1960s Austin Gangsters: Organized Crime that Rocked the Capital

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INTRODUCTION

Tim Overton reached the peak of his football career with the University of Texas (UT) at the Cotton Bowl Classic on New Year’s Day 1960. A sophomore on the reserve list, he got no field time in the game against the Syracuse Orange. It was just as well. Before the crowd of 75,500 fans, the all-white Texas Longhorns went down 23–14, defeated by a small, integrated New England college that fielded several outstanding African American athletes, including Heisman Trophy winner Ernie Davis. Texas also exacerbated its humiliation by inciting an ugly racial brawl in the second quarter.¹

Never mind that now. Having played football for UT still carried enormous prestige, and it remained part of Tim Overton’s identity for the rest of his short life—even after he achieved notoriety as the leader of an infamous Austin gang of safecrackers, pimps, drug dealers and Cadillac-obsessed hoodlums.

The Overton gang was Austin’s locally grown white trash mafia, with heavy connections to the Italian counterparts in the Big D, Cowtown, the Little Man in New Orleans, Biloxi, Oklahoma, Florida and Chicago. At least two other ex-football stars were part of that team.

It was the ’60s, and Austin was beginning its evolution from sleepy state capital and college town to the creative class/music mecca we know today. Austin natives are so proud and protective of our city’s reputation for coolness that we adopted the slogan Keep Austin Weird. Did the coexistence of counterculture and thug culture help make Austin cool?

The Austin Motel on South Congress Avenue today. For several decades, it was a magnet for prostitution and vice. Author’s collection.

The State Capitol Building in Austin; with its pink granite dome, it is taller than its counterpart in Washington, D.C. Author’s collection.

It was a good place to party, said musician Gerry Storm. Austin had a reputation for being a beautiful, rather colonial place, different from the rest of Texas and a destination for rich kids…as they waited for their inheritances. And even before there was any kind of a music scene, much less something to brag about, Austin was different because it was snobbish, a city of tea sippers, home to an underground of irreverent scholars, artists, and politicos—some of them with national reputations—that you don’t find in any city.²

It’s an important part of Austin history, said Nick Kralj, former club owner and longtime Austin backstage historian. You always had a connection with the outlaws and the lawyers and the politicians, said Kralj. It was all connected because they all like the same things. You know, whores and booze and other stuff like that.³

My introduction to the Overton gang came from the microfilm archives of the Austin American-Statesman. The year was 2002, and I was researching a series of murders in 1976 by a serial killer in which my girlfriend, Dianne Roberts, was one of the victims. That story was incorporated into a book titled Never the Same Again, published in 2004. A crime story headlined Police Feel Deaths Gang Action told of two Austin hoodlums, John Soriano and Henry Travis Schnautz Jr., murdered gangland style within hours of each other. Schnautz was a former associate of Tim Overton. An eight-hundred-word background article, Austin Underworld of the ’60s: Overton Gang Capers Recalled, made me feel that I had stumbled onto the secret history of Austin.⁴

Ghosts of the notorious Timmy Overton gang, an Austin-based underworld outfit involved in drugs, prostitution, bank burglaries, jewel thefts and other crimes in several states in the 1960s, may be haunting police again in the gang-style slayings of Travis Schnautz and John Soriano.

James Timothy Overton, an Austin native and star football player who eventually was accused of numerous crimes, was the titular chief of a large group of pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers and burglars which began organizing in the 1960s. The gang—including the infamous Jerry Ray James, one of the FBI’s 10 most wanted men until his arrest in 1968—was believed to have staged more than 30 bank burglaries and numerous other crimes in several states before law enforcement officers cracked down on 20 of its principal members in a massive federal conspiracy indictment in 1967.

Soriano turned out to be a minor figure, but Travis Schnautz was an old-school hood. Since the mid-’50s, he had bounced between burglary, haircutting, pimping, the music scene and drug dealing. His record showed more than fifty arrests and several prison terms. He was busted in 1957 for selling five pounds of weed to a narc for the Elvis and Edsels–era price of $350.⁵ Travis and his wife, Robyn, were good friends of country singer Willie Nelson—a reminder that the music scene has always been a magnet for fringe characters and illegal activity."⁶

I soon learned that Overton and his best pal, Jerry Ray Fat Jerry James, were co-captains on dozens of bank burglaries in small towns, mostly in West Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma. Overton’s father owned a transmission shop in East Austin, which served as a headquarters for the gang and doubled as a safecracking lab.

