John Stoppelli was in trouble with the law from his teenage years when he stole carrier pigeons from a Long Island City coup. In 1938 he was questioned following the death of a beautiful dancer named Thelma Giroux. The woman leaped to her death from a fifth story window of the Lincoln Hotel in New York City. Giroux's death was eventually ruled a suicide. In the mid-1940s Stoppelli was implicated in a multinational drug ring that brought heroin into the United States from Mexico. The ring had members from New York and California. Operative from 1941-1945 it was managed by a close associate of Mafioso Charles "Lucky" Luciano.