I’ve heard two Ridgefield brothers went on a shooting spree in the 1930s. True?
By 1930s standards, the Farruggio brothers’ gunplay was probably fairly tame, not even making the front page in New York, where it happened. Today, the media might devour the story.
The brothers were born in Branchville—Salvatore Joseph “Sam” Farruggio in 1913, and Giuseppe Liopoldo “Joseph” Farruggio three years later. They were the sixth and seventh children of Calogero and Cyrena Norata Farruggio, who’d immigrated from Parma, Italy. Calogero was listed on their birth certificates as a laborer.
When the brothers were kids, the family apparently moved to Bridgeport, where Sam and Joseph perhaps began getting into trouble. By 1930, both had been arrested for burglary and had spent a year in the state prison at Wethersfield.
In 1934, something went really awry.
On Friday, May 4, around 3 a.m., the brothers were spotted by Patrolmen Lawrence Ward and William Brennan as they were walking on East 101st Street in Manhattan with a two-gallon can of gasoline. According to police accounts, they were on their way to “burn down the first Roman Catholic Church they came to.” They reportedly believed church-burning would rid them of “evil spirits.”
When the patrolmen tried to stop the pair, they ran into a nearby building where they lived with another brother, Calogero, and “their aged mother.”
Inside, a shot rang out and Officer Ward fell backward down a staircase, fatally wounded. Brennan chased the brothers out another door and down the street. More shots were fired; one hit and killed bystander Ernest Krahenbuehl, and another felled Officer Brennan, seriously injuring him.
Sam and Joseph escaped.
“Desperate Man Hunt Centers in Ridgefield for Alleged Murderers of New York Cop,” announced the front-page headline in the May 10, 1934, Ridgefield Press.
The story said two New York detectives were working with state police under Lt. Leo F. Carroll in trying to track down the brothers, who were believed to have friends in town. The Farruggios were “well known to Lt. Carroll” (who later became Ridgefield’s first selectman) and were “said to be religious and social fanatics.”
Police checks of the pair’s former haunts in both Ridgefield and Bridgeport turned up nothing.
However, on Jan. 18, 1935, two New York City transit policemen picked up “several suspicious-appearing individuals on the Astoria elevated line,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported Jan. 20. The group included the Farruggios, who were “carrying brown paper bags which, they said, contained bread. … As they were led to a patrol wagon by Patrolman Thomas Connors, they ripped the bags open and drew revolvers from them. They fled, firing several shots. Police returned the fire and the pair dropped.”
The brothers were taken to a nearby hospital, where they died.
The Eagle’s account was buried at the end of a long story that recounted nearly a half-dozen murders and shootings during the previous day or two. —J.S.
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