illustration by mike benny
Editor's Note: This story originally appeared in our July/August 2005 issue.
In the 1920s, Memphis was one of the most dangerous cities in America. Almost every day, the newspapers here carried tales of burglaries, robberies, prostitution, bootlegging, stabbings, and shootings. Crime was so rampant that federal agents were coming to Memphis to show the local police how to use machine guns, and insurance companies had stopped offering automobile policies because the risk was too high. Even G.T. Fitzhugh, a community leader and prominent attorney, told reporters that the city had become “the capital of the amalgamated crooks of America.”
During the first week of August 1921, readers of The Commercial Appeal may have casually noticed two seemingly unrelated stories. One article was a followup on the brazen theft at gunpoint of a new midnight-blue Cadillac owned by a young fellow named Malcolm Buckingham. The other story announced that the Memphis police, who were cruising the streets in pokey Fords, were purchasing a high-powered roadster “equipped with special gears that would be used to run down speeding culprits.”
Both bits of news would have considerable more significance on the morning of August 10, 1921.
“Not a Dog’s Chance”
illustration by mike benny
That Wednesday morning, two employees of the Ford Motor Company got ready to pick up the firm’s payroll from the Central State Bank downtown. In the 1920s, Ford employed more than 200 skilled workers to build cars at their factory here on Union Avenue, and the weekly payroll was usually a routine transaction. Chief clerk Edgar McHenry and special agent Howard “Shorty” Gamble hopped in their late-model Ford, drove to the Memphis Police Department headquarters on Adams to pick up two patrolmen, Polk Carraway and W.S. Harris, to serve as guards, and headed to the bank on Second Street to fill a leather satchel with $8,500 — an enormous sum at the time.
Dodging bullets, McHenry dashed from the car, stumbled at the curb, and managed to hurl himself into the entrance of the Ford building.
The bank transaction took five minutes, so at precisely 9:45 a.m. the payroll car pulled up in front of the Ford plant. Just at that moment, a dark-blue Cadillac that had been shadowing the car roared around it and jammed the Ford against the curb. Four masked men in the Cadillac jumped out, pointed revolvers and shotguns, and shouted, “Hands up!”
Before anyone in the Ford could move, the bandits pulled their triggers. “Carraway and Gamble were not given an instant to defend themselves,” said The Commercial Appeal. “They were shot down by cold-blooded murderers who never gave their victims a dog’s chance.” In the back seat, Harris was shot in the stomach and shoulder.
Dodging bullets, McHenry dashed from the car, stumbled at the curb, and managed to hurl himself into the entrance of the Ford building. “I don’t know what made me do it,” he recalled later, “and I can’t tell you how I got to the door of the office. Everything happened in a flash.” He screamed at a nearby clerk, “Huston! Come get the money! Bandits!” Both men rushed into the safe and tugged the door shut behind them.
The Ford payroll had been saved, but at a terrible cost. Gamble was dead by the time he was carried into the Ford offices. Carraway died within a half hour at Baptist Hospital. Harris, though seriously injured, would survive.Outside, the bandits leapt back in the Cadillac. The driver jammed the accelerator to the floorboard, and the big car roared eastward down Union at 60 miles per hour. Within minutes, witnesses would call police and say they had spotted the car heading north on Dunlap, then speeding east on Poplar, then racing further east past the community of White Station.
What nobody reported was that the getaway car, at some point shortly after that, turned south and actually looped back into the city.
“A Gauntlet of Death”
illustration by mike benny
At police headquarters, the calls came in that the Ford plant had been robbed. Police Lieutenant Vincent Lucarini, a popular officer and newly appointed head of the city’s traffic division, took charge. He knew that the department’s four-cylinder Fords couldn’t hope to catch up with the speedy eight-cylinder Cadillac, so he commandeered a car owned by Joe Robilio, a grocer who was in the station that morning.
Robilio’s car just happened to be a midnight-blue Cadillac.
