All Honest Men: The Story of J. Willis Newton and America's Most Successful Outlaw Gang Book

All Honest Men is the true-life story of J. Willis Newton, a feisty sharecropper's son who fled the Texas cotton fields to become the leader of the most successful band of outlaws in American history. It's also one of the most unlikely love stories ever recorded in criminal lore. If there were an Olympic competition for bank and train robbing, Willis and his three brothers--Joe, Jess, and Dock--would easily have won the gold medal, carrying off more money in their day than Jesse James, the Daltons, Butch Cassidy, and all the other famous outlaws put together. They were fascinating characters who bridged the Old World outlaw era and the gangster world of A1 Capone. In the early 1920s, Willis' four-brother gang emptied dozens of banks and held up six trains, pulling off the biggest train robbery in U.S. history--a $3 million heist near Chicago. A flinty and restless person, Willis decided he wasn't going to spend his life picking cotton and following a "stinking mule's ass." Ironically, he modeled himself after his mother, Janetta Pecos, who, weary of the family's slave-like existence, told him once that if she had been a man, she might have become an outlaw. The only other person Willis respected as much as his mother was Louise Brown, who he met between robberies. The relationship blossomed unitl Louise discovered something about Willis that he'd neglected to mention--he was a bank robber. What happened after that surprised them both. By the 1920s, the original American dream of owning a patch of land had, with the industrialization of the country, changed to a dream of acquiring money, even to becoming a millionaire. Willis spent his life chasing that dream.