Something just outside the door of his Brooklyn apartment awakened Edward W. "Eddie" Bentz. The 41-year-old career criminal from Tacoma figured the apartment would be a safe haven until police relaxed their manhunt. But something was amiss on the morning of March 13, 1936. Bentz heard a man in the hallway shout, "Open that door! We’re federal officers." He scanned the apartment, desperate for escape routes, and spotted a dumbwaiter that led to an empty unit upstairs. Bentz hid in the shaft intending to hoist himself to safety as FBI agents lobbed tear gas canisters into his apartment. Agents caught him upstairs.

Later, in a federal building overlooking New York’s East River, Bentz told an FBI agent: "I hope they send me to Alcatraz Prison. All my friends are there." Indeed, they were. Eddie Bentz masterminded numerous bank robberies in the 1930s and was the state of Washington’s most notorious contribution to the violent gangster years of the Great Depression.

Bentz ran with some of the most prominent and feared hoodlums of the time, including George F. Barnes Jr., known as "Machine Gun" Kelly, and Lester Joseph Gillis, a particularly ruthless thug also known as "Baby Face Nelson." Bentz even knew John Dillinger, dubbed "Public Enemy No. 1" in 1934.

Criminals and police alike respected Bentz for his intellect and resourcefulness in casing banks, researching their financials, and finding the best getaway routes. When FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wrote Persons in Hiding, about the gangster years of the 1930s, he devoted an entire chapter to Bentz, noting: "Bentz was a superman even to his own kind. Hardened criminals looked to him for advice. Often they would pay him a consultant’s fee for examining their plans for a holdup and deciding whether or not the robbery should be carried out."

Bentz knocked off banks all over the country. In Washington, Bentz and his accomplices were suspected of pulling off brazen, daytime bank heists in Bremerton and Colfax. When he was not busy with his criminal activities, he was said to indulge in more refined pursuits, such as collecting rare books and coins.

Tacoma was his hometown. He grew up in the city and returned often. In the early 1930s he lived on South Grant Avenue, and in 1932 he married his teenage girlfriend, Verna Freimark, in Tacoma. When Bentz was paroled for the last time in 1963, he retired there. For all of his exploits, however, Bentz kept a low profile. While Dillinger flaunted his gangster career, Bentz often portrayed himself as a law-abiding citizen. He used several aliases and at various times called himself a machinist, engineer, or salesman. As a result, Washington’s most prolific gangster of the 1930s is now largely forgotten. But a review of court and prison records, newspaper accounts, city directories, and other public documents reveals the story of a career criminal who reached the highest level in his profession.

Edward Wilhelm Bentz was born June 2, 1894, in Pipestone, Minnesota, the fifth of eleven children born to German immigrants George and Rose Bentz. After an accident killed George Bentz around 1907, Rose and her children moved to Tacoma. It is unlikely that the entire Bentz brood came with her, but records show that young Eddie and at least seven of his siblings lived in the Pacific Northwest.

Bentz later told prison officials his family ran a boardinghouse and that he had a middle-class upbringing. That may have been the case when he was a youngster in the Midwest, but records show that by the time Bentz was a teenager in 1909 his mother Rose and sister Pauline were working as maids in a boardinghouse affiliated with the St. Paul & Tacoma Lumber Company.

Old Tacoma telephone directories show that the family moved often, sometimes every year. They tended to live in neighborhoods just south of downtown Tacoma. Young Bentz had theft-related brushes with the law from an early age. At 14 he received a petty larceny conviction, and in January 1909 Pierce County sent him to the Green Hill State Training School in Chehalis. He was paroled 18 months later, but Green Hill failed to rehabilitate Bentz-his life pattern was already set. He began stealing tools from stores around Tacoma. Court and prison records reflect an adolescence that resembled a revolving door of arrests, convictions, sentences, escapes, and releases.

On June 12, 1911, while being held for burglary at the Tacoma City Jail, Bentz escaped by springing the bars in the juvenile ward and hiding out in the jail kitchen. He managed to flee to Oregon, where he was picked up two months later. After that, he became an inmate of the Washington State Reformatory at Monroe. By the following year, at age 17, Bentz was in the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, serving one to five years for burglary and a jail break. After 18 months the state granted him parole, and he lived for a time with his family.

On October 14, 1916, he walked into the Rhodes Brothers Department Store in downtown Tacoma and bought a small item. He gave the clerk a $34 check and took the balance in cash. The check was forged, as were checks Bentz used at two other businesses that day. Police apprehended him when he tried to pass a fourth bad check at yet another store.

This time Pierce County threw the book at him with a first-degree forgery conviction and a sentence of up to 20 years in Walla Walla. When the prison doors closed behind him on January 6, 1917, Bentz was 22. He talked his way out of jail in July 1920 by swearing he wanted to enlist in the Canadian army and turn his life around. He even enlisted, but within two months he was AWOL.

