Nothing of the gaunt, bald criminal known only as the Needle was set down before January 1942, beyond his own admission that he had once performed in the circus. By that winter he had turned to extortion, demanding tribute of wealthy men and murdering those who refused—the killings carried out by his confederate Reynauld, a circus midget small enough to mail himself to a victim in a parcel and emerge after dark to fire a heavy needle-gun at the sleeping mark. When the Needle marked Sylvester Pemberton for death, he drew the notice of the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy; in the ensuing struggle Reynauld’s needle struck the Needle himself, and both were taken by the police (Star-Spangled Comics #4).

That same winter the dying master-criminal called the Hand set five freed felons against the Seven Soldiers of Victory, the Needle—who had crossed the pair before—drawing the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy. From an unfinished skyscraper he meant to turn a stolen experimental ray upon the Panama Canal and sell the weapon abroad, but the Kid deflected the beam with a borrowed shield, toppled him from the building, and returned him to the law (Leading Comics #1). 

Breaking jail with a pistol whittled from an ink-blackened potato, he next sought the priceless Star of Delhi at a charity fete on the Pemberton estate, forging a duplicate, posing as the gem’s owner, and leaving Sylvester Pemberton to drown in a locked bath while he made the switch—only for the cold water to revive his victim, and for both stones to prove forgeries already stolen by another hand (Star-Spangled Comics #5).

In the spring he seized a steamer to take a sinister painting bound for John Pemberton and fell in with Dr. Weerd, each plotting to betray the other; a third thief, the strangler called the Assassin, throttled the Needle senseless and made off with the canvas, and when the heroes ran the plot to ground the Needle and Dr. Weerd slipped away together into the sea (Star-Spangled Comics #7). That summer he again joined Dr. Weerd, with a glowing-faced rogue called Moonglow, against an unknown killer who was murdering underworld bosses to the chapters of a serialized novel; the three were caught looting a perfume works, and the Needle handed to the police with the killer (Star-Spangled Comics #9).

By late 1942 he had become a celebrated graduate of a hidden “College of Crime,” and on its alumni day it was the Needle—who knew the boy as Sylvester Pemberton—whose sharp eye pierced the Star-Spangled Kid’s disguise, though too late to save the school, which the heroes broke up and gave to the law (Star-Spangled Comics #15). His most ambitious scheme came the next spring: a nationwide crime wave run from a network of victory farms, his orders carried in invisible ink upon eggs and his plunder shipped out hidden in canned goods. Tracing the racket to its rural hub, the heroes were marked for death by the Needle’s own hand—but the Kid had charged the villain’s arsenal with blanks, and the pair feigned death long enough to break the operation and leave the Needle and his men for the arriving police (Star-Spangled Comics #20).

The later activities of the Needle are unknown.