John got his early education in the ways and means of bank heists from me and Red and Charley and Russ—and then a couple of rough characters named Walt Dietrich and Oklahoma Jack Clark came to M City and we all learned even more about the business. For the previous two years they’d been part of the Herman Lamm gang, the best band of bank robbers ever.
The way Dietrich told it, Lamm had been an officer in the German army until he got in some kind of bad fix just before the war and amscrayed from Europe to the USA, where he took up the time-honored occupation of holdup man, and if anybody can be said to have made a true profession of bank robbery, Lamm’s the guy. Until he came along, bank robbers had been operating in much the same catch-as-catch-can fashion since the days of Jesse James. You picked out a bank and went in and pulled your piece and told everybody to stand pat, you bagged all the cash you could lay your hands on, and then you made a run for it. Lamm regarded that technique as primitive Wild West stuff. He believed a bank job should be a clockwork operation, as well planned as a military raid, and he worked out a system of operation.
The first step was to become thoroughly familiar with the bank he was going to hit. He learned its routine and found out how many employees there were and what their jobs were, who the manager was and what kind of safe or vault the place had. He made a map of the layout and every member of the gang memorized it. He found out if the cops regularly patrolled the bank’s neighborhood, and if they did, he learned what the patrol schedule was. He studied street maps of the town and road maps of the region, then made his own map and noted on it the precise distances and speed limits and travel times from point to point on the getaway route. He’d do the same with a backup route, in case they’d have to use it. Every man in the gang had a specific job and every job had to be done with perfect timing. Timing was the key. Lamm would figure to the exact second how long a job should take from the moment they entered the bank until they came out again, and he never deviated from the timetable by a hair, not even if it meant leaving some of the money behind.
But there’s an old saying in the criminal trades—when you set out to pull a job there’s a hundred things that can go wrong, and if you can think of fifty of them you’re a mastermind. Even the best-laid plans require a lot of luck. Lamm sure had his share of it to last more than a dozen years, which is a hell of a long run in the robbery business. His luck ran out in Clinton, Indiana, when the getaway car blew a tire in front of the bank. They grabbed another car but it couldn’t go faster than thirty miles an hour, and Dietrich later read in the paper that the car belonged to an old man whose son had slyly rigged the throttle so his daddy couldn’t speed. The gang switched to still another car but it ran out of gas inside of ten miles. You run out of everything when you run out of luck.
Two hundred cops and vigilantes caught up to them and opened fire. Lamm and two others in the gang were killed. Walt and Okie Jack considered themselves blessed that they’d been allowed to surrender. They’d come to M City on life sentences for big bitch convictions.
There was no denying the beauty of Herman Lamm’s system. All it required was a smooth and well-disciplined team, and we knew that team was us. I think it’s safe to say it’ll be a good long while before anybody robs banks as…artfully, that’s the word for it…as artfully as we did.
I hadn’t heard a word from Mary, not that I’d expected to, since she’d told me she’d gotten married, but I never did stop thinking about her. She stayed in touch with Earl, however, and he kept me informed of how things were going for her. Almost from the start they hadn’t gone well in her marriage. It turned out that her husband, the Kinder guy, was a small-time stickup man. Yep, the son of the police sergeant. They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but every now and then an apple will take a big bounce when it hits the ground and some will roll a long way down the hill. Earl said Mary hadn’t been specific, but reading between the lines he got the impression Kinder was a boozer and sometimes smacked her around. What I wouldn’t give for five minutes with that guy, Earl said. I didn’t say anything, but my gut was tight as a fist.
They hadn’t been married very long before Kinder took a fall for armed robbery and was sent to M City. Earl found out from Mary and his first impulse had been not to tell me until after he’d had first crack at the guy. But he’d been suffering for weeks from some kind of respiratory infection, coughing almost constantly, and he wasn’t sure he was in shape to give Kinder what he deserved. So he came to me and told me the news. Imagine my glee.
Red and Russell went with me to Kinder’s cell house one evening before lockdown. I wanted them along to keep away witnesses, but when the other cons on the row saw the three of us coming they all ducked into their cages and stayed there. Red positioned himself on one side of Kinder’s cell and Russell on the other, and I went in.
Kinder was on his bunk but jumped up when he saw me. His cellmate wasn’t there—maybe he’d seen us coming, maybe he was just lucky.
Who the hell are you, Kinder said, giving me a hard-guy look he’d probably picked up from the movies.
He was shorter than me but thicker and heavier. To tell the truth I wouldn’t have taken it any easier on him if he’d been a midget.
Got a message for you, I said. From Mary.
His expression got curious. My wife? What’s she want?
I gave him the first one in the solar plexus so he couldn’t yell out, then held him against the wall with one hand and punched him with the other for a while before I let him fall. I kicked him in the face until his nose was a bloody ruin and some of his teeth were on the floor and his lower jaw was turned at an angle you wouldn’t believe. I stomped on his hands until they were bloated and purple and some of the fingers pointed in different directions. See how many women he could beat up with those.