Bentz spent most of the 1920s in and out of prison in Washington, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois, serving sentences for various crimes, including burglary and car theft. For the most part, people like Bentz operated anonymously in the 1920s Prohibition era. They looted banks throughout the Midwest without drawing the police response or banner headlines that big Chicago mobsters like Al Capone or George "Bugs" Moran typically elicited. Bootleggers held the spotlight.

By the 1930s the nation had changed and so had the nature of crime. The country was struggling with the economic calamity of the Great Depression. Criminals flourished with the aid of an effective new tool. Automobiles had become more reliable and readily available. It was now possible for hoodlums to stage brazen daylight heists and flee in fast cars, outrunning local authorities whose jurisdiction often stopped at the state line. Bentz was different, too. He was a more accomplished and ambitious criminal with a prestigious specialty-bank robbery.

Some suspect Bentz of masterminding the sensational armed robbery of the Lincoln National Bank and Trust Company in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1930. Police accounts say the robbers made off with about $2.5 million in cash and securities, which would be worth about $30.8 million today. Bentz’s confirmed stickups had less extravagant payoffs.

During the noon hour of July 29, 1932, two armed men walked into the First State Bank of Bremerton, in the old Charleston neighborhood. "This is a holdup," one man said. When bank president H. A. Bruenn resisted, one of the robbers knocked him unconscious with a blackjack. The gunmen grabbed about $7,000 and rolls of silver dollars. The robbers sped out of town in a stolen maroon Pontiac. Authorities identified Bentz and his nephew Ernest Robert Johnston, 23, as suspects. They picked up Johnston in Reno and extradited him to Bremerton to face charges. Bentz went into hiding.

Two months after the Bremerton holdup, on September 21, 1932, at least three armed men walked into the First Savings & Trust Bank in Colfax and ordered everyone to lie on the floor. Guns drawn, they made a nervous cashier open the bank safe and stuffed a bag with loot.

When they sped off in their getaway car they had about $77,000 worth of cash and securities-about 1.1 million in today’s dollars.

Within weeks authorities were searching for two suspects in the Colfax heist: Eddie Bentz and Albert L. Bates, an excon with a 16-year record for burglary and theft. They also wanted to question an additional suspect, bootlegger and wouldbe bank robber Machine Gun Kelly, whom witnesses in Colfax identified as an accomplice. Police suspected that Kelly, Bates, and Bentz were part of a gang that held up banks from Washington state to Texas in the early 1930s.

In June 1933, Bentz’s criminal career turned a corner when a visitor appeared at his Lake Michigan vacation cottage in Long Beach, Indiana-unstable, trigger-happy Baby Face Nelson. Making a fateful decision, Bentz agreed to become his partner.

On the Friday afternoon of August 18, 1933, Bentz, Nelson, and four other gunmen pulled up to the Peoples Savings Bank of Grand Haven, Michigan, in a Buick sedan. The driver stayed with the car in a back alley while another man guarded the door. Bentz, Nelson, and the other two men went inside and stole at gunpoint $14,000, plus checks and bonds.

The robbers grabbed bank employees as human shields and pushed their hostages out the door. But the Buick getaway car was gone. Their driver had panicked and driven away. With the hostages still in tow, the gunmen fired into the street. Nelson, hoisting a Thompson submachine gun, sprayed bullets in several directions while onlookers ran for cover.

Bentz, brandishing a pistol, ran into the street and flagged down a woman driving a Chevrolet. Four of the robbers piled into the car and drove away, leaving one man behind to face arrest. The fugitives ditched the car several miles out of town and stole two others to make their escape.

The bungled getaway and heavy use of gunfire was far from a signature Bentz robbery, and police responded in a big way. Barely a month passed before authorities started rounding up suspects. Baby Face Nelson eluded officers, although he died 15 months later in a Skokie, Illinois, shootout. Bentz somehow escaped the dragnet. He fled to Portland, Maine, where he and Verna bought a big house. Bentz then tried to go straight and stay under cover by starting a toy business.

While Bentz was on the road selling toys in New England, lawmakers in Washington, D.C., were debating laws that ultimately ended his bank robbery career. Early in 1934 Congress passed a series of anticrime bills, and on May 18, 1934, President Franklin Roosevelt signed six of them into law. One of the bills made bank robbery a federal crime. Bentz and other bank robbers had readily outrun local authorities by fleeing from state to state. Now, however, bank robbers would be pursued by a national force called the Bureau of Investigation, later called the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). With a stroke of his pen Roosevelt dramatically changed the rules.

Meanwhile, Bentz was apparently getting bored with the law-abiding life in Maine. While on the road in Vermont, he spotted a bank in the small town of Danville and saw it as an opportunity to raise capital for his toy business. On the afternoon of June 4, 1934, Bentz and an accomplice robbed Danville’s Caledonia National Bank of about $7,600 in cash, plus bonds, checks, and securities. No one was hurt, but one cashier was forced to the floor and another was threatened at gunpoint to open the vault.

