Wanted Comics #41

When young Joseph Stacio illegally jumps ship to reach America in 1923, he falls under the influence of his older brother Tony—a seasoned underworld operator—and embarks on a ruthless path through the criminal underworld. Working his way up from dock labor and illegal gambling, Joe eventually discovers a highly profitable racket: organizing goon squads to break strikes through violence and intimidation, terrorizing both workers and factory owners who refuse to pay. Mort Leav and Bob Rogers expose how Joe Stacio's hunger to match his brother's criminal success leads him to build an empire based on extortion, brutality, and fear.

Martin Main is a man of terrifying physical strength but dangerously fragile pride—so wounded by insults that he's driven to violence. After killing a farmhand and fleeing into the vagrant underworld, he finds refuge in a carnival, where his raw power makes him valuable and his outsider status almost bearable, until his obsession with a dancer named Loretta and his inability to tolerate disrespect collide with the carnival's ruthless pecking order.

This true-crime account documents the pursuit of Roy Franklin Murphy, wanted by the FBI for assault and battery with intent to kill. In October 1946, Murphy was arrested in Confluence, Pennsylvania on a disorderly conduct charge, setting off a chain of events that would lead authorities on the hunt for a dangerous fugitive. The $100 reward offered by Wanted Comics underscores the seriousness of the case and the determination to bring him into custody.

In 1951, Wanted Comics presents the bloody rise and fall of Ernie Narvo, a "finger man" for the underworld whose job is to track down targets for hired killers—until the friends of one of his victims decide to even the score. When Ernie attempts to save his own skin by betraying his partner Ginger Baer to Don Murto and the Mauler, he sets in motion a chain of ironic consequences that proves there's no escape from the code of the streets. Based on actual police files, this is a taut crime tale about a man learning too late that in the underworld, nobody stays ahead of the game.

On January 19, 1944, a woman in a Persian lamb coat flees a Chicago hotel room after firing a shot, leaving behind a dying victim—Adele Born Williams—and a terrified daughter, Patricia, as the only witness. The police investigation hits wall after wall: no robbery motive, no clear reason why either mother or daughter would be targeted, and a suspect who vanishes without a trace. Can you solve the mystery that stumped Chicago's finest?

When conductor Ladislaw Feras is shot dead outside a symphony hall on a freezing February day, crime lab experts Doc Gage and Lieutenant Matt Dundy must sift through thirty musician suspects to find the killer. With the help of a paraffin test and an eyewitness account of a man fleeing with a French horn case, the detectives narrow their focus—but a crucial detail about the cold weather and a musician's instrument becomes the key to exposing the real murderer.

This true crime feature recounts the rise and fall of Danny Boy Sullivan, a tough from the Gas House District who organized a neighborhood gang and escalated from petty street robberies to armed holdups and murder in the late 1940s. As Sullivan's crimes grow bolder and bloodier—and his gang's loyalty crumbles under pressure—the law closes in on the increasingly desperate hood and his crew. Based on actual police files, this is the stark chronicle of ambition and violence that defined one of America's bloodiest crime sprees.