JOHN DILLINGER WAS THE consummate public enemy of the 1930s. The amazing thing is that he achieved this status

in a criminal career that spanned a mere eleven months, from September 1933 to July 1934. Dillinger and his mob robbed between ten and twenty banks, plundered three police arsenals, engaged in three spectacular jail breaks, and fought their way out of police traps, murdering ten men and wounding seven others in the process.

Dillinger captured the public imagination with his style and daring, exemplified by his famous "wooden gun" escape. He had a casual impudence toward authority, and he often displayed a form of chivalry during robberies, especially flirting with older women bystanders, that turned him into a Depression era Robin Hood. After all, he just robbed banks, not people, and on occasion told impoverished depositors to hold onto their money, that all the gang wanted was the bank's money.

Dillinger was a master bank robber. His gang's jobs were all well planned and timed to precision. Banks were always cased in advance, usually by gang members posing as journalists or movie directors, who were given a grand tour of the institutions by their chief officers. Getaway routes were planned in minute detail, and dry runs were always made in advance of a robbery.

Where did Dillinger acquire his expertise and technique? From a former inmate of Utah State Prison!

Baron Herman K. Lamm was born circa 1880 in Germany (Prussia) and emigrated to the United States as a teenager prior to the turn of the century. For a brief period Lamm was a relay horse-holder for Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch. In this job he was sometimes joined by an associate, another immigrant, a Russian-born Jew named Itzak Charlie Birger.

In 1901 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid departed for South America. On July 5, 1901, two days after holding a relay of getaway horses for Cassidy following the robbery of the Great Northern train near Wagner, Montana, seventeen year-old Charlie Birger enlisted in the calvary. From his advantageous position Birger funneled information on express and railroad payroll shipments to Lamm and a few associates who had organized a robbery gang from remnants of the Wild Bunch.

The gang consisted of, in addition to Lamm and Birger, William Wild Bill Cruzan, William T. Phillips, Norman E. Weaver, and occasionally one or two others. During the period from 1901 to about 1905, this gang pulled off a number of spectacular robberies, including train robberies in the Idaho panhandle near

Sandpoint in 1902 and another near Unaweep, Colorado, in 1903.

During 1904-05 Lamm operated a burglary and robbery gang along the Wasatch Front in Utah in association with Lew McCarty, son of Tom McCarty and nephew of Matt Warner, both members of the Wild Bunch. They robbed stores and trolley cars in Salt Lake City, mugged strollers in Liberty Park, and burglarized private homes in a wide area from Ogden, to Manti in central Utah.

At the later place, young Lew McCarty was thrown into jail and made a daring escape shortly thereafter, perhaps aided by Lamm and other associates.

Now it became too hot for Lamm and his gang to remain in the region. Sometime following 1905 the group left to join Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid in South America. Not much is known about Lamm's activities in this region, but a few fact are known about other members of his gang. William T. Phillips, alias Harry Nation, operated a train and mine payroll robbery gang in Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia. Lew McCarty, alias Willie Wilson, alias Kid Wilson, was shot to death by a posse near Rio Pico, Argentina, in 19 10. In the same gun battle The Sundance Kid was shot through the lungs but survived.

When it appeared imminent that his native Germany would go to war sometime prior to 19.14, Herman K. Lamm returned to his homeland and enlisted in the military. About 1916, just before World War I broke out in full force, Lamm was caught cheating at cards and discharged from his regiment.

Emigrating once again to the United States, Lamm returned to his old stomping ground in Utah. He put his military training and study of tactics to the best possible use as a holdup man, and robbed several banks and individuals before being caught. He was sentenced in 1917 to a term in Utah State Prison.

In prison Baron Lamb (a title he assumed after being in the German military) determined that he had been doing something wrong-not legally or morally, but in getting caught. He worked up what became known as the Baron Lamm technique of bank robbery.

It was Lamm's belief that a bank job required all the planning of a military campaign, with a full range of options to allow for unforeseen developments. When he was released from prison, Lamm organized another bank robbery gang and drilled the members in a fashion that would have done a Prussian sergeant proud. He spent many hours in a bank before robbing it, drawing up a detailed floor plan, noting the location of the safes, and whose duty it was to open them. He put his men through a complete series of rehearsals, sometimes even using a full mock-up of the bank's interior. Each man was given a specific assignment, a zone of the bank to survey for possible trouble, and an exact time schedule for his duties. Lamm's cardinal rule was that the job had to be performed on schedule, and that the gang had to leave the bank at the specified time, no matter how little or how much loot had been collected.

