JoelTurner wrote: ↑Sun Aug 20, 2023 9:59 am
PolackTony wrote: ↑Fri Aug 18, 2023 5:10 pm
JoelTurner wrote: ↑Fri Aug 18, 2023 4:08 pm
Does anyone know anything about the 2 on the right?
John Gomsota and John Giacchi
I couldn’t find anything on them so I’m guessing their names were misspelled. I don’t know where they from or their ages.
Couldn’t find anything on Gomsota. There was a John Giacchi who was arrested for forgery in California in 1915, but the one in the photo looks like he wasn’t born back then.
Last we discussed these two here on the board, the thinking was that they may have been two unconnected guys who just got swept up in the raid on the Statler. From what Eric found, “Gomsota” seems to have been a Romanian dude.
viewtopic.php?p=217073#p217073
I guess that makes sense why they aren't in any articles about the whole affair
I looked at the older thread. I'm not sure there's enough to connect John Ciacchi and John Giacchi as the same people. His lack of a tie in the booking photo kind of makes me he was an innocent picked up by the police but he could've been staying in the hotel from anywhere in the country. I do think its extremely likely that Romanian immigrant John Comsuta is "Gomsota". I looked into his life and in a weird way it kind of makes a lot of sense that he would be arrested by police if he was at that hotel in 1928.
Here is what I could find about the life and times of John Johan Comsuta:
- According to his American records, he was born on February 8, 1898 in Porumbacu, Transylvania. It's currently in Romania but prior to the end of World War I, Transylvania was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
- Comsuta immigrated to the US as a teenager around 1914, just missing being conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I.
- According to a 1921 Cleveland directory his job his listed as a riveter. And throughout the succeeding decades, he always seems to be working in different steel mills
- Comsuta adopts the English name John and make his original first name, Johan, his middle name ("John John"?)
- He married his wife in Cleveland in 1926. They would go on to have three children.
- He becomes a US citizen in 1927.
- Arrested at the Hotel Statler in Dec. 1928, just 2 and a half weeks before the birth of his first child, a daughter.
- During the Great Depression he seems to have fallen on hard times because in the 1930 census he's an inmate at the Stark County, Ohio workhouse.
- In March 1936 he's shot three times by his wife during a domestic dispute. Here's the newspaper article from page 6 of the 16 March 1936 edition of the
Cleveland Plain Dealer with the whole story:
Comsuta shot by wife Cleveland Plain_Dealer_16 March 1936_pg. 6.png
(Comsuta's refusal to tell his wife his whereabouts that night in 1936, brings up the question what exactly he was doing, dressed in a suit, at the Hotel Statler with his very pregnant wife presumably at home?)
- The Comsutas divorced sometime after the shooting.
- In August 1944 Comsuta's son his hit by a truck while riding his bike,but luckily survived with relatively minor injuries.
- John Comsuta dies in July 1971, I couldn't really find anything from the last few decades of his life