Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [13]
The Newton Brothers typified the mistake-prone amateurs who ushered in the motorized age; they were arrested in the wake of their Roundout, Illinois, job. The criminal credited with introducing a new level of professionalism to bank robbery was Herman K. Lamm, a German émigré known as “The Baron.” Born in 1880, Lamm is a quasimythic figure; some claim he began his career with the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. What is known is that around 1917, while in a Utah prison, he developed a rigorous system for robbing banks. Lamm pioneered the “casing” of banks, the observation of bank guards, alarms, and tellers; a bank was known as a “jug,” and an expert caser of banks was known as a “jug marker.” Each member of Lamm’s gang was assigned a role in the robbery: the lookout, the getaway driver, the lobby man, the vault man.
Most important, Lamm is credited with devising the first detailed getaway maps, or “gits.” Once he targeted a bank, Lamm mapped the nearby back roads, known as “cat roads,” to a tenth of a mile, listing each landmark and using a stopwatch to time distances. Any teenager with a birdgun could rob a bank; it was getting away that posed a challenge. Lamm’s detailed gits, clipped to the dashboard of a car, took the guesswork out of the getaway. His gang was credited with dozens of robberies during the 1920s, until Lamm was shot and killed near Clinton, Indiana, in 1930. By then his system had been widely imitated. Two of his men would teach it to an Indiana prison inmate named John Dillinger.
Baron Lamm’s peers included three older men who would influence many of the yeggs who rose to prominence in 1933 and 1934. One was Eddie Bentz, a nomadic Seattle-born bank robber and book lover who fancied himself an intellectual. Bentz, who mentored both Machine Gun Kelly and Baby Face Nelson, traveled with a chestful of the classics and in his spare time could sometimes be found leafing through a copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Another notable Jazz Age yegg was Harvey Bailey, a onetime bootlegger so gentlemanly he termed the female hostages he loaded into his getaway cars “hostesses.” Bailey masterminded the most celebrated raid of the 1920s, the robbery of cash-laden messengers outside the Denver Mint in 1922. He was so successful he retired for a time, opening a chain of gas stations and car washes on Chicago’s South Side, until he lost almost everything in the 1929 stock market crash. Resurrecting his career from a base in St. Paul, Bailey mentored a number of young bank men who congregated at the city’s notorious Green Lantern tavern, including Machine Gun Kelly, Alvin Karpis, and the Barker brothers. Arrested on a Kansas City golf course in 1932, he led a massive prison breakout on May 31, 1933, and went back to robbing banks.
The last of the great Jazz Age yeggs was the man whose smuggled guns freed Bailey from prison, his friend Frank “Jelly” Nash. Nash, a stout figure with a comic toupee who began his career robbing trains on horseback in his native Oklahoma, was a Leavenworth escapee who also worked out of St. Paul, robbing banks with Bailey and the Barker Gang.
All three of these men—Eddie Bentz, Harvey Bailey, and Frank Nash—were destined to play roles in the Great Crime Wave of 1933-34. It was Nash who accidentally triggered the war with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. He did it not with a bank robbery or a high-profile kidnapping, but with the simple desire for a quiet Arkansas vacation.
2
A MASSACRE BY PERSONS UNKNOWN
June 8 to June 15, 1933
From a newsman’s point of view, the month of June opened quietly. In Washington, senators debated the Roosevelt administration’s industrial recovery bill. Each morning brought a worrisome new headline from Germany; on Tuesday,