The next phase of the operation, the getaway, received meticulous attention from the Baron. He always obtained a nondescript model car with a high-powered engine, and his driver was usually a veteran of the race tracks. Lamm pasted a chart on the dashboard for the driver to follow. The escape route, with alternate turns and speedometer readings, was marked block by block. Before the robbery Lamm and the driver clocked the route to the second under various weather conditions.

From the end of World War I until 1930 Baron Lamm's men were the most efficient gang of bank robbers in the business, pulling dozens of jobs without a hitch.

Meanwhile, the indomitable Charlie Birger had organized his own gang in Williamson County, Illinois, to which Lamm temporarily aligned himself. After a great deal of mayhem and murder, Charlie Birger was convicted of murder and hanged at 9:45 a.m., April 19, 1928.

Lamm's gang consisted of various members over the years, recruited somewhat from the Birger gang, the Weaver gang, and other Midwest groups. It was from one of these factions that Lamm recruited Harvey Bailey. Bailey, at that early date, was not so well-known as he would become later when he joined ranks with Machine Gun George Kelley.

One of the most spectacular robberies perpetrated by the Lamm gang, with the expert help of Harvey Bailey, was the robbery of the Denver Mint, December 18, 1922. The "Denver Mint" robbery is technically a misnomer. The robbery was of a delivery truck of the Federal Reserve Branch Bank of Denver. The truck was picking up a consignment of currency that had been stored for security at the Denver Mint.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Denver (branch of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank) was located at that time in the Interstate Trust Building at 16th and Lawrence Streets. Vaults there were inadequate, so large amounts of currency and coin were kept in the Mint building on Colfax Avenue.

Some days prior to the robbery,Lamm and his associates took an apartment at 13 10 E. Colfax Avenue near the Mint in the Altahama apartment building. At 8 a.m. on December 18, the day of the robbery, the gang had breakfast at the apartment and left about an hour later in a stolen car.

To the bank's men who were to transfer the money that morning from the Mint to the bank, it meant a short but chilly ride in the mesh-wire cage on the back of a pickup truck. Arrangements for the transfer of $200,000, all in new five dollar bills, had been made by coded telegram from the U.S. Comptroller's Office in Washington, D.C., and local telephone from the bank. The currency was wrapped in ten packages, each eighteen inches long, weighing eight pounds each.

Bank cashier J. E. Olsen had Will Havenor drive him to the Mint in the bank's pickup truck. The money was loaded into

the mesh-wire cage and guarded by armed men. As the pickup emerged onto Colfax Avenue, it was cut off by the gang in the stolen car, a big Buick, and a ninety second gunfight ensued.

The pickup was forced to the curb, and the money was hastily removed at gunpoint. As the Buick sped away, it was noticed that one of the robbers, next to the driver, was slumped over. The getaway car sideswiped a truck but managed to escape the robbery scene. Later it was determined that the robbers proceeded to the Altahama apartments to divide up the money and place it in suitcases.

The ninety seconds in front of the Denver Mint triggered the greatest manhunt in Denver history. Garages, public and private, were searched, especially around the Capitol Hill area. Eighteen days after the robbery the Buick, bloody and battered, was located in a residential garage rented at 1631 Gilpin Street. Slumped in the front seat was the frozen body of one of the robbers. He was identified as Nicholas Trainor, alias J.S. Sloane, a member of the gang of Harold G. Bums. A bank guard had also been killed.

Between noon and I p.m. on the day of robberies, voices of members of the gang were heard in the Altahama apartment, where they divided the money before leaving Denver. Two days after the robbery, Mrs. J.S. Sloane, widow of the robber who was found dead, and Mr. and Mrs. Harold G. Bums left the apartment about 3 p.m. carrying suitcases containing their shares of the stolen money. .

Several gangs had joined to pull the Denver Mint robbery. An elaborate trap was set for the remaining criminals in February 1923 in St. Paul, Minnesota, where it was believed the gang had been hiding. Although it failed, $80,000 of the loot was recovered from the cellar of a St. Paul banker. In 1925 federal agents announced they had identified all members of the gang, but no names were made public. In 1934 Denver Police Chief A.T. Clark said that five men and two women, responsible for the robbery, were dead or serving terms for subsequent crimes. Some believe as many as twelve were involved in the heist. However, no one was ever arrested or served time in prison for the Federal Reserve Bank robbery in front of the Denver Mint.

