Roy Gardner

Roy Gardner (born January 5, 1884 in Trenton , Missouri , † January 10, 1940 in San Francisco, California ) was an American railroad and jewel robber and breakout artist.

In the course of his criminal career, Gardner stole foreign currency and securities valued at over $ 1 million. His delinquent hussar pranks earned him various nicknames such as "The Smiling Bandit", "The Mail Train Bandit" or "King of the Escape Artists", as well as a reward of more than $ 5,000 on his head.

Breakout artist

Gardner's resourcefulness and consummate mastery as a breakaway from prisoner transports and penal institutions has gone down in American history as a piece of modern folklore. The designation of his virtuosity as a breakout with the word escapology, an attribute that is mainly used in the English-speaking world on escape artists like Harry Houdini , but rarely on prisoners, points to the almost scientific perfection (-ology as the English equivalent of the German-Greek syllable -ologie for the description of scientific words) of his ability in this area.

Appearance

Gardner was six feet tall, had a strong, stocky but athletic build, piercing blue eyes and black hair, so in many ways corresponded to the cliché of the dashing gangsters of the robbery period and the prohibition years.

biography

Early years

Gardner was born on a farm in Trenton, Missouri in 1884 and spent his youth from the age of eight in Colorado Springs , where his father ran a local electricity company. Gardner spent his early adult life as a vagabond adventurer in the Southwest of the States, where he earned his living as a miner and farrier, among other things. Gardner joined the American Army for a while as a recruit to the 22nd Infantry Regiment in Fort Worth, Texas. From 1903 to 1905 he was stationed in the Philippines. In 1906 Gardner deserted and initially settled in Nogales in Mexico.

During the Mexican Revolution he worked as an arms and ammunition smuggler for the benefit of the revolutionary Carranza troops. After his capture by the dictator Huerta's army , he was sentenced to death, but on March 20, 1909, he overpowered his executioner on his way to execution and escaped from the prison in Mexico City. After his return to the States, he initially hired himself as a prize boxer, a profession in which, in the summer of 1910, he was promoted to the sparring partner of heavyweight champion JJ Jeffries at the Ben Lemond training camp in Reno .

After Gardner had made his earnings from his time as a boxer gambling, he raided the Gilindemann Jewelry Store, a jewelry store in San Francisco, in the summer of 1910 , but was arrested and sent to San Quentin State Prison to serve his sentence. After he saved the life of a guard during a prisoner uprising in 1912, he was pardoned by the governor and released early. He worked as a welder at Linde Air Products Company in San Francisco. In June 1913, Gardner married the waitress Dolly Nelson. The marriage resulted in a daughter who was born on September 23, 1917.

During the First World War he worked as an acetylene welder in the Mare Island naval warehouse for the Schwa-Batcher Company. On the armistice day in 1918, he left Schwa-Batcher and opened his own company.

The most wanted criminal in the United States

According to Gardner's own account, he turned to train robbery after sending his sister, who was in financial distress, a letter with $ 200: since she had only received the letter and not the banknote and he had gambled away all of his remaining money, he had felt it was his right to take revenge on the railway company.

The fact remains, regardless of the doubtfulness of this apologetic anecdote, that on the night of April 16, 1920, Gardner ambushed a US Mail mail train outside San Diego , stealing $ 80,000 in foreign exchange and securities. Three days later he was found burying his booty and arrested. Gardner was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison on McNeil's Island, Washington, for armed assault, while he swore in the courtroom that he would never serve his sentence. On June 5, 1920, while he was on the way to prison on the train in the company of US Marshals Cavanaugh and Haig, near Portland he succeeded in obtaining the gun of one of the two law enforcement officers to disarm the two men , captured, chained in the compartment with their own handcuffs, and jumped off the train. In Rainier, Washington, he stole a motorboat and was able to take the train to Canada via Astoria and Bellingham. In Saskatchewan he got a job as a welder under a false name. He started traveling to the United States as a traveling dealer.

In 1921 he secretly returned to the States and as a lone perpetrator raided banks and mail trains all over the country and eventually went back to California. He stole the stately sum of $ 187,000 in the attack on the mail train from Sacramento on May 19, 1921. After an attack on another mail train on May 20, he was able to escape again, but was clearly identified and put out to be searched. A few days later he was arrested at the Porter House Hotel in Roseville, where he lived under the name Neal Gaynor. The owner of the Peerless Cafe , where Gardner occasionally dined, had recognized his face on a wanted poster. Gardner was again sentenced to a twenty-five year sentence and again sent by train to McNeil Island. Once again, Gardner managed to obtain a weapon, overwhelm his guards - the marshals Mulhall and Rinkell - captured, chained to their seats and disembarked from the train at Castle Rock .

After the authorities launched the largest manhunt in the history of the American west coast, Gardner - who tried to mask his face with bandages - was identified and recovered at the Olympic Club Hotel in Centralia , Washington. His arrest was announced on June 18. After being sentenced to a 25-year prison term in McNeil Island, he finally managed to get him to McNeil Island on the third attempt.

After only six weeks in prison, Gardner managed to get over the fence of the prison yard during a prisoner baseball game on September 5, 1921 and - while two other inmates were shot by the tower guards - to flee the island. In a letter to a newspaper, Gardner mocked the prison administration and the entire penal system and thus angered the already angry authorities even more than was already the case.

Gardner, who now has the official status of the most wanted criminal in the United States, was overpowered by the postal worker Roy Gin and handed over to the police in a train robbery near Phoenix in the fall of 1921. He was sentenced to an additional twenty-five years and sent to Leavenworth Federal Prison . On January 24, 1925, he was transferred to the Atlanta Federal Prison . There he made various attempts to break out, but all of them failed. After he captured three prison guards at gunpoint in 1927 to force his release, he was placed in solitary confinement for twenty months. After his release from solitary confinement, the prison authorities felt compelled to transfer him to a mental hospital in Washington, DC for a few months . After participating in a hunger strike, Gardner was transferred to Leavenworth Annex Prison in 1930 and to Alcatraz in 1934 , where he worked in the mattress factory. In 1938 he was finally pardoned.

Late years

In the last years of his life, Gardner published an autobiographical book entitled "Hellcatraz", took part in criminological lectures and played one of his for the film "You Can't Beat the Rap" with the mail train attendant Louis Sonney, one of his former victims Coups after. The planned film "I Stole A Million" never came about. On January 10, 1940, Gardner was found dead in his room at the Governor Hotel in San Francisco after he committed suicide using cyanide fumes and poison gas.