THIRTY-SEVEN

A little before eight o’clock that morning an anonymous phone call reporting a loud argument brought Sweetwater police to the Alamo Plaza Tourist Courts. The best the officers could later determine, four men had left to go to breakfast, only to return sometime later to see their cabin surrounded by police. They abandoned the place, of course. And in doing so they also abandoned two cheap suitcases full of nondescript clothes, a few bottles of whiskey and a duffel bag containing $94,000 from the robbery of the Mercantile State Bank.

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That afternoon the cops brought us all back in and grilled us until late in the evening. There were two Rangers present, and they were more thorough in their interrogation than the local cops. They interviewed us separately and they interviewed us as a group, but nothing changed. At last they grew tired of hearing what they already knew, and told us we were free to go.

It turned out to be a busy week for Bob Crowder. The next day the Attorney General’s Office in Austin announced that Clifton Robillard had been arrested and charged with seventeen counts of embezzlement from a state chartered financial institution. It was Crowder who made the arrest. Twenty-four hours later he drove to Dallas, and then flew on to Kansas City. He was gone three days. The newspapers speculated that the trip was related to the robberies that had occurred the previous weekend.

Shortly after returning to town, he and two Dallas FBI men rearrested Clifton Robillard, who had managed to make bail on the embezzlement counts. This time Robillard was jailed on both state and federal charges of bank robbery and suborning a felony.

The following morning Crowder walked into Will Scoggins’s inner sanctum, laid a warrant on his desk and told him that he was under arrest for numerous charges of bribery and extortion. Normally in Texas when peace officers are arrested for nonviolent crimes they are not handcuffed and subjected to the public humiliation of being led away in chains. But such was Crowder’s contempt for Scoggins that he disarmed and cuffed him and took him out into the street manacled like a common felon.

The robbery of the bank had already brought a number of big-city reporters to town, and word quickly spread among them that the sheriff was to be transported to Sweetwater in neighboring Nolan County for arraignment. When Crowder and Scoggins arrived at the courthouse there, a crowd of newsmen awaited them. The next day pictures of the sheriff in irons graced the front pages of the state’s major daily papers. In the Dallas Morning News those pictures ran alongside a story that quoted Detective Ollie Marne as saying his office was investigating possible ties between Clifton Robillard and organized criminal elements in the community. On that same front page a shorter article documented the long-standing personal association between the recently jailed Robillard and the recently jailed sheriff. These stories were quickly picked up by the wire services, and the affair was deemed timely enough that reporters for several out-of-state papers, including the New Orleans Times, were dispatched to the area. Within days, documentation of Robillard’s Buckshot Row connections began to emerge and appear on front pages all across the Southwest. One of the most interesting developments was proof of his outright ownership of one of the most lucrative of the Row’s hot-pillow fleabag hotels.

A tastefully written and almost nostalgic account of the history of the Weilbach and its longtime patrons appeared in the Dallas Times Herald. The same week a San Antonio daily noted neither for taste nor nostalgia ran a similar article, only this one was much longer and it dwelt on the darker side of the hotel’s past. It did further damage to Robillard’s reputation by revealing that the “bridge tournament” the now-disgraced sheriff had spoken of was actually a high-stakes poker game that had been going on for decades. Mention was made of the presence of mistresses and call girls in the suite, and the article dwelt at great and vivid length on the amounts of whiskey consumed and the large sums of money that had flowed across the table. A photo of one of the bedrooms appeared with the article, and its caption read, “Millionaire Cattle Barons Gamble, Tryst in Famous Old Hotel.” Meanwhile the West Coast tabloids had pounced on the story. A reporter for one of them, a Los Angeles rag called Whisper, found Miss Teeny-Tunes, and the band played on.