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holdup. Cammarata stated that he had dropped his girlfriend off at work on the day in question and returned to his apartment, where he slept most of the day. When cross-examined by Assistant Wayne County Prosecutor James Chenot, Cammarata could not remember the address of his apartment or where he had borrowed the Pierce-Arrow car that he was driving when he was arrested. Gerdes, the Detroit police officer who was wounded in the holdup, was the only witness to positively identify Cammarata. Several weeks after the robbery of the Kleiner Cigar Manufacturing Company, Gerdes was mysteriously shot by unknown gunmen while on duty. He believed that he had been shot by friends of Cammarata to keep him from testifying at the trial. Stanley Rootes, the auditor and paymaster at the Kleiner Cigar Manufacturing Company who had been carrying the payroll bag at the time of the holdup, failed to identify Frank Cammarata as one of the bandits.
    Cammarata’s second trial in the Kleiner robbery case was again declared a mistrial after the jury had deliberated more than 24 hours and were released by Judge W. Skillman McKay. Cammarata was eventually acquitted in the Kleiner Cigar Company holdup. He was still awaiting trail on the People’s Bank of Wayne County robbery charge, when he and Thomas Licavoli were arrested in Canada on a concealed weapons charge.
    There is some evidence that Frank Cammarata, Pete Corrado (later an important leader in the Detroit Mob), and Thomas Licavoli may have been operating a stolen-car ring out of Detroit during the mid-’20s. On June 12, 1925, they were indicted by a Federal Grand Jury on a charge of violation of the Federal Dyer Act (driving a stolen car across state lines). The feds had found proof in shipping records that they were investigating at that time that Cammarata, Licavoli, and Corrado had shipped at least three stolen cars to Buffalo, New York, by boat. Once the vehicles had arrived in Buffalo, they had obtained New York plates for the cars and then driven them back to Detroit for resale. The three men never went to trial on the charge, as other events had begun to shape their futures.
    Aside from their other rackets, both Frank Cammarata and Yonnie Licavoli were important leaders in the River Gang. Their partners in this venture were Joe Moceri, Pete Licavoli, and Joe Massei. Joe Massei was a downriver bootlegger, rumrunner, and gunman. Massei was a highly respected, well-liked leader in the Detroit underworld. The son of an Italian father and Irish mother, Massei was to eventually become an important national underworld figure.
    By ruthless methods, the River Gang consolidated their control over most of the large-scale rum-running activities on the upper Detroit River between the eastern city limits of Detroit and Mt. Clemens, Michigan. According to one Detroit underworld source, the River Gang operated outside of the Detroit city limits to make it more difficult for the Detroit police to interfere in their activities. According to another account, most of the newly arrived gangsters in the Detroit area stayed out of the city because by the mid-’20s, the Purple Gang and its various factions maintained a tight control over the Detroit underworld’s most lucrative rackets.
    The River Gang never hauled its own loads. The gang made its money by carrying the loads of other rumrunners in its boats and charging a 25 percent tax for protection on whatever the load of liquor was worth on the retail market. If their speedboats were pursued by the U.S. Coast Guard or Customs’ cutters and the loads had to be dumped into the Detroit River it was the owner’s loss and not the River Gang’s. Any whiskey haulers who refused to use the services of the River Gang and attempted to run their own loads were frequently hijacked, beaten, or worse. If they continued to haul liquor without paying tribute to the River Gang, they would often disappear. The hijacking of independent rumrunners occurred so frequently