Chapter 8 The Talent Whisperers It's not about recognizing talent, whatever the hell that is, I've never tried to go out and find someone who's talented. First you work on fimdamentals, and preity soon you find out where things are going. —Robert Lansdorp, tennis coach of former world number-one players Pete Sampras, Tracy Austin, and Lindsay Davenport, all of whom grew up within a few miles of each other in Los Angeles THE ESP OF HANS JENSEN Ia the early past of the twentieth century, Ametican bank rob- bers weren't very skilled. Gangs like the Newton Brothers of ‘Texas followed a simple and unvarying plan: they picked a bank, waited until nightfall, then blew open the vault with dyna- mite and/or nitroglycerine (which, in addition to being ticklish to handle, occasionally had the unfortunate side effect of setting the money on fire). This straightforward approach worked well for a time. Butby the early 1920s the banks had caught up, intto- ducing alarm systems and concrete-reinforced, blast-proof vaults. Gangs like the Newtons were stymied; bank authorities expected that a new era of safety and security had dawned.160 The Talent Code Ir didn't dawn. ‘The bank robbers simply became more skilled. These new thieves worked in daylight and operated with such clockwork professionalism that even the police were occasionally moved to admiration. It was as if bank rob- bers had suddenly evolved into a more talented species. They demonstrated their capabilities in downtown Denver on December 19, 1922, when a gang telieved the Federal Mint of $200,000 in ninety seconds flat, a feat that then ranked, on a pet-second basis, among history's most Incrative bank heists. This evolution could be traced to the man who led that Denver gang: Herman "The Baron” Lamm. Lamm was the originator and teacher of modern bank-robbing skill. Born in Germany around 1880, Lamm tose to become an officer in the Prussian Army. Expelled from the army (allegedly for cheat- ing at cards), he emigrated to the United States, where he took up a semisuccessful career as a holdup man, robbing people and occasionally banks. In 1917, while serving a two-year stint in Utah State Prison, Lamm conceived of a new system of bank robbery, applying military principles to what had been an artless profession. His singular insight was that robbing banks was not about guts or guns; it was about technique. Each bank job involved weeks of preparatory work. Lamm pioneered "casing," which meant visiting the bank, sketching blueprintlike maps, and occasionally posing as a journalist to get a look at the bank's interior operations. Lamm assigned each man on his team a well-defined role: lookout, lobby man, vault man, driver. He organized re- hearsals, using warehouses to stand in for the bank. He in- sisted on unyielding obedience to the clock: when the allotted time expired, the gang would depart, whether or not they had the money. Lamm scouted the getaway route in differentThe Talent Whisperers 161 weather conditions to gauge time; he taped maps to the dash- board that were indexed to the tenth of a mile. Lamm's system—dubbed the Baron Lamm Technique— worked well. From 1919 to 1930 it brought Lamm hundreds of thousands of dollars trom banks around the country; after his death it was taught to John Dillinger, among others.* Lamm's system, still employed today, succeeded not only because of its conceptual strength but also because Lamm was able to communicate his ideas and translate them into the seamless performance of an immensely difficult task. He was an inno- vator who taught with discipline and exactitude. He inspired through information. In short, Baron Lamm was a master coach.