He was curled up on his side and moaning low, his breath gargly, when I bent close to his ear and said Don’t call her your wife again, you yellow son of a bitch. And don’t even dream about fingering me. You do, you’re dead.
As Red and Russ and I walked back down the row, not a con was out on the tier and nobody said a word to us as we passed the cells.
Not long after that I got a letter from Mary saying Earl had told her what I’d done, although he’d been skimpy on details. She thanked me for taking up for her. She called herself the biggest dope in the world for marrying Kinder. She’d known he wasn’t very smart but she’d had no idea he was so stupid or such a bully. Talk about stupid, she said, look how stupid she’d been to think it was so god-awful important to wait till she was married rather than indulge herself with me—that was how she put it—while she’d had the chance. I rue my mistakes, she wrote. She placed a bright red lipstick kiss at the end of the letter, and below that she wrote Thinking of you.
She came to see me on the next visiting day and brought me a batch of fudge. The scooped neck of her dress exposed the sprinkle of freckles along her collarbone. I had an aching erection the whole time we talked.
She thought she must be awful bad luck for the men in her life, seeing as she had a husband and a brother and me all in prison. She didn’t care that she was bad luck to Kinder, but she was sorry about me and Earl. She thought a curse ran in the women in her family. Her mother’s most recent ex-husband, Burke, had been killed in a car crash a week before their divorce was to become final. He was on his way back to Indy from Cleveland after phoning her and saying he wanted to talk about the two of them giving it another try. God only knew what was in store for her mother’s new husband, a car mechanic named Jocko who’d already had a few scrapes with the law.
Her mother’s problem wasn’t that she was bad luck for men, it was that she took up with men who were no good, and I told Mary she’d made the same mistake with Kinder. She wasn’t bad luck, I assured her, not for me.
When our time was up we touched fingertips through the wire mesh and she looked like she might cry and laugh at the same time. She whispered Oh baby how I wish. And blew me a ki
ss as she got up to go.
That winter the wind came off the lake and over the dunes even harder than usual. It ripped through the prison grounds every day like an icy sandblast. I’d walk in the yard with my collar up and my hands deep in my pockets, my eyes stinging, and I’d think and think. By winter’s end I’d come up with an escape plan.
It was different from my others in that it was long-range and called for patience, never my strong suit. Still it was a plan we all agreed on. We was only six of us to begin with—me, Red, Charley, Russell, Walt Dietrich, and Okie Jack.
It was my plan, but in fairness I have to give a lot of credit to Fat Charley. He always insisted that a plan should be simple as possible. The more complicated the scheme, he said, the more things that can go wrong with it. The way he saw it we needed only one thing to try a break—guns. With guns and a little luck we might be able to take hostages and use them to get past the gates to the outside.
When Charley had first mentioned this idea to the rest of us, Russell smacked a palm up to his forehead and said Guns, of course—why the hell didn’t I think of that? Then he laughed in Charley’s face.
Red said That’s a pretty simple plan all right. Why don’t we just ask the warden if we can borrow the keys to the place? That’s even simpler and it’s got about as much chance.
That was the problem in a nutshell—how to get the guns into the joint. Months crawled by and none of us could think of a way. Then there was a major change in inmate job assignments and Dietrich was made the supply clerk in the shirt factory. That’s when the answer to the gun problem came to me.
I didn’t say anything about it right away. I wanted to have the thing worked out as much as possible before running it by the guys. I grilled Dietrich like a cop about the supply procedures in the shirt factory. And then I had a talk with Pearl Elliott. I needed her to convey a proposal to a Mr. Williams, the shipping manager of a certain trucking company in Chicago. She was gone for a week before coming back and informing me that the deal was acceptable to Mr. Williams, but he’d have to have his money in advance. No tickee no washee was how he’d put it to her.
The following afternoon out in the windy yard I laid it all out for the other guys. The whole thing depended on John and on the assumption that he would get his parole when he went up for it sometime in the coming spring. I wasn’t sure he would throw in with us, and if he hadn’t, the plan would’ve died then and there. But he was as keen for it as the rest of us.
You boys can count on me, he said.
It was a lot of groundwork he’d have to do, I said, and it wouldn’t be easy.
He said he could handle it.
Red said that was easy to say, but rounding up the dough to pay for the groundwork would be one risk after another.
John said it wouldn’t be as much fun if it wasn’t.
Oh man, Russell said, listen to this guy.
I told John it might be fun for him because he’d already be out there free as a bird, but we’d still be inside, sitting on our hands waiting for the big day.
Dietrich said John hadn’t got the parole yet and we were counting an unhatched chicken there as far as he was concerned.
John said the man had a point. After all, he thought a Pendleton parole was a cinch and it fell through.
I said if he kept his nose clean until he went before the board the parole would be in the bag.
He looked around at the others and said Get a load of who’s telling who to keep his nose clean.
It got a laugh. Charley said it was a distinct case of the pot advising the kettle against blackness.
They were right, and from then on I began walking a finer line myself. I couldn’t afford to get put in the hole while we were prepping John, and once he was out I didn’t want to get clapped into solitary and miss out on anything going on with him.
