The Aug. 15, 1930 edition of The Berkshire Eagle highlighted the charging of strongman swimmer Harry Pincus in connection with the murder of a Bennington, Vt., taxi operator.
Pincus, who was suspected of driving the getaway car, was on the lam for a decade. Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part series. Part 2 will be published later this month.
I continue to be amazed at the stories that can be discovered researching “ordinary” homes for clients. For example, a closer look at a local multifamily house revealed not only had Barry Manilow’s ancestors lived there, but their residency was closely intertwined with a bizarre saga involving former boxers, a strongman performer, a mysterious flapper actress, and two brutal murders. Bear with me, there’s a lot to unpack here.
Harry Pincus (1898-1959) came to Pittsfield in the early 1920s with his wife, Anna, and infant son Harold. He lived first on Burbank Street, then in a duplex on Grove Street, with his brothers who operated the old Berkshire Glass Co. While a traveling salesman for them, he also became well known around Western Massachusetts and eastern New York performing as a swimming strongman.
Billed as a “human tug boat,” Harry would tow boats of passengers across lakes like Pontoosuc, often with the rope between his teeth or with one hand behind his back. This photo of Harry Pincus and his wife, Anna, holding infant son Harold, appeared in the Aug. 15, 1930, edition of The Berkshire Eagle.
In 1922, local and Boston papers report Pincus swam across Pontoosuc pulling a rowboat with eight passengers aboard, totaling 1,105 pounds. By 1927, he had upped the ante, becoming the first person to pull a boat with both of his hands and feet tied. Later that summer, he set another record, pulling five boats with 25 people across the lake.
The 1928 Pittsfield directory marks Harry and Anna as having recently departed the city for New York, around the time other records show their marriage was dissolving. Harry would return to Pittsfield in the summers to perform at Pontoosuc. He could be seen swimming there almost daily in the scorching hot summer of July 1930.
About July 23 or 24, he took his last swim there. By the time of his next advertised performance, Harry had vanished without a trace. At the same time a little further north, a different sort of strongman was out celebrating the weekend lavishly at a local boxing match in North Adams.
A former boxer, the flashy Michael Kane was well known in the booming Northern Berkshire boxing culture. He’d since opened a taxi and luxury limousine service in the Bennington, Vt., area, but was still packing a punch.
A couple of weeks earlier in July 1930, Kane made the papers as a passerby who knocked out a violent offender that was fleeing police after an escape from municipal court. At the July 25 match, he was seen as had become his custom, diamond rings on his fingers, flashing large rolls of cash. The next morning, he picked up a long-distance passenger from his taxi stand, at the corner of South and Main streets in Bennington.
A man wearing a blue suit and a Panama hat got in, negotiating a ride to Troy, so Kane set out west in the 1927 Buick cab. A 1926 Chevrolet coach followed at a discreet distance. The cab followed Route 7, through the Shingle Hollow part of Hoosick Falls.
As they passed the old stone schoolhouse by Tibbits State Forest, the passenger suddenly rose up in the back seat. He shot Michael Kane through the head with a .38 caliber handgun and followed up with a strong blow from a blunt instrument, fracturing his skull.
A New York State Police poster out of Troop G in Troy from 1930 identifies Harry Pincus as the suspect in the murder of well-known former boxer Michael Kane, who ran a taxi service in Bennington, Vt. Reaching forward, he managed to steer the vehicle safely into some trees by the side of the road. The Chevrolet pulled over on the road’s shoulder, shielding it from view, as a man and woman got out, feigning car trouble.
The unknown assailant from the car got in, having stripped Kane of cash and jewelry, and the car sped off. After the discovery of his body, several witnesses came forward with a description of the second car. One man who had found it strange when the party rudely refused mechanical help, took down the plate number.
The car was quickly traced to Harry Pincus. Available photos of the well-known swimmer shown to witnesses placed him as the man driving the getaway car. On July 27, police staked out Pontoosuc Lake, but Pincus was in the wind.
He would not be apprehended for a decade. The next installment of this column will explore how a mysterious woman crying in a bar years later cracked open the Michael Kane murder case. In the meantime, Harry’s ex-wife moved on.
Census records for 1930 show Anna (Sheehan) divorced, back in Brooklyn with 10-year-old Harold Pincus. In 1942, according to genealogist Megan Smolenyak, the same Harold married a woman named Edna, and the following year Barry Alan Pincus was born. As many music biographers have since noted, Harold left the family when Barry was 2, and the boy eventually changed his surname to his mother’s maiden name, Manilow.
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