Read an Excerpt
Verne Sankey
America's First Public Enemy
By Timothy W. Bjorkman UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2007 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5618-7
CHAPTER 1
The Best of All Possible Worlds
At half past three in the morning, Verne Sankey and Gordon Alcorn eased into the sleepy city of Greeley, Colorado. Hours earlier, they had fled Denver in a hail of police gunfire. Bullets had pierced the windshield of Sankey's performance-enhanced 1932 Ford V-8, narrowly missing each man's head. Now they breathed sighs of relief. A club bag containing sixty thousand dollars in ten- and twenty-dollar bills lay safely near Alcorn. The men helped themselves to some local gas in the slumbering city then rolled north toward its outskirts, bound for Dakota. When a solitary patrol car approached, they turned east a block ahead of it. When the patrol car also turned, Sankey cut his lights and sped away, screeching around corners, turning first north again, then east. The patrolmen raced closely behind.
Suddenly Sankey's Ford sputtered. He swung off the street alongside a warehouse. The police appeared to have the men checkmated. Alcorn panicked. He bailed out of the car, tossed his gun onto a Greeley street, and disappeared into a nearby field. Unwilling to surrender or to follow his partner on foot, Sankey hopped out of the Ford sedan and, using it as cover, trained his .32-caliber pistol on the police car as it pulled to within twenty yards of the warehouse and stopped. He exchanged several shots with officers who also exited their Terraplane. As Sankey fired, his Ford slowly rolled down the gentle knoll on which he had stopped. Now exposed, Sankey chased after the moving auto. When he reached it, he jumped in and fired it up. The Ford restarted and Sankey roared away, cornering at times on two wheels, driver's door open as he fired back at pursuing officers until he outran them.
It was the beginning of what would be labeled the most exhaustive manhunt in the history of the West.
The life that Verne Sankey had forged throughout the Prohibition years presaged what transpired that February night in 1933. Sankey roared through the 1920s with the best of them — adorned in a raccoon coat, diamond rings on his fingers, flashing large bills, tipping grandly.
He was born Reo Verne Sankey, the product of German and Irish ancestry, in Avoca, Iowa, on July 18, 1891. As a boy, he moved with his family to a farm near the tiny town of Wilmot, in South Dakota's northeastern corner. There, the Sisseton-Wahpeton tribe had negotiated an agreement with the federal government that entitled each tribal member to a 160-acre tract, a deal that permitted the government to open the remaining land to homesteaders. On a spring day in 1892, five hundred hopeful homesteaders breathlessly waited at the starting line. As a bugle sounded, the homesteaders raced onto the newly opened sod, feverishly staking out sites for farms, homes, and businesses.
The boy Verne Sankey — the youngest of three sons born to Joseph and Wattie Sankey — arrived at this frontier soon after with his family. Joseph Sankey worked at turns as a farmer, a railroad engineer, and a rural mail carrier, but it was railroading that flowed through his veins. Mesmerized by the train's whistle and the thunderous roar of its massive engines, Joseph's youngest son loved the rails too. The boy stood fascinated as the iron horse's steel wheels slowly began their rhythmic turn, gradually gaining in momentum and speed. He grew accustomed to the smell of the sooty, black smoke trailing the engine.
Wilmot folks knew Verne Sankey as a convivial boy, full of life, neither more nor less mischievous than the average turn-of-the-century American lad. He was soft spoken and polite, particularly toward women and elders — the kind of youngster good parents hoped their daughters would bring home but also the kind to which other young men were drawn. As Verne Sankey grew he worked as a farmhand around Wilmot but he dreamed of engineering a train.
In the spring of 1914, Sankey, twenty-two, married his Wilmot sweetheart, nineteen-year-old Fern Young, whose own parents homesteaded a mile or so across the prairie from the Sankeys. Fern was petite and pretty with a gentle personality that easily won friends. The heritage of a good family showed in her quiet but distinct dignity and bearing. The two seemed a good match.
Around the time of their marriage, Verne took a bold step toward attaining his childhood dream. As war broke out in Europe, he left with Fern for Saskatchewan and the promise of a railroading career. Settlers were flooding Canada's Great West, and railroad companies were building track as fast as they could to accommodate the westward push. As Sankey left for the Saskatchewan town of Melville with his young bride, the editor of the Wilmot Enterprise wrote, "We have yet to meet a man who did not say he liked Verne Sankey and enjoyed his friendship and company. ... He loved children, too, and it was a bad day for him when he didn't have a word of cheer or greeting for the young folks about him."
Once in Melville, Sankey landed a job on the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, which was built to allow the Grand Pacific to compete with the Canadian Pacific Railway for the robust passenger business spurred by settlement of Western Canada. Its main line from Winnipeg, to Melville, to Edmonton, to Jasper, to Prince Rupert had opened in April of that year and there were jobs aplenty. Sankey began as a lowly watchman in the railroad yards, vigilant for freeloaders and thieves. Before long, he was promoted to fireman. Verne wrote his parents that first Christmas, bursting with pride over his new job feeding coal to the steam engine's fire. He earned good money — November's pay had totaled well over two hundred dollars, about a fifth of what the average worker earned in an entire year. He sent his parents a photograph of the check to prove its amount. For Verne Sankey, money was already the chief measuring stick of his success in the world.
