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TRUCKS, TUBES, AND MAIL ROBBERS 293
000 loss in 36 major robberies in those two years proved that the ungentle art of mail robbery was not dead.
While I was "humanizing" the mails in Washington on April 6, a group of bandits were burglarizing them in Chicago. I was shocked by the report that a $500,000 to $750,000 "haul" had been made at the loading platform of the Dearborn Street Station. The story was that a group of men started an ostensibly harmless baseball game shortly after noon in a vacant lot across Federal Street from the station. At fourthirty the game suddenly stopped, and the shooting started. They drew their revolvers, made a dash for the loading platform, ordered an unarmed mail clerk to throw out the registered-mail sacks, and made their getaway in an automobile. Whatever the details, the Post Office Department was suddenly running a huge deficit of more than half a million dollars. And as if that were not enough, the theft of one sack of registered mail was reported from my home town on the same day!
I don't know whether the Chicago haul or the idea of somebody robbing my own back yard brought me to the boiling point the faster, but something had to be done. Thirteen days after those two robberies we announced a five-thousand-dollar reward for the capture and conviction of any mail robber, and we also announced the arming of all postal employees handling mail in places where robberies might occur. The War Department released sixteen thousand .45-caliber pistols, hundreds of repeating shotguns of the riot type, and a million rounds of ammunition for use by postal employees.
Issuing firearms may seem a drastic action, but it was needed to protect the lives of men performing their duties and public property entrusted to the Post Office Department. Many postal employees had been shot down in cold blood; others trained in the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps were not to be denied the right to fight fire with fire if other methods failed. At this same time I issued a report to the press, inviting them to keep the public fully informed: "We do not care how far the papers go in criticizing the Department. The public is entitled to know if we are to blame and know just what we are doing to stop the mail robbing."
Post office inspectors were called into immediate conference, and the urgency of the situation was impressed upon them. The circumstances surrounding all robberies for the past two years were reviewed, and the whole department was briefed to be ready to handle our Public Enemy No. 1.
Things quieted down to some extent after the April announcements, and no more major robberies occurred until August, when a $60,000 theft occurred in Illinois. On the other side of the ledger, one of the biggest mail-robbery rings had been cracked wide open. We picked up a swindle king in Chicago who had coast-to-coast mail-robbery dealings;