Coal Region Mobsters: Louis Moff

The history of the Pennsylvania Coal Region wouldn't be complete without one, or several, chapters devoted to organized crime. During the Prohibition Era, crime rings could be found in just about every nook and cranny of the anthracite region. The nefarious plots of many mobsters were hatched in dozens of area houses of "ill repute", such as the notorious Sunset Inn in Numidia, where, for many years, prostitutes from all over the country plied their trade. Sometimes they did so voluntarily. Other times, these young women were forced to perform against their wills.

Human trafficking flourished in the coal region during the era. During the first seven weeks of 1925, twenty-nine teenage girls vanished from Northumberland, Columbia and Schuylkill counties alone. With 34 "houses of ill repute" situated within a 30-mile radius of Pottsville, the national press had dubbed Schuylkill County the "Port of Missing Girls". Several of these seedy establishments were owned by Louis Moff (alias Louie Muff), who came to be known as the "Vice King of the Coal Region".


The Rise of Louis Moff


The son of Joseph and Concetta Moff, Louis was born in 1883 in the town of Ricca, in the Italian state of Abruzzi. Known as an unusually bright student, he embarked for the United States alone at the age of 22 and settled in Hazleton, where he learned the plumbing trade. Three years later he moved to Exchange (now known as the village of Atlas) and found employment with the Reading Coal and Iron Company. Because of the exceptional schooling he received in Italy, his likeable personality, and has uncanny ability to learn things quickly, he moved up the ladder quickly and for many years was considered one of the company's most capable employees.

But then two terrible tragedies struck, and Louis was never the same. In 1909 he lost his first-born infant son to measles, and the following year his home was one of several buildings on Columbia Avenue that had been burned under mysterious circumstances. The Exchange fire of October, 1910, destroyed ten homes and several businesses, such as Richard Menapace's barbershop, Charles Schiccitano's meat market, and the hotel owned by Charles Menapace. Authorities believed the fire had originated at the meat market at around two o'clock in the morning, while several witnesses reported hearing dynamite explosions. Since most of the residents were Italian miners, law enforcement believed that the explosions were the result of dualin and gunpowder that the miners had carried home from work. Others, however, insisted it was the work of the shadowy underworld organization known as the Black Hand.

Fortunately, Moff was one of the few victims of the fire who had the foresight to have his house insured. He eventually left his job and used his savings to enter the saloon business. He operated a dance hall at 201 West Saylor Street in Atlas. In addition to live music, Moff's Hall also offered cockfighting, which was legal at the time, as the sport was a favorite pastime of Italian immigrants.

Moff also loved sports, and he had a fondness for baseball in particular. One of his greatest triumphs came in 1924, when he managed to set up an exhibition game between the Mount Carmel Possums-- a local pick-up team managed by George 'Possum' Whitted-- and a barnstorming team comprised of American League All-Stars. The game, which took place on October 15 at Mount Carmel Park, is notable for several reasons: The Possums' starting pitcher was future Hall-of-Famer Stan Coveleski, and the visiting All-Star team featured a young unknown first baseman, freshly graduated from Columbia University, named Lou Gehrig (some of you might've heard of him). Unlike most exhibition games between major leaguers and local weekend warriors, this one was pretty competitive; the All-Stars won by a score of 7-6, with two of the runs being scored by Gehrig. Gehrig, who had only seen playing time with the Yankees as a pinch-hitter to that point in his career, was chosen as a last minute substitute.

As for Louis Moff, he soon opened several other saloons and roadhouses in the area, and this line of work brought him into contact with every phase of underworld life.


The Cabaret Murder


Moff was able to keep his name out of the papers until 1920, when a deadly brawl erupted at his Girardville cabaret. On March 1, Louis' wife, Rose, was tending bar when she got into an altercation with one of the patrons over money. Threats were made, guns were drawn, and when the smoke cleared, four men had been shot. Frank Machease was killed in the fracas, while Michael Brazilla, Charles Comoloski and the cabaret piano player, Michael Bronza, were rushed to Fountain Springs Hospital with life-threatening injuries. Mike Borelli, who was charged with the murder of Frank Machease, was also shot during the brawl.

Moff's Girardville cabaret had a reputation for rowdiness; it was not unusual for five or six fights to break out on any given night, and about once a week somebody would pull out a revolver. One witness later testified in court that the cabaret band-- accustomed to such rowdy behavior-- continued to play music during the entire fray, even as their piano player was slumped over his keyboard with a bullet through his left kidney.

Although Moff was in Mt. Carmel when the shooting took place, he and his wife were arrested as accomplices, but were later acquitted. This experience only made Moff more brazen in his contempt for the law, and he expanded his network of bawdy houses to Mahanoy City, Trevorton, Kulpmont, Irish Valley, Hazleton and Ringtown. At the height of his career, Moff owned over thirty roadhouses and boasted a fleet of expensive automobiles. To staff these brothels with prostitutes, Moff handpicked and trained young men whose sole purpose was, as one newspaper politely stated, "to induce girls to lead lives of shame for financial profit." One of Moff's handpicked thugs was Felix Bocciccio, who later rose to notoriety as the Baltimore mobster and hitman known as "Man of War".


The Sunset Inn


When Moff became the owner of the notorious Sunset Inn, which was located between Aristes and Numidia, he moved up into the heavyweight class of racketeers. During the Prohibition Era, the Sunset Inn served as the crossroads for the sex trafficking trade, where girls from all over the country-- runaways and abductees alike-- waited to be shipped out to larger cities. A murder occurred during an attempted robbery of the roadhouse, but although Moff was suspected to be the one who had pulled the trigger, he was released from custody after successfully establishing an alibi.

