There was a rumor that Charles Boles sent some gold home to his wife via Wells Fargo. The stage was robbed and his gold was stolen, thus the story that Boles chose to get even with Wells Fargo by robbing their stages and no others. Another story has it that Wells Fargo cut off the water to his mine when he refused to sell it to them, and that got him really riled.
Let’s Take a Closer Look at Gentlemen Bandits
Charles Boles was a failed teacher, farmer, prospector, and poet who fought with Sherman on his March to the Sea.
You might know him better by the name he found in a dime store novel: Black Bart.
Stylishly dressed, Boles would step out from hiding, point his shotgun at the driver, stop the stagecoach, and rob it.
Those he held up at gunpoint said he was unfailingly polite, always saying please and thank you. This odd behavior for a stagecoach robber led to people calling him “the gentleman bandit.” Some claim that he never stole from the passengers, just from the bank. Others disagree.
As kids, we were taught that stagecoach robbers wore bandanas as masks.
Not Boles. He cut eye holes in a feed sack and wore it over his head. He robbed dozens of Wells Fargo stages without ever firing a gun, sometimes leaving bits of his poetry behind.
“I’ve labored long and hard for bread, for honor, and for riches. But on my corns too long you’ve tread, you fine-haired sons of bitches.”
Boles was identified when he dropped his handkerchief during one of his holdups.
The laundry mark led to his conviction, sentencing, and incarceration in San Quentin Penitentiary. When he was released, he disappeared.
Kentuckian Bill Miner was the first to point a gun and say “Hands up!”
This came in handy, because he robbed trains and stagecoaches, always with a soft voice and good manners. Miner was credited with being so polite during his robberies that he was referred to as “the gentleman bandit.” A posse captured him after his first stagecoach robbery when his horse got too tired to go any farther and quit, leaving Miner on foot and the posse on horseback.
Also a San Quentin graduate, Miner was captured again.
This time, he robbed a Canadian Pacific Railway payroll train. As he and his accomplices made their getaway, Miner said “Goodnight, boys, sorry to have troubled you.”
His trial went viral when citizens helped him slip away from the hot-on-his-trail Mounties.
People treated him as a folk hero because he robbed the unpopular Canadian Pacific Railroad. As one story goes, Miner hid a pile of loot in the forest nearby. People still look for it today.
Exaggeration was the rule with tales of the Wild West, not the exception. Never put too much stock in the accounts of desperadoes or the people who write about them.
Reverend Bernard Thomas Pagano was known as a kind and pious man.
Pagano was fond of fedoras because he’d lost most of his hair. People knew him as a friendly and well-regarded B-29 tail gunner who had been wounded in World War II. Prior to becoming a priest at 32, he had been a bartender, salesman, and schoolteacher who unloaded banana LINK boats during the summers he was studying at the seminary.
Once ordained and settled at a church, Pagano booked wresting exhibitions for the 600-pound Haystacks Calhoun.
Pagano liked the pageantry so much that he became a participant, calling himself the “Mad Monk,” of course. Church officials called him out for inappropriate conduct. Pagano bounced around from church to church because of his peculiarities and was never given a parish of his own.
Pagano insisted upon being called Bernie because he disliked Father.
His doubters, those who always come out after the action is over, said Pagano’s sermons were very unusual. Others who knew him said he had an “earthy” sense of humor and enjoyed telling off-color jokes.
Pagano was kicked out of one church for charging parishioners for private counseling, claiming he was a Doctor of Psychology. One young woman who came to Pagano for divorce counseling had a sexual relationship with him that lasted more than three years.
It seems the Rev was also an armed robber.
- Using a small chrome-plated pistol, he robbed the Oven Door Bakery, Tri-State Meats, Haverbeck’s Hardware, and half a dozen other stores in New Castle, Delaware. Most of the stores were small, and none had large amounts of money. The total take of all eight robberies was a bit less than $800.
- Every one of the clerks who handed over the cash said the robber was well-groomed, quite dapper, and polite as can be. A newspaper headline writer named him the Gentleman Bandit because he told a clerk, “I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t have to.”
- Pagano chose stores where the clerks were very young or very old and unlikely to resist. He robbed mostly along a five-mile stretch of highway, always on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 6:30 and 8:30 p.m.
The robber wore a fedora, too. Hat and all, Pagano was picked out of a lineup after one of his strong-arm robberies. The Reverend wore his clerical collar to court and claimed to have blackout spells. Pagano agreed to three hours of polygraph exams. He failed all of them. After all this, the prosecution dropped the charges when another man confessed. The cops still don’t believe it.
Can you say Sir Charles Litton?
How about John “The Cat” Robie, Cary Grant’s character in To Catch a Thief? As kids, we all knew that Robin of Locksley was Sherwood Forest’s gentleman thief who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. And how about Steve McQueen in the The Thomas Crown Affair – a cultured, wealthy gentleman thief who masterminded bank robberies for fun?
Many thanks to Patricia Talorico and Esteban Parra, writers of the in-depth, four-part series, The Gentleman Bandit.
Bonus
Tropes are things we see a lot, stock characters instantly recognizable from other stories. Critics say the Gentleman Bandit/Thief/Burglar is one of many easily identifiable stereotypes.
Disney defined a classic trope, the brilliant but lost-in-thought-and-unaware-of-his-surroundings-scientist for generations of kids in the movie The Absent-Minded Professor.
In the film, Disney’s Professor Dan Brainerd lived up to his billing by forgetting his own wedding not once, not twice, but three times. Blame the Professor’s last no-show on his latest invention, an anti-gravity substance he called Flubber, a portmanteau word for FLying rUBBER. Fred MacMurray played the absent-minded professor, a character type that is a long way from MacMurray’s earlier noir films, most notably his character Walter Neff in Double Indemnity with Barbara Stanwyck.
How many of these movie tropes can you picture with your mind’s eye?
Mob goons, bimbos, the wholesome girl next door, drill sergeants, cheerleaders, gun molls, greasers, Jewish-American princesses, Latin Lovers, mad scientists, mothers-in-law, mama’s boys, nerds, schoolmarms, backwoods sheriffs, starving artists, surfer dudes, Valley girls, yokels, hippies, yuppies, and cultured villains.