In February 1927 Baron Lamm, using the alias James Madsen, was arrested with two cohorts, Edward Wilheim Bentz, alias Avery Simmons, and James M. Clark at Winston Salem, North Carolina, following the robbery of the First National Bank of Mooresville, North Carolina. Authorities did not know who they had in custody, and the three men soon put up bond, but jumped bail and disappeared.

Finally, things went wrong during the robbery of the Citizens State Bank of Clinton, Indiana, on December 16, 1930. The gang successfully robbed the bank of over $15,000, but when they got to the getaway car, the driver noticed the local barber approaching the bank with a shotgun. The barber, who was one of thousands of Indiana vigilantes organized to help police fight the growing number of bank holdups, was coming to investigate the presence of four strangers in the bank. The driver panicked and pulled a quick U-turn that caused the car to jump a curb and blow a tire. Lamm and his men were forced to seize another car which, unfortunately for them, had a secret governor installed by a man to prevent his elderly father from driving recklessly.

They switched to a truck, but it had very little water in the radiator and began blowing steam. They commandeered another car which happened to be down to just one gallon of gas. The gang was cornered in Illinois by 200 police officers and vigilantes. In the wild gun battle that ensued, Lamm and the driver, F. H. Hunter, were shot down. Lamm died immediately, and Hunter died two days later from his wounds. Another member of the gang, seventy-one year-old G. W. Dad Landy, who once rode with the Dalton gang, shot himself rather than spend his final years in prison.

The other two gang members, James M. Clark, alias Charles M. Wilson; and Walter Dietrich, alias William Martin, alias Walter Reed, were captured and sentenced to life imprisonment on January 3, 193 1, and committed to the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City, Indiana.

When Clark (called Oklahoma Jack) and Dietrich entered Indiana State Prison, they encountered a brash prisoner who was soon to become their leader-John Herbert Dillinger.

The product of an unhappy home lifeJohn's mother died when he was three and his father subsequently remaffied-young Dillinger became a juvenile delinquent. As a member of a youth gang called the Dirty Dozen, he was charged with stealing coal from the Pennsylvania Railroad's gondolas to sell to residents of his Indianapolis neighborhood; he was in the sixth grade at the time.

The Dillinger served a brief stint in the Navy, from which he simply "walked away." He then worked as a novice with several gangs and perhaps knew Baron Lamm at that time. Then, in 1924, he and an older, more seasoned criminal, Ed Singleton, attempted to rob a grocer whom they knew carried the day's receipts on him. The two men accosted their victim, B. F. Morgan, on a darkened street, and Dillinger, armed with a.32, struck him on the head with a bolt wrapped in a handkerchief. The grocer didn't go down but struggled, and Dillinger's gun went off. Frightened, the two would-be robbers ran off.

Apprehended quickly, Dill inger drew a sentence of ten to twenty years, although he had been assured by the local prosecutor that as a first offender, he would be treated lightly if he pleaded guilty. Dillinger's accomplice, ten years older, was brought before a different judge and drew a far shorter sentence; he was released after doing two years. Dillinger ended up doing nine years and the experience embittered him.

In 1934 Indiana Governor Paul V. McNutt's secretary, Wayne Coy, would observe: "There does not seem to me to be any escape from the fact that the State of Indiana made John Dillinger the Public Enemy that he is today. The Indiana constitution provides that our penal code shall be reformative and not vindictive... Instead of reforming the prisoner, the penal institution provided him with an education in crime."

During his time in the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City, Dillinger came in contact with criminals who became his mentors and later his accomplices, among them accomplished bank robbers like Harry Pierpont, John Hamilton, Homer Van Meter, Fat Charley Makley, Oklahoma Jack Clark, and Walter Dietrich.

From Clark and Dietrich, Dillinger learned the details of "the Lamm method" of bank robbery, and he studied the technique and refined it. Lamm's technique, invented in Utah State Prison, became his legacy to John Dillinger in Indiana State Prison, and Dillinger, because of it, would soon emerge to become the greatest public enemy in the history of American crime.