Lucarini and four others — Robilio, motorcycle patrolmen C.L. Bonds and Al Rodgers, and a mechanic named Eddie Heckinger — piled inside and sped off in pursuit of the robbers. As they raced eastward, Heckinger noticed a group of armed men gathered at White Station and suggested they slow down. But Lucarini wouldn’t hear of it. “They can see my uniform, I’m sure,” he said.
Meanwhile, out in Collierville, deputy sheriff Morris Irby had been telephoned that the bandits were heading his way in a dark-blue Cadillac. Irby quickly assembled a posse of about a dozen men, but found himself joined by some 40 young men who wanted in on the action. They hid themselves in bushes along Poplar Pike on the western edge of town and waited.
Robilio leapt from the door and, according to newspaper stories, “ran around like a chicken with his head cut off.” He dashed up to a nearby farmhouse, but the owner slammed the door in his face, saying, “We don’t want no bandits dirtying up our kitchen.”
Irby himself stood in the middle of the roadway and waited. About 10:30 a.m., a big car raced towards him. Everything fit the description he had been given. It was a dark-blue Cadillac, carrying four men. When the vehicle was about 50 feet away, Irby fired his revolver in the air and ordered the car to halt. It kept coming. As it passed him, he noticed that one of the passengers was holding something out of the window, but he couldn’t tell what it was. Suddenly, every man and boy along the roadway opened fire on the vehicle, peppering it with almost a hundred bullets and buckshot.
It was the wrong car.
They had fired on the Cadillac that was pursuing the robbers. Newspapers later reported that patrolman Bonds, sensing the mistake, yelled, “For God’s sake, stop the car!” but the driver, Robilio, said, “I can’t — I’m shot!” From the back seat, Bonds grabbed the steering wheel and managed to keep the vehicle on the road until it coasted to a stop a half mile away. In the meantime, according to the News-Scimitar, “every man who possessed a weapon must have fired it,” and the victims drove through “a gauntlet of death.”
Lucarini, sitting in the front passenger seat, was the first man hit. “Six buckshot crashed into the back of his head, making a noise like the quick tearing of paper.” Bonds stumbled out of the riddled Cadillac, holding his hands in the air and waving the police cap that he had been holding out the window. On the other side of the car, Robilio leapt from the door and, according to newspaper stories, “ran around like a chicken with his head cut off.” He dashed up to a nearby farmhouse, but the owner slammed the door in his face, saying, “We don’t want no bandits dirtying up our kitchen.”
Even as Bonds walked back towards the assembled posse, they continued to shoot at him. “Al Rodgers in police uniform held his hands high over his head and followed me down the road,” he bitterly told reporters. “They shot at him unmercifully, but their aim was poor. They fired six or seven shots straight at me.”
Finally, the shooting stopped, but it was too late. Lucarini was dead. Bonds had been hit multiple times in the face with buckshot. Heckinger took a bullet in the head, Robilio in the shoulder. Only Rodgers had escaped serious injury.
Irby would later complain that it hadn’t really been their fault. The Cadillac looked just like the bandits’ vehicle, the car hadn’t stopped, and “that posse was composed of a bunch of trigger-happy kids,” he said. “I couldn’t control them.” One of Memphis’ most popular policemen had been killed by mistake while he was doing his duty. No one was ever held responsible for his death.
Newspapers summed up the grim toll that morning. On the side of the law: Three dead, two critically wounded, three injured. The payroll, at least, had been saved. But the score was still better for the crooks: None dead, none wounded, and all escaped. The Commercial Appeal expressed outrage about the murder, calling it “the climax in a wave of crime that has been increasing throughout our city.” At the same time, reporters feared the bandits had made a clean getaway: “It looked at first as if there was no chance to solve this mystery. Four men in a stolen car had dashed upon the scene, murdered two men, wounded a third, and sped away, with none of the eye-witnesses to the crime able to give even a description of the bandits.”
