The Gary American, 28 September 1928, page 1: Holstein back home, and mystery around his abduction

The Gary American, an Indiana weekly, ran the banner “Millionaire Kidnapped in New York” across its front page of Friday, 28 September 1928 (Star Edition). The story itself, in the right-hand column, is headed “Wealthy Sport Man Returns to Residence,” with the deck “Mystery Surrounds Disappearance and Quick Return,” and is credited to the Amsterdam News Service under a NEW YORK dateline. The credit and the headline were read from the stored scan; the Library’s OCR garbles both.

It says the mystery around “the disappearance Thursday night and the return early Monday morning of Casper Holstein, wealthy Harlem sportsman, has not entirely been dispelled, and perhaps never will be. No one—neither the police nor Holstein himself—knows where he was taken and held captive when he was kidnapped by gangsters who demanded $50,000 ransom.” Holstein, it says, was blindfolded all the time, and said that one of the gang leaders was “a very nice fellow.” It reports that “On the person of one of the prisoners the police say they found a list of wealthy Negroes who were to be kidnapped,” and that before his disappearance Holstein “is said to have sent $5,000 cash and shipped $4,300 in timber to the Virgin Islands, his native home, for storm relief.”

The list is what the paper says the police said; this archive does not repeat the names the paper printed from it. The gift and the description of the Virgin Islands as his home are the paper’s. The words “Negroes” and “sport man” are the paper’s.