Five Blasts in Portage

Portage, Ohio, was a blink-and-you-miss-it farm town near Bowling Green — the kind of place where nothing was supposed to happen. Then, in the small hours of November 19, 1912, five dynamite blasts tore through the dark, and the Munn Bank's vault came apart in pieces.

What followed wasn't a quick collar. It was a two-year, multi-state manhunt that ran from a Toledo saloon to a South Bend boarding house to a Fort Wayne jail cell — and along the way, it turned up an inside man, a jilted lover, a one-handed ex-convict, and a legal gray area that the prosecutor himself wasn't sure would hold up in court. The story comes straight from our historic case files, the Pinkerton's National Detective Agency's records, archived in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division.

Two armed men held the street, warning Portage residents to stay back "under penalty of being shot," while their partners went to work on the Munn Bank's safe. They'd broken into a nearby blacksmith shop first, stealing a hammer, wrench, and crowbar to jimmy a side window before ever touching the vault. Once inside, they packed the safe with charge after charge — five blasts in total, roughly five minutes apart, the last one hurling the safe doors clear across the room and blowing out every window in the building. They even tried, and failed, to blow open a second, fireproof vault holding the bank's books and papers.

The burglars fled in a horse and buggy stolen from a nearby barn. That same night, two of the same men reportedly stopped a 15-year-old newsboy and took his 21 cents, a detail almost comic next to five sticks of dynamite, and later useful for identifying them.

It wasn't a clean job in the way Hollywood tells it, either. Newspapers at the time put the haul at $4,000. But under oath at trial months later, the bank's own assistant cashier, Harold Starn, testified the actual figure was closer to $2,000 — a discrepancy nobody in 1912 seemed all that eager to reconcile.

Besides, it wasn't even the bank's first brush with trouble. An earlier robbery, around 1904, also used nitroglycerin and made off with roughly $2,500.

It would be remiss not to note that the real heroes of the night were on the telephone. Mrs. Foster, who ran the local exchange out of her home, and her neighbor, Mrs. Will Shuler, raised the first alarm. Then the night operator, a woman named Fern Ernsberger, crawled on her hands and knees to the switchboard — staying below the sightline of the gunmen outside — and phoned the alarm through to Bowling Green.

The bank's bonding insurer, the National Surety Company of New York, retained Pinkerton's within days. Cleveland Superintendent S.L. Stiles and Chicago Assistant Superintendent Hugh C. McCaffrey ran the case, working alongside Toledo detectives Herbert and Delahanty and Wood County Sheriff Floyd Heald.

The early legwork read like a tour of the Midwest's traveling-criminal underworld. An investigator dispatched to Toledo just a day after the robbery was soon swapping information with local police and informants about known safecrackers who worked the freight lines — men going by names like "Cedar" Ross and "Louis Slim." One lead pointed to a Toledo saloonkeeper named Kirk Brown, found near a dismantled getaway car not far from the scene.

Reward notices in the case file tell their own version of how fast the net widened. A circular offered $300 for two men, at $150 a head. Weeks later, a $750 circular named all five: Charles Wollever, John Powers, William Behrensen, William Miley, and Albert Peverett. The National Surety Company was paying for arrest and conviction — not just information. It was a distinction Pinkerton's enforced.

The first of the gang to fall was William Behrensen — alias John Miller, alias Henry Bernard — a 32-year-old Cleveland man who'd married a Cleveland girl just months before the robbery. Cleveland police picked him up in December 1912 on suspicion of the Portage job, and Sheriff Heald hauled him back to Bowling Green to stand trial. Berenson’s arrest turned out to be the thread that unraveled everything else: investigators learned he'd been collecting his mail in South Bend, Indiana, and living at a rooming house there run by the Peverett family.

By late December, that trail led straight to the South Bend boarding house, where Pinkerton's ran down two more of the gang: William Miley — an escaped Michigan penitentiary inmate who went by "Indianapolis Billy" — and Albert Peverett, a career criminal notorious for having deliberately severed his own hand as a convict to avoid forced prison labor.

On New Year's Day 1913, Miley sat for a roughly three-hour confession in front of a court stenographer in the Wood County prosecutor's office. He admitted to his part in Portage, and he tied the same crew to four other jobs — a Paulding, Ohio, jewelry store, two Indiana post offices, and an Indiana bank — with total takings investigators pegged near $50,000.

William Pinkerton, head of the Agency’s Western Division, Chicago, IL, told the press, "In my opinion these men are responsible for a large number of the recent jewel robberies in Chicago...They are dangerous men, and we are proud to have caught them."

The confession also outed the inside man: Fred "Freddie" Smith, brother-in-law of the bank's cashier, J.J. Freyman. Smith admitted he'd tipped the gang off on the bank's layout and routine, then personally drove them into and out of Portage in his own car — allegedly for a commission he was promised and never actually received.

Behrensen went to trial in Bowling Green in February 1913. Miley became the state's star witness against Behrensen, and his courtroom testimony reads less like a police report and more like a heist movie script. He walked the jury through the whole night: the ride from Lima on the interurban, linking up with Kirk Brown and the rest of the crew, the stop for tools at the blacksmith shop, and Behrensen posted as lookout near a water wagon south of the bank. The getaway car broke down two miles outside town, and the gang left Brown behind with a line straight out of a dime novel: "Go on, you don't know me, and I don't know you." From there it was the stolen horse and rig, a split at the town of Haskins, and a freight train ride to Deshler before regrouping in Lima, where Miley wired his own hideout under the alias "William Joyce."

