The Four-Eyed Felon

Crime Does Not Pay was a series of true-crime stories told in comic-book form. Dark Horse Publishing has reissued Issues 50-53 in one volume. These stories were originally published in 1947 and come complete with ads for such items as boomerangs and filmstrip projectors.

In Issue 50, one of the criminals profiled was Danny Iamascia (1902-1931), who was the bodyguard for gangsters Ciro Terranova and Dutch Schultz. This particular profile was very amusing.

Iamascia, called in the story the "four-eyed felon," was extremely near-sighted and was "blind as a bat," to quote one of his colleagues, when he was without his glasses which frequently fell off his face. I can identify with that situation since that has happened to me on more than one occasion. Whenever Iamascia's glasses would fall off, he became the gangster who couldn't shoot straight making him a danger even to his cohorts.

Iamascia became the brunt of jokes by other gangsters and his eyeglasses mishaps are emphasized as a source of humor by the comic-book writer. You would think that he would be more of a liability to his employers than an asset and that he would follow another line of work that didn't involve life and death.

I have the feeling that the comic-book writer either exaggerated or made up the eyeglasses problem to poke fun at Iamascia. Looking up his bio on the Internet, I could find no mention of his eyesight or his eyeglasses frequently falling off.

 After he was killed by two New York City detectives in 1931, his funeral had a massive turnout, a fact the comic-book writer failed to mention probably because  such adulation would have undermined the "crime does not pay" theme of the series.