The career of "Midget Bandit" Henry J. Fernekes is largely forgotten today, but he rose from a beginning as a bumbling stickup man to a criminal mastermind rarely seen outside of thriller novels.
In fact, it turns out that his criminal career was even inspired by popular fiction.
Fernekes, a “pygmy dynamo of crookedness” according to the newspapers of the day, was a brilliant pint-size general of crime, the scourge of bank officers, police and the Pinkertons across the north east.
As the head of an army of crime, he plotted and executed bank robberies from New York state to Florida to Chicago. He was known for the meticulous scientific planning of his jobs and the military precision used to carry out bank robberies.
Fernekes had but a high school education and a few months of law school, but he educated himself by reading books at free libraries, becoming an expert in welding, acetylene cutting, explosives, chemistry, gas and physics.
When they weren’t calling him “The Midget”, police pursuing him gave him another name, that of “The Scientific Bandit”.
He used his hard-won knowledge to burn through bank vaults, make bombs, defeat security measures and make chemical agents to use against the police.
“I didn’t go into the game for a thrill,” he supposedly told an NEA feature writer . “I made a business of it and employed every ounce of brains I could command to win.”
I’d like to be able to say that he really was a midget, but sadly, like many of the bandits tagged with the “Midget” name, Fernekes was short, but not that short. Criminal records show that he was 5 foot, 4 and a half inches, although some reports say he was several inches shorter. He is constantly referred to as a short man of slight build, however.
Fernekes early life didn’t foreshadow his mastery of crime, in fact his early exploits were more farcical than ferocious.
His parents were the notorious “Pete and Lizzie”, proprietors of a “disorderly” house in the vice district of turn of the century Chicago called The Village Inn. The young man grew up in the back rooms of the house, rubbing elbows with the criminals and thrill-seekers of the age.
The road house was well known to local police, who cited the couple on more than one occasion and raided the place from time to time. Lizzie struck back by making a series of sensational charges about corruption in the ranks of the Chicago police that resulted in a shakeup at police headquarters.
Peter Fernekes also knew some trouble with the law being arrested for hit and run when his automobile struck and seriously injured a young boy.
But by the time Henry makes the news, “Pete and Lizzie” had split up. Henry had gone with his father back to Valparaiso, Ill, where Peter Fernekes ran a more respectable lake resort. That was where the teenage Henry met his femme fatal, Lulu Woodward, two years younger and quite pretty.
Over the objection of his father, the 18-year-old Henry eloped with the 16-year-old Lulu, taking her to Chicago, where he’d found employment at $9 a week as a clerk.
But that paltry amount was not enough, he found, to support a wife, and so his depredations began.
Always a thinker, the young Fernekes turned to the popular fiction of the time for lessons in crookdom.
“The kid has been fed too much crook literature,” Sergeant John Anderson of the central division said at the time.
The book he chose as his blueprint was a melodramatic tome by George C. Jenks and Carlyle Moore titled Stop, Thief! with a cover by James Montgomery Flagg and four interior illustrations. The 1913 novel tells the story of a youthful yegg who starts out on a life of crime, but meets a charming young lady of good repute. During his adventures he must use his criminal talents to save her from disgrace and by the end of the book the power of love has reformed this young footpad and set him on the road to straight success and marriage.
This sterling example of melodramatic crook fiction of its time, by the way, is now through the wonders of technology available for download at Google Books.
Fernekes wrote a note to his young bride, who was away visiting friends, assembled a crook’s kit based on the notes he’d taken, and set out to gain some loot.
“Dearest Lulu: A few words before I go on this ungodly errand, although knightly in purpose. If I am caught, which will only be at my death, as that is much preferable, learn to forgive and forget, as my sincere love for you prompted this action.”
He began by studying maps of the Chicago elevated railway and picking ticket agents to hold up. His first effort netted him nothing, as agent Edward J. Kane swatted at him with an iron poker.
Taking his defeat in stride, he tried again to hold up Kane, and again got nothing, although he did shoot a button off of Kane’s shirt sleeve.
“Have you got a grudge against me?” asked Kane.
“Not particularly,” answered the boy, “but I’m coming back and get you again.”
He never did succeed in robbing Kane, but his luck was better with some other agents, earning a few dollars.
Not satisfied with holding up ticket offices for chump change, he set his sights on bigger game.
Early on September 18, 1914, he begins the adventure that would first earn him his first newspaper headlines and his first nickname: “The Bridegroom Bandit”.
His kit, helpfully shown in a newspaper article of the time, included both a revolver and a semi-automatic pistol, cotton batting and leather thongs for restraints, burglar tools and his copy of “Stop Thief”. For a mask, he took out the “Turkish” rug from a package of cigarettes and cut holes in it, using rubber bands to fit it to his face. (These sort of “rugs” were cloth premiums given away with tobacco purchases and were often repurposed. They are sometimes seen in period quilts, for example. It’s unlikely that his mask was one of the small, 3"x5", rugs that were given out in individual packages, but larger textiles could be obtained from the tobacco firms by turning in coupons.)
