100 years ago in The Record
Tuesday, March 12, 1918
Joseph Campine is sentenced to twenty years in the Clinton penitentiary at Dannemora today for a robbery that exposed the persistence of organized vice in Troy. The Campine case has received more extensive coverage in the weekend Sunday Budget (which spells his name Champine) than in The Record. Our paper reports that Campine’s sentencing in County Court is a warning to the city’s underworld elements. Campine was convicted of robbing a Rensselaer County farmer who had come to town to buy clothes but had been taken to several saloons by Winnie Morris on the way to her apartment at Federal and Eighth streets, where she and Campine drugged and beat him. Morris, who cooperated with prosecutors, will be tried at a later date. In court this morning, Campine asks Judge Pierce H. Russell to “overlook my past as much as possible.” “I will overlook your past as far as I can,” Russell says, “but I cannot overlook the outrageous crime you committed. To do that would be to open the city to thugism and gang terror. It was a cruel and vile crime, and you and those like you must be shown that such crimes will not go unpunished. “The city must be made safe for those coming to it on business, or to settle here. A severe penalty is called for in such a case as yours, and the sentence is that you be confined in Clinton prison, at Dannemora, for the term of twenty years.”
“If evidence were lacking that the underworld spirit laughs in the face of decency,” a Budget reporter finds it at Union Station tonight as Campine waits to be taken to prison.
“Champine was given a farewell reception at the depot by a crowd of his kind. Young women in that crowd were so lost to shame that they embraced and wept over the ‘ hero’ of their miserable life drama. He was their ideal! The ideal created in
‘ the just stopped in to get a glass of beer’ resorts.
“They wept over him in a maudlin condition, some of them clearly under the influence of drink, and Champine was evidently proud of them. He was also boastfully hopeful that he will soon be back among them, telling them that his case is to be appealed, and that he will be out in a year.”
The courts will next turn their attention to Campine’s common-law wife, Bertha Durant. Durant, calling herself Bertha Campine, claimed to be his lawful wife in an affidavit supporting his application for exemption from the wartime military draft. She now faces a perjury charge.
— Kevin Gilbert