Signal Watch Reads: 1960's Austin Gangsters - Organized Crime That Rocked the Capital

Not too long ago, I read Jesse Sublett's follow up to this book, Last Gangster in Austin.  I enjoyed the book and determined to check out his first installment, 1960's Austin Gangsters: Organized Crime That Rocked the Capital.  

There's less of a clear narrative to this book than the follow-up.  That's not a product of poor writing or research with this first book - instead, there's a wider scope, more folks involved, and it takes place over a longer timeline.  All of that territory means you have to think in bullet points while adding some color.

In 1960's Austin Gangsters, Sublett charts the rise and fall of regional criminals in what was then the sleepy college and State Capital town of Austin, Texas.  

I listened to the audiobook version, which ran less than five hours.  Much to my delight, it was narrated by former Superman voice actor, George Newbern, who gets almost all of the Texas locations correct, minus one or two.*

The Overton Gang engaged in vice, burglary, and every sort of crime one could think of, operating not just in the underworld but in a curious flipside to the Austin I think from my first arrival in the city in the mid-1980's.  While Austin has generally been a safer, easier town to navigate than many, Sublett reminds the reader of the drugs, prostitution, and violence that co-exists with people going to church and Luby's.  The trajectory of our characters seems in parallel with many other stories of success and the non-criminal life from 20th Century Austin - even playing football for Darrell K. Royal and attending the University of Texas before figuring out raising hell and tearing the doors off bank vaults was maybe more fun.

In a way, yes, these are gangsters.  In another way, these are simply out-of-control hoods who were always five steps ahead of a police force more interested in harassing Austin's minority communities and giving out parking tickets than sorting out the town's more rambunctious side.  "Organized crime" is accurate, but this isn't the mob taking over sanitation companies and influencing unions.  This is drug trafficking, pimping, and stealing trucks full of televisions. And some good old fashioned bank jobs.

Sublett does good work making sure you get who is who in a parade of names, from the safe-crackers to the hookers to the crooked lawyers and lawmen trying to sort things out.  And the timeline of what happened has the feel of the inevitable rise and hard crash, told in the manner of an old Austinite spinning a yarn about some names you've maybe heard but never got the lowdown.  Along the way, he mentions connections to well-known folks like former presidents  and celebrity football coaches while also name-dropping familiar street corners to keep things grounded.  This all happened.  There's some speculation as well about whether these crooks, who were avid fans of the Austin music scene, would have known The 13th Floor Elevators.

Perhaps Sublett seems overly intrigued by possible connections between this gang and folks like Jack Ruby.  I can't blame him for showing interest in any possible connection with the JFK assassination - the incident that dealt Texas its first real blow on the national stage and laid the foundation for much of the distaste for the state (before voters took it upon ourselves to look terrible in the national stage in any of 1000 different ways). 

But for Austinites, this is some fascinating stuff.  This city has never been good with memory, and we tend not to want to think of ourselves as living in a town that's so easily manhandled, or could produce such vile characters.  

Sublett brings receipts in the way of interviews with some still living, and he's done his hard research - maybe getting a little too in the weeds from time to time when it comes to specifics when a broader stroke would do.   But the picture he paints of Austin as a town that was ripe for producing these people, vulnerable to the criminally minded, and unready for them as the crooks tore up banks, turned girls out (to raise money for their legal fees), etc...  And served as a home for them as they spread their bad behavior - sometimes impressive in scope, sometimes oddly petty - until they wound up in jail.

Worth a read, fellow Texans.

*I am going to start offering a service to audiobook companies who need to record books set in Texas.  For a small fee, I will correctly pronounce the names of towns and streets and the word "pecan".