He carried his little suitcase of crime to the First National Bank Building and made his way to the 10th floor office of real estate dealer Robert North, apparently at random where the farce commenced.
He accosted stenographer Ella Jones and demanded that she turn over all of the money in the firm’s vault. Jones laughed at first, thinking it was a joke, but after Fernekes shouted and pointed his guns at her, she complied, giving him $45.50.
When Fernekes tried to lock her in the vault to aid in his getaway, she resisted and a struggle ensued. Fernekes ended up fleeing before Jones’ wrath as she screamed and raised the alarm.
She later said she was ashamed that she allowed the youth to rob her at all.
Fernekes sought a hiding place in the building where he could lay low and entered the offices of Charles S. Norton & Co. where he encountered Norton, his brother Irving, and two pretty teenage stenographers, Esther Penikoff and Florence Mayer.
“Sh-h-h-h,” Ferneks said.
“Shush yourself, whadda you want?” replies Mayer.
The young tough brought up his twin guns and silenced the group.
“Why it must be a movie,” Penkoff guessed.
Ferneks smiled and allowed the group to think it was all just a gag, beginning to joke with them. He even put his guns down and put one in the pocket of his coat which he laid nearby.
“You’ll know all about it soon enough,” Fernekes said.
The little group enjoyed their time, with Fernekes even posing the group and using the camera from his burglar kit to take snapshots.
“We thought it was a movie stunt," Mayer said. “He did look rather young for a leading man, but his eyes were large and expressive.”
Small though he was, Fernekes always did well with the ladies.
Charles Norton made an excuse to leave the room and from the front office, phoned Mayer to tell her to remove the gun from Fernekes coat. She demurred, but Irving Norton succeeding in removing the revolver when Fernekes wasn’t looking.
Norton found out about the search for the boy and returned to the office with police officers.
Asked why he didn’t try to flee before police found him, Fernekes said: “I guess I didn’t think Norton would turn me over to the police after we had such a nice time.”
The judge didn’t find him entertaining, sentencing him to an indefinite stay in the state reformatory. While incarcerated, his young bride obtained a divorce, although she seemingly stayed on good terms with him for the rest of his life.
“After we were married I did the only thing I could to get money—I went out with my guns and took it,” Fernekes said. “I didn’t want it for myself, but for her.
“And I haven’t heard from her since. It’s not her fault.
“I should have let the bulls kill me when I saw I could not escape. I don’t know why I didn’t.”
He did two years behind bars, and during the time he was incarcerated he turned from popular fiction to a more practical study of crime.
"There's no denying that I mixed in with a lot of older boys, and bad ones," he told the Chicago Daily Tribune. "All kinds of criminals. That's bad for a kid. Still, they've got to have places like that. There doesn't seem to be any other way.
When he came out he had connections with the Chicago underworld. The likable and smart young felon, just 20, began to learn the trades that would make him a criminal star.
From free libraries he taught himself chemistry, physics and engineering. On his own, he became a bomb maker in demand by the bustling Chicago syndicates. He learned welding and became an ace safe and vault cracker.
He studied art so that he could better draw up the plans for robbing banks.
He was soon leading a gang of expert bank bandits.
"It's really much easier and safer to work alone. As soon as you pool your plans you can go in for bigger deals, but you split the profits. Still, it's just like most businesses. One fellow has got something the other fellow hasn't. Together they make a team. Enlarge that idea and you get what people call the 'gang'."
Although his techniques had advanced from his days as the "Bridegroom Bandit", he maintained a sense of fair play of the gentleman thief variety.
"No, I'd never stoop to a stickup. You see, when you do that you are taking money away from some poor fellow who hasn't much. Probably his pay check. But a bank, or a syndicate, now that's entirely different. They're insured. It's just a profit and loss business deal with them. It requires finesses (sic) to outsmart such a corporation. And it seems legitimate, at least fairly so, it seems to me."
Never a physical threat because of his size, although he wasn’t shy about hitting a victim if he got out of line, he became a small arms expert. A two-gun man of deadly accuracy with the brace of pistols he carried in shoulder holsters under his natty suits.
He left the shotguns and Tommy guns to his larger confederates.
His preparation for a job was intense. His trademark was that his jobs were well-scouted and he hit hard and fast and was gone before the police knew what hit them.
He was at the forefront of the new, modern bank robber.
"In the old days you hear of robbing a store and driving away in a horse and buggy. That's funny. And the automobile now helps out a lot. Still, I believe it's much harder to get away with a job nowadays. Much harder."
That’s what makes one of his most famous jobs so puzzling. There’s no doubt that he had some involvement in the 1924 Pearl River bank job. New York authorities certainly thought he was the man who killed two clerks in the failed robbery.
