Inside The Drake Park Bank Robbery Des Moines 1921

 

The crowd outside the Drake Park State Bank after the robbery

The four men who walked into the Drake Park State Bank on July 13, 1921, didn’t look like bank robbers. They were dressed like ordinary customers. Men wanting to cash a check or ask about a loan.

The bank sat in a busy Des Moines neighborhood. Inside, it was a normal summer day. Clerks counted money and worked their books. Customers drifted in and out. Nobody paid much attention to the four strangers.

Then the guns came out.

One man covered the lobby with a revolver. Another jumped the counter. The others rounded up employees and shoved them toward the rear, barking orders. Police later suspected “Lucky” Tommy O’Connor was one of the men inside. Several bank employees identified him as the robber who drove them toward the safe.

A man in khaki overalls grabbed Drake University Professor Robert S. Fulton as he entered the bank. “I fought with the man,” Fulton said later, “but before he could pull the trigger I grabbed the weapon with both hands.”

A minute later, one of the other robbers clubbed him with a pistol, and Fulton was dragged to a closet.

Bank employees Harry Gross, Laura Russell, and Max Van Scoy

Bank clerk Max Von Scoy didn’t understand what was happening at first. “A tall man in a blue serge suit came up to the window and said, ‘Put ’em up!’ I thought he was joking and laughed.”

Then the gun came out. Von Scoy threw up his hands.

Laura Russell, the assistant cashier, “didn’t know there was anything going on” until she stepped out of the vault. When she turned and saw the barrel of a revolver pointed at her, she went “limp as a rag.”

Harry Gross, another assistant cashier, didn’t argue. He raised his hands when ordered to do so. Gross later said he had a gun in his desk drawer less than two feet away, but reaching for it “would have been plain suicide.”

The cashier and several clerks were forced into the vault. Then the heavy steel door slammed shut, leaving them in the dark.

Out front, the gang got to work. They didn’t smash drawers or stumble around in a panic. They knew where the money was, and scooped it up—cash, bonds, and traveler’s checks. Everything went into sacks and coat pockets.

This wasn’t their first job. Ten minutes and they were done.

Professor Robert S. Fulton

The men jumped into a waiting red Cadillac and were gone before anyone outside knew what had happened. Police believed “Slim” Bates handled the wheel.

Back inside the vault, the trapped workers pounded on the door, shouting for help. When they were freed, the neighborhood woke up in a hurry.

Telephones rang. Police whistles blew. Officers raced toward the bank. Others covered roads leading out of the city, hoping to catch the gang before they got clear.

It was already too late.

A fast automobile changed crime. Years earlier, robbers needed horses, back roads, and luck. By 1921, a powerful car and a few minutes’ head start could carry men miles away before police had time to put a man on the street.

Early reports didn’t agree on the take. Some said seven thousand dollars. The final count was less— $3,870. Of that, $2,870 was currency and $1,000 was in registered bonds.

What rattled people most wasn’t the loss. It was how smoothly the robbers had carried it off.

This wasn’t some random stickup. They were calm, quick, and organized. They didn’t waste any time. The robbers came in with a plan and walked out minutes later with a small fortune.

The police quickly decided they were dealing with professionals.

Leon Babe Emerson

Times were changing. Prohibition had created easy money for men willing to move liquor, hijack shipments, or bribe the right people. Cities were growing. Roads were improving. Cars were faster. A man could rob a bank in Iowa and be drinking in Omaha that night under another name.

Lawmen were still trying to catch up.

The Drake Park robbers had another problem, though. They didn’t just steal cash. They took bonds and traveler’s checks. Cash was easy to pass. Securities had a habit of talking. Numbers could be traced. Owners identified. Bankers noticed when stolen securities appeared.

So detectives waited.

It didn’t take long before traveler’s checks tied to the robbery surfaced. That told the police someone was trying to cash in. Once thieves started dividing profits, somebody usually got careless.

One name that surfaced just days after the robbery was Babe Emerson. He was also implicated in the Valley Junction bank robbery and the Stuart bank robbery where a night watchman was killed.

In June 1927, officers arrested Emerson inside Fort Madison prison just days before he was to be released on another charge. He had gone to prison in 1921 for aiding in a prison escape. Instead of walking free, he was handed a fresh problem.

Map showing locations in Drake Park Bank robbery

But he hadn’t acted alone.

There’d been four men in the bank, and likely several others behind the scenes. A getaway driver. Someone who moved stolen paper. And another who knew where to hide afterward.

The trouble was that gangs were temporary partnerships held together by greed. Men joined up for one score, then split the second things got hot. One headed for Chicago. Another drifted to Kansas City. One got arrested for something unrelated. Another vanished under a new name.

Then came one of those turns old crime stories are full of. A man reached out asking whether reward money might be offered for returning some of the stolen securities. It suggested somebody holding the loot was nervous.

A meeting was arranged. Detectives hoped to recover the bonds and grab the man carrying them. And then everything fell apart. Someone snatched the papers and bolted before officers could close in.

Maybe it was a double-cross. Maybe somebody got scared.

The case kept moving anyway.

Another tip came from a jailed informant who said some of the Drake Park loot had been hidden near Council Bluffs. Officers followed the lead and recovered securities from a rural property. But nobody could explain how the securities got there.

It didn’t matter. By then, the gang had likely blown apart. Whatever friendship existed during the robbery vanished once arrests started and names hit the papers.

The other robbers were never caught. Detectives recovered some of the money, but the rest was gone.

For good.

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