"A sordid partnership that began in the reformatory and was continued gloriously on the battlefields of France and Germany ended yesterday for two ex-service men who returned to resume an interrupted career of crime." That was how The Sunday Times coverage of the Amsterdam Avenue hotel robbery began. See the Sunday News coverage for more detail on the incident. While crime was not a focus of The Times that it was for the tabloids, it did get covered, sometimes making it to page one.
The Times story said the bandits had bound the desk clerk with his necktie and gagged him with his handkerchief in a back room. They took $41 from his pockets and $35 from a cash drawer before being confronted by two cops. When the patrolmen ordered the robbers to "get em up,' one of them, Albert John Ray, answered with a shot that went wild. The patrolmen opened up and emptied out most of the six bullets in each of their regulation 38s. Ray staggered out and fell down dead in the lobby. His accomplice, the unarmed John Joseph Farragher, fled to the street where he was cut down by the pursuing cops and a third patrolman who happened to be ticketing cars on Amsterdam Avenue. Farragher also took six bullets.The police were able to i.d. the dead perps from their fingerprints. The police commissioner commended the police officers and the mayor called it a "swell job."
It turned out Ray and Farragher had served together in Europe. Ray had two bronze stars and two battle citations and Farragher two battle stars. The police speculated that the two men may have known each other from the reformatory, which Ray had entered at 19 in 1938 on a charge of petty larceny reduced from burglary. Farragher was already there, having entered in December of 1937 for unlawful entry reduced from burglary. Both had records of other petty crimes.
The same article also briefly noted the truck hijacking in Brooklyn and the police drive on gambling covered in more detail in the News.