Planning
On May 23, 1928, Ralph Fleagle, his brother Jake, George J. Abshier, (a.k.a. Bill Messick), and Howard “Heavy” Royston, came in to Lamar, Colorado. They planned to rob the First National Bank.
They had hooked up at a ranch near Marienthal, Kansas shortly before the robbery, but Jake Fleagle had been planning on robbing the Lamar bank for some time. Like many professional robbers of that time, the Fleagles, together with Abshier, had carefully scouted the bank on several occasions before the day came to actually hold it up.
The gang had maps of the roads of Prowers County, Colorado, and the brothers had been inside the bank building and knew its layout. Abshier said they had weighed the “possibilities” and decided that it was a job for no less than four men, so they recruited Heavy Royston.
When they left Kansas on May 23, about 3 a.m., the men had license plates from Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma and California to throw any witnesses off their track. Each man went heavily armed.
The drive took about six hours, but the plan required them to wait until the afternoon to commit the robbery. Finally, about 1 p.m., it was time to move.
Read more about this topic: Fleagle Gang
Famous quotes containing the word planning:
“Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the “wrong crowd” read like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren’t planning to get a Ph.D. from Yale.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Sensuality takes planning and work.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969)