The Gangsters Who Robbed the Wrong Bank
American gangsters botch a British bank robbery; PLUS Beatles UFO egg
Hi, this is Paul from Singular Discoveries. We’ve got a longer story this week, published with our friends at Narratively. It’s the true story of a pair of self-styled American gangsters who attempted one of Britain’s first armed bank robberies, in Newcastle upon Tyne, with disastrous results. You can see a preview below, and read — or listen to — the full story on the Narratively website. Thanks for reading, subscribing and sharing.
The American gangsters entered the British bank at three minutes to closing time on a Friday afternoon. Three men — two brothers and an accomplice — arrived outside, wearing black masks and gloves, horn-rimmed glasses, and narrow-brimmed trilby hats pulled low over their foreheads. They were armed with two revolvers and an automatic pistol. It was 2:57 p.m. on June 2, 1933, and the bank was the Cattle Market branch of Lloyds Bank in the soot-black industrial city of Newcastle upon Tyne in North East England. Outside, at the Friday meat market, butchers and wholesalers closed up their stalls and rinsed blood from their cleavers. Inside, at the end of a busy week, bank clerks tallied up receipts and attended to the last straggle of customers, including apron-wearing market workers and a 15-year-old girl. The masked men pushed through the bank’s double doors and raised their guns: “Everybody stand still and put up your hands.”
The brothers were Joe and Tommy Duffy, a pair of self-proclaimed American gangsters. They described themselves as hardened villains who had run with America’s most notorious criminals and served time in the country’s toughest prisons. They claimed reputations as violent enforcers and armed robbers — and had the broken noses and gunshot wounds to prove it. Now they were bringing the bullet-spraying American bank robbery to sleepy England, where armed robberies were virtually unknown. But their gangster credentials were about to be severely tested. They had chosen the wrong bank, in the wrong city, at the wrong time, and there would be terrible consequences…
Read or listen to the full story here.
There are some interesting extra tangents to the Duffy brothers’ story that I couldn’t squeeze into the article. For example, their older brother was a famous athlete who won the Boston Marathon in 1914 then was killed in action at Ypres in 1915. I’ll be posting some of these tidbits, with some photos and other info, this week on my Twitter account.
Now a brief recommended section:
Recommended:
One Two Three Four: The Beatles In Time by Craig Brown
I strongly support the theory that The Beatles are underrated, and I’ve read enough Fab Four books to feel I know their story by heart. But Craig Brown has found an ingenious way of telling the story anew via 150 brief vignettes, allowing him to leave out the boring bits and focus on amusing encounters, often told from the perspective of people who were drawn into the band’s orbit — partners, fans, hangers-on — and also from the author himself. I delayed reading this until it came out in paperback, thinking it might be “just another Beatles book”. It isn’t.
Finally, a post-Beatles story of the time John Lennon told Uri Geller he’d met aliens and gave Geller a gold alien egg. There’s a summary of the story here: This Beatle Saw UFOs And Met With Aliens. Geller’s account is on his blog. Geller subsequently claimed to have purchased Lennon’s sketch of a UFO and also a lock of the Beatle’s hair, from which he planned to clone Lennon, “if it is legal and ethical”.
Next time: Beer Versus Water, plus Ed Needham Recommends
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Here’s John Lennon describing a UFO sighting, as mentioned in a scrawl on the cover of his Walls and Bridges album (“On the 23rd Aug. 1974 at 9 o’clock I saw a U.F.O.”)