(Exciting Comics 009, 1941)
Dr Zinn feels like a character who is somehow aware of my classification system and who is desperate not to be relegated to the ranks of the Generic Costumed Villain (yes, the "costumed" part has lost all meaning, I know) and so has shoehorned as many extra details into his appearance as possible to force me to give him Minor Super-Villain status. "what if I wasn't just a super tall hypnotist, but also obsessed with snakes? And what if I ran a cult, the Cult of the Serpent, full of mind controlled thralls and they were also obsessed with snakes?" And I guess it worked.
Dr Zinn's main goal in his one appearance is to get ahold of the contents of a safe deposit box owned by a Mr Britt and his daughter, and while they never lay out what exactly is in there I certainly hope it's securities or deeds to property or something, because if that little bundle of paper is meant to be cash then it's like ten thousand dollars tops (I guess the Britts could have gotten their hands on some vanishingly-rare ten thousand dollar bills but we're still not talking about multiple millions) and even in 1941 that's not enough money to go to so much effort for.
Zinn is captured after Edith Britt hires PI par excellence Dan Williams, who really undercuts the threat of hypnotic mind control by giving him a couple of eyes full of black pepper.
Addendum: I almost forgot to mention that Dr Zinn (whose first name is Mephiste, by the way) comes to the attention of the law when he orders some poisonous snakes through the mail and some get out and kill two postal workers, and he just grabs the rest and skedaddles out of there.
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