Former ADA Robbed in Office
Five armed men held up Charles Froessel, former First Assistant District Attorney of Queens County, in his law office on the seventh floor of a building at 161-19 Jamaica Avenue, Jamaica, and after binding him and a watchman in the basement, they methodically ransacked four offices in the building.
I was called to the District Attorney’s Office. I wasn’t surprised. I knew just what he had to say; that Charles Froessel’s name as a robbery victim had made headlines and alerted the public; that three more robberies inside of two weeks had made the police department look foolish; that he wanted action.
Captain Henry FlatteryCharles W. Froessel
While an assistant district attorney, Charles Froessel tried several capital murder cases. The most famous was that of Ruth Snyder, a Queens housewife, and her lover, Judd Gray, who were accused, convicted and executed in Sing Sing Prison for the murder of Mrs. Snyder’s husband, Albert, in a scheme to collect on his life insurance.
Froessel was elected to the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, in 1949. In his final year on the bench, he voted with the majority in the court’s decision to clear the way for construction of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Related Stories
FRONT PAGE DETECTIVE
October 1955
Brooklyn Eagle
February 28, 1936
New York Times
February 28, 1936
NEW YORK TIMES
March 10, 1936
NEW YORK TIMES
June 30, 1936
NEW YORK TIMES
December 1, 1936
NEW YORK TIMES
December 20, 1939
NEW YORK TIMES
December 21, 1939
NEW YORK TIMES
March 5, 1940
NEW YORK TIMES
March 7, 1940
NEW YORK TIMES
March 13, 1940
Pay in Dog Years