Melville was a frontier town. Established only six years before the Sankeys' arrival there, the town was strategically located as the second divisional point of the railroad west of Winnipeg. It served as the intersection for trains running north-south and east-west. Within a year of its founding, the town claimed one thousand inhabitants. By the time the Sankeys arrived there in 1914, Melville boasted a power plant, a fledgling hospital, a milling company, Luther College, and the Queen Street Arena, home of the semipro Allan Cup champions, the Melville Millionaires. It was hockey lover Verne Sankey's kind of town.
In 1919, Fern gave birth to a daughter, whom they christened Echo, and Verne busied himself establishing a reputation as a solid railroader. He briskly climbed the employment ladder, eventually reaching his goal of becoming an engineer. Sankey's steam locomotives often pulled their load from Melville southwesterly to Regina, ninety miles away — passenger cars brimming with optimistic immigrants bound for the West. Each town along the way, often little more than a whistle stop, boasted its own personality.
There was, in the life of the railroader, something that appealed to Verne Sankey's wanderlust. Whatever problems he encountered at home seemed diminished amid the vast expanses of land spreading across the horizon. In the restaurants and bars, the railroader, especially the engineer, held a position of status and authority. He was a local celebrity of sorts, seldom staying long enough to wear out his welcome. There was, too, the camaraderie he shared with fellow workers on the rails and the seemingly endless track, that ribbon stretching across the vast, treeless prairie.
The long hours on the rails provided Verne Sankey with idle hours to fill. He passed his time reading true crime magazines, mocking the hapless criminals foiled by police, confident he could do better. Games of chance also beckoned him, especially cards and dice. The railroad was a natural environment for refining his skills in both pursuits with its long, unoccupied hours and forgiving salaries. Sankey bit the gambler's hook. Early success spurred him on, and he plowed harder and harder. On good nights, he spent lavishly, tipped big. Neither the money nor the luck lasted long but what never abandoned him was his zest for the good life.
Sankey was stocky and rather short — no more than five feet, seven inches tall. He often covered his receding hairline with a Stetson hat set above intelligent, rather sensitive blue eyes, the hallmark of his cherubic face. His inviting smile revealed mildly bucked teeth. He possessed midwestern charm, conversing confidently and easily with people.
Sankey's colorful, good-natured personality made him one of the best-known trainmen on the line. Betty Champagne fondly remembered the day she made Verne Sankey's acquaintance as a fifteen-year-old high school girl. Sankey came to see her father, a fellow engineer. She considered Sankey a "nice looking man. You wouldn't call him terribly handsome. He was fine looking," she recalled. "He [was] the sort of man you'd be attracted to because he had a very pleasant personality." Almost everyone who met Sankey shared Champagne's impressions of him, but there were exceptions among fellow railroaders, some of whom got a larger helping of him than they desired. Unlike most people who found the trainman disarmingly soft-spoken and fun, some fellow rail workers witnessed a braggadocio that rubbed them wrong.
By 1923, Sankey's insatiable urge for money and what it could buy led him into the illegal but widely tolerated bootlegging industry. He began hauling Canadian whiskey south across the border at handsome profits, sometimes in train cars. It was easy money. If Fern objected, her protests did not cause her to decline the fruits of her husband's endeavors. The Sankeys lived a cut above their neighbors. They owned a charming home on a corner lot in Melville, which still stands. They went places and owned things beyond the reach of others around them. Fern wore fine clothes and expensive jewelry. Sankey "always had the ... smartest and newest Nash car in the Melville district," one Melville old-timer recalled. "And he was the envy of the youngbloods of the town. He always spent his money liberally, and he rarely drank." This latter observation was not entirely accurate. Others who knew him were aware that he frequently imbibed, although he seldom seemed affected by it. Sankey became something of a legendary figure to those young Melville men seeking adventure, some of whom he reportedly employed on his liquor runs.
Sankey's bootlegging was no secret to Melville residents. He loved to recount rollicking tales of his exploits with police that were full of color, drama, and vivid humor, sometimes including dramatic escape scenes. Despite his Prohibition law-breaking, though, Verne Sankey was a hard man to resist. As Betty Champagne explained it, "You couldn't admire his bootlegging, but at the same time, you couldn't help but like him."
