When Ernest Hemingway Trod The Earth With A Heavy Footprint And The Devil Took The Hinter Post Gladly Come Killing Field Time

By Si Landon

Sometimes things happen in the world, sometimes people rear up on their hind legs and throw you the biggest curve ball out of nowhere and that is what makes life interesting. Made life interesting one time for the now fully retired newspaperman Larry Larson who spent his entire career working by-lines for small-time (The Riverdale Gazette) and big time (The Post ) publications centered around the “slice of life” stories that people would tell him, or he would hear about or somebody would tip him to check out this or that person or situation. He always had plenty of material, great and small, to work his three columns a week magic on. One of the biggest stories that he had covered was the long trail aftermath of the big Tip Top Hat Company robbery which happened in 1946 and carted the robbers a quarter of a million dollars, a lot of money then, although now as Larry said in his article strictly walking around money. As one of the robbers was alleged to have said it was almost like money found on the ground the job went so smoothly. It was the aftermath though that made the story “slice of life” worthy. Actually, as will be detailed below, made two such stories that kind of worthy.

Larry Larson was not even born in 1946 so he had no first-hand knowledge of the robbery. The way he got the story was from the son of the main planner of the robbery John Colfax. That name is important because when the deal went down it was his mother, Kitty Colfax, who had done the mastermind planning although his father, “Big Jim” Colfax, for many years got the public credit. The way John found out about the whole adventure was by accident. He had been sitting in a bar in Pottsville, Pennsylvania where his grandparents, Frank and Etta Collins, had raised him when some old-timer barfly hearing his name mentioned asked whether he was related to Kitty Colfax, nee Collins, who had been involved in the big Tip Top Hat Company robbery over in Gloversville. Figuring the old-timer was on his uppers, was looking to cadge a few drinks from a fresh face walk-in against the indifference of the sullen crowd of all-day drinkers John thought he was being worked for a few whiskies. Something about the guy though made him bite, maybe because he recently been thinking about those lost parents or maybe because he had always been semi-consciously curious about stuff his grandparents dismissed whenever he long ago brought the subject up. The old-timer gave him a few details and John, half-drunk thought no more of it that night. The next day though sobered up he went to his grandparents’ house and asked about Kitty Colfax, nee Collins. Frank and Etta went white knowing that the time had come to tell their grandson who his mother and father were and what they had done. Since he was only a year old when they took custody of him John had no memory of them, and his grandparents had told him they had died in a tragic car accident. End of story.

John wanted to know more, much more about who his parents were and what they had done but since Kitty had run away from home when she was sixteen to run around with whoever had dough in Philadelphia, whoever would buy her love for sale in what the whole thing really amounted too once Kitty knew how to get her claws into a man and keep them there, they were vague on what had occurred. The details of how after meeting Big Jim and planning the caper that would put them, really her on easy street Kitty had wound up spent the next twenty years of her life in prison dying of cancer shortly before she was to be released. Frank and Etta had thought it best to break off totally with their daughter to protect John and so the lie and the whitewashed walls on the subject on one Kitty Collins.

Once John pressed the issue his grandparents did tell John that the guy who broke the case, Jim Reardon, the ace claims investigator for the Allied Insurance Company, the company that had a small insurance policy which they had to honor taken out by one of the robbers, a guy named Ole Andreson known as the Swede, might still be around and check with him in Philadelphia. John did so working his way through the thickets finding out that Reardon had retired to Tom’s River over in New Jersey. He got the address and a few weeks later he was sitting in Reardon’s living room peppering him with a million questions. Reardon had done a million big time claims for Allied so although he remembered what had happened and how he had nabbed the last of the robbers alive, John’s mother and father, he had forgotten many of the details about Kitty and Big Jim. He did have boxes of material in his musty basement catalogued by the year so he invited John to go down and look.

John got a general idea about the caper from the various reports and newspaper clipping in Reardon’s Colfax dossier, but the most fascinating item was Kitty Colfax’s journal that she kept from her girlish days until a few days before she was nabbed by Reardon. Reardon confessed he had never read the journal after he had grabbed the item from the Colfax mansion where he had nabbed Kitty and Big Jim after a shoot-out. A shoot-out between Big Jim and Dum Dum one of the other robbers who was looking to find out why he had been left with egg on his face and nothing else when it came time to divvy up the robbery proceedings. Reardon had meant to do so to learn yet another lesson in the ways of human greed but the press of big cases didn’t give him time to see what made Kitty tick. That journal was the source of John (and Reardon as well) finding out that the demon planner behind the robbery and the betrayal of their confederates had been Kitty’s work and Big Jim was just the “front” man since the others would not have listened to her on her own hook.              

Here’s where the second story comes in. After John had satisfied himself that he probably would not have liked to meet his mother-or father -and that his grandparents were right to keep the knowledge of his bad ass parents from him he started on the trail of a reference early on in his mother’s journal about a daughter named Sheila who had been born in 1943 not long after she had left Pottsville and whom she had given up, had let be adopted by the Farr family from Scranton. This would be John’s half-sister of some sort even if she was illegitimate. He felt that if he had gone this far he might as well see the thing through and so he started a search for her. Unfortunately by the time he was able to catch up to her whereabouts he found out that she had been killed a couple of years before by a renegade “hit” man after taking part in the big U.S. Mail truck robbery out in Riverside, California. That had netted the robbers over a million dollars, once again a lot of money then if only walking around money now.

