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Bank Robberies · the documented cases
Fort Wayne's banks are chronicled in the Banks section, and its crime in the Crime section. This section holds the narrow ground where the two meet: the times men took money out of a Fort Wayne bank by force or by stealth, in the order they happened. It is a shorter record than the city's size might suggest. The famous gangs of the 1920s and 1930s robbed banks all around Fort Wayne and, so far as the documented robbery lists go, never one inside it; the city's first bank robbery, by its own newspapers' later account, was a Chicago gang's work in 1930. The cases that follow are the whole of what the surviving record — newspapers, federal court opinions, and the FBI's released investigative files — will support. Where the record gives a suspicion rather than a conviction, the entry says so. Where it gives nothing at all, as for the whole nineteenth century, the section prints the blank.
The nineteenth century · a blank page
1863–1900
No case: Fort Wayne had banks from the State Bank branch of the canal era forward, and by 1874 it had a First National Bank advertising itself as the first national bank organized in Indiana. What the published record reached for…
The gang era, tested · the famous gangs robbed around Fort Wayne, not in it
1924–1934
The question: northeastern Indiana sat inside the working territory of the two most documented bank-robbing gangs of the era, and local retelling has long placed their work in Fort Wayne itself. The robbery lists — the hardest…
Darl Parker and the Lincoln National robbery · the road to Alcatraz
OCTOBER 18, 1957 – DECEMBER 16, 1962
The robbery: on Friday, October 18, 1957, Darl Lee Parker — the name is spelled Darl Dee Parker in the caption of his federal appeal, and Daryl Lee Parker in the Alcatraz literature — and John T. Bartholomew robbed the Clinton…
The manager held overnight · the robbery of November 20, 1961
NOVEMBER 20, 1961 – JULY 31, 1968
The crime: on the night of Sunday, November 19, 1961, three men — Julian Perez, Jesse Paramo and Manuel Zurita — got into the home of a Fort Wayne bank manager on the pretense of being deputy sheriffs, and held the manager and…
March 4, 1976 · the robbery whose record is a shooting
MARCH 4, 1976
What the record holds: a bank robbery occurred in Fort Wayne on the morning of March 4, 1976 — the federal court opinion that preserves the day does not name the bank, and no account of the robbers themselves is in the record…
The Saint Joe Road robbery · $174,441 and a detective down
JANUARY 27, 1994 – FEBRUARY 1995
The robbery: at about 10:30 in the morning on January 27, 1994, two men entered the NBD Bank at 5767 Saint Joe Road and robbed it of $174,441.68 — the largest bank take documented in Fort Wayne's record. The FBI's memorandum of…
The modern tail · the federal record
FEBRUARY 14, 2013
One case, at the record's size: the twenty-first century's Fort Wayne bank robberies belong, as the main Crime section rules, to the Current section's public-safety record, and they are not catalogued here. One modern case enters…
The answer · law, laboratory and task force
1934 – THE PRESENT
The law: every case in this section after 1930 was prosecuted under a statute that did not exist when the Broadway State Bank was robbed. The federal bank robbery act — the ancestor of today's 18 U.S.C. § 2113 — was enacted in…