Husband Scooped

As a free-lance writer for the Miami Daily News, Jane Wood specializes in offbeat features, seldom lands on the front page. But last week one of Reporter Wood's offbeat features touched off Miami's biggest crime story of the year, exposed a robbery gang led by two cops, and caused another shake-up in Miami's police department, already riddled by bribery charges.

It all started last fall when Reporter Wood, who is the wife of Henry Reno of the opposition Miami Herald, wrote a story about the financial troubles of the wife and two children of LeRoy Horne, jailed for ten years for armed robbery. Home read the Daily News story, was so touched that he decided to go straight, joined the prison church, became a model prisoner.

To clear his conscience he sent a message to Jane Wood that he wanted to tell her the whole story of the robbery gang. She went up to the De Land state prison camp where Home confessed to her four other holdups, named five accomplices, including Miami Policemen Peter Balma and Lewis Womack. The two cops, said Home, picked out easy robbery victims while on their motorcycle rounds, gave the names and addresses to Home and his partner, Gerard Casselli, collected 25% of their take.

Miami police picked up Casselli, who also confessed and corroborated Home's story. One of the gang leaders, Policeman Womack, was killed in an unexplained boat explosion last summer. But Balma, 27, was still on the force. He was called in off his beat, stripped of his badge and pistol, suspended from the force and charged with robbery. Reporter Wood saw it all, wrote the story, gave the Daily News a clean beat over the Herald. She also scored a clean beat over her husband; he is the Herald's crime specialist.

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