New York Herald, 9 September 1921, page 1: Girl's Escort Shot by Gunmen in Motor

Front page of The New York Herald of Friday, 9 September 1921. The story is in the fourth column under the headline “Girl’s Escort Shot by Gunmen in Motor,” with the decks “Car Stops at 7th Ave. and 28th St.; Men in Rear Seat Open Fire on Couple,” “Mystery for the Police” and “Trio Near By Ran Away When Bullets Fly—Owney Madden’s Old Gang Suspected.”

The Herald calls the shooting “the third attempt on successive nights at murder from the back seat of an automobile.” Three men fired from a car at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, and a man walking with a young woman was shot in the leg; the police did not know whether the shots were meant for him or for three young men walking ahead, who ran. The paper then reports a police theory, as read on the scan: detectives of the West Thirtieth Street station “are trying to lay the trouble to the Owney Madden gang, whose bailiwick begins at Thirtieth street. Although this gang has been officially non-existent for some time there are still left many of the thugs and murderers who followed” Madden, and the detectives believed they had set out “to avenge a real or fancied insult.”

This is a newspaper’s report of what detectives were “understood” to be trying to show, the day after the shooting. It does not say Madden was present or involved, and this archive does not take from it that the gang existed in 1921 or did the shooting. The wounded man and his companion were private people; the story prints their names and home addresses, which are not repeated here.