“Over My Dead Body”
illustration by mike benny
But they didn’t count on so many other witnesses. Though only a few people saw the actual robbery, and McHenry couldn’t identify any of the shooters, at least a dozen people came forward who did. Many of them claimed they noticed a 29-year-old sales clerk by the name of Thomas Taylor Harriss — better known as “Red” — at the wheel of the Cadillac that morning. What’s more, he had been seen hanging around the Ford plant on the days the payroll was delivered. Unfortunately for that young man, he apparently had a rather memorable appearance, judging from one reporter’s account: “Red Harriss is a bizarre chap, distinctive in look, action, and manner. No one has ever got a good look at him once and failed to recognize him a second time. The robes of a Carmelite nun could not conceal him.”
The night after the robbery, police nabbed Harriss as he was about to board the steamer Princess, a pretty girl on each arm. When they raided his rooms at 22 N. Front Street, they found what newspapers described as “the most complete equipment for banditry that has been brought to light in many months,” including pistols and more than 700 rounds of ammunition. The caliber matched the bullets taken from the bodies of Gamble and Carraway. They also found a stack of letters written to two brothers, Jesse and Orville Jones, who lived in South Memphis at 28 Norwood Street and claimed to be opticians.
When the police showed up at that address, the men’s father insisted they weren’t home. The cops pushed past him and found the Jones’ boys dressing hurriedly, but they slapped handcuffs on them before they could get away. The brothers, both in their early 20s, were also identified by witnesses who saw them in the Cadillac moments before the shooting.
Gamble’s landlord told reporters, “I was always worrying about him guarding that payroll every week, but Shorty said, ‘If they ever get the money, it will be over my dead body.’ Now the money’s safe, but he’s dead.”
The final member of the “deadly quartet” (as the newspapers described them) was arrested within hours. He was variously identified as Goodwin Von Steinkerk and Edwin Von Steinkrich before the newspapers finally settled on Edwin von Steinkirk. This young man, who was employed as a “trouble-shooter” with the Memphis Gas and Electric Company, claimed to be descended from German nobility, and letters found in his apartment at 91 Mallory were indeed addressed to “Baron Steinkirk.” When he appeared in court, The Commercial Appeal scoffed, “The baronial pretender in no way at all resembled a scion of the nobility yesterday. He appeared to be nothing more than a fieldhand, who comes to Memphis every Saturday night to spend his wages.”
What’s more, that same paper didn’t think much of “Red” Harriss spelling his name with a double S: “The state is willing to accede to his wishes in this small matter, for it feels that the electric current can cut off a long name from the face of the earth as easily as it can a short one.”
The day after the shooting, a public meeting took place at the Lyric Theatre on Madison to discuss ways to prevent more crimes like this. No specific remedies came forth, but a newspaper proclaimed, “It was the best mass meeting we ever saw. There was no fury and fuss about it, and glory be, the police did not have to throw out a lot of drunks. In the old days, people prepared for a mass meeting by liquoring up.” Still, the meeting apparently accomplished one thing: “It has aroused a determination in the minds of most law-abiding citizens that it is their duty to take more than a passing interest in the restoration of normal, peaceful conditions here.”
Meanwhile, the dead were laid to rest. A funeral service was held at the home of Vincent Lucarini at 176 S. Cooper. Afterwards, his body — accompanied by an honor guard of 40 police cars — was escorted to Union Station and placed aboard a train to Nashville, where he was laid to rest. Carraway was taken to his parents’ home in Kern, Oklahoma, and interred there. Gamble was buried here, in Forest Hill Cemetery. His landlord told reporters, “I was always worrying about him guarding that payroll every week, but Shorty said, ‘If they ever get the money, it will be over my dead body.’ Now the money’s safe, but he’s dead.”
The Ford Motor Company plant closed for two hours on the morning of August 14th so employees could attend Gamble’s funeral. The Commercial Appeal later reported that workers who did were docked two hours’ pay. “I don’t think we have done anything unfair,” said the company’s sale manager. “We gave the men two hours, and we were entitled to that in return. They could have made up that time later that afternoon.”
