford his poison. When one of his own clients informs on him, police close in, but this wanted criminal manages a desperate escape, though the law is hot on his trail.

A newspaper reporter's ambition collides with his personal dreams when his editor demands absolute loyalty to the job, forcing Jackson to make an impossible choice between his career at the Gotham Courier and his desire to marry. As deadline pressure mounts in the bustling newsroom, the two men clash over what it means to be a newsman in a city where the next story always waits around the corner. Will Jackson find a way to balance his duty to report the truth with his hopes for a life beyond the printing press?

A reporter named Al Jackson quits the newspaper beat to pursue a respectable life in banking—until a siren from the nearby penitentiary calls him back to cover an escape. When Mad Man Martin seizes a hostage in the prison tower, Jackson devises a daring plan to slip through the ventilation system and stop the breakout before tragedy strikes. With photographer Len Bates and a maintenance worker in tow, Jackson races against time as Martin's gang storms the prison gates.

Paul Baker dreams of the perfect crime—one that leaves no trace for the police to find. When a pawnbroker becomes his target, Paul believes he's finally engineered a flawless murder; but as doubt gnaws at him in the days that follow, he discovers that some clues can't be hidden, no matter how carefully a criminal plans.

Jackson Stringer, a laborer tired of honest work, spots an opportunity when the payroll arrives at his construction site—and seizes it with a gun and a stolen satchel. After a swift capture and sentencing, Stringer makes a desperate escape from a prison transport train, and now he's on the run with the law closing in. This true-crime account from 1949 poses a stark question: how long can a fugitive evade justice?

A man condemned to death for a murder he didn't commit sits on death row while the Tracer—a determined investigator—takes on the case for the desperate fee of fifty dollars from the condemned man's mother. As the Tracer digs into the evidence, he uncovers a web of bribery and intimidation tied to a ruthless crime boss, leading him to a heroin-smuggling scheme that holds the key to proving innocence. In a race against the execution clock, he must piece together the truth before it's too late.