We’ll never know exactly what happened on that December day, but the robbery just wasn’t up to Fernekes usual standards.
Fernekes was living in the nearby town of Westwood at the time under an assumed name. He’d been there for more than a year, running an electrical shop, becoming part of the local community, enjoying the life of a family man with his “wife” and young child.
When he went to “work” he commuted to Chicago, Florida or New York City. Westwood was his hideout, where he raised his family and was a respectable man.
The job had some hallmarks of a Fernekes affair. The robber or robbers struck on the day the big payroll came in for the local factory. Aside from that, the small bank was stuffed with cash and bonds. The robbers hit at the ideal time, right after most of the employees had left for lunch, leaving only two men behind.
But then it all went wrong. One of the clerks was shot and killed, the second grappled with the gunman, attempting to shoot him with the bank’s pistol. The gunman wrested the pistol away from him and shot him to death. A third man, working nearby and responding to the gunshots, was shot in the leg.
The robber, described as a large, heavily built man, fled. He and another man were seen fleeing in a new Ford driven by a third man. One of them was injured and bleeding. The men successfully escaped.
Along with evidence at the bank that showed that Fernekes obtained a safety deposit box under an assumed name, one that had been accessed and left on the floor of the vault the day of the robbery, the only evidence pointing to Fernekes involvement was that he owned a new Ford and the robbers disappeared in the area where Fernekes lived.
It may be that he was using the small town bank as a place to deposit his ill-gotten gains. Fernekes used banks as far away as San Francisco to stash his loot.
It may be that he planned the robbery and provided a safe house for the robbers afterward.
But he certainly wasn’t the big man who was the shooter. And I don’t think he took part in the job. Fernekes was a field commander. He led his men in person and took charge at the scene. There’s no evidence of him actually being there.
He certainly denied it.
"This is all the bunk. Those Pennsylvania and New York murder raps are no good. Get Clarence Darrow. You boys will be whistling for me yet."
None-the-less, the robbery and double murder aroused the area and it made staying too risky. Fernekes and his wife, really Mrs. Joe Saunders, wife of a pal of Fernekes who was in prison, were last seen driving that new Ford out of town on a back road with their possessions.
Mrs. Saunders, A.K.A. Jennie Mulhall, Fernekes senior by at least a decade, seems to have been his partner in romance as well as crime. (Don’t believe the news articles that state she was an innocent who thought her husband was a traveling salesman. All bunk.) Not only does he seem to treat his “stepson” with affection, the pair have a son of their own and it seems that Fernekes thought of her as his wife.
By the time authorities identified him in the Pearl River case, he was in the wind.
"Sure I knew there was a $2,500 reward for me. Why, I had two of the police bulletins in my car. But identification by facial means only is the hardest thing in the world, absolutely."
On March 19, 1925 in Chicago Michael Swiontkowski was carrying a payroll to a bank in his car when he was stopped and murdered by a gang allegedly led by Fernekes.
By this time teams of detectives were on the lookout for the Midget. Not only were state authorities on the case, but detectives of both the Pinkerton National Detective Agency and the Burns National Detective Agency were hired by banking associations.
“This man, who is known to the police of this country as 'The Lone Wolf,' is one of the cleverest and most astute criminals of the age,” Rockland county District Attorney Morton Lexow said. “His is a far greater menace than Gerald Chapman, as he is known to be a relentless killer, and has a keen mind, plus a pleasant personality.”
For those not up on their 1920s crook hierarchy, Chapman was the first “Public Enemy No. 1” and while his crimes are impressive, he probably wasn’t as big of a menace to law as Midget Fernekes. Fernekes might have been more flattered with the comparison to the fictional character of "The Lone Wolf" whose exploits were best sellers in the crook-fiction genre at the time.
Authorities credited him with up to 14 bank jobs in one 18 month period during this time.
Ferneks was also accused at various times with up to six murders. However, the murder of two policemen in Pennsylvania may have been committed by a similar crook in both stature and type named Barche, who was confused with him because of the similarity to Fernekes’ main alias of Darche. Fernekes actually had an alibi, even if a weak one, for the murder of Swiontkowski and as I’ve shown, he may not be the shooter in Pearl River.
It could very well be that he never actually killed anyone. On the other hand, he could have killed many more that he was never charged with slaying.
It was the Pinkertons who finally got him, thanks to a tip from a stool pigeon that he liked to study at the Crerar Library in Chicago. It wasn’t an alert library attendant who became suspicious of the Midget’s research into explosives that tipped them off as the papers claimed.
He was sitting in the library reading a book on photography chemicals when a team of detectives surrounded him and forced him to the floor, grabbing his arms so he couldn’t reach his pistols.
“I always said I’d never be taken alive and here I let you get me like this,” Fernekes said.
The arrest led investigators to uncover the Midget’s most daring heist plan yet. A squad of gunmen wearing gas masks were to have descended via automobile on a Loop area bank, loose noxious gas to overcome the bank officials and clean it out.