By the mid-twenties, Sankey's bootlegging operation generated large sums of money — far more than he could earn on the railroad. As a consequence, his dream job began to lose its luster. To accommodate his budding liquor enterprise, Sankey, by then a naturalized Canadian, took leaves-of-absence from the Grand Trunk Pacific, which had by then merged with the government-owned Great Canadian Railway. When he traveled, he stayed at luxurious resorts, bought the finest tailored suits, and returned home with expensive presents for his young family. He ran liquor to Minnesota, Michigan, Wyoming, Colorado, North and South Dakota — to small towns, cities, and to "boom towns" like Casper, Wyoming, where oil and liquor both flowed freely. Sankey's marketing strategy was to sell high-quality Canadian liquor at below-market prices. He transported his product in a rickety automobile, portraying himself as a railroad man traveling to his farm in the States for respite. Sankey often took his daughter, Echo, on these trips. He loved her company and found her an unmatchable decoy at border crossings. On a single trip, Sankey hauled twenty-four cases of liquor placed in a concealed compartment underneath his rear car seat, and sold them for an average of $125 per case.
Alas, Sankey's huge rum-running profits were eroded by occasionally devastating gambling losses. While cards and dice were his preferred forms of chance, he bet on anything. One-time Sankey poker partner, Raymond Bailey, Sr., recalled a time the local dray man pulled up outside Ernie Thomas's Melville barbershop for a haircut. The shop had a pool room in the back, where Verne Sankey and a friend engaged in a friendly game. The two began discussing the dray horses outside, one a bay and the other black. A debate arose over which horse would defecate first. Soon each man dropped one hundred dollars in one of the pool table's pockets, and watched through the pool room's window to see who the winner would be.
In 1924, Sankey's commodities market losses nearly broke him. Two years later, he made a huge windfall from liquor sales in Casper, then embroiled himself in a no-limits poker game at a resort on the town's outskirts. The game dragged on for five days. When it was over, Sankey had lost virtually all his profits. He seldom held his cash tightly. Sankey once found himself in the café of a North Dakota town with a car full of booze when he noticed two men he suspected were Prohibition agents watching his movements from across the street. Sankey calmly ate his lunch, then quietly slipped out the back door to the train depot and boarded a train to Minneapolis, abandoning his contraband-laden car parked in front of the café.
Sankey was an avid sportsman. He bowled competitively and loved to watch the Melville Millionaires play hockey, befriending and assisting members of the team. "The beggar had a lot of good points," remembered old friend Bailey, referring to Sankey's hallmark kindness. "Sankey heard about Clint Head's young teenage daughter who was dying [after being struck by a hockey puck] and so went to her home. He insisted her parents take her to a Regina hospital to save her life and tossed $800 in rolled up bills on the dresser. But the parents refused, knowing the money was tainted. The girl died."
Sankey's gambling reputation and his penchant for flashing money — he frequently dropped five-dollar and ten-dollar tips — drew ire from more than a few in the bustling new town. "Women in Melville used to hate the sight of Mrs. Sankey because Sankey took all their husbands' money for gambling or liquor," recalled Sankey contemporary, Wilmarie Spearey.
By the fall of 1930, Sankey had developed a particularly lucrative trade in Denver as a gentleman rumrunner, catering to the exclusive banker and broker trade. That took him to Denver's Seventeenth Street where the city's most powerful men kept offices. By this time, Sankey's work absences had increased; he claimed Fern did not tolerate Canada's cold winters well. The family moved to Regina for a time, and from there Sankey continued his rum running venture. "He operated two big Nash cars equipped with truck springs to carry a heavy load without a noticeable sagging," Regina resident Clark Zimmerman remembered. "With these cars he ran big loads of liquor to Denver during the summer months. During the winter months he operated over the Mexican border."
Sankey's Denver business was robust. He would call at his customers' offices and take orders but never left a phone number. He sold nothing but high-end booze such as Baccardi, with prices ten dollars to twenty dollars a case lower than his competitors. Sankey was a born salesman; how many other bootleggers sent Christmas cards to customers? One Seventeenth Street customer recalled Sankey's delivery of an order to the fashionable Denver home where the customer's wife was hosting a bridge party. Sankey carried his shiny leather suitcase to the front door, was shown in, unloaded the liquor in the kitchen, and bowed himself out with apologies for having interrupted the gathering.
For all Sankey's bootlegging, his record was remarkably spotless, blemished only by a solitary bootlegging conviction in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, where he posted bond and never returned.
As the thirties dawned, however, Sankey's bootlegging business faltered. Syndicates controlled more and more of the trade and ran him out of some cities, finding his considerable competition unwelcome. As the Depression wore on, moreover, people had less money to spend for the contraband. Sankey, like other bootleggers, began to seek easy money elsewhere.
From around 1929 to 1931, Sankey also spent large amounts of time in Winnipeg, where he set off a craze in the area by introducing Manitoba to miniature golf through a business he operated known as The Mall. Sankey frequented a local hotel there, where he established himself as a generous and good-natured wheeler-dealer and kept a sweetheart on the side — Beth Earhardt, who waitressed at the Silver Slipper Cafe. An old Sankey friend who tended bar in Winnipeg commented, "You get to know a man pretty well when you're tending bar." He knew Verne Sankey as a jovial, straight shooter, a "square guy." He ran a card game in town, frequently paying his bills with the coins he raked in — his vigorish, the 10 percent the house kept from each bet.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Verne Sankey by Timothy W. Bjorkman. Copyright © 2007 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