Behrensen’s defense lined up a Cleveland clothier and his own brother as alibi witnesses. It didn't matter. On February 11, the jury took less than 20 minutes to convict him. He was sentenced to 12 years.

Miley was sentenced to seven years, Wollever to 11 years, and Peverett to ten years, although he died in prison shortly after his conviction.

One by one, the rest of the gang was accounted for, except for John Powers — alias Frank Burke, alias “Sankey.”

Sankey stayed loose for two full years. He finally surfaced in December 1914, arrested in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on an unrelated charge and booked under the alias "Dave Gorman." Only after Pinkerton's notified Fort Wayne police of his real identity did they realize who they were holding.

Getting him back to Ohio turned out to be the easy part. Convicting him was another matter entirely.

Wood County Prosecutor Charles Hatfield wrote candidly to the Agency that Ohio law required a witness who could independently corroborate the defendant's identity — not just testify that a crime occurred. In Behrensen's trial, that corroboration had come easily: Switchboard operator Fern Ernsberger, a telegraph operator, a streetcar conductor, and others could place him at the scene. But Sankey had only joined the getaway car after the burglary was already underway, which meant nobody who saw the robbery itself could put him there. Hatfield's proposed workaround was almost clever enough to work on its own: argue that Kirk Brown, though himself under indictment as an accomplice, wasn't “really” an accomplice — and therefore his identification of Sankey could stand in as the corroborating testimony the law required. Brown was later acquitted; the judge believed he was coerced.

It never had to be tested. By January 1915, with Superintendent Stiles laid up in bed — he'd been sick for three weeks — the Agency quietly signaled to Sankey, through the prosecutor, that if he pleaded guilty, the agency would help push for his release after two years. As the general manager put it to his own staff, in a line that says more about how these cases actually got closed than any courtroom drama could: “This, however, cannot be put in writing.”

Sankey took the deal. On January 18, 1915, he withdrew his not-guilty plea and pleaded guilty. Two days later, he was delivered to the Ohio State Penitentiary to serve an indeterminate term — closing the books on a case that had run for more than two years, on a legal theory nobody was ever fully confident about.

Even the reward money had one more round of finger-pointing left in it. Detective Delahanty of Toledo asked that his cut of the $150 be sent to a man named Edward Snell, care of a Toledo hotel, crediting him as the original tipster who'd helped identify Sankey — a smaller echo of a dispute that had already played out once before in this case.

No case is complete without some indiscretion, and the case file doesn't spare the details.

According to Superintendent Stiles, Joseph H. Zucker, a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, had a long-term relationship with the woman who became Mrs. Behrensen for several years—before she married Behrensen and perhaps after, if you listened to the rumors. What is undisputed is that when her new husband was arrested, she called a friend for advice. She called Zucker.

By Stiles' account, she had no idea her husband was a burglar. But she did know where she'd been mailing his letters: 424 South Michigan Street, South Bend, Indiana. Zucker, Stiles wrote, "was smart enough to figure out that if that address was Behrensen's headquarters, it was also the headquarters of his associates."

So, on the evening of December 27, 1912, Zucker walked into the office of the Cleveland police Bertillon expert and handed over the address. He contacted Stiles. Stiles phoned Pinkerton's Chicago office before 6 p.m. By three o'clock the next morning, Assistant Superintendent McCaffrey had Miley and Peverett in custody, along with a large amount of nitroglycerin and a full complement of burglar tools.

Then Zucker wanted to be paid.

When Zucker wrote to the National Surety Company in May 1913 demanding a share of the reward, Stiles, didn't mince words: "Part of what Mr. Zucker claims is true and part is untrue. The claim for the reward, for the arrest and conviction of three of the safe blowers, is ridiculous…He did not 'arrest and convict' anyone."

The Toledo informants and the Toledo detectives, Herbert and Delahanty, who had helped to identify the gang in the first place, had been promised the reward — even though they had not yet made the arrests.

One informant, when told the matter was finally settled, said it had dragged on so long "he did not anticipate receiving any of the reward but would be glad to receive what was left."

After months of dispute and negotiation, Surety made good on the reward money. But nobody walked away happy. Zucker received $50, much less than the $125 he had asked for. The informants received a portion, and the rest went to the Toledo detectives, whose share was put into their pension fund. Pinkerton, for its part, had a policy of never taking reward money — the Agency was always paid an agreed-upon rate by its clients and nothing more.

Stiles conceded the point that mattered most: "There is no question but what Zucker rendered a valuable service in that his information led to the arrest of two of the burglars."

Strip away the century of distance, and the Munn Bank case is a study in something still true today: complex financial crime rarely closes on the first arrest, or even the first conviction. It takes patient, cross-jurisdictional legwork — coordinating with local law enforcement, tracking aliases across state lines, and following threads that don't pay off for months, sometimes years, and sometimes only pay off through a quiet conversation that never gets put in writing.