And then, in 1925, came the darkest chapter in the history of the Sunset Inn. Still known today as the Broad Mountain Murder Mystery, this event took place in 1925 when hikers found the badly charred remains of a young female near the summit of Broad Mountain, between Frackville and Heckshersville (since I've written extensively about the case in previous posts, I'll skip over the details, but if you're interested, the articles can found here, here, and here). The body was burned so badly that an identification was never made, but authorities believed that the young woman was a prostitute who had been murdered at the Sunset Inn, stuffed into the trunk of car, and transported to Broad Mountain, where it was set on fire.

Believing that Moff may have directed the dumping of the body, he and his chauffeur were arrested by the state police and held at the Schuylkill County jail while authorities attempted to make an identification. One it became evident that detectives could neither prove nor disprove that the victim had been at the Sunset Inn, Moff and his chauffeur were released. This would be the sixth, and final, time that Moff would be a suspect in a Coal Region murder investigation.

Because of the tremendous publicity surrounding the Broad Mountain murder, Moff's saloon on Oak Street in Mount Carmel-- which was also an infamous meeting place for the mob-- was forced to close. With police raids becoming an increasingly frequent occurrence, business began to suffer at his other establishments, and he made the decision to retire from the saloon business altogether (as for the Sunset Inn, it continued to operate until April of 1932, when it burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances).



The Death of Louis Moff


After closing his roadhouses, Moff focused exclusively on bootlegging. Because of his training as a plumber and pipe-fitter, he became a prolific maker of stills, which were hidden in secret locations all across the Coal Region. Just as soon as federal agents found one of his stills and destroyed it, ten more popped up to take its place. However, this business enterprise wasn't as profitable as prostitution or gambling, and it was said that Moff had spent what was left of his fortune on building new stills.

There is no doubt that, if given enough time, Moff would've been able to recoup his losses. However, he did not live long enough for that to happen.

On the evening of Tuesday, December 29, 1931, Louis Moff and his wife, Rose, had gone to watch a movie at the State Theater in Mount Carmel. They arrived home at 10:15, and Rose got out of the car as it was stopped in front of the garage at the rear of their home at 113 East Saylor Street in Atlas.

After Rose walked through the garage and made her way into the house, Louis parked the car in its usual place and had just reached up to close the garage door when he was gunned down in a fusillade of bullets. Five shots were fired, four of which struck Moff. The fatal shot, believed to have been the first one that was fired, pierced his heart.

Though mortally wounded, he managed to run for about forty feet before he fell, dropping dead on the short walkway between the garage and the back door of his home. He was found a short while later by his son, Joseph, who had heard from a neighbor that shots had been fired near his father's house.

The spot where Moff was gunned down

Local police, along with state police from Tharptown, arrived on the scene within the hour, and came to the conclusion that Moff's killer had hidden behind a fence on the opposite side of the alley from the garage. This suggested the murder had been carefully planned, presumably by a rival mobster. Detectives found one of the stray bullets embedded in the front of the garage, and determined that it had been fired from a .32 caliber automatic pistol.

Neighbors were questioned, but all of them said that it had been too dark to see anything. However, some of the neighbors said that they'd seen a large, unfamiliar sedan with New York license plates driving slowly up and down the streets the day before. Since it was the holiday season, it was possible that the unfamiliar vehicle may have belonged to a visiting relative of local resident.

As for Rose Moff, she later told police that she was busy hanging up her coat and hat in a closet when Joseph and neighbors dragged Louis' body into the house. Apparently, she hadn't heard any of the five gunshots, but when she discovered that her husband was dead, she collapsed and had to be carried to her bed.

The Moff home, as it appears today

The Police Investigation Goes Cold


Corporal Earl Pepple and Trooper George Sauer handled the investigation into Moff's slaying. They chased down various leads; one source claimed that Moff had run afoul of Philadelphia mobsters and was "rubbed out" for one of his favorite dirty tricks-- ordering liquor from Philadelphia and then having his men ambush the bootleggers when they attempted to deliver the goods. In this manner, Moff was able to get his hands on whiskey for a fraction of the cost of buying it from the mafia. His only costs were the payments he made to the hijackers.

Three hours after Moff's death, desk sergeant Joseph Kehler of the Shamokin police department received a mysterious call, in which the caller asked how he could get in touch with Louis Moff. When Sergeant Kehler asked the man why he wanted this information, the mysterious caller said: "I want to warn him about something that is going to happen to him." The sergeant, unaware that Moff had already been slain, instructed the caller to contact the Mount Carmel police department. Police dismissed this call as the work of a prankster.

According to Tony LaCrosse, an associate of the slain racketeer from Kulpmont, Moff had invested the majority of his savings in a "wildcat" brewery in Exchange, which was later busted up by the police. He had entered into this ill-fated enterprise with two men from Pittston, who LaCrosse knew only as "Tony" and "Tommy". LaCrosse believed that these men might've killed Louis as an act of revenge, but Joseph Moff insisted that these shadowy men were good friends of the family and above suspicion.

Despite months of running down leads, detectives made little headway into their investigation into the murder of Louis Moff. One thing they did learn, however, was that the "vice king of the coal region" had just $400 left to his name at the time of his death.

Rose Moff's mental health began to decline rapidly after the death of her husband. She was institutionalized at the Danville State Hospital shortly after the murder, and remained a patient for the remainder of her life. She passed away in 1946 at the age of 53. After a funeral service held in Hazleton at the home of her sister, she was laid to rest at the Most Precious Blood Catholic Cemetery in Luzerne County.

Louis Moff was buried at the St. Peter parish cemetery on Merriam mountain, just outside of Mount Carmel. His son, whose date of death is unknown, is buried alongside him in the same plot.