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Edward Larry arrested
Larry was one of nine men arrested away from the scene of their alleged crime, etc. - the only one in a car, although photograph indicates that this was not the only instance that police stopped vehicles - reminder that vehicles continued to travel the avenues and 125th Street (Battle and Fred ? drive up 7th Avenue at different times, buses attacked) - Larry said returning home with goods, but could have walked (but said at 129th St), and not really on route? Home was the Salvation Army on West 124th Street, behind Kress' store.
Towbin was at the station, where he had gone to report the theft from his store once the group of men fled. It is not clear how he had spent the two and a half hours since the men entered his store; it would have taken some time for a group of men, even if joined by others, to remove $2000 of goods, so he may have been in the basement for much of that time, and given the growing scale of the disorder, he may have had to wait some time at the 28th Precinct station to report the theft. Regardless, he saw Larry there, and identified him as one of the men who had threatened him, and the shirts in Larry's possession as from his store. That encounter is described only in the more detailed account included in the Probation Department investigation, not the Magistrates Court affidavit. Had Towbin only identified the property Larry would have been charged with burglary; the allegation of force changed the charge to robbery. That the police blotter recorded the charge as burglary suggests that Towbin's identification came after Larry's initial booking, as police charged others arrested away from looted stores in possession of goods suspected of being stolen with burglary.
Larry was arraigned in Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 and held without bail for the grand jury, which nine days later indicted him. Rather than go to trial, Larry agreed to a plea bargain. Six days after his indictment he appeared in the Court of General Sessions to pled guilty to Attempted Grand Larceny in the second degree [is that still a felony = sentence up to five years]. Ten days later, after an investigation by the Probation Department, the judge sentenced Larry to a term of between fifteen months and thirty months in the State Prison. That was the longest sentence given to anyone arrested in the disorder, a reflection of the charge, and of Larry’s criminal record, which included three convictions for picking pockets in the three years before the disorder, and most significantly, a conviction for grand larceny in West Virginia in 1928