Elmore Leonard_Carl Webster 03 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Mystery & Detective, Fiction
ISBN: 0061735159
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-09-28T05:00:00+00:00

There was a coalminer named Joe Tanzi from Krebs, who started digging coal when he was a kid, 13 years old but big for his age. On his 44th birthday, still going down in the mines, he told his wife he wasn’t going to work anymore. He was going to hitch a ride to McAlester and rob the first bank he came to on Choctaw Avenue. Two weeks before this, at Osage No. 5, an explosion sealed off Joe Tanzi for four days with four dead miners and five lunch pails. Joe didn’t eat much, the smell of the dead miners made him sick. He decided he was through with mines.

His kids were grown by then. The boys had left Krebs for Tulsa and the oil fields, and the girls were married and keeping house. His wife locked the front door and went to her mother’s.

That morning Joe Tanzi had put on a clean shirt and pants with his wornout suitcoat, his cap, hitched the ride to McAlester and walked in the bank. He took out a pistol he’d bought for six dollars off an old guy who was supposed to have been a Black Hand assassin in his time, and robbed the bank of 7,700 dollars of miners’ payroll.

What he did then, he got on the interurban streetcar and rode it twenty miles to Hartshorne, the end of the line, where he was arrested the next morning at the home of his oldest sister, Loretta, who was known as Grandma Tanzi and made a living brewing and selling Choc beer to coalminers. They asked Joe Tanzi, all right, where was the money? Joe Tanzi, one of those big guys who didn’t talk much, said, ‘What money?’

They had bank people identify him and a hundred witnesses who saw him riding the streetcar with bank sacks. They asked him where he’d hid it. He wouldn’t answer. They asked him using blackjacks on his kidneys till he was peeing blood and he still wouldn’t tell them. For several days they searched his sister’s house, her car, her property and adjoining lots. They brought dogs to the sister’s house to sniff out in all directions. Once they gave up, knowing he’d never speak a word to them, they brought Joe Tanzi to federal court, charged him with bank robbery, found him guilty in five minutes and, mad as hell, sentenced him to twenty-five years of hard labor. This was in 1928.

In 1933 Joe Tanzi was one of six convicts in a work crew repaving Stonewall Avenue from McAlester’s business district to the prison. He heard the signal as they were coming to the Barnett Memorial Church, a wolf whistle, and the six convicts took off in all directions. Joe Tanzi ran for the church, hearing gunfire from the guards, but none of it coming at him. He got around back of the church and inside, the door unlocked, a man in there playing the organ, booming through part of a hymn when he heard the gunfire, went to a window to see what was going on.

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