United States v. William P. "Dinty" Colbeck et al., criminal case file No. 25 (S.D. Ill.)

The National Archives at Chicago holds the criminal case file for Case No. 25 in the Southern District of Illinois, Southern Division. The catalog title names fourteen defendants: William P. “Dinty” Colbeck, Oliver Dougherty, Frank “Cotton” Eppelsheimer, Gustav B. “Gus” Dietmeyer, Frank Hackethal, James J. “Stickey” Hennessey, Charles “Red” Lanham (the title prints “Lamnham”), Izadore “Izzy” Londe, Stephen Ryan, David “Chippy” Robinson, Charles “Red” Smith, Lee Turner, Raymond Renard and Thomas H. Saatkamp. The catalog dates the file from 3 September 1924 to 11 January 1952 and notes that “The majority of the documents are from 1924 and 1925, but some were created when the defendants were released from prison in the 1940’s and 1950’s.”

The archivist’s scope note reads, in part: “This file consists of a criminal case in which the defendants were accused of assaulting Postmaster George A. Roberts, who was in charge of $55,000, on a mail train on May 26th, 1923. The money was the payroll for a coal mine in Southern Illinois. The defendants were members of a gang called Egan’s Rats. They were led by World War I veteran William P. “Dinty” Colbeck.” It adds that a former gang member and fellow defendant, Ray Renard, “serving time in federal prison in Atlanta, decided to turn on the gang and make a deal for clemency,” and that “The robbery was planned at “Hackethal’s Place,” and a warrant led to the discovery of shotguns, revolvers, rifles, ammunition and explosives.” The file includes the indictment, verdict, transcript of proceedings, warrants, affidavits, jury instructions, appeal papers and “Treasury Department Investigation letters from 1952, relating to Charles “Red” Smith.”

“Egan’s Rats” and “led by” are the archivist’s words. The indictment and the Seventh Circuit’s opinion do not name a gang or rank the defendants. The note’s account of the robbery also differs from the indictment in detail: the note speaks of a mail train, a freight train and an armed mail truck in St. Louis, while the indictment charges a robbery at Staunton of two named custodians of a mail pouch. Two parts of the file are digitized: the court documents (636 images) and the testimony (897 images). The jacket shown above records the defendants “found guilty by Jury and sentenced” to the penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, “for 25 yrs., each”; its handwritten conclusion date is only partly legible and is not given here.