“Each man has his duties drilled into him time and again by the midget,” according to Captain of Detectives William Schoemaker. “There wasn’t a chance for a slip, they thought.
“They were prepared with pumpguns, rifles, sawed off shotguns and revolvers enough to equip an army.
“Also they had the most modern offensive weapons known to science. There were three big tanks of ammonia, gas masks for themselves and ten big smoke bombs to cut off pursuit.
“The plot called for the gang to enter the bank, close all doors and take off the caps from the ammonia tanks. The poison fumes would drive out all persons in the place while the robbers, protected by gas masks, were to gather up bank notes and gold and then leave by a rear entrance.
“They were ready to shoot it out with police and in a chase, they were to use the smoke bombs to elude their pursuers.”
Evidence of the plot was found in the basement of the rooming house run by Anna H. Beaucamp, who committed suicide when her complicity was revealed.
Beaucamp’s son, mistakenly called Fernekes step-son by authorities and the press, was also one of the Midget’s confederates. He was a known associate of the Capone mob, serving as the organization’s dentist. Among other tasks, he devised an acid for removing ink from stolen securities. Police questioned him over the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. He was gunned down in his dentist office by gangsters in 1929.
At the time of his capture, Fernekes was reportedly devising a bomb that would blind bank tellers temporarily and a chemical that would burn through safes without needing explosives, although he disputed that he was a criminal mastermind.
"But that's all pure fiction about me reading up on minute details of crime. It's just fiction too, that story that I wanted to be a Jesse James. Why, nobody has to be a criminal. Nobody should. I can't tell why I got into the game. I just did, that's all.
Fernekes believed in spending money on the best lawyers he could. For his defense, he chose none other than the famous Clarence Darrow to represent him.
''Get Clarence Darrow. He'll get me out of here by Monday."
Even that attorney couldn’t prevent his conviction in Illinois on a murder charge over the Swiontkowski kill.
But while the state was eager to hang the Midget, Fereneks’ legal team had other ideas. A successful appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court resulted in the murder conviction being overturned.
He remained in prison on a bank robbery charge.
This resulted in a strange legal tangle.
The state of Illinois was unwilling to re-try him for the murder of Swiontkowski. The state of New York wanted him badly so they could fry him in the electric chair for the deaths of the two bank clerks in Pearl River.
But he could not be extradited as long as he was under sentence in Illinois. The governor of the state declined to pardon him for the bank robbery charge so he could be extradited.
Fernekes refused a conditional parole, preferring to stay in Joliet rather than risk death in New York.
But he was not idle behind the walls of the old prison.
First there was the failed attempt by confederates to dynamite the walls of the prison. Warders knew it was a Fernekes plot because while the other inmates ran away from the explosion, Fernekes ran toward it. Unfortunately for him, his aides were not the explosive genius he was and the bomb failed to breach the wall.
From his prison cell he also plotted the kidnapping of the two children of Charles G. Schwappe, heirs to a $15,000,000 fortune. It was only a police wiretapping operation that prevented the meticulously planned snatch.
Fernekes was put into solitary confinement to prevent him from masterminding any more capers from behind bars. Or so the authorities thought.
In 1935, he made his most daring strike against the law with his escape from custody.
Fernekes was obviously-well known at the prison and the warders knew he was a serious escape risk. Not only was he brilliant and determined, not only did he have a record of attempting escape, but he had well-funded confederates outside the walls to aid him.
His plan was sheer perfection in its simplicity. He just walked out.
Oh, there was a bit more to it than that. He procured a suit of civilian clothes, some dark glasses and a hat. Under the pretext of having cut himself, he adhered a plaster over his upper lip to disguise that he was growing a natty mustache.
He obtained access to the room where visitors met with prisoners and handed the guard there a slip of paper with the name of a friend of his, an inmate who had recently been transferred to another prison. The guard told him that he was at the wrong place and signaled the outer door warden to let the small man out.
He then just strolled to freedom.
The authorities were not amused. Several guards were fired and the department of corrections was shaken up. Once again the Midget Bandit had made fools of the law and was on the loose.
He struck quickly, gathering a team of gunmen together, he held up a rail yard depot and stole acetylene cutting gear. He was preparing for yet another major heist.
With squads of detectives on his trail, though, his time outside was short.
Just a few months after his escape, a team of detectives from the state attorney’s office spotted him and surrounded him in a car.
"Well you fellows aren't so slow after all."
He was returned to custody, but he would cheat the law one last time. Twice before he had been caught, twice before he had lamented that he had been taken alive.
Not this time.
A vial of potassium cyanide was concealed in a hidden seam of his trousers. It held enough to kill ten men. He palmed the vial and took the contents under the watching eyes of his guards. He walked to a bench, sat down, slumped over, and died.
At his death, police theorized that he might have as much as a million dollars in stolen loot squirreled away, although a forensic accountant later said he died almost broke. He left what he had to his stepson and to his son.
