Moe the Gonif

The carriage trade of Beverly Hills, Calif, was greatly taken with Mr. Maurice Monte Reingold, the fashionable jeweler and clubman. He had the greying good looks of a man of 56 who keeps himself in condition. He peddled costly kickshaws behind a fagade of glass and pink & grey marble--only a thimble toss from Dress Designer Adrian's atelier. To the Hollywood elite he was just plain Moe. But to the cops he was a high-class gonif.* Last week they proved it.

Until this spring, all they had on Moe was a jaundiced eye and a 1942 federal rap for perjury. He was fined $2,000 for denying the purchase of some hot ice from a New York source. Then he tried to do business with Mrs. Sayde Genis.

Sayde was a middle-aged lady whose husband made his bundle in real estate. She got interested in what she thought was a 21-carat diamond ring. Moe and his brother Gail, who worked for him, wanted $40,000 for the rock. Mrs. Genis demurred. Anyway, the Reingolds only had the ring on consignment. So when Mrs. Genis bought it through another jeweler for a mere $19,000 (it was a mere 18 carats, too, she discovered), Moe was miffed and said so. "Mr. Moe Reingold," the lady later recalled explicitly, "called me a son of a bitch and said I would never get away with it if it was the last thing I did." It almost was.

One morning, Sayde's maid answered the doorbell, saw two characters with stockings pulled over their faces. "This is a nice way to enter a person's home," Sayde observed. She was understating it. One of the men clubbed her on the head and face with the flat of a gun. "Where's the big ring?" the gunman wanted to know. She said the store had it.

With a gun at her back, she staggered upstairs, showed them it wasn't in the jewel box. The thugs spotted a 300-lb. safe, told her to open it. "I can't," she wept. "Take it." She knew the ring was in the safe. "Aaah, how can I carry a 300-lb. safe?" the gunman asked in disgust. The pair emptied her jewel box, locked Sayde and the maid in a closet and beat it. Sayde wound up in a hospital with a fractured skull. The crooks' heist was $125,000.

When Sayde could finally talk, she told the cops about her dealings with Moe and his brother. They traced a thug named Abe Greenburg to New York, where he confessed that Moe and Gail had put him up to the job. They also found the man with the gun, a short, swart ex-convict, Joe Miller. The boys were pretty mad. Between them they'd made only $5,000.

Greenburg turned state's evidence. Moe, Gail and Miller were charged with armed robbery. Gail pleaded guilty, then attempted suicide. Last week, Moe the gonif and Miller, his hired punk, were convicted. Yiddish for thief.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.