Herman “Baron” Lamm may be the most famous Prohibition Era gangster you’ve never heard of. If not for Lamm, you may never have heard of John Dillinger either. Herman Karl Lamm was born in Kassel, Germany on April 19, 1890. Lamm joined the Prussian Army as a young man, but by the time World War I erupted, Lamm was gone, kicked out of his regiment after he was caught cheating at cards. By 1914, the defrocked sergeant had emigrated to the United States where he quickly turned to a life of crime.
Lamm was a stickup man, but unlike most bank robbers of his era, the Baron was not just a Tommy gun and a cloud of dust type outlaw, he was a man with a plan. Lamm used his military training with its study of tactics, precision, and discipline to form his own style of bank robbery. Lamm is considered to be the most brilliant and efficient bank robber of his time and the father of modern bank robbery. Virtually every bank robber cliché in movies and books contains one or more of Lamm’s methods.
After Lamm was arrested in 1917 following a botched holdup, he was sent to Utah State Prison for a year. While there he developed “The Lamm Technique,” a blueprint for robbing banks in which he pioneered the concept of “casing” banks and developing contingency plans in case of unforeseen problems. The Baron’s technique for casing a bank was designed to take the guesswork out of bank robbing. It included noting the comings and goings of guards (if any), reviewing and mapping out the bank’s floor plans, and sending in men and women posing as bank customers, security system salesmen, or reporters to get a better look at the inside of the buildings and noting the location of the vault and any other safes. Drawings, spare vehicles, and gasoline were incorporated into each plan.
Lamm assigned each gang member a specific job in an assigned zone of the bank. Each accomplice was given a strict timetable to complete their stage of the robbery. Among the jobs he assigned to his fellow robbers were the lookout, the getaway driver, the lobby man, and the vault man. Lamm staged “dry-run” rehearsals for his men using full-scale mock-ups of the interior of the bank. Lamm used a stopwatch during these practice runs to ensure the proper timing was achieved. He insisted that his gang members stick strictly to the schedule, regardless of how much money they could steal.
Lamm developed meticulous getaway plans for each of his robberies. He created the first detailed bank robbery getaway maps, which he called “gits,” on which he mapped the nearby back roads, which he called “cat roads” that were accurate to within a tenth of a mile, Before every heist, Lamm stole a getaway car with a high-powered engine and then recruited local bootleggers and auto racing drivers to drive it. Lamm would then paste a chart on the dashboard which included block-by-block markings of escape routes, alternate turns, and speedometer readings. Often, Lamm marked trees, fence rails, and signposts with torn strips of colored cloth to mark the route. Before each run, Lamm and the getaway driver timed each route down to the second. Practice runs on the escape routes and alternative routes would take days to master. Despite his meticulous planning, Lamm had several run-ins with the authorities, using several aliases.
After he was arrested using the alias Robert J. Masden in Finley County, North Carolina in February 1927, Lamm’s past came up in a bond hearing after evidence showed that he had been arrested in San Francisco on a charge of robbery in December 1914 and again in Superior, Wisconsin in June 1918 under suspicion of being connected with separate robberies under his real name. In both cases, he was told to leave the city after no connection could be established. The next month (July 1918), he was arrested while using the alias Harry K. Lamb in Kansas City, Missouri, and again released. And as Thomas Bell, he was arrested in St. Joseph, Missouri in December 1920, on a charge of burglary. In May 1929, Lamm was arrested in Benton, Illinois, and it was discovered he was a suspect in the robbery of $296,000 at the Northwestern National Bank of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Five of Lamm’s accomplices in that robbery were captured but Lamm, (aka “Thomas Bell”), escaped.
Lamm and his gang conducted dozens of successful bank robberies from the end of World War I to 1930 using the Lamm Technique, stealing more than $1 million in total (equivalent to over $15 million today). They were considered the most efficient gang of bank robbers of the era. However, Herman Lamm was living on borrowed time.
On December 16, 1930, Lamm and his gang drove up in a new Buick sedan to a bank in Clinton, Indiana. Getaway driver Edward H. Hunter double-parked the flashy car outside of the Citizens bank of Clinton. Inside the car with him were James “Oklahoma Jack” Clark, Walter Dietrich, G.W. “Dad” Landy, and Herman “Baron” Lamm. Hunter (no relation to the author) was a Terre Haute resident without a criminal record. Clark, an escapee from the Kansas State Reformatory, was sought for killing Lafayette policeman Charles Arman during a heist at the Tippecanoe Loan and Trust Co. on Nov. 1, 1927. He was also linked to a $200,000 hijacking of a U.S. Mint armored car in Denver during December 1922 and a $67,000 robbery of the Frankfort State Bank. Known by several aliases, Dietrich’s rap sheet included a 1925 robbery of a Los Angeles theatre. He was being sought for his role in the robbery of Procter & Gamble Soap’s St. Louis payroll on March 7, 1929. 71-year-old Landy began his career during the era of ‘Butch’ Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. “Dad” Landy had been recently acquitted of robbing a bank in St. Bernice, Indiana.