The mother of the two boys was serving a sentence of her own. It was his first wife, Lulu, who finally claimed his body for burial.
“I couldn’t stand to bring home a weekly $10 pay envelope to my wife,” Fernekes said at the time of his first arrest. “Crime paid better.”
“I failed and they got me.”
In fact, it turns out that his criminal career was even inspired by popular fiction.
Fernekes, a “pygmy dynamo of crookedness” according to the newspapers of the day, was a brilliant pint-size general of crime, the scourge of bank officers, police and the Pinkertons across the north east.
As the head of an army of crime, he plotted and executed bank robberies from New York state to Florida to Chicago. He was known for the meticulous scientific planning of his jobs and the military precision used to carry out bank robberies.
Fernekes had but a high school education and a few months of law school, but he educated himself by reading books at free libraries, becoming an expert in welding, acetylene cutting, explosives, chemistry, gas and physics.
When they weren’t calling him “The Midget”, police pursuing him gave him another name, that of “The Scientific Bandit”.
He used his hard-won knowledge to burn through bank vaults, make bombs, defeat security measures and make chemical agents to use against the police.
“I didn’t go into the game for a thrill,” he supposedly told an NEA feature writer . “I made a business of it and employed every ounce of brains I could command to win.”
I’d like to be able to say that he really was a midget, but sadly, like many of the bandits tagged with the “Midget” name, Fernekes was short, but not that short. Criminal records show that he was 5 foot, 4 and a half inches, although some reports say he was several inches shorter. He is constantly referred to as a short man of slight build, however.
Boyhood of a Superfiend.
His parents were the notorious “Pete and Lizzie”, proprietors of a “disorderly” house in the vice district of turn of the century Chicago called The Village Inn. The young man grew up in the back rooms of the house, rubbing elbows with the criminals and thrill-seekers of the age.
The road house was well known to local police, who cited the couple on more than one occasion and raided the place from time to time. Lizzie struck back by making a series of sensational charges about corruption in the ranks of the Chicago police that resulted in a shakeup at police headquarters.
Peter Fernekes also knew some trouble with the law being arrested for hit and run when his automobile struck and seriously injured a young boy.
But by the time Henry makes the news, “Pete and Lizzie” had split up. Henry had gone with his father back to Valparaiso, Ill, where Peter Fernekes ran a more respectable lake resort. That was where the teenage Henry met his femme fatal, Lulu Woodward, two years younger and quite pretty.
Over the objection of his father, the 18-year-old Henry eloped with the 16-year-old Lulu, taking her to Chicago, where he’d found employment at $9 a week as a clerk.
But that paltry amount was not enough, he found, to support a wife, and so his depredations began.
Always a thinker, the young Fernekes turned to the popular fiction of the time for lessons in crookdom.
“The kid has been fed too much crook literature,” Sergeant John Anderson of the central division said at the time.
The book he chose as his blueprint was a melodramatic tome by George C. Jenks and Carlyle Moore titled Stop, Thief! with a cover by James Montgomery Flagg and four interior illustrations. The 1913 novel tells the story of a youthful yegg who starts out on a life of crime, but meets a charming young lady of good repute. During his adventures he must use his criminal talents to save her from disgrace and by the end of the book the power of love has reformed this young footpad and set him on the road to straight success and marriage.
This sterling example of melodramatic crook fiction of its time, by the way, is now through the wonders of technology available for download at Google Books.
Fernekes wrote a note to his young bride, who was away visiting friends, assembled a crook’s kit based on the notes he’d taken, and set out to gain some loot.
“Dearest Lulu: A few words before I go on this ungodly errand, although knightly in purpose. If I am caught, which will only be at my death, as that is much preferable, learn to forgive and forget, as my sincere love for you prompted this action.”
He began by studying maps of the Chicago elevated railway and picking ticket agents to hold up. His first effort netted him nothing, as agent Edward J. Kane swatted at him with an iron poker.
Taking his defeat in stride, he tried again to hold up Kane, and again got nothing, although he did shoot a button off of Kane’s shirt sleeve.
“Have you got a grudge against me?” asked Kane.
“Not particularly,” answered the boy, “but I’m coming back and get you again.”
He never did succeed in robbing Kane, but his luck was better with some other agents, earning a few dollars.
Not satisfied with holding up ticket offices for chump change, he set his sights on bigger game.
Early on September 18, 1914, he begins the adventure that would first earn him his first newspaper headlines and his first nickname: “The Bridegroom Bandit”.
His kit, helpfully shown in a newspaper article of the time, included both a revolver and a semi-automatic pistol, cotton batting and leather thongs for restraints, burglar tools and his copy of “Stop Thief”. For a mask, he took out the “Turkish” rug from a package of cigarettes and cut holes in it, using rubber bands to fit it to his face. (These sort of “rugs” were cloth premiums given away with tobacco purchases and were often repurposed. They are sometimes seen in period quilts, for example. It’s unlikely that his mask was one of the small, 3"x5", rugs that were given out in individual packages, but larger textiles could be obtained from the tobacco firms by turning in coupons.)
