United Cigar Stores Robbed, Repeatedly

One hundred years ago today … At around 6 in the evening, a United Cigar store at 1760 2nd Avenue, off 92nd Street, was robbed for the third time in two months.

United Cigar stores, ubiquitous throughout the city, were frequent targets of armed thieves. Earlier that week the Bergen Street/Flatbush Avenue location was held up. (“CIGAR STORE BANDIT GETS $230 NEAR POLICE STATION AND MAKES ESCAPE EASILY.” Times Union, 23 January, 1921, p. 1.)

Just a month earlier, two NYPD officers had shot and killed a would-be robber of the United Cigar store at 880 Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. The policemen, Randall McCarthy and Timothy Connell, were both grazed in the cheek by bullets and taken to Fordham Hospital to recover. (“ONE BANDIT DEAD, TWO DETECTIVES WOUNDED” announced the Daily News, then adding: “Christmas Shoppers Scatter Before Fusillade.” (24 December, 1921, p. 23.) The company’s own dick delivered them each $500 in thank-you checks.

Note: we have reported about a cigar store getting robbed previously on our site, focusing on cigar factories’ significance to NYC’s Latinx communities.

United Cigars had recently been in the financial news, having floated a plan for a higher-priced stock offer, and then pulled it back after shareholder backlash.

United Cigars, founded in Syracuse, New York in 1906, was by 1922 a nationwide chain. In 1926 it owned an estimated 3,000 stores (“Salesman, Time, 20 December 1926. Web Archive.) This made excellent odds that one would be robbed now and then, though not necessarily at the frequency that the NYC stores were.

– Jonathan Goldman, 26 January, 2022

TAGS: crime, tobacco, guns, police, smoking, business, finance, stock market