People who knew Overton described him as smart, funny, generous and charismatic. Fat Jerry, also a former football star, got mixed reviews. Jerry Ray James was a vicious, brutal sociopath who didn’t have any redeeming qualities whatsoever, said attorney Roy Q. Minton.⁷

Others apparently found James to be tolerable, even hilarious, especially when he was with Overton. The two of them together were like a vaudeville act, said Betty King.⁸

Probably the closest the gang ever came to becoming nationally famous was during the federal conspiracy trial referred to in the Statesman article. Overton and James were among the fourteen men and six women accused of running a multi-state bank burglary and prostitution ring. The case went to trial in Del Rio in early 1968 and concluded there the following June.

The indictment alleged that 14 men in the gang burglarized 18 banks in 1964–66. It also charged various gang members with six bank burglaries in Kansas and one in Oklahoma and other crimes in Colorado and Mississippi.

Six well-known Austin prostitutes were also accused of conspiracy. The women allegedly accompanied the men to areas where burglaries were planned. If any of the men were arrested, the women allegedly raised funds by prostituting themselves in order to post bonds for their men.

At a time when the war in Vietnam and civil rights made questioning authority feel like a moral imperative, the Overton gang confronted authority as a lifestyle. When Tim Overton discovered a hidden microphone in his wall heater vent—shades of the post-9/11 surveillance state—he filed a federal civil rights suit against the Austin Police Department. A second scandal erupted when it was revealed that a sophisticated recording system had been installed in the county jail.

One of the small-town banks victimized by the Overton/James gang in the 1960s. Courtesy of the NARA, author’s collection.

Unfortunately, on the date that the Statesman reported Overton’s illegal surveillance lawsuit, the big feature was an incident at a South Congress Avenue bordello owned by Austin’s leading madam, Hattie Valdes. Gangsterism—Austin Style: One Night at Hattie’s told how Tim Overton and his shotgun squad had moved to take over prostitution in Austin but were beaten back by the police and rival pimps. Tim Overton the thug had upstaged Tim Overton the civil rights champion.

Even if the Overtons didn’t affect the direction of culture in Austin, they were certainly part of it. With their caravans of Cadillacs, pinkie rings, expensive suits and alligator shoes, they made an impression wherever they went. They smoked pot long before it became a political statement, and they patronized the coolest clubs in town, along with some of the most disreputable. Bandleader Henry Blues Boy Hubbard told me that Overton tipped him $100 at a time, but go-go dancers got twice as much.⁹

Tim Overton, who attended Austin High from 1956 to 1957, had a bright athletic career ahead of him. Courtesy of the Comet, 1957.

Tim Overton in jail, 1966. In every photo I’ve seen, he has the same strange, unfocused expression, as if he’s mentally somewhere else. Courtesy of the NARA.

Let’s be clear: these guys were not admirable citizens. Tim Overton and his friends were violent, predatory and brutal. Their tracks are sometimes easy to follow because they left a trail of abused victims and destroyed property. The last thing I’d want to do is to romanticize them, but they were interesting people living during an interesting time. Many, if not all, of the men came from dysfunctional backgrounds and the kind of circumstances that tend to foster feelings of powerlessness and low self-esteem. In a perverted way, learning to control others through intimidation and violence might have felt like personal advancement.

A NOTE ON TERMS

Overton’s network of criminal cohorts and camp followers included two brothers, his father and stepmother, hence the use of the name Overton gang and sometimes the Overtons, particularly in the Austin area. In places where Jerry Ray James was better known, members of the media took to calling them a modern-day James gang.

By the mid-’60s, law enforcement agencies from New Mexico to the Florida coast had begun to recognize the existence of a sort of alternate mafia, particularly in the South and Southwest, where the Italian mafia had gradually lost ground. Rather than being a centralized crime syndicate, Tim Overton, Jerry Ray James and their colleagues were part of that network. Police bulletins began referring to them as traveling criminals. By the end of the decade, the term Dixie Mafia was being applied to the same people.¹⁰

The Dixie Mafia has been the subject of several books and movies over the years, but the subject matter is almost exclusively about later periods, as opposed to the era in this book, the ’60s. For a short discussion of books and films about the Dixie Mafia, please see Appendix 2.

1

GETTING EVEN : 1956–1961

In the ’50s, before the Austin skyline was a clutter of high rises, the Capitol and the University of Texas Tower were its undisputed defining landmarks. You could see them and know that you were in the capital city, the home of the University of Texas.