He carried his little suitcase of crime to the First National Bank Building and made his way to the 10th floor office of real estate dealer Robert North, apparently at random where the farce commenced.
He accosted stenographer Ella Jones and demanded that she turn over all of the money in the firm’s vault. Jones laughed at first, thinking it was a joke, but after Fernekes shouted and pointed his guns at her, she complied, giving him $45.50.
When Fernekes tried to lock her in the vault to aid in his getaway, she resisted and a struggle ensued. Fernekes ended up fleeing before Jones’ wrath as she screamed and raised the alarm.
She later said she was ashamed that she allowed the youth to rob her at all.
Fernekes sought a hiding place in the building where he could lay low and entered the offices of Charles S. Norton & Co. where he encountered Norton, his brother Irving, and two pretty teenage stenographers, Esther Penikoff and Florence Mayer.
“Sh-h-h-h,” Ferneks said.
“Shush yourself, whadda you want?” replies Mayer.
The young tough brought up his twin guns and silenced the group.
“Why it must be a movie,” Penkoff guessed.
Ferneks smiled and allowed the group to think it was all just a gag, beginning to joke with them. He even put his guns down and put one in the pocket of his coat which he laid nearby.
“You’ll know all about it soon enough,” Fernekes said.
The little group enjoyed their time, with Fernekes even posing the group and using the camera from his burglar kit to take snapshots.
“We thought it was a movie stunt," Mayer said. “He did look rather young for a leading man, but his eyes were large and expressive.”
Small though he was, Fernekes always did well with the ladies.
Charles Norton made an excuse to leave the room and from the front office, phoned Mayer to tell her to remove the gun from Fernekes coat. She demurred, but Irving Norton succeeding in removing the revolver when Fernekes wasn’t looking.
Norton found out about the search for the boy and returned to the office with police officers.
Asked why he didn’t try to flee before police found him, Fernekes said: “I guess I didn’t think Norton would turn me over to the police after we had such a nice time.”
The judge didn’t find him entertaining, sentencing him to an indefinite stay in the state reformatory. While incarcerated, his young bride obtained a divorce, although she seemingly stayed on good terms with him for the rest of his life.
“After we were married I did the only thing I could to get money—I went out with my guns and took it,” Fernekes said. “I didn’t want it for myself, but for her.
“And I haven’t heard from her since. It’s not her fault.
“I should have let the bulls kill me when I saw I could not escape. I don’t know why I didn’t.”
A Gradate Course in Crime
"There's no denying that I mixed in with a lot of older boys, and bad ones," he told the Chicago Daily Tribune. "All kinds of criminals. That's bad for a kid. Still, they've got to have places like that. There doesn't seem to be any other way.
When he came out he had connections with the Chicago underworld. The likable and smart young felon, just 20, began to learn the trades that would make him a criminal star.
From free libraries he taught himself chemistry, physics and engineering. On his own, he became a bomb maker in demand by the bustling Chicago syndicates. He learned welding and became an ace safe and vault cracker.
He studied art so that he could better draw up the plans for robbing banks.
He was soon leading a gang of expert bank bandits.
"It's really much easier and safer to work alone. As soon as you pool your plans you can go in for bigger deals, but you split the profits. Still, it's just like most businesses. One fellow has got something the other fellow hasn't. Together they make a team. Enlarge that idea and you get what people call the 'gang'."
Although his techniques had advanced from his days as the "Bridegroom Bandit", he maintained a sense of fair play of the gentleman thief variety.
"No, I'd never stoop to a stickup. You see, when you do that you are taking money away from some poor fellow who hasn't much. Probably his pay check. But a bank, or a syndicate, now that's entirely different. They're insured. It's just a profit and loss business deal with them. It requires finesses (sic) to outsmart such a corporation. And it seems legitimate, at least fairly so, it seems to me."
Never a physical threat because of his size, although he wasn’t shy about hitting a victim if he got out of line, he became a small arms expert. A two-gun man of deadly accuracy with the brace of pistols he carried in shoulder holsters under his natty suits.
He left the shotguns and Tommy guns to his larger confederates.
His preparation for a job was intense. His trademark was that his jobs were well-scouted and he hit hard and fast and was gone before the police knew what hit them.
He was at the forefront of the new, modern bank robber.
"In the old days you hear of robbing a store and driving away in a horse and buggy. That's funny. And the automobile now helps out a lot. Still, I believe it's much harder to get away with a job nowadays. Much harder."
The Napoleon of Crime.
We’ll never know exactly what happened on that December day, but the robbery just wasn’t up to Fernekes usual standards.
Fernekes was living in the nearby town of Westwood at the time under an assumed name. He’d been there for more than a year, running an electrical shop, becoming part of the local community, enjoying the life of a family man with his “wife” and young child.
