Around 1925, Clara moved Al, by then a gawky, tow headed teenager with a hot temper and a penchant for arson, into Indianapolis. She died there in 1929, only 37 years old, leaving Brady a 19-year-old on his own.Two months after her death, his nerves snapped one night and he set out to rob Indianapolis grocer Clifford Barnard. Fleeing the scene, he was shot three times by a patrolman but survived and received a suspended sentence.

Not until 1934 was he sent to the reformatory for vehicle theft.

Newly released in January 1935 and schooled in he ways of crime, Brady visited his legal guardian, Ira Wells, at his Hanover, Ind., farm and met a bootlegger names Jim Daihover, four years his senior, living nearby.

"Daihover had a long record of penitentiary offenses," wrote J. Edgar hoover in a 1938 magazine article, "ranging from robbery to moon shining, plus something which interested Brady greatly. He had an absolute mania for guns."

Joining up with young Shaffer and a Kentucky bootlegger names Charles Geisking, who ran with the gang for a while, the outlaws were petty thieves on their way up.

"Thus, in the fall of 1935 and the spring of 1936," Hoover wrote,"an epidemic of motorcar and grocery-store robberies broke forth in Indiana and Illinois.."

Brady killed a 23 year-old Ohio store clerk on March 21, 1936, and on April 27 Indianapolis police Sgt. Richard Rivers was murdered outside a doctor's office where the gang had sought treatment for Geisking, wounded during a jewelry heist. While awaiting trial for Rivers' murder, the three men broke out of the Greenfield, Ind., jail on October 11, 1936, in the style of their idol, Hoosier bank robber John Dillinger, whom Shaffer, not Brady, as reported, had vowed to "make look like a piker."

The gang fled to Baltimore, a safe distance from the Middle West, where a police and FBI dragnet made life risky. Moving in with Margaret Raimondo and her family, who had been conned into believing they were furniture salesmen from Bangor, Maine (a place they had not yet visited), the gang continued into 1937 to make forays in Indiana, robbing banks and returning to Baltimore to the sanctuary of the Raimondo home.

where a clerk, unable to furnish the guns they desired, had referred them to Dakin's earlier that day. I introduced Mr. Hurd to the two men. They then talked about Colt .45-caliber automatics."

They also discussed a 35 Winchester automatic rifle.

"They wanted a new one," Hurd recalled. "I pointed out that new ones hadn't been made for more than 30 years and that I could possible get them a secondhand one, but this they did not want."