The four bandits entered the bank and each took his preassigned position. Landy and Dietrich promptly ordered the employees and the bank’s only customer to lie on the floor while Clark and Lamm cleaned out the tellers’ drawers. “Oklahoma Jack” instructed assistant cashier Lawrence Jackson to open two vaults, pistol-whipping him when he could not disengage a time lock.
Meanwhile, Clinton barber C.E. VanSickle cautiously approached the suspicious Buick brandishing a shotgun. VanSickle was one of the thousands of Indiana citizens organized to help police fight a growing number of bank robberies in the state. VanSickle arrived just as the bandits exited the bank carrying $15,567 in cash and bonds. Hunter panicked, pulled a fast U-turn, and hit the gas, slamming hard into the curb and blowing out the front tire. Undaunted, the bandits jumped into the fleeing car as it thumped north up Vine Street. Two miles outside of town on Highway 63, the bandits stopped to change the tire. Clinton police chief Everett “Pete” Helms and patrolman Walter Burnsides arrived in pursuit only to have their car riddled by slugs from three Tommy guns. Officer Burnsides was wounded during the skirmish but not before he managed to shoot a hole into the rear tire of the getaway car as it sped away.
This second flat tire forced the robbers to abandon one stolen Buick for another. Unbeknownst to them, this second stolen Buick was equipped with a device that prevented it from going any faster than 35 miles per hour. The speed governor had been installed by the car’s owner to prevent his elderly father from driving recklessly. The bandits jumped out of that car and flagged down a Chevrolet cattle truck owned by Wells Gilbert. Three miles south of Dana, 35-year-old former deputy sheriff Joe Walker picked up the chase but was shot and killed in a crossfire gunfight with the desperados.
Unsurprisingly, Gilbert’s cattle truck overheated during the high-speed chase near Scotland, Ill. Gilbert was released unharmed while the fugitives frantically searched for their next getaway vehicle. By the time the gang hotwired a Ford, National Guard scout planes and about 150 vigilantes from Indiana and Illinois were in close pursuit from both sides, quickly closing the trap on the outlaws. The bad luck continued when the gang discovered the hotwired Ford had only one gallon of gas in the tank. It ran out of gasoline at Leo Moody’s farm near Sidell, Ill. Lamm and his gang were surrounded by about 200 police officers and armed citizens.
A massive gun battle ensued, farm owner Moody emptied his rifle at the desperadoes, and getaway driver Hunter was shot eight times and later died. Here’s where it gets a little sketchy. One newspaper account states that as the posse closed in, Clinton police chief Helms killed Hunter and Ernest Boetto of Clinton, a member of the posse, is credited with killing Herman Lamm from 400 yards. Another account claims that Lamm and fellow gang member, 71-year-old G.W. “Dad” Landy ran from the gunfire ending up on Moody’s farm. Vowing never to return to prison, the alternate account states that both men shot themselves in the head in Moody’s hog house rather than surrendering. Two survivors of Lamm’s gang, Walter Dietrich and James “Oklahoma Jack” Clark, were captured and eventually sentenced to life at the Indiana state prison in Michigan City for Sheriff Joe Walker’s murder.
While in Michigan City. Dietrich was assigned to work in the prison shirt factory alongside a very young John Dillinger, serving 45 months for strongarm robbery. Dietrich and Clark struck up a friendship with Dillinger after Lamm’s death. Legend claims that the convicts were permitted to join Dillinger’s gang under the condition they teach him everything they knew about the Lamm Technique. Actually, it seems much more logical that the young inexperienced Dillinger was an eager pupil of the two much more experienced bank robbers. Soon after Dillinger was paroled on May 10, 1933, he put his education to good use.
Of course, John Dillinger didn’t use the Lamm Technique for very long. On July 22, 1934, Dillinger was shot to death in an alley next to the Biograph Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. And as every Circle City historian knows, Dillinger is buried in Crown Hill Cemetery under an austere, yet iconic, headstone visited by hundreds of crime buffs every year. While the man credited as the architect of his career, Herbert “Baron” Lamm, who died 92 years ago this week, rests in an unmarked grave less than 90 miles away in Songer Cemetery in Tilton, IL.
The Dec. 22, 1930 Indianapolis Times ran an article titled: “Three Bandits Rest In A Ditch” reporting “pine boxes painted black served as coffins” for the robbers who were buried “dressed in the cheapest of burial robes…without benefit of clergy” at the “county poor farm near here. The coffins were placed in a ditch which served as a potter’s field.” The article further noted that “more than $1,000 found on the bodies of the three will be given to the family of Joe Walker of Dana” the deputy killed by the gang. While hundreds of people visited the Sidell (Illinois) morgue to view Lamm’s body alongside those of his two cohorts, the bodies went unclaimed. The Baron was given a “pauper’s burial” and, while the location of the bandit’s bones are unknown, he is not alone. G.W. “Dad” Landy and the getaway driver E.H. Hunter are buried alongside him.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View,” “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide,” and “The Mystery of the H.H. Holmes Collection.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