Lamm's influence on Dillinger, however, didn't end there. Lamm had also studied another technique that had to be employed in case of being caught-how to escape. Dillinger studied this technique of Lamm's until he knew its every aspect, and, although he wouldn't need to employ it for himself immediately, he would soon enough use Lamm's ideas to engineer his own amazing escape.

Dillinger was paroled in May 1933. The "inside gang" made him their "outside man" to raise money and aid them in an escape. His duties were to get enough money to make the proper payoffs, buy guns, obtain getaway cars and clothes, and find a hideout for the escapees. He immediately pulled off a series of robberies, including bank job which netted $10,600, and a payroll robbery that yielded more than $24,000.

Dillinger traveled to Chicago where he bribed an intermediary, who was foreman of a thread-making firm, to conceal several guns in a barrel of thread destined for the prison's shirt shop. The barrel was marked with a red X so that the escapees would recognize it. Dillinger probably got the idea from the escape of Harvey Bailey and ten other men from Lansing Penitentiary on Memorial Day of that same year. Bailey had learned it from Baron Lamm.

On September 26, 1933, Harry Pierpont and nine others-including Oklahoma Jack Clark and Walter Dietrich, Lamm's former associates-took several hostages and made their way out of the prison.

Ironically, Dillinger had been arrested and was being held in the jail at Lima, Ohio. On October 12, Columbus Day, the Pierpont gang appointed Makley and Clark to break into the Limajail and free Dillinger. Led by Pierpont, they mortally wounded Sheriff Jess Farber

The Dillinger gang pulled off a string of between ten and twenty bank robberies, vacationed in Florida, then went to Tuscon, Arizona. At Tuscon, several members of the gang were captured on January 10, 1934, including Dillinger, Pierpont, Makley, Clark, and Dietrich. All were flown to Ohio to answer for the death of Sheriff Farber except for Dillinger. Pierpont and Makley were eventually electrocuted, while Clark and Dietrich were given life sentences. Both were paroled in 1948.

Dillinger was flown to Chicago, where that city's entire "Dillinger Squad'~- forty officers permanently assigned to the job of capturing him, and eighty-five other policemen-met the plane. A thirteen-car convoy then took America's most famous prisoner to an "escape-proof 'jail in Crown Point, Indiana.

It was here that Dillinger was to electrify the nation with his famous "wooden gun" escape. Using a small smuggled knife or razor blade, he whittled a wooden gun out of the top of a washboard, colored it with shoe polish, and used it to escape. He used the mock gun to capture and lock up several guards, and then made his way to the warden's office, where he grabbed two machine guns.

He gave one of the machine guns to a black prisoner, thirty-five year-old Herbert Youngblood, and together they locked up several more officers, snatched the car of a lady sheriff, Mrs. Lillian Holley, from the jail parking lot and made good their escape, taking two hostages with them. Dillinger later released the two hostages, giving one, an auto mechanic, four dollars for his troubles.

The wooden gun escape made headlines. Governor McNutt ordered an investigation, and rumors were spread that the gun had been real. Dillinger, however, explained in a letter to his sister:

... [the reports] I had a real forty-five ... That's just a lot of hooey to cover up because they don't like to admit that I locked eight Deputys and a dozen trustys up with my wooden gun before I got my hands on the two machine guns. I showed everyone the wooden gun after I got a hold of the machine guns and you should have seen thire (sic) faces. Ha! Ha! Ha! Pulling that off was worth ten years of my life. Ha! Ha!

While Dillinger is credited with inventing the clever wooden gun escape, again it was originally the device of Baron Herman K. Lamm.

A sometime member of Lamm's Utah gang near the turn of the century was David Lant, son of a Mormon bishop from Payson, Utah. Dave Lant had herded sheep for John Reader near Vernal Utah in 1894 and remained in that area for several years.

About Il: 30 on the morning of February 4, 1897, Lant got into an argument in the Exchange Saloon at Vernal with one of the proprietors, James McNaughton. Lant, intoxicated, slammed McNaughton in the head with a bottle of liquor. The other proprietor, William McCaslin, shot three times at Lant. The third shot hit Lant in the shoulder. Both Lant and McNaughton recovered, and no charges were filed.

Lant left Vemal in the company of two friends, Charles Lovit, alias Charles Fergeson, and Bill Johnson, alias William Kid Dalton. The trio robbed the Cook Brothers General Mercantile at Woodruff, Utah, on August 19, 1897. For this Lant was sentenced to eight years in the Utah State Prison.

