TIME Magazine content is available exclusively for TIME subscribers.

Current subscribers for full access. Not a TIME subscriber? .

CRIME: Black Legion

In Detroit one evening last fortnight some 50 members of the Black Legion, wearing cheap black & white robes and hoods, held a solemn conclave. Present were two relatives of the wife of a 32-year-old WPA worker named Charles Poole. They reported that Charles Poole was a wife-beater. "Let's beat him up!" "Let's stripe him!" cried the Black Legionaries. Some, more bloodthirsty, screamed: "Let's hang him!"

The Legion's "Colonel" Harvey Davis decided on hanging. Poole was lured to the meeting on the pretext that he was needed for a sandlot baseball team....

Quotes of the Day »

RAY KELLY, New York City Police Commissioner, on the arrest of a New Jersey man in one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases, the disappearance more than three decades ago of 6-year-old Etan Patz.
For use in rail of Articles page or Section Fronts pages. Duplicate and change name as necesssary to distinguish.