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much to increase certain types of banditry. We now have a definitely established type called an automobile bandit who operates exclusively in motor vehicles, whether it is to perpetrate a holdup on a bank or merely to stick up pedestrians and rob homes.” 7
    Lawmen were powerless to chase the new auto bandits across state lines, making border areas, especially the notorious tristate region of Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kansas, magnets for crime. The federal government was of no help: bank robbery wasn’t yet a federal crime. Coordination between police departments was spotty; only a few states had introduced statewide police, and those that had had seldom possessed the resources to break a major case. In their place, vigilante committees sprang up across the Midwest. Not that it mattered: if a yegg fled a bank robbery without getting shot, there was little chance he would ever be caught.
    All of which made bank robbery a tempting vocation to a Midwestern populace that faced more temptations than ever. During the 1920s, mass-produced goods such as dresses, washing machines, and radios became widely available. Yet with the drought and the resulting downturn in the Midwestern farm economy, fewer citizens could afford the goods that lay out of reach behind department-store windows. A single bank robbery could change a dirt farmer’s life. At a time when the average household income in states like Oklahoma and Missouri hovered below $500 a year, bank robbers could make off with $10,000 for a morning’s work.
    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.