The activities of the criminals known as the Amazing Farads are unknown prior to 1949 when they began a series of brazen thefts in Calvin City.  Their initial target was museum collection of artifacts of the Haida people, an indigenous tribes of the islands off British Columbia.  After Ridley subdues a guard and takes his uniform to serve as a look out, three members infiltrate the museum to seek out the artifacts. 

Serendipitously, Al Pratt arrived at the museum to conduct research for a research paper in his collegiate studies on Native American cultures.  He encounter Ridley, thinking him the real guard and after a period of stalling, he is admitted passage.  The gang, having heard someone coming, quickly disguised themselves as Haina Indians and formed a totem pole.  As Pratt perused too closely,  they threw a tomahawk at him.  Seemingly scared off, the Farads resume their plunder only to see  the Atom quickly rush in.  While the hero initially had the upper hand, he did not see Ridley approaching from behind and was rendered unconscious by a sharp blow to the head.

When he came to, he found himself suspended above a pit of knives the a fraying rope.  The Farads, loaded down with rare artifacts, mocked the Atom and departed.  Using the weight of his body, the Atom slings himself free and sees that in their haste, they have dropped a brass ring.  Speculating that a ring of that nature was commonly found at the circus and that their acrobatic skills would provide a useful cover in a traveling operation, the Atom makes his way to a carnival outside town.  Entering the Big Top, he finds Ridley manning a human cannon and subdues him right as he fires it, sending the Farads into their act.  Bounding into the ring, the Atom intercepts the criminal aerialists and begins to juggle them until the police arrive.  Seeing the stolen artifacts, the Farads are carted off to jail (Unpublished issue of Flash Comics).

The activities of the Farads otherwise are not known.  It is worth noting that Batman encountered a very similar gang known as the Three Devils (Detective Comics #50) in 1941 and again in the 1950's whereas Starman encountered a likewise similar group, the Three Comets, in 1944 (Adventure Comics #92).  It is possible that all of these criminal groups are the same individuals, operating with different names in different towns to create confusion and shadow of a doubt at their eventual trials.  Whether such is the case is not known.