Stop the Presses

As a sportswriter who never covered anything more exciting than home-town boxing bouts for Texas' San Antonio News, young (29) Dan Cook nursed a Technicolored dream: to stop the presses for a Page One beat. One night last week--as he later told the story--an anonymous phone call promised the big chance. The caller tipped him to "the biggest robbery pulled since the Brink's job"--the theft of $200,000 from a safe in Houston, some 200 miles to the east. The voice even gave Cook the address and automobile license number of the robber.

Cook picked up a friend, Jimmy Parks, 33, a fight promoter, and one of the county's numerous "special," i.e., honorary, deputy sheriffs with the privilege of flashing a badge and toting a pistol. Then the pair took off for Houston, stopping occasionally on the way to fortify themselves with beer. "I got to thinking," Cook later recalled, "if I could go over to Houston and clean up the case and bring the man and the money back to San Antonio and dump it all in the lap of the police chief, I would be famous." Finally, in a beer-blurred haze of headlines and bylines, Cook rapped on the door at the Houston address.

"Who is it?" asked Edwin Roy Hamlett, 34, an auto salesman. "We're police officers," shouted Deputy Parks, and the door opened. "All right," rasped Parks, "where's it hidden?" Hamlett protested that he did not know what they were talking about. Reporter Cook, a high-school halfback who packs 210 lbs. into his 6 ft. 1 in. frame, took turns with Parks trying to cuff a confession about the robbery out of Hamlett.

The Loot. All the money Hamlett could produce was $885. They took it and demanded to be led to his boss. After another cuffing, Hamlett supplied the address of his employer, Used-Car Dealer Jimmy Hicks. Cook and Parks put Hamlett into his own Cadillac and drove to Hicks's home. On the way they pocketed another $1,000 they found in the glove compartment.

They burst in on Hicks, beat him until he surrendered $1,200. Then they taped up their victims' hands and mouths and announced they would take them into the country and "make you tell us" where the bulk of the loot was hidden. As they were leaving the house, the captors decided to untape the men lest they seem conspicuous. At that, Hicks and Hamlett dashed in opposite directions yelling for the police. The two sleuths fled in alarm in Hamlett's car, quickly ditched it after a narrow brush with a police car.

Headlines. Next morning Newsman Cook decided that he had better let the police in on his big story. Recalling that he had gone to high school with a brother of Houston Police Chief Jack Heard, he telephoned the chief and got an appointment. Cook found the police harder to persuade than a city editor. Though he told his story once--and backed it up with a brown envelope containing the money he had seized--they made him tell it over and over again. Then they booked him and Parks for armed robbery and jailed them.

When Houston police reporters sniffed out the arrest, Chief Heard offered to give them an "off-the-record" account of what had happened. They refused, and the chief produced his prisoners for an interview. "I could just see the suitcases full of $1,000 bills," Cook told the newsmen, describing his visions. "Frankly, I was intending to make fools out of you boys. I got to thinking of the headlines there would be." Cook's opposition paper, the San Antonio Light, was delighted to give him an eight-column headline across Page One: S.A. SCRIBE, FIGHT PROMOTER, CONFESS HOLDUP. His own paper gave the story only three inches, noted pointedly that Cook had been a member of its staff.

But Reporter Cook made fools out of the boys anyway. Three days later, the police admitted that there had indeed been a safe robbery totaling $300,000 in cash and securities--and they charged Auto Salesman Hamlett, an ex-convict, with burglary as one of the culprits. Hamlett led eleven officers to the San Antonio home of his ex-jailmate, Harvey Marley, 31, where they found $6,220 behind a bedroom chest, $59,000 in a buried tin box and coaxed his wife into producing another $29,000 from a cache outside. They jailed Marley with Hamlett on the burglary rap. Reporter Cook, out on $10,000 bail and firmly back on the News staff, enjoyed a triumph beyond his own dream: to front pages all over Texas, the A. P. carried his byline account of how at last "I've been able to sit down at a typewriter and write my own story . . ."

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