The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1934–2025
The statute: bank robbery became a federal crime in May 1934, weeks before the Merchants National was robbed — the statute that stands today at 18 U.S.C. § 2113 was the Dillinger era's own legislation. It was never used on the South Bend robbers of 1934, for the plainest of reasons: the three men the Bureau names were dead before any indictment could have mattered. Every later case in this section, from Holleman's credit union in 1976 forward, is a § 2113 case, made federally in the Northern District of Indiana on an FBI investigation, and preserved in the court reports and the Department's releases rather than in the city's own paper — which is why the modern entries so often cannot name the bank: the federal record that survives in public names defendants, dates, counts and sentences, and leaves the institution a dateline.
The scale: the documented takes run downhill across the century. The Merchants National lost $28,439 by the Associated Press report of the day — $29,890 in Newton's compilation — in a single Saturday noon. The credit union of 1976 lost about $2,400. The modern cases are counted in the low thousands: $3,409 in restitution in the 2011 Fox record, over $12,000 taken by Jiggetts, over $8,000 by Maez, $12,155 in restitution across Taylor's three banks, $1,965 in Jenkins's. The sentences run the other way: twenty years in 1977, thirty years for Maez, 262 months for Taylor. The largest documented take from a South Bend bank in this whole record remains the 1934 figure, whichever of its two printed values the reader takes.
The cost: and this section's whole human cost in nine decades of record is one name. Customers and tellers were threatened in these pages, a bank officer was wounded in 1934, hostages were fired on, and robbers in other cities' cases in this section's boundary list died at other scenes — but the only person the documented South Bend bank-robbery record shows killed at a South Bend bank is the patrolman who walked toward the noise at Michigan and Wayne on June 30, 1934: Howard C. Wagner, 29, directing traffic on a Saturday noon. The record begins with a blank century, peaks in a single documented hour, and is sober the rest of the way down. That is the shape of it, printed as found.
Sources:
- 18 U.S.C. § 2113 and its 1934 enactment (Federal Bank Robbery Act, May 18, 1934) — the statute under which every post-1934 case in this section was prosecuted.
- The entries of this section, and their sources, for the takes, sentences and the Wagner record assembled here.