1924 The Bank of Pompano is Robbed

On a hot, dusty afternoon in September 1924 at the Bank of Pompano on Northeast First Avenue and First Street, cashier Cecil Cates and assistant cashier T.L. Myers were totaling the day's balance when they heard the command "hands up.” They found themselves staring at two .45's and an automatic rifle held by three men who were near the tellers' windows. The gunmen entered the vault, grabbed $5,000 in cash and $18,000 in securities, and then seized several thousand dollars more from the cash drawer and tellers' trays. The gang's leader then handed Cates a rifle bullet and told him it was a souvenir of his own career as a bank robber. Afterwards, the desperadoes fled in a car hijacked from West Palm Beach taxi driver Wesley Powell.

The crime was supposed to have been committed by the Ashley gang. This group operated in South Florida from 1911 until November 1, 1924 when three members, Ray Lynn, Hanford Mobley, and John Clarence Middleton, and their leader John Ashley, a one-eyed trapper, wood chopper, and sharp shooter called "the fastest man on the trigger in Florida,” were trapped in an ambush by a posse of law enforcement officers on the narrow wooden Sebastian River bridge outside of Vero Beach while they were heading north in a rusty Model T Ford. It was rumored that the posse gunned down the gang in cold blood after handcuffing them. Reportedly, there were bullet dents in the handcuffs. But, with legends of the Ashley gang's plunder and robbery circulating in towns the bandits never visited, few cared how the gang died, as long as they were dead. The loot was never recovered.

Pompano pioneer Robert "Bob" McClellan recalled: "Although my brother and sister actually had witnessed the Pompano bank robbery through a window, they were too young to realize what had happened. In the ensuing confusion, a whole bunch of people packed into a car to chase the gang then fleeing into the Everglades; but they really weren't in any hurry to catch them.

Courtesy of the Pompano Beach Historical Society. All rights reserved.