"Bring me the head man!"
The head man being Monsignor D. P. O'Connell
Dedicated on November 26, 1848, the beautiful Saint Mary’s Cathedral, today a Basilica, in Galveston, Texas, like all churches, should be a peaceful place of prayer.
However, the peace of the parish was disturbed by an incident coinciding with its 100th anniversary.
On Monday, November 29, 1948, a thirty-eight-year-old merchant seaman made the mistake of his life: he broke into the rectory at four-thirty in the morning intending to rob the place. The intruder was wearing a dark handkerchief over his lower face and holding a revolver when he approached the bedroom and woke the sleeping assistant rector, Father Joseph Dazio.
But the perp wasn’t satisfied with an assistant. “Bring me the head man! Bring me the head man! This is a stick-up!” he told the dozing Dazio.
“I wasn’t sure what to do,” Father Dazio told reporters. “He was talking rather fast and using abusive language. I got out of bed and took him to Monsignor O’Connell.”
The startled monsignor rose from his slumber and all three men went to the office where the safe was kept while the perp continued to warn the two pajama-clad priests that if he didn’t get the money he would “fill them full of lead!”
The monsignor opened the safe and the intruder told Father Dazio to put the currency into his left pocket while he held the gun in his right; but when the perp stooped to pick up some sacks of change – quarters, dimes, and nickels – Monsignor O’Connell grabbed an aluminum bookend off a nearby desk and bludgeoned the villain. Father Dazio jumped in, slugging the man and wrestling him to the floor.
When detectives arrived, they found the crook “dazed by the beating, sprawled on the floor, surrounded by several hundred dollars in change.”
Monsignor O’Connell got a bruised eye, Father Dazio’s hand was injured, the merchant seaman was charged with “burglary at night” and “felony theft,” but the church funds were secure - thanks to the bookend-bonking by “the head man” and the fisticuffs of his assistant.