Every summer, young boys went down to watch the Longhorns in their preseason workouts, drilling, sprinting downfield in one-hundred-degree heat and jogging up and down the steps of Memorial Stadium. Mike Cotten was there, watching and dreaming. I grew up wanting to be a Longhorn from when I was six years old, said Cotten. I was watching them back in the 1940s. There was never any doubt about who I wanted to play for.

Tim Overton was there, too. Cotten and Overton were the same age but from very different backgrounds. Overton grew up in the East First Street neighborhood, home to a mixed population of Hispanics and working-class whites. Some of the streets were still unpaved. The Cotten family lived in a spacious, rambling mid-century ranch-style home on Belmont Parkway in Tarrytown, the west side of Austin, the prosperous side. The addresses were barely five miles apart, but they were worlds apart.

The Tower stood tall from the campus hilltop, a beacon marking a possible way out for Tim Overton. He wasn’t a running back, a golden boy like Mike Cotten. Overton played guard on offense and linebacker on defense, positions where aggressiveness and a mean streak were key. He also fought in Golden Gloves. Boxing was another possible way out.

The University of Texas Main Building, universally known as the Tower, stands higher than the Capitol dome. Author’s collection.

For the poor and/or nonwhite, Austin could be a mean town in the ’50s. Congress Avenue was the dividing line, with the haves on the west side and the have-nots on the east. Working-class and country people were often ridiculed as cedar choppers, stump haulers and white trash. Across the river from downtown, South Austin was still countrified, with north–south thoroughfares lined with feed stores, tourist courts, junkyards and beer joints. Hyde Park, now solidly middle class or better, was a gritty neighborhood. As Eddie Wilson tells it, today’s solid middle-class addresses once bred street fighters and hoodlums. There were guys who went off to the pen for five or ten years, said Wilson, and once they got out, they couldn’t afford to live there anymore.

The Sixth Ward, east of downtown between Sixth and Eleventh Streets, was the official African American neighborhood. South of Sixth Street down to the river was the Seventh, home to a mix of Hispanics and working-class whites. The Seventh was also called East First Street (renamed Cesar Chavez Street in 1993).¹¹ Many Hispanics in the East First area had been forced to vacate other parts of the city that the city planners of the 1920s had designated for whites only, the same policy that established the Sixth Ward as the official black section.¹²

In the ’50s, the west side—with its clean streets, Greek Revival mansions and sprawling mid-century ranch-burgers—became the destination for teenagers from the poor side of town. They went cruising for dates, starting brawls and crashing parties. Every October 31, Tarrytown became ground zero for mayhem and madness. Water balloons, rotten eggs and other missiles were launched at cars and pedestrians. Street fights broke out.

Halloween 1956 would be remembered as a real Hell Night. Burning tires were rolled into the street. A bunch of teens commandeered the roof of the Gulf station. Max Fat Max Roesch lassoed a cop off his three-wheeler. Don Jester cold-cocked a guy who turned out to be a plainclothes cop. Surviving participants include Dick DeGuerin, the renowned defense attorney whose high-profile cases in recent years have starred Willie Nelson, Tom DeLay and Clara Harris, a Houston dentist who killed her philandering husband by running over him in her Mercedes multiple times.

Dick DeGuerin was another flat-topped wannabe-thug following in the shadow of brawling, swaggering Austin High bruisers like Tim Overton, Don Jester, Jesse Freeman and Sonny Stanley. But on November 1, 1956, DeGuerin was taken aside by his father. He told me I was headed for prison, DeGuerin told me, just like those other guys.

Message received. DeGuerin entered an afterschool work program, graduated from Austin High in ’58, enrolled at UT in the fall, joined a fraternity and avoided getting into trouble—unlike many of his former classmates. After graduating UT School of Law in 1965 and passing the bar, DeGuerin learned his trade at the side of the esteemed Percy Foreman, a titan of Texas criminal defense attorneys, and then became a legend in his own right, regularly defending clients who have committed vile, abhorrent acts.

Calvary Baptist Church, circa 1937. Of the two little girls, left of center, Ima Nell has the blond hair, and cousin Mildred is at right. Courtesy of Mildred Green.

Finus and Ima Nell Overton, Tim’s parents. The photo was taken not long before her terminal illness. Courtesy of Mildred Green.

Jack, Finus, little