The only thing John asked for was that Jenkins be in on the break. His correspondence with Jenkins’s sister had heated up plenty—whenever he got a letter from her he brought it over so I could smell the perfume—and I guess he felt an obligation to her brother.
It was a minor favor compared to what John would be doing for us, so I said Okay, he’s in.
Smuggling the guns into M City required a five-thousand-dollar payoff to Mr. Williams in Chicago and we didn’t have five bucks among the lot of us. But bringing in the guns was the last step in the plan. As I’d come to see it, the trouble with most prison breaks was that the guys didn’t plan far enough ahead. Almost all their thinking went into the break and not to what they’d need after they got outside the walls—namely, safe places to stay and enough money to get by on. Guys who don’t plan ahead are forced to act out of desperation, and desperation makes for bad decisions. That’s why most guys who make it over the walls are caught so soon. My idea wasn’t simply to break out but also to have everything else all set up and waiting—two or three separate hideouts with the rent paid two months in advance at each one. Clothes, guns, good cars with legitimate plates. And sufficient cash on hand to get by on until we were ready for our first job.
No telling how long it would take John to round up the money for all those things—on top of the five grand for Williams—and get everything in order, but he had to do it all before smuggling the guns to us. Once we got the guns, we’d have to move fast, before they could be discovered in a sudden shakedown or some fink got wind of them and put the button on us.
Over the next few months we gave John a crash course in the basics of making your way around in what the newspapers love to call the underworld. We made up a roster of guys for him to get in touch with who would make good heist partners. We drew up a list of banks that we knew handled payrolls for factories and other businesses. Charley and Walt made a list of different fences in Indianapolis, Chicago, and East Chicago where John could sell bonds and new currency.
Charley and I also helped him play the Good Convict in preparation for his parole hearing. We kept him on a tight leash and out of trouble with the other cons and made him mind his p’s and q’s—no gambling or sassing the hacks or fooling around with punks and never mind his complaints about headaches. We edited every letter he wrote to his family. Each one testified to a reformed character and sincere contrition for his wayward youth and was of course meant to impress the prison censors and make it into his board review file. Now and then he’d sound like he was auditioning for a church choir and we’d make him tone it down. Sincere but restrained, I told him, that was the ticket.
Pearl Elliott had agreed to be our go-between once he got out. I made John memorize her telephone number and the address of the Side Pocket in Kokomo. He asked if I was sure she could be trusted, and I said As sure as I am about you. Oh hell, he said, you better keep a damn close eye on her.
We grinned at each other like loonies.
Sometime in there I came to find out Homer Van Meter would be going before the board within days of John’s hearing and that he was pulling the same Good Convict act. He was working in the prison hospital and walking the straight and narrow, doing his best to convince the bosses he had finally seen the light. When I asked John if he knew the scarecrow was coming up for parole, he said sure he did but he hadn’t mentioned it because he didn’t think I’d be interested. I said I’d be sorely disappointed if he took up with the guy once they were both out. He’s a damn clown, I said, and you don’t have time for clowns. You said we could count on you and we’re taking you at your word.
He gave me that wiseguy smile and said the only way he’d ever let me down is if they killed him.
In May he got the parole. On the morning of his release he shook hands with all of us and said to sit tight and he’d be in touch soon. Then the Indiana state penitentiary gave him five dollars and showed him the door.
Out in the yard a little later that day Russell said that if he was in John’s shoes he might have second thoughts. He might wonder why he should risk getting put back in the slam for any reason except robbing banks.
&nb
sp; I could tell by their faces that the others had been thinking along the same line. There were ten of us in on the break now. John Burns had thrown in and so had Joe Fox, who was doing life, and Ed Shouse—that miserable bastard. Shouse was doing twenty-five years for robbery, but if I’d known back then the kind of guy he really was, he would’ve received capital punishment. From me.
You might have second thoughts, I told Russell, but you’d come through.
Yeah, Russell said, but that’s me.
Charley said he didn’t know if John would have second thoughts but it wouldn’t be surprising if he was distracted from his mission. After all, he said, the lad hasn’t had a taste of the free life in nine years.
Hasn’t had any poon in nine years is what you mean, Red said. He said if he was in John’s shoes the top item on his things-to-do list wouldn’t be us guys, it’d be making up for what he’d been missing. The way he saw it, even if John didn’t have second thoughts, it’d probably take him a while to get around to business.
And even when John did get around to business, Dietrich said, if just one job went bad and he got taken down, that would be all she wrote. We’d have no man on the outside and it’d be back to the drawing board.
He’ll come through, I said.
Perhaps he will, said Charley, but like all else beyond the immediate moment, it remains to be seen.
He’ll come through, I said.
How do you know, Russell said.
I just do, I said.
Well hell, Pete, that’s a load off my mind, Red said.
Jesus. I think about it now and I wonder what made us think we had a chance. So many things could’ve gone wrong.
Then again, what could’ve happened…did.
Handsome Harry Page 8
