Wanted Comics #28

Frank Verlow is a charmer with expensive tastes and loose ethics—a man who'll happily spend someone else's money and talk his way out of trouble. When he lifts a gangster's wallet and later uses his ill-gotten gains to muscle into the prizefighting business, he gets tangled up with Frankie Yale and sets in motion a scheme that leaves a fighter brutalized and puts him squarely in the crosshairs of a very dangerous man he once swindled. In this gritty crime tale, fast living catches up with a faster talker.

When Paul Hensley Payton and his partner Samuel Reeves attempt to rob a Kent, Ohio cafe in the early morning hours of November 1946, they encounter a bartender who refuses to surrender without a fight. After Reeves is knocked cold and Payton flees the scene, the police begin their hunt—eventually tracing him to his hometown of Akron, where he narrowly avoids capture. This true-crime tale from Wanted Comics follows the law's relentless pursuit of a fugitive who thought he could outrun justice.

When a dead gangster haunts his old neighborhood as a murderer, the police face an impossible riddle: how can Jack Firenzo commit crimes from beyond the grave? Detective work and a torn scrap of fabric lead authorities to a shocking truth hidden within Firenzo's own family in this 1950 crime tale. The "Twice Dead Killer" mystery unravels the line between the living and the dead—and the dangerous secrets some families keep.

In Spokane, Washington, a hearing-aid salesman named Visger befriends an elderly doctor and gains access to his home—and knowledge of the large sums of money kept there. When the old man is found murdered with his own war bayonet, suspicion falls squarely on Visger, whose fingerprints are discovered on the weapon. Now the fugitive is on the run, but as authorities know all too well, the law's net always closes eventually.

A young fighter named Charley Dooley catches the eye of gangster Lips Morelli, who recruits him into his Chicago mob during Prohibition with the promise of easy money—but what starts as muscle work quickly evolves into something darker when Morelli forces him to become a professional killer. As Charley racks up body after body, the toll of his work begins to show, and Morelli decides he's become too unstable to live.

Thomas Peters stole half a million dollars in jewels—but his escaped cellmates know exactly where he's hidden them, and they're determined to reclaim their share. Trapped in his sister's house with a ticking clock and nowhere left to run, Peters discovers that the perfect crime requires a lot more than just good planning. This 1950 crime tale shows how greed and desperation can turn a criminal's own scheme into his undoing.