DOB 1940, Lithuania, immigrated to US circa 1947 with parents. Quickly fell into crime, and became a figure of sport for the city’s newspapers, which liked to refer to his “self-styled aristocratic lineage” and his “castle” in Mattapan. A part-time security guard, he was arrested in 1962 for a safe job on Summer Street. The Baron told the curt his grandfather was a count in Czarist Russia and that his father is a German nobleman.

 Almost five years later, in February 1967, the Baron turned up missing, shortly after the disappearance of Edward “Wimpy” Bennett, a loanshark with whom he was associated. (In 1962, he’d been arrested in Dearborn Square, Roxbury – one of the areas controlled by Wimpy and the Flemmi brothers.) The cops got a call about an abandoned automobile on the Medford-Somerville line, and when they saw the vanity plates – AVE – they knew that the Baron would not be down for breakfast. His corpse was in the trunk of his 1965 gold Mustang, a rope around its neck, although he probably died of either two gunshots or “blunt injuries” to his head administered with a tire iron. His shoes were missing.

 He had been indicted on bank fraud charges the previous fall with William Waugh and Earl Smith, who had tried to set up Punchy McLaughlin for a hit. He was reportedly deeply in debt to loan sharks.

 Mrs. Annette von Etter was too distraught to identify the body. He also left behind a child.