When he went to “work” he commuted to Chicago, Florida or New York City. Westwood was his hideout, where he raised his family and was a respectable man.
The job had some hallmarks of a Fernekes affair. The robber or robbers struck on the day the big payroll came in for the local factory. Aside from that, the small bank was stuffed with cash and bonds. The robbers hit at the ideal time, right after most of the employees had left for lunch, leaving only two men behind.
But then it all went wrong. One of the clerks was shot and killed, the second grappled with the gunman, attempting to shoot him with the bank’s pistol. The gunman wrested the pistol away from him and shot him to death. A third man, working nearby and responding to the gunshots, was shot in the leg.
The robber, described as a large, heavily built man, fled. He and another man were seen fleeing in a new Ford driven by a third man. One of them was injured and bleeding. The men successfully escaped.
Along with evidence at the bank that showed that Fernekes obtained a safety deposit box under an assumed name, one that had been accessed and left on the floor of the vault the day of the robbery, the only evidence pointing to Fernekes involvement was that he owned a new Ford and the robbers disappeared in the area where Fernekes lived.
It may be that he was using the small town bank as a place to deposit his ill-gotten gains. Fernekes used banks as far away as San Francisco to stash his loot.
It may be that he planned the robbery and provided a safe house for the robbers afterward.
But he certainly wasn’t the big man who was the shooter. And I don’t think he took part in the job. Fernekes was a field commander. He led his men in person and took charge at the scene. There’s no evidence of him actually being there.
He certainly denied it.
"This is all the bunk. Those Pennsylvania and New York murder raps are no good. Get Clarence Darrow. You boys will be whistling for me yet."
None-the-less, the robbery and double murder aroused the area and it made staying too risky. Fernekes and his wife, really Mrs. Joe Saunders, wife of a pal of Fernekes who was in prison, were last seen driving that new Ford out of town on a back road with their possessions.
Mrs. Saunders, A.K.A. Jennie Mulhall, Fernekes senior by at least a decade, seems to have been his partner in romance as well as crime. (Don’t believe the news articles that state she was an innocent who thought her husband was a traveling salesman. All bunk.) Not only does he seem to treat his “stepson” with affection, the pair have a son of their own and it seems that Fernekes thought of her as his wife.
By the time authorities identified him in the Pearl River case, he was in the wind.
"Sure I knew there was a $2,500 reward for me. Why, I had two of the police bulletins in my car. But identification by facial means only is the hardest thing in the world, absolutely."
More Dangerous Than
Public Enemy No. 1!
On March 19, 1925 in Chicago Michael Swiontkowski was carrying a payroll to a bank in his car when he was stopped and murdered by a gang allegedly led by Fernekes.
By this time teams of detectives were on the lookout for the Midget. Not only were state authorities on the case, but detectives of both the Pinkerton National Detective Agency and the Burns National Detective Agency were hired by banking associations.
“This man, who is known to the police of this country as 'The Lone Wolf,' is one of the cleverest and most astute criminals of the age,” Rockland county District Attorney Morton Lexow said. “His is a far greater menace than Gerald Chapman, as he is known to be a relentless killer, and has a keen mind, plus a pleasant personality.”
For those not up on their 1920s crook hierarchy, Chapman was the first “Public Enemy No. 1” and while his crimes are impressive, he probably wasn’t as big of a menace to law as Midget Fernekes. Fernekes might have been more flattered with the comparison to the fictional character of "The Lone Wolf" whose exploits were best sellers in the crook-fiction genre at the time.
Authorities credited him with up to 14 bank jobs in one 18 month period during this time.
Ferneks was also accused at various times with up to six murders. However, the murder of two policemen in Pennsylvania may have been committed by a similar crook in both stature and type named Barche, who was confused with him because of the similarity to Fernekes’ main alias of Darche. Fernekes actually had an alibi, even if a weak one, for the murder of Swiontkowski and as I’ve shown, he may not be the shooter in Pearl River.
It could very well be that he never actually killed anyone. On the other hand, he could have killed many more that he was never charged with slaying.
His Greatest Score: Foiled!
He was sitting in the library reading a book on photography chemicals when a team of detectives surrounded him and forced him to the floor, grabbing his arms so he couldn’t reach his pistols.
“I always said I’d never be taken alive and here I let you get me like this,” Fernekes said.
The arrest led investigators to uncover the Midget’s most daring heist plan yet. A squad of gunmen wearing gas masks were to have descended via automobile on a Loop area bank, loose noxious gas to overcome the bank officials and clean it out.
“Each man has his duties drilled into him time and again by the midget,” according to Captain of Detectives William Schoemaker. “There wasn’t a chance for a slip, they thought.
“They were prepared with pumpguns, rifles, sawed off shotguns and revolvers enough to equip an army.