After scooping up their loot, the two gunmen climbed into a Ford V-8 and sped away. This time, however, federal agents pursued them and no state line could interfere. Bentz soon adopted the precarious lifestyle of a federal fugitive. He and Verna left their home in Maine and split up. Bentz moved from place to place, one step ahead of his pursuers. He changed his habits, apparently fearful of any slip that would signal his whereabouts to federal agents. He avoided bookstores and coin shops, gave up golf, and stayed away from fancy restaurants and nightclubs.

Figuring to lose himself in the big city, Bentz moved to Brooklyn. Verna accidentally revealed his location. The pursuit ended when Bentz climbed out of the apartment dumbwaiter and into the hands of waiting FBI agents. He pled guilty to the Vermont bank robbery and received a 20-year sentence. Authorities booked him into the U.S. penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 26, 1936, and transferred him to the federal prison on Alcatraz Island two months later.

Alcatraz opened in 1934 as a maximum security prison to hold dangerous criminals convicted of violating federal laws. The island prison in San Francisco Bay was considered nearly escape-proof. Bentz spent 12 years there. His fellow inmates included Albert Bates and Machine Gun Kelly, who were serving time for kidnapping an Oklahoma oilman. Although Bentz was clearly involved in the Bremerton and Colfax holdups, and Bates and Kelly were suspected accomplices in the Colfax heist, none of them was prosecuted for the Washington robberies. It hardly mattered, though, because all three had been sentenced to long prison terms for other crimes.

When Bentz was released from Alcatraz, the State of Massachusetts was waiting to prosecute him for a prior larceny offense. In October 1948 federal marshals escorted him directly to Boston, where he was sentenced to five to six years in the Massachusetts State Prison at Charlestown.

Massachusetts released Bentz in the spring of 1953. He immediately reunited with Jeannette Bentz, 18, apparently his daughter by his late wife Verna. The two eventually settled into an apartment on Winthrop Avenue in Chicago where Bentz took a job as a machinist.

The straight life was difficult for Bentz, who promptly got himself into debt. He bought a 1948 black Buick, financed through monthly payments, and owed money on a television set. After buying a coat, clothes, and a wristwatch for Jeannette, he was broke. When a friend from Wisconsin tried to interest him in robbing a bank, Bentz declined, saying he would be too easily identified by the FBI. Nonetheless, in May 1954 Bentz and his friend drove around Green Bay, Wisconsin, scouting out possible heists. Late in the afternoon on May 18, 1954, Bentz, now nearly 60, walked into the Pulaski-Chase Co-op, a farm and home supply store near Green Bay. Brandishing a gun, he robbed the store of about $1,500 while his friend waited outside in the black Buick.

Authorities caught up with Bentz and his alleged accomplice, Robert Van Beek, in a matter of days. The court convicted Bentz of assault and attempted robbery and sent him to the Wisconsin State Prison in Waupun to serve his sentence. Because he refused to testify against his accomplice, the charges against Van Beek were dismissed. He eventually served time at the Wisconsin prison for burglarizing a Milwaukee sausage factory.

Wisconsin released Bentz in February 1962 after he had served eight years at Waupun. Freedom eluded Bentz even then. His Wisconsin conviction violated the parole terms on his federal sentence for the Vermont bank robbery. As a result, federal authorities promptly threw him in the Federal Correctional Institution in Sandstone, Minnesota, for a year.

At age 69, Bentz was finally a free man. He returned to Tacoma and retired from crime. From the mid 1960s on, he apparently lived a quiet life on South Thompson Avenue, about two miles east of Interstate 5 and the Tacoma Mall. A brother and sister of his also lived in the area. Once robust, Bentz became a diminished man with a heart condition in his later years. He was 85 when he died of heart failure on October 31, 1979.

Bentz once boasted of having robbed 50 to 100 banks in his lifetime. His rap sheet shows dozens of allegations and offenses from Washington to Vermont. He embraced the criminal lifestyle for most of his adult life and served about 40 years behind bars-almost half his lifetime-in some of the United States’ more formidable prisons. But unlike Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and other notorious gangsters of the 1930s, Eddie Bentz never became a household name. This was largely intentional. J. Edgar Hoover wrote that Bentz preferred a low profile and held publicity seekers in contempt: "He regarded Pretty Boy Floyd as a cheap thug and John Dillinger as an upstart. They were publicized outlaws of the moment."

Bentz tried to keep his cover until the very end. On the old bank robber’s death certificate, the line for "usual occupation" contains a single typed word: "salesman."

Mavis Amundson is a Seattle journalist and author of The Lady of the Lake and The Great Forks Fire.