He dug into what the California newspapers had written about the case, written what they knew anyway and what he was able to pick up from a guy, a grease monkey, Claude Atkins, who worked with Eddie Stevens, a.k.a. Billy Baxter, a.k.a. Sam Lawrence and who knows what other names a has-been big time race car driver who was involved in the robbery in order to get enough for Sheila’s wanting habits once she got her claws into him. What he found out, and which he related to Larry who had known the particulars of her mother’s story was that Sheila had the same genes as her mother. Had the expensive wanting habits that drove Kitty from nowhere Pottsville. Had driven Sheila from hard-scrabble Scranton when she was old enough to escape. Larry was able to take what John had given him, which had been a lot less that he had been given about Kitty and whipped it into a story-line “like mother, like daughter.”     

Apparently Sheila had run away from the Farr home when she was fourteen with an older guy who promised her the moon. She had wound up originally in Chi town with him where he dumped her after a few months when the next best thing came along. After he had tired of her. Left her stranded at fifteen with nowhere to go, not back to Scranton anyway so she started whoring in a place over on the right side of Division Street. That is where she met Red Riley who also went under the moniker Dutch Reagan, another older guy, a big-time gambler who was her client one night and who came back several times to sample her wares before they took off together for Reno. For a couple of years, maybe three, she got about everything that she wanted from Red-except excitement which she craved ever since the day she high-tailed it out of Scranton and the strict Pentecostal Farr home.     

One day she heard that the Reno Classic, a car race was coming up. She asked Red to take her, but he backed out saying he didn’t give a damn about race cars and he needed to rest up for a big poker game that was starting that night. Sheila went alone and was thrilled by the speed and action, got her adrenal up. Got it up particularly when the winner, Billy Baxter later to be Eddie Stevens, turned out to be a good-looking guy. She went right up to him after his victory while he was surrounded by a bevy of young and beautiful girls and asked him if she could buy him a drink. He took one look at her and said “sure, baby, after I change into my street clothes.” Claude saw then that she was nothing but trouble and the volatile Billy was doomed to fall prey to her charms. That night and for about three nights after Billy went underground, Claude couldn’t find him to get himself and the car ready for next race in Riverside the next week. When he did show up he was non-committal about the next week’s race. Had that shit-eating grin that every guy who has been taken around the world had.

Two bad things, bad for the guys if not for Sheila, then happened. First Eddie took a horrible spin-out at Riverdale and wreaked the car when he tried a foolhardy inside move for position trying to impress Sheila with his skills. No fool after that incident Sheila dumped him as a guy who was going nowhere and would not have the dough necessary to keep her in fast action style. Second Red, after a three days and nights poker game tapped out, was busted and Sheila was ready to leave him when he told her about the plan. A plan to rob a U.S. Mail truck that would be carrying over a million in cash on a not well-travelled road through the high desert down in Southern California. That idea kept her in check, kept her in Red’s clutches.  They, Sheila and Rusty along with a couple of Red’s confederates kept working out the plan to ambush the truck on a deserted road once they were able to pass the truck on the one lane dirt road. Nobody’s reflexes and driving ability was good enough to do the task though. Then Sheila, half-thinking that she needed a safety valve in case the job went bust and half-thinking that Red’s plan didn’t mean a damn thing if they couldn’t get pass the mail truck told Red that she had a guy who could do the serious driving easily. If she could find him.                    

Sheila did find Billy now working the auto demolition circuit under the name of Eddie Stevens down in Riverdale after getting in contact with Claude who knew where Eddie was and what he was doing. Claude said she had that same hungry look on her face that he had seen that day when she first approached Eddie. He was fucked whatever she had in mind. After bullshitting Eddie about how he knew from the get-go that she was only interested in guys who were interested in fighting their asses off for a shot at the main chance she soft-pedalled him into a motel bedroom and went to work on him. A couple of days later she brought Eddie to see Red and see if he was the guy for the driver’s job. Done deal after Eddie beat the pajamas out of the timed clockings that were needed to successfully complete the job.   

In the event the robbery went off without a hitch-the actual robbery part anyway. There had been bad blood between Red and Eddie though over Sheila before the robbery over Red’s attitude toward her. That bad blood never abated when Eddie was left along with the other confederates looking stupid once Red and Sheila (Sheila’s idea here so like her mother ready to stiff any guy except she didn’t have whatever genes Kitty had to plan the heist) made their prearranged plans to keep all the dough under some principle that cutting dough two ways (really one way in the end) was a lot more profitable, that easy street would last a lot longer than splitting five ways.

Of course Eddie may not have been the brightest bulb on the planet but he soon figured when Sheila did not show at the spot that they had planned to meet and take all the dough for themselves that he had been put on the spot. Put on the spot big time when Red told his boys that Eddie had been the one, had stiffed them. Red knowing that Eddie would be hitting some low-rent race track to earn his kale had his boys work the circuits. They eventually found him doing “chicken runs” against high school drop-outs in Modesto, found out the shack rooming house where he hung his hat and went in for the kill. As far as the local sheriff could tell Eddie put up no struggle, had no obvious fear of death on his rigid face when the coroner came to do his report. Yeah, Sheila had done her work well.       

They say that no good turn should remain unpunished, the same with bad though when Judgement Day came for Red, using the name Dutch then and Sheila after those loose cannon killers found out that it had been Red who had stiffed them. After a big afternoon shoot-out the local sheriff and that over-worked coroner had four more stiffs to figure out the cause of death.

John Colfax knew one thing, no, two things. He was glad he had never met his mother and equally glad he had never met his sister.