The Denver Mint robbery happened on December 18, 1922. Five men hijacked a Federal Reserve Bank delivery truck outside the U.S. Mint in Denver, Colorado.
Robbery
At approximately 10:30 a.m., a truck was being loaded with $200,000 in $5 bills on West Colfax Avenue. A black Buick car arrived, and two men exited and shot short shotguns, while a third person took the money bags. About 50 U.S. Mint Police Officers inside the mint responded immediately by shooting back. One robber was hit in the jaw by a shotgun shot. The robbers remained at the scene for about one minute and 30 seconds before leaving quickly.
Suspects
None of the robbers were ever identified, except for 36-year-old Nicholas "Chaw Jimmie" Trainor, who was killed during the shootout with U.S. Mint Police. The gang managed to escape with $200,000. After one of the guards, Charles Linton, was killed, the gang fled, taking the seriously injured Trainor with them. Linton was an Arapahoe and Denver Deputy Sheriff before becoming a guard at Denver's Federal Reserve. In 1882, Linton helped arrest Doc Holiday on a warrant from Arizona related to the OK Corral Incident (1881). Doc Holiday was not taken to Arizona, as friends and political connections kept him safe in Colorado. ISBN:1-559 330-232-0. On January 14, 1923, Trainor's body was found in the getaway car after it was abandoned in a Gilpin Street garage in Denver. Police later suspected Harvey Bailey, who had previously worked with Trainor, might have been part of the gang, but no evidence was found to prove his involvement.
On February 17, one month after Trainor's body was discovered, Minnesota authorities searched an abandoned hideout and the Secret Service recovered $80,000 from the Denver Mint Robbery and $73,000 in bonds stolen during a bank robbery in Walnut Hills, Ohio, three months before the mint robbery. Both Trainor and Bailey were suspects in the Walnut Hills robbery, which supported the theory that Bailey was involved. Bailey disappeared in late 1922 and avoided capture until his arrest and conviction in 1933. Bailey died in 1979.
The case remained unsolved for 12 years until Denver Police Chief A.T. Clark announced that the robbery team had been identified and included five men and two women, all of whom had died in the years following the robbery. The two alleged surviving members, Harvey Bailey and James "Oklahoma Jack" Clark, had been sentenced to life in prison for unrelated crimes. Police claimed the gang fled to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where the money was given to "a prominent Minneapolis attorney." No one was ever charged with the robbery, and the case was officially closed on December 1, 1934.