“Witness After Witness”
illustration by mike benny
The four men went to trial on September 20, 1921, after attorneys spent several weeks selecting 12 jurors from a pool of 655 — possibly a record for a trial in Shelby County. Inspector William T. Griffith seemed confident about the outcome, telling reporters, “The evidence we have is of such a nature that it cannot be controverted. We have the goods on the four men who are responsible for the deaths of two police officers and a special agent, and there is no chance for them to escape.” What’s more, detectives did not seek a confession from any of the four, because Griffith said, “We do not need one.”
Throughout the seven-week trial, “on the face of Harris was the smile he has worn since his incarceration, while his alleged comrades in crime showed only signs of amusement at the proceedings.”
The Commercial Appeal declared, “Witness after witness has come forward. It is almost beyond imagination how it will be possible for Harriss to convince the jurors he was not in the car, and the chains of evidence are almost as tightly binding Edwin von Steinkirk and the Jones brothers.”
The state eventually called forth more than 130 witnesses who had seen the men before, during, and after the shooting. The Cadillac they had used for the robbery had been found, hidden in a clump of bushes at Riverside Park, with some of the men’s fingerprints on the windshield, and prosecutors also introduced as evidence the guns and other items found in Harriss’ rooms.
Throughout the seven-week trial, “on the face of Harris was the smile he has worn since his incarceration, while his alleged comrades in crime showed only signs of amusement at the proceedings.” Even though the newspapers obviously considered them guilty, one reporter observed, “All of the men are local products, and while their ancestry shows a varying degree of refinement and culture, there is nothing in any of it to indicate anything but rectitude and respectability.”
No one ever came forward — not even the men themselves, who took the stand very briefly in their own defense — to explain just why they embarked on this deadly venture.
Defense lawyers stuck to one strategy — to discredit any and all witnesses by repeatedly asking them the same question as many as a dozen times and pouncing on any disparities in the answers. This ploy finally backfired when the judge fined one of the defense attorneys $5 for “the umpteenth repetition of a question that had been answered identically that many times” by one of the witnesses. One of the jurors, in a whisper that could be heard throughout the jammed courtroom, said, “Make it double that, Your Honor.” Clearly, even the jury was growing weary of the proceedings.
But when it was all over, the jury couldn’t decide what to do with the men. The death penalty required a unanimous guilty verdict, and after debating the matter for “just a few minutes short of 24 hours,” the jury deadlocked at seven jurors for the electric chair and five against it. The final verdict: murder in the first degree for all four, but “with mitigating circumstances.” The punishment: life in prison at the Tennessee State Prison in Nashville.
In an editorial, The Commercial Appeal expressed bafflement at the verdict: “It is difficult to find in the record any real mitigating circumstances, and it may be that the youthful appearance of the men, combined with the fact that a number of witnesses for the state did not have the best character, induced the jury to use that as the only possible legal phrase by which they could convict of murder in the first degree and order the defendants to life imprisonment instead of instant death.”
None of the men remained in prison their entire lives anyway. Historian Paul Coppock related that all four broke out in 1925 but were quickly recaptured. Harriss tried again two years later, hiding inside a packing crate that was being delivered to a Nashville hardware store. Police were waiting for him when the “package” was opened. Records from that long ago are unclear, but according to an article in Paul Coppock’s Mid-South, by 1935, all four men had been pardoned, after serving just less than 15 years of their “life” sentences.
photograph by vance lauderdale
Today, little survives from this infamous crime. The Ford Motor Company moved into a larger plant on Riverside Drive in the mid-1930s, and the old factory on Union was taken over by The Commercial Appeal. That building was torn down to make way for the CA’s present building. Harriss’ lodging house on Front Street has been replaced by the Falls Building, and the homes of Steinkirk and the Jones brothers, though still standing, are much changed since the 1920s.
Only the tombstone in Forest Hill of Howard “Shorty” Gamble, who bragged that thieves would get the Ford payroll money “over my dead body” remains as evidence of one of the most notorious episodes in our city’s history.
