Public Enemies Read Online Free PDF Page B

term in Sing Sing. Smith’s brainstorm led to an early advance in U.S. bank security—the advent of safes—in 1834. Until the Civil War, armed robberies of banks were all but unknown. During the war, Confederate raiders robbed several Northern banks, but the first recorded bank robbery by a civilian came on December 15, 1863, when an irate man named Edward Green wandered into a bank in Malden, Massachusetts, shot a banker in the head, and, as an afterthought, scooped up $5,000. For his place in history Green earned an 1866 date with a noose.
    The first organized bank robbery in peacetime, an 1866 raid in Liberty, Missouri, was carried out by a ragtag band of out-of-work Confederate irregulars led by the brothers Frank and Jesse James. The James Gang’s string of robberies over the next fifteen years was glamorized by the press, bringing bank robbery to the attention of a number of Western imitators, including the Dalton Brothers, Bill Doolin, and the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. With the migration of Cassidy’s core group to South America in 1901 and the shrinking of the Western frontier, bank robbing faded from popular consciousness. Banks continued to be robbed, but no outlaw achieved national notoriety, and while statistics are unreliable, the number of armed robberies probably fell during the years before World War I.
    Nor did they soar after the war. Until the mid-1920s, most ambitious thieves preferred nocturnal bank burglaries. A case in point was the Newton Gang, a band of four Texas brothers who hit dozens of Midwestern banks between 1919 and 1924. Their tactics were those of burglars across the nation; they broke into banks at night, used a nitroglycerine explosion to “pop” safe doors, and were generally gone before a sheriff could mobilize pursuit. This strategy worked until banks reacted in the mid-1920s by introducing reinforced safes and alarms. The Newtons and their peers were forced to initiate daylight robberies. Their biggest strike, the $2 million robbery of a mail train in Roundout, Illinois, outside Chicago, was the decade’s largest.
    When the federal government suddenly found itself engaged in open warfare with groups of heavily armed bank robbers in 1934, many asked why. The common answer was the Depression. It was true, as far as it went: many bank robbers were desperate, unemployed men. But blaming the Great Crime Wave of 1933-34 on the Depression ignores the fact that the years between 1925 and 1932 amounted to a golden age for American bank robbers, known in the press as “yeggmen,” or “yeggs.” Robberies along what came to be known as the “crime corridor,” from Texas to Minnesota, soared. Between 1920 and 1929, the Travelers Insurance Company reported that property crimes—from bank robberies to drugstore stickups—jumped from 17 to 965 a year in its Dallas office; 30 to 300 in Gary, Indiana; 9 to 836 in Saginaw, Michigan. 6 The violence that catapulted men like John Dillinger to prominence in 1934 wasn’t the beginning of a crime wave; it was the end of one.
    The spread of bank robberies was the result of technology outstripping the legal system. Faster, more powerful weapons, especially the 800-bullet-per-minute Thompson submachine gun introduced after World War I, allowed yeggs to outgun all but the best-armed urban policemen. But the greatest impetus was the automobile, especially new models with reliable, powerful V-8 engines. While a county sheriff was still hand-cranking his old Model A, a modern yegg could speed away untouched. A Frenchman may have been the first to use a car to escape a bank robbery, in 1915; one of the first Americans to try it was an aging Oklahoma yegg, Henry Starr, who used a Nash to rob a bank in Harrison, Arkansas, in 1921. The practice caught on.
    “Seventy-five percent of all crimes now are perpetrated with the aid of the automobile,” one crime writer noted in 1924. “Automobiles and good roads have done