Like its arch-rival the Sunday New, the final city edition of the Sunday Mirror of April 14 gave the front page to a banner headline about the House vote to suspend the draft and the Amsterdam Hotel robbery. It also found room for a shot of Lana Turner and her latest boyfriend Charles Uneger at a Hollywood night spot. Like the News, the Mirror reported that the two had flown together to New York, feeding the speculation that something serious was going on between the two despite their denials.
Surprisingly, the Mirror put the gory shot of the blood-spattered corpse at the robbery on an inside page photo spread. Newly widowed Mary Farragher, who had been married to one of the deceased thugs, was on page one with her four-year-old son were on page one. Perhaps this was what was meant by the "newspaper with heart." The photo was taken at her home at 618 Academy Street in the then heavily Irish Inwood section of Manhattan. The caption read "HE WAS JUST NO-GOOD," referring to her dead husband, one of the two war heroes killed while attempting to rob the hotel. See the Newsfor more on the draft vote and the thwarted hotel robbery. Both stories also made the front page of the Sunday Times.
The Mirror photo caption quoted Mary Farragher as saying "I told him he'd get in trouble." She shed no tears. In a story carried inside, she is reported to have told the press that she had signed him up for the draft, asking the local board to get him out of her life. He was a bum. "When they came to take our furniture he was sleeping off a drunk," she added. Since she was his only family, she assumed she would have to handle the burial arrangements. This story gave credence to the song in "Call Me Mister" about how the men who went into the Army as no goods pretty much exited the same way.
In the main story on the robbery, the Mirror reported that Farragher's accomplice and fellow corpse, Albert J. Ray, was called a "bad boy" by his friends as well as by the police. He had been on probation when he entered the Army. Both men had been combat buddies and may have known each other before from reform school. The Mirror story also noted that the early morning gun battle had awakened the neighbors and many of the hotel's residents who came down to the lobby in their nightclothes (not an especially smart move when there is a gun battle in that lobby). Police had thwarted a similar robbery hotel at this same hotel in 1939. The links above lead to more details on the robbery and the police action.
The robbery also took up much of the double-truck photo spread on page 22 and 23. One photo showed the German luger that Ray had brandished. In another, elevator man Pat Hartigan showed the wounds on the back of his head to the bespectacled hotel manager, Joel Davis. The largest photo showed Patrolmen Carl Daum and Albert Russo being commended by Police Commissioner Wallender as Ray's bloody body lays on the floor behind them. In this shot, Ray is sprawled flat out on his back. He had been curled into a near fetal position in the Sunday News. Somebody must have moved him. The other photo in the spread was of the crash of an Army F-6 plane into a residential neighborhood in Chicago.