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• 1 2021-05-27T20:08:18+00:00 Louis Cobb arrested 39 plain 2023-09-01T02:04:23+00:00 Around 1:20 AM, Officer Nathaniel Carter allegedly saw several men leaving William Feinstein's liquor store at 452 Lenox Avenue carrying bottles, according to the Magistrate's Court affidavit. He arrested one of those men, Louis Cobb, a thirty-eight-year-old Black laborer, with one bottle of gin and two bottles of whiskey in his possession. A crowd of thirty to forty people had attacked the closed store a few minutes earlier, according to witness testimony in the Municipal Court reported in the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune, breaking down the iron gate protecting it, then smashing the windows, taking bottles of liquor and damaging the storefront. Feinstein put his losses at $627.40 when he sued the city for failing to protect his business. The three bottles allegedly taken by Cobb amounted to just over one percent of that total, $7. Cobb lived only a block north of the store at 473 Lenox Avenue.
  
  
  
  Louis Cobb appeared in the Washington Heights Magistrate's Court on March 20. However, the affidavit making the complaint against him was not taken until March 25. In the interim, Magistrate Ford held Cobb without bail. An annotation in the docket book dated March 21 records "no bail in absence of record," suggesting police had not been able to produce his criminal record. Magistrates reaffirmed the denial of bail when Cobb appeared repeatedly in court, on March 25, 26 and April 2, when he was finally sent to the grand jury. Those decisions reflected the criminal record eventually produced for him: six charges in New York City since 1920, for burglary, robbery, drug possession, homicide, procuring and possession of a firearm, resulting in two sentences to the State Prison at Sing Sing, two terms in the Penitentiary and a sentence in the workhouse, and two sentences for violating parole. Cobb appeared in the list of those arrested and charged with burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list published in the New York Evening Journal. There were no newspaper reports of his prosecution.
  
  The grand jury did not indict Cobb; on April 10 they instead transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions to be tried for petit larceny. That decision likely reflected the lack of evidence of him breaking into the store required for a charge of burglary, and the value of the three bottles of liquor Officer Carter allegedly found on him, $7, according to the Magistrate's Court affidavit, well below the $100 threshold for a felony charge for larceny. Less than a week later, on April 15, the Magistrates in the Court of Special Sessions convicted Cobb and sentenced him to the Penitentary, an outcome recorded only in the records of the 32nd Precinct.
  
  Born in Georgia in 1897, Louis Cobb had made his way to New York City some time before January 10, 1920, when a census enumerator found him boarding at 334 53rd Street, in San Juan Hill, the city's major Black neighborhood before the rise of Harlem, and working as a porter. A series of criminal convictions though the 1920s and 1930s offer fragmentary glimpses of Cobb's life in Harlem. Just over two months after the census, his criminal record indicates that police charged Cobb with attempted burglary; he was convicted and sentenced to an indefinite term in the Blackwell Island Penitentiary. He was on parole by February 1921, when police arrested him again for violating the terms of that parole and returned him to the Penitentiary. Released again later that year, within a few months Cobb was in court, charged with robbery. Convicted of second-degree assault, the judge sentenced him to five years in Sing Sing, the state prison. The prison admissions register recorded that Cobb was unemployed at the time of the alleged crime, now living in Harlem at 30 West 135th Street; in a subsequent admission register entry he would attribute his "first crime" to being out of work. According to the admissions register, Cobb was eligible for parole in May 1925. He likely was released around this time, as in November 1925 police arrested him again, this time for a drugs offense, according to his criminal record. The judge sentenced him to another indefinite term in the Penitentiary, but the conviction violated his parole, so Cobb was returned to Sing Sing Prison to serve out his previous sentence.
  
  Likely released in early 1926, Cobb later that year began living with Martha Nelson, who was about ten years his junior. The couple made their home at 8 West 137th Street, in the heart of Harlem. In 1930, Cobb gave his occupation as longshoreman in the 1930 census, but indicated he had not been employed in 1929. He may have been supporting himself in other ways. In May 1929, his criminal record indicates that a magistrate convicted Cobb as a procurer, supplying prostitutes, and sentenced him to sixty days in the workhouse. About five months after his release, in December 1929, police again arrested Cobb, for the murder of Bert Moore, a Black store manger, during a robbery of the candy store at 23 West 138th Street that he managed. The New York Amsterdam News and New York Age published very different accounts of the crime, neither of which explain why Cobb's criminal record indicated he was discharged in 1931 and charged instead with gun possession. The robbery of the store was the third in as many weeks.  According to the New York Age, in a story accompanied by a photograph of Moore, Cobb was involved in all those robberies; on the first two occasions, he had an accomplice, John Boyle, who was arrested after the second robbery when Moore managed to subdue him with a baseball bat until police arrived. Cobb then returned on his own to rob the store again and shot Moore as he left. A customer in the store at the time identified Cobb. The New York Amsterdam News reported Doyle [Boyle] as acting alone and captured by Moore and three customers, and did not link Cobb to either previous robbery. After the third robbery, the New York Amsterdam News reported less evidence linking Cobb to the murder: Moore gave police a description before he died, based on which officers arrested Cobb on West 138th Street close by the candy store. The story also reported that police found a gun when they searched Cobb's home, but that his wife claimed it belonged to her, leading to her arrest for gun possession. The New York Amsterdam News a week later reported Cobb's arraignment and his wife's arraignment in separate stories. Neither paper published anything further about the case.
  
  In April 1930, the census recorded that Cobb was in the Tombs Prison; a Magistrate had ordered him held without bail on the murder charge. However, at some point before early 1931 he was released; beginning in February, he worked as a laborer for a coal company, according to the Sing Sing Prison admission register. In April, police arrested him for possession of a revolver; the prison admission register recorded the date of that crime as December 13, 1929, when Cobb was arrested for Moore's murder. Police must have found a way to link Cobb to the gun found in his home that day, but not to Moore's murder; it did not seem that Martha had changed her story, as Cobb still listed her as his wife in the prison admission register. Convicted of gun possession, Cobb was sentenced to seven years in Sing Sing Prison.
  
  Paroled in 1939, rather than returning to Harlem, Cobb settled in Albany, New York, and found work as a presser. He identifies himself as single, and his mother, rather than Martha Nelson, as his next of kin, in the Clinton Prison admission ledger in 1939. In July that year police arrested Cobb for burglary, charging him with stealing a $15 radio, a coat and a vest. The admission ledger recorded that he asserted his innocence, saying he took the property from a friend not knowing it was stolen. Nonetheless, he was found guilty and sentenced to a term of ten to twenty years. The 1940 census recorded him as an inmate of Clinton Prison. He was not eligible for parole until 1948.