In the fall of 1962, attention in Reading’s underworld drifted away from Abe Minker and the city’s familiar vice rackets to a quieter figure with powerful connections: Frank Donato. Though Reading was Minker’s turf, Donato had enough pull to run a numbers operation from his home while reporting up the chain to the Philadelphia Mafia under Angelo Bruno. A year earlier, Treasury agents had raided Donato’s residence at 29 South 2nd Street, seizing six boxes of gambling materials and charging him with taking wagers without the required federal occupational stamp. What never appeared in public paperwork, but quickly became mob lore, was a supposedly missing cache—$31,000 that Philadelphia believed Donato owed the “boss.”
At about 10:15 p.m., while walking his dog near 2nd and Franklin, a black station wagon carrying five men rolled to the curb. Two jumped out, handcuffed Donato, and hustled him into the car. Thinking he was in federal custody, Donato didn’t cry out. The abductors pushed the dog out in West Lawn, then continued along Penn Avenue, turned onto Fritztown Road, and exited at Chapel Hill Road. There they stripped his T-shirt, tied his hands, and lashed him to a tree. The interrogation was blunt: “Where’s the money?” “You owe the boss $31,000.” Donato insisted he had “a few hundred in the bank.” After threatening him and jamming a gag in his mouth, the crew said they were headed to his house to make his sister hand over the cash; if she didn’t, they warned, they’d be back. They took $54 from his pocket and drove off.
Donato, sweating and straining on a warm night, worked himself free of the twine, removed the gag, and finally reached a nearby home where resident Philip Klahold let him phone authorities. State Troopers Warren Werner and Jack Bednar responded. Meanwhile, three of the abductors returned to South 2nd Street: the youngest waited in a parked car as two men walked to No. 29 and rang the bell. Inside, Donato’s sister Jenny opened the door to two armed strangers—John Miller and James Porter—who pushed into the living room, flashed Frank’s keys, and demanded “the thirty-one thousand.” They searched and came up empty, then returned the keys and stepped outside—just as city police arrived, capturing Porter and later finding Frank Townsend Jr. idling in a car down the street. Out on Penn Avenue, state troopers pulled over the station wagon Donato had identified, arresting Frank Townsend Sr. and George Sykes…