“Also they had the most modern offensive weapons known to science. There were three big tanks of ammonia, gas masks for themselves and ten big smoke bombs to cut off pursuit.
“The plot called for the gang to enter the bank, close all doors and take off the caps from the ammonia tanks. The poison fumes would drive out all persons in the place while the robbers, protected by gas masks, were to gather up bank notes and gold and then leave by a rear entrance.
“They were ready to shoot it out with police and in a chase, they were to use the smoke bombs to elude their pursuers.”
Evidence of the plot was found in the basement of the rooming house run by Anna H. Beaucamp, who committed suicide when her complicity was revealed.
Beaucamp’s son, mistakenly called Fernekes step-son by authorities and the press, was also one of the Midget’s confederates. He was a known associate of the Capone mob, serving as the organization’s dentist. Among other tasks, he devised an acid for removing ink from stolen securities. Police questioned him over the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. He was gunned down in his dentist office by gangsters in 1929.
At the time of his capture, Fernekes was reportedly devising a bomb that would blind bank tellers temporarily and a chemical that would burn through safes without needing explosives, although he disputed that he was a criminal mastermind.
"But that's all pure fiction about me reading up on minute details of crime. It's just fiction too, that story that I wanted to be a Jesse James. Why, nobody has to be a criminal. Nobody should. I can't tell why I got into the game. I just did, that's all.
Fernekes believed in spending money on the best lawyers he could. For his defense, he chose none other than the famous Clarence Darrow to represent him.
''Get Clarence Darrow. He'll get me out of here by Monday."
Even that attorney couldn’t prevent his conviction in Illinois on a murder charge over the Swiontkowski kill.
But while the state was eager to hang the Midget, Fereneks’ legal team had other ideas. A successful appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court resulted in the murder conviction being overturned.
He remained in prison on a bank robbery charge.
This resulted in a strange legal tangle.
The state of Illinois was unwilling to re-try him for the murder of Swiontkowski. The state of New York wanted him badly so they could fry him in the electric chair for the deaths of the two bank clerks in Pearl River.
But he could not be extradited as long as he was under sentence in Illinois. The governor of the state declined to pardon him for the bank robbery charge so he could be extradited.
Fernekes refused a conditional parole, preferring to stay in Joliet rather than risk death in New York.
But he was not idle behind the walls of the old prison.
First there was the failed attempt by confederates to dynamite the walls of the prison. Warders knew it was a Fernekes plot because while the other inmates ran away from the explosion, Fernekes ran toward it. Unfortunately for him, his aides were not the explosive genius he was and the bomb failed to breach the wall.
From his prison cell he also plotted the kidnapping of the two children of Charles G. Schwappe, heirs to a $15,000,000 fortune. It was only a police wiretapping operation that prevented the meticulously planned snatch.
Fernekes was put into solitary confinement to prevent him from masterminding any more capers from behind bars. Or so the authorities thought.
In 1935, he made his most daring strike against the law with his escape from custody.
Fernekes was obviously-well known at the prison and the warders knew he was a serious escape risk. Not only was he brilliant and determined, not only did he have a record of attempting escape, but he had well-funded confederates outside the walls to aid him.
His plan was sheer perfection in its simplicity. He just walked out.
Oh, there was a bit more to it than that. He procured a suit of civilian clothes, some dark glasses and a hat. Under the pretext of having cut himself, he adhered a plaster over his upper lip to disguise that he was growing a natty mustache.
He obtained access to the room where visitors met with prisoners and handed the guard there a slip of paper with the name of a friend of his, an inmate who had recently been transferred to another prison. The guard told him that he was at the wrong place and signaled the outer door warden to let the small man out.
He then just strolled to freedom.
The authorities were not amused. Several guards were fired and the department of corrections was shaken up. Once again the Midget Bandit had made fools of the law and was on the loose.
He struck quickly, gathering a team of gunmen together, he held up a rail yard depot and stole acetylene cutting gear. He was preparing for yet another major heist.
With squads of detectives on his trail, though, his time outside was short.
Just a few months after his escape, a team of detectives from the state attorney’s office spotted him and surrounded him in a car.
"Well you fellows aren't so slow after all."
He was returned to custody, but he would cheat the law one last time. Twice before he had been caught, twice before he had lamented that he had been taken alive.
Not this time.
A vial of potassium cyanide was concealed in a hidden seam of his trousers. It held enough to kill ten men. He palmed the vial and took the contents under the watching eyes of his guards. He walked to a bench, sat down, slumped over, and died.
At his death, police theorized that he might have as much as a million dollars in stolen loot squirreled away, although a forensic accountant later said he died almost broke. He left what he had to his stepson and to his son.
The mother of the two boys was serving a sentence of her own. It was his first wife, Lulu, who finally claimed his body for burial.
“I couldn’t stand to bring home a weekly $10 pay envelope to my wife,” Fernekes said at the time of his first arrest. “Crime paid better.”
“I failed and they got me.”
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