Free Wrong Side of the Law by Edward Butts Page B

more than 3 million dollars in cash and bonds, making it the biggest train robbery in American history. However, in the course of the holdup, Glasscock panicked and shot Doc by mistake. The gang made a clean getaway with the loot, but their subsequent search for a doctor to tend to Doc put the police on their trail. Soon they were all in jail.
    Through plea-bargaining and helping the police recover much of the stolen money, the Newton brothers received amazingly light sentences. None of them spent more than a few years in prison for the Rondout robbery. Nor were any of them ever charged with the robbery of the Toronto bank messengers. Not until the 1994 publication of The Newton Boys: Portrait of an Outlaw Gang , a book based on extensive interviews with Willis and Joe in their later years, did people know that the Texas outlaws were responsible for the morning on which, in the words of the Toronto Globe , “Cold-blooded and calculated villainy stalked abroad in the streets of Toronto.”

Chapter 5
    Verne Sankey:
    Kidnapper
    P ublic Enemy Number One! During the crime-ridden early years of the Great Depression, that dubious honour fell to some of the most notorious bandits in American history. Outlaws like John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd didn’t want it. Psychopath Baby Face Nelson gloried in it. But even though these and a few other “celebrity” criminals in turn topped the list of men most wanted by J. Edgar Hoover’s fledgling Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), none of them was the first. That distinction went to an American-born naturalized Canadian citizen whose criminal career was somehow overlooked by the mythmakers of outlaw and gangster legends.
    Verne Sankey, the Canadian Pacific Railway engineer who became a kidnapper and America’s first Public Enemy Number One.
Colorado Historical Society.
    Verne Sankey was born in Avoca, Iowa, in 1891; the youngest son in a homesteading family. He grew up in a frontier environment and fell in love with the lore of railroading. While young Sankey worked as a farmhand, he dreamed of being an engineer.
    In 1914, twenty-two-year-old Sankey married his boyhood sweetheart, nineteen-year-old Fern Young. He took his bride north to Canada, where railroading was booming because of a flood of immigration to the West. The couple settled in Melville, Saskatchewan. Sankey soon found a job with the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway.
    Sankey started out as a watchman in the railyards, looking out for thieves and train-hopping hoboes. He was eventually promoted to fireman, shovelling the coal that kept the locomotive running. Then at last Sankey’s childhood dream came true: he became an engineer.
    Just like the riverboat pilots of Mark Twain’s day, early twentieth-
century railroad engineers had a special mystique. There was an aura of adventure about them that Sankey liked. Engineers were also relatively well-paid. That became especially important to Sankey when in 1919, Fern gave birth to a daughter whom the proud parents named Echo.
    Life in Melville was good for the Sankeys. They owned an attractive home, and every year Verne bought a new Nash automobile. The family went on vacations that most of the neighbours couldn’t afford. By the time the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway merged with the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1923, Verne had become a naturalized Canadian citizen.
    Most of the people who knew Sankey found him friendly and outgoing. He enjoyed bowling and was a fan of the local hockey team, the Melville Millionaires. He was charming, intelligent, and a gifted storyteller. He could juggle and would perform for kids. He enjoyed a drink, but was never seen drunk. Sankey was of stocky build, and not tall — only five-foot-seven. But his boyish features, soft blue eyes, and winning smile complemented his pleasant personality. Not everyone, however, was won over. Some of Sankey’s railway colleagues considered him a show-off and a braggart.
    Sankey did indeed like to flash his