Comfort to the Enemy (2010) by Elmore - Carl Webster 03 Leonard Page A

with his worn-out suit coat, his cap, hitched the ride to McAlester and walked in the bank. He took out a pistol he'd bought for $6 off an old guy who was supposed to have been a Black Hand assassin in his time, and robbed the bank of $7,700 of miners' payroll.
    What he did then, he got on the interurba streetcar and rode it 20 miles to Hartshorne, the end of the line, where he was arrested the next morning at the home of his oldest sister, Loretta, who was known as Grandma Tanzi and made a living brewing and selling Choc beer to coal miners. They asked Joe Tanzi, all right, where was the money? Joe Tanzi, one of thos e b ig guys who didn't talk much, said, "What money?" They had bank people identify him an d h undred witnesses who saw him riding the streetcar with bank sacks. They asked him where he'd hid it. He wouldn't answer. They asked him using blackjacks on his kidneys till he was peeing blood and he still wouldn't tell them. For several days they searched his sister's house, her car, her property and adjoining lots. They brought dogs to the sister's house to sniff out in all directions. Once they gave up, knowing he'd never speak a word to them, they brought Joe Tanzi to federal court, charged him with bank robbery, found him guilty in five minutes and, mad as hell, sentenced him to 25 years of hard labor. This was in 1928.
    In 1933 Joe Tanzi was one of six convicts in a work crew repaving Stonewall Avenue from McAlester's business district to the prison. He heard the signal as they were coming to the Barnett Memorial Church, a wolf whistle, and the six convicts took off in all directions. Joe Tanzi ran for the church hearing gunfire from the guards, but none of it coming at him. He got around back of the church and inside, the door unlocked, a man in there playing the organ, booming through part of a hymn when he heard the gunfire, went to a window to see what was going on. It allowed Joe Tanzi to get behind the organ in time to hear the guards coming, shouting, and heard the organist tell them nobody came in here, he'd have seen them. That night Joe Tanzi got pants and a shirt still damp off a clothesline, burned his prison stripes and walked two full nights to Hartshorne and dug up his bank money buried six feet deep in the middle of Grandma Tanzi's cornfield. The two thought they ought to move to Arkansas and that's what they did: paid $900 for a dinky farm near Mulberry, on the road east of Fort Smith.
    "I guess they missed living in Oklahoma," Carl said to Gary Marion, "'cause now they have a farm near Idabel, close to the Red River. Cross it you're in Texas."
    They were riding in the '41 Chevrolet seda with 180,000 miles on it but good tires, Gary driving, Carl watching the ex-bull rider staring straight ahead at the highway. "You start to see a lot more dogwood s y ou know you're coming to Idabel." Gary said, "This convict'll be armed?" "I don't know. He might be." "He robbed the bank he was armed."
    "Sixteen years ago," Carl said. "You want him still holding a gun, don't you?" Earlier in this trip talking about Jurgen Schrenk , Gary maintained P . O. W .'s were no better than fugitive offenders. He said he walked in that cell and Jurgen was set on killing him. "Why would he care about you?" Carl said. "Jurgen's a combat veteran, a captain in the Afrika Korps. He doesn't even have to talk to you he doesn't want to. What we'll do is forget the whole thing."
    Approaching Idabel, Carl said: ''There are fugitive felons we can't wait to find, and there are guys like Joe Tanzi who dug coal till he couldn't dig anymore. Some parolee around here recognized him from prison and went to the county sheriff. Who knows why. Joe Tanzi's a federal fugitive, so the sheriff called Tulsa. Joe's 60 years old now, his sister's about 80. They say he bought a full section off a Choctaw was trying to grow cotton. Joe's letting a colored famil y s hare-crop it with him." "But he still owes us 20 years," Gary said "Commit the crime, you