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the night they were shot. Licavoli was briefly held as a suspect in Hoyle’s murder. Phillips, who had identified Licavoli from his hospital bed, disappeared after recovering from his wounds, and the case was dropped.
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    When Frank Cammarata was not working with the River Gang, he sometimes supplemented his income by robbing banks in the Detroit area. On the morning of July 1, 1925, four gunmen patiently waited outside the People’s Bank of Wayne County located at the corner of Grand River and Brooklyn Avenues in Detroit. The men were waiting for the bank’s bookkeeper to arrive that morning. When the bookkeeper walked up to the bank, the four men pushed him inside as he opened the front door. At gunpoint, they forced the terrified man to open the safe from which they took $2,100 in silver coins and escaped. Cammarata was the only one of the bandits that was positively identified by witnesses as participating in the holdup. On September 22, 1925, he was arrested by Detroit police and arraigned in Detroit Recorders Court on charges of armed robbery. He was released on a bond of $10,000 to await trial on the charge.
    On November 7, 1925, five gunmen armed with sawed-off shotguns and pistols held up the Kleiner Cigar Manufacturing Company in Detroit. Patrolman Edward Gerdes, with only two weeks on the police force, had been assigned from the Chene Street station to guard the company’s payroll. Gerdes accompanied Stanley Rootes, who was the Kleiner Company paymaster, to the Central Savings Bank at Chene Street and Harper Avenue. When the two men returned with the payroll to the Kleiner Plant, they were assaulted by five gunmen who jumped out of a parked car and began firing wildly. Rootes dropped the payroll bag, which contained between $8,700 and $10,000, and threw up his hands. Gerdes, who was wounded in the legs, managed to use his own shotgun before he fell and wounded one of the bandits. The five men grabbed the payroll bag and escaped, taking their wounded comrade with them. Cammarata was identified by witnesses who had watched the gunfight as one of the five men who held up the Kleiner Company. Gerdes identified Cammarata as the man he saw come towards him with a pistol in his hand after Gerdes had been wounded.
    Cammarata, who was still out on bond and awaiting trial on the People’s Bank of Wayne County robbery charge, was arrested again on November 11, 1925, and charged with the Kleiner holdup. After a second arraignment in less than two months in Recorders Court on a charge of armed robbery, Cammarata furnished the new bond of $20,000 and promptly disappeared. On November 18, 1925, his $20,000 bond was forfeited because of his failure to appear in Court. Cammarata returned to St. Louis, where he was arrested on January 2, 1926.
    The Detroit police theorized that the Kleiner robbery was an inside job. The bandits’ car pulled up at the same time that Gerdes and Rootes had returned with the company payroll. The gunmen’s abandoned car was later found by Detroit police with five sawed-off shotguns inside. Detectives believed that one of the bandits’ girlfriends might have been an employee at the Kleiner Company and had tipped the gang off as to the time that the payroll usually arrived.
    The first Kleiner holdup trial was declared a mistrial by Recorders Court Judge W. McKay Skillman after a woman who had been a spectator at the trial was discovered to have told jurors during a lunch break that Frank Cammarata was innocent. The woman, a Mrs. Catherine Ivy, was lectured by Judge Skillman and then sentenced to 30 days in the Detroit House of Corrections for contempt of court.
    At Cammarata’s second trial in the Kleiner robbery case, several witnesses appeared on behalf of the defense and stated that Cammarata had not been identified by Gerdes when the police officer had viewed him from his hospital bed. Cammarata’s girlfriend claimed that he had been with her during the day and time of the Kleiner