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BY KRISTIN BEUSCHER
OF NORTHERN VALLEY PRESS
NORTHERN VALLEY- Our little corner of America made nationwide headlines 90 years ago this week, when a railroad porter was found handcuffed to a tree in the Palisades after being kidnapped and robbed.
Our story begins about 30 miles south, at the Rahway railroad station. Joseph Van Cline, a porter who for years had been employed by the Pennsylvania Railroad at $25 per week, always retrieved the mail from the 7:44 a.m. train. On this particular day, Sept. 28, 1928, among the mail was a pouch containing $10,000 in cash from the Federal Reserve Bank in New York City, which was destined for the Rahway Trust Company and the Rahway National Bank. That sum would be equivalent to about $150,000 today.
Waiting inside the station were Rahway Patrolman Robert Walker and post office employee Erville Madison. They were to escort Van Cline to the post office, but he never showed. After about five minutes, the patrolman went up to the train platform to look for the missing messenger.
The policeman had no idea that in that spot just moments earlier, Van Cline had been approached by man with a gun. With the tip of a revolver buried in his ribs, the porter was ushered through an underground passageway running to the other side of the tracks. Three cars were waiting, each with their engines running. The holdup gang included a dozen men. Van Cline was seated in the lead car between two bandits holding guns.
“They didn’t beat me or harm me at all,” 38-year-old Van Cline would later tell police. “But they kept telling me to be quiet or they’d blow my head off.”
When neither Van Cline nor the mailbag turned up at the station, a massive manhunt ensued. Postal inspectors, secret service men, railroad detectives and police from New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey were all on the lookout for the diminutive porter, whom authorities described as being a black man, a little over 5 feet tall, 125 pounds, and sporting a moustache like Charlie Chaplin’s.
Six hours after the alarm was broadcast, Van Cline was finally found in Englewood Cliffs, handcuffed to a tree in a densely wooded section off Route 9W. A man by the name of George Brandt, an elderly laborer working for the interstate park commission, heard Van Cline’s cries for help and discovered him hugging a tree, with two pairs of handcuffs binding his wrists. It took Englewood Cliffs Police Chief William Markham 20 minutes to sever the handcuffs using files and a hacksaw.
One of the getaway cars was later found, having been abandoned on the side of the road with a flat tire. Inside was a mail pouch, slashed open, with letters scattered around the vehicle.
No trace of the robbers or the loot was ever found.