Joe Rego (1937)

Discovery and identification

The body was found late Sunday about a mile from Route 39 on the Atsion road, in the same broader area where Henry Rider had been killed in 1916. It was partly covered by a dark-blue coat and dressed in coarse white trousers and black low shoes. Three dollars and change, two Bridgeport ferry matchbooks, and a typed name card were recovered; no weapon or visible vehicle tracks were reported. The condition of the remains led Coroner John N. Schwartz and State Police Detective William P. Kelly to suspect homicide.

Follow-up coverage identified the man as Joe Rego and connected him to New York, apparently under the name Andrew J. Mancuso. That reading is superseded: the Mount Holly reports below name him Andrew Canzoneri, and a keyword search of the New Jersey Mirror index returns no “Mancuso” in 1937 at all. The OCR says police had sought him for about four months and described a transient gambler who readily made acquaintances. Important portions of the identification story, including the exact wanted notice and physical description, are too corrupted to state reliably.

The Mount Holly reports: Andrew Canzoneri

The New Jersey Mirror put the case on its front page on August 25, 1937. According to that report, Fire Warden Joseph C. Holloway of Tabernacle Township found the decomposed body on Friday while he and others were on their way to a forest fire at Atsion. The paper placed it about fifty feet off Route 39. The date and distance differ from the clippings summarized above, and the paper does not explain the difference.

The Mirror named the dead man as Andrew Canzoneri, 33, with the alias Joe Rego. It did not mention the name Mancuso, which the damaged OCR had seemed to show. Canzoneri had been living in Hammonton for about four months, on Peach Street. He carried a courtesy card from Atlantic County Sheriff Walter Jeffries made out to Joseph Rego.

After the burial, two brothers, Grida and Anthony Canzoneri of New Columbia, Pennsylvania, came to the Vincentown funeral home and identified him from a photograph. They told the funeral home that their brother had left his wife and five children that January.

County physician Dr. John S. Conroy and Dr. Edward J. Muldoon of Florence performed the autopsy on Saturday at Cline’s undertaking establishment in Vincentown. They found two bullet wounds, one in the back near the left shoulder and one through the skull, and reported that either would have been fatal. He was buried in the Vincentown Baptist cemetery on the following Monday.

Allegations reported by police

These accusations come from New York and Pennsylvania police as relayed by the Mirror. Canzoneri died before any trial, so none was tested in court.

New York police said he shot and killed a dance-hall manager named Albert Rossi. Pennsylvania authorities blamed him for shooting two men in Luzerne County on March 26, 1937. Police believed that friends of the New York victim followed him to Wyoming, Pennsylvania, where two men were badly wounded in an exchange of gunfire. On this theory, the same group later tracked him to Hammonton. There, according to the report, strangers asked at a pool room where Joe Rego lived. The report also mentions four men in an expensive car with Ohio plates. The paper called the killing a revenge “ride.” Neither Mirror report names a suspect or mentions an arrest. The Mount Holly Herald of August 27, 1937, as summarized in a county index, said state police wanted to question a New York gambler, known under two aliases, about the killing. No charge or arrest has been found, so that man is not named here.

The two Mirror reports disagree on several points. The 1937 article dates the Rossi shooting March 22 and names the victim Albert. The 1938 follow-up names him Alfred, dates it August 22, 1936, and places the Pennsylvania shooting at a Wilkes-Barre dice game. The 1938 item also says Canzoneri was taken from Hammonton on August 7, 1937. The 1937 article dates the pool-room visit to the “last Monday,” which does not match August 7. The New York and Pennsylvania records have not been checked.

Reburial

A short Mirror front-page item of February 9, 1938, reported that Vincentown funeral director Edward Cline had exhumed the body the previous Friday. It was taken to Summit Hill, Pennsylvania, for reburial at the request of Canzoneri’s widow, Margaret, of Nesquehoning, Pennsylvania. That item gives the discovery date as August 20, 1937, which matches the Friday in the earlier report.