On October 8, 1897, Dave Lant and three other convicts escaped from prison, and Lant and one of the escapees, Harry Tracy, returned to the Vernal area. The two outlaws ended up in Brown's Park, that infamous outlaw stronghold on the borders of Utah-Colorado-Wyoming. Here they became involved in the killing of a young boy named Willie Strang, the hanging of a comrade named Jack Bennett, and the murder of a rancher-posseman named Valentine Hoy.

Arrested by Sheriff William Preece of Uintah County, Utah, and Sheriff Charles Willis Nieman of Routt County, Colorado, Lant and Tracy were placed in the Routt County jail at Hahn's Peak, Colorado. There, early in 1898, Harry Tracy carved a mock gun from a large bar of lye soap and blackened it with soot from the stove. With it the two men made a daring escape from the Hahn's Peak jail. When Dave Lant joined the Baron Lamm gang, about 1903-04 (after serving in the SpanishAmerican War), he detailed the escape to Lamm, who passed it on to Dillinger via Clark and Dietrich, and Dillinger used it effectively thirty-five years later. (Dave Lant was hanged about 1907-08 at Cottonwood Crossing of the Green River, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, by the Sundance Kid, for having spent some of the gang's loot in a whorehouse in Oregon.)

There was one other "Lamm connection" that should not be neglected. On June 17, 1933, an event occurred that alienated Americans from their love affair with gangsters. On that day gunmen shot down four lawmen in front of Kansas City's Union Station: The escaped convict in their custody, one Frank Jelly Nash, was also killed in the melee.

The victims included Raymond J. Caffery, a special FBI agent on assignment to the Kansas City office; Otto Reed, Chief of Police at McAlester, Oklahoma, assisting in identifying and arresting Nash; W. J. Red Grooms and Frank Hermanson, the two Kansas City, Missouri, police detectives assigned to meet Nash and his captors at Union Station and escort them to Leavenworth prison.

Frank Jelly Nash (1884-1933) came from Hobart, Oklahoma. His career was violent and colorful. He was acquitted at his first murder trial in 1913, and then murdered the witness who had testified against him. In 1918 he robbed the Corn State Bank in Corn, Oklahoma. On August 20, 1923, he helped rob a mail train in Osage County, Oklahoma. He brutally assaulted a mail custodian and, on March 2, 1924, was sent to the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth. In October 1930 he simply walked away from an outside work detail.

Two things are important to know about Nash: He was a sometime member of both the Baron Lamm and Capone gangs, and it was believed he had engineered the escape of Harvey Bailey and nine others from Leavenworth, several months before Dillinger employed the same technique. Again, Lamm was the inventor of the method.

Finally, although the perpetrators of the Kansas City Union Station massacre were never brought to justice, their identities were more or less determined as having been Charles Arthur Pretty Boy Floyd, Harvey Bailey, Adam Richetti, Vern Miller, and Oklahoma Jack Clark. Nearly all of these men were graduates or associates of the Baron Lamm gang.

Baron Herman K. Lamm's early experience with outlaw gangs in Utah and his "method" contrived during his imprisonment at Utah State Prison formed an unusual link between the Wild Bunch and the Dillinger-era gangsters. His function as Dillinger's "teacher" illustrates graphically that prisons often serve as schools of crime.

Before any would-be criminal inmate decides to emulate the careers of either Lamm or Dillinger, however, they should first examine the final lesson taught by the Lamm method: No matter how clever the method, or how certain the technique, the bloody end of both teacher and pupil surely proves that crime does not pay.

by Gary DeNeal

Outdoor Illinois magazine, Aug-Sept 1976

(Charlie Birger)

The Denver Post, December 7, 1975, "The Denver Mint Robbery, 1922," by Dow Helmers

Lettem FBI agent John A. Dowd, May 12,1936, May 13,1936, and June 6, 1936, re: Herman Larrun, Jack Clark, Wafter Dietrich, et. al., obtained through Freedom of Information Act Des Moines Register, May 11, 1948

Oklahombres, newsletter of An Association for the Preservation of Lawman and Outlaw History of the Indian Territory (Oklahoma), Spring, Summer, and Fall issues, 1991: "The Kansas City Union Station Massacre," by Gloria Maxwell

Boren Collection