Petrillo Decided To Form A Matrimonial Agency During The 1930s

Toxicology Article Cases Cousins Herman and Paul Petrillo were career criminals from Philadelphia who decided to form a matrimonial agency during the 1930s. The purpose of their agency would be to help widowed women remarry and get life insurance policies for their new husbands. However, since the agency functioned as a conduit for collecting money from these policies, the Petrillo cousins and their gang had a vested interest in making sure their clients’ husbands came to tragic ends, often with the wives as willing accomplices. Paul considered himself to be a practitioner of witchcraft and intended to use black magic to cause the husbands’ deaths. When that didn’t work, they decided to use arsenic instead. And they might have gotten away with it too, but the two couldn’t limit themselves to killing just their clients’ husbands.In 1938, Herman was having an affair with a woman named Stella Alfonsi and offered to pay an associate to murder

He wanted this associate, George Meyer, to hit Ferdinando with a car to make his death look like an accident. Herman later simply poisoned Ferdinando with arsenic because Meyer was taking so long to act. The reason Meyer had delayed action for so long was that he was actually a police informant, working with investigators to catch the Petrillos on an unrelated counterfeiting charge. When Ferdinando died, Meyer talked to the police and launched an investigation.Authorities now noticed a pattern of Italian immigrants dying of arsenic poisoning throughout Philadelphia. Virtually all these victims had wives who took out life insurance policies through the Petrillos’ agency. The total number of poisoning victims officially attributed to them was 35, though authorities suspected it might have been higher. A total of 14 people from the Petrillo cousins’ gang were sentenced to life imprisonment. Herman and Paul both