Wildest of the Wild Bunch with Ben Feldman

Olla, mios. This is Greatest Escapes, a show bringing you the wildest true escape stories of all time. Today we're telling an iconic story of the Old West, getting into the life and escapes of Kid Curry, the wildness of the Wild Bunch. I'm Aartoro Castro, and my guest today is actor, producer and incredibly generous lover Ben Feldman. Ah wow, Ben, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. Thank you for that incredible intro music. That was really it'd be really funny if you went straight from that into like a really kind of Maudlin sad like.

Yes, So then everybody the story begins with everybody dying and how that has affected masculinity throughout the generations.

So, Ben, what do you consider to be You're a great as escape. No, you know what's funny is I was thinking about it this morning because I was thinking about escapes, and I guess I'm constantly having to be reminded just sort of what a hashtag blast life I've had. I was like, have you ever been trapped? And I had, I mean, I've been trapped in like boring what like there's been like jobs that I've bailed on and stuff

Yes, the year was nineteen sixty four. Well exactly, nobody takes messal what does can you hear? Mescaline is essentially peyote, And like I was at a fish concert.

At turn of the century y two K, like the two thousand when we all thought the computers were going to kill us, and it was like a three day event and by the third day, no one could find any molly, like is what we were looking for? This feels wrong to tell guess whatever familiar, but we were looking around everything was you know, it was just like dry,

The time of their lives.

So they to me, this was just a what post?

Why are these soldiers dancing in rhythm?

Yeah, it's all of these things. And then the sun came up and I saw everybody kind of wander back to the tent like zombies. And I don't really remember anything except the next thing I knew, I was in a car with my friend Lily and we drove back from Florida. Oh.

Man, that's a great story.

That's a great escape. That's that's like when I think about like getting trapped. Yeah, I'm trotted in my own head.

That was a fantastic skit. In fact, we have one of the producers, Carl, you here to tell me that I can't. I can't do any of that.

No.

No, Carl is like is having PTSD from the time when him and I went to see an aqua concert in Sweden in nineteen ninety eight. Man, that was a fucking time, wasn't it. When they played I'm a Barbie Girl.

I was a Barbie girl. I literally was a Barbie girl.

Ah, let me ask you something. And have you ever considered robbing a train? Only?

Every day? When I think of all the places i'd love to rob, which I do often, train is not high on the list. It does not seem like a very lucrative loot for me.

Do you like westerns is out of things?

Yeah, if it's a good one, I don't know.

Well, today I'm going to tell you the greatest Western you've.

Ever heard of? Yellow Stony. I like yellow.

Yeah, it's yellow stony. That's right, Kevin Cassler is coming on.

Just like you're opening song.

That's right, Well, let's escape, shall we ye? So Born in Iowa in eighteen sixty seven, Harvey Logan and his brother started out as wandering ranch hands and horse breakers, working across the West from Wyoming to Colorado and then down south all the way to Texas. No one knows exactly why he changed his name, to be honest, maybe it was just a line of work, but at some point Harvey decided it would be best to choose an alias.

You know, I was expecting something a little more west. You know, they all had nicknames. I was about to say, what. Of course, he changed his name to steel Toe, bullet chewer or whatever they called it, and he was Yeah, he was just like Harvey Potpourrie was taking.

So. Historians guessed that Harvey was trying to outrun the law because of a saloon brawl in Colorado. Also his older brother was trying to make sure that he couldn't be tracked down by his wife. Ben. Give me ah, there you go, I.

Could do your sound effects. So anyway, this guy, this cowboy, mister Curry.

Yeah. One of the local Montana ranchers said that Harvey and his brother were the best cattle ropers around. They were known for being hard working and good natured. So it sounds like he's got a nice life of cattle ranching ahead of him. But all that changed in eighteen ninety four when Harvey tracked down his neighbor, Pike Lindunsky at a bar. Pike, that's right. So the two men, these two men, these two neighbors had been feuding and

So that's just great name though. I like the name Pike.

So he found him drinking at a bar and tapped him on the shoulder and as he was turning around, Harvey bam hit him in the jaw. Give me a yeah, that's right, give me a yeah. Yeah, that's okay, that won't hurt, Okay, that's is that the bar oo?

Yeah, there's an audience, right, wow.

Good. So Harvey hit him in the jaw with a right hook. Pike hit him back, and then the two men ended up rolling on the floor.

Right.

Harvey ended up on top of Pike, punching him until the bystanders begged him to stop. Right, that's right, they got there. They only have one level and that is shock, So that that might have been the end of things. But as Harvey was walking away, Pike drew his pistol and he pointed it to Harvey's back and he pulled the trigger. But the gun jam.

No, no, I thought that only happened in movies.

I'm sure there's some embellishment here from I don't know. It's fucking the West. Everybody's right, he's gun jammed, it responds. I'm like, I don't buy it, but fuck it, I'm saying it anyway. In response, Harvey shot Pike three times in the chest. Can you like that is such classic Western shit?

Though? Is it a three times the amount of times he shot him?

Like the gun jams and they're like, you know, you're beating him up and you were like walking away, all cool?

Well, what I don't understand is like, if there are no rules, we can all use our guns and shoot each other. Why are they rolling around before they got to the rolling around on the floor part. I can't believe a gun didn't come out. Why did the gun not come out until sort of there he's exiting.

I know, maybe they just wanted to like duke it out, you know, right, he didn't intend to kill Pike, but then you know, got he got bystanders. I mean we've heard him. They sounded fucking cool from whatever.

You got to shoot someone if you want to hear the ooze and eyes.

Exactly, I get it. I totally got it.

Oh did someone drop something? Yeah?

Are those chains?

There was total chaos. He had one of those chain wallets on and that was.

Just he just kept beating on the floor as he's beating his ass. So Harvey's life of cattle ranching was over from then on, right, he went on the run, but he knew where he was going to go. He set out for a banded camp called Hole in the Wall, and he had some friends there. You see, while he was running cattle, Harvey met some extremely wild dudes, including a man who would served time for horse thieving in Sundance. And his name is Jasper Rebindo and his name is cho Lemons.

Yeah.

So this was in Sunhans, Wyoming, Y. Of course, Sundance Kid that was there, it is. Yeah, So Harvey Curry now had a body to his name and met up with the one and only Sundance Kid. Right, so soon he had a new name to go with his new friend. They called him Kid Curry. Whoa wow, Kid Curry.

Okay, that sounds really modern, that sounds yeah.

Yeah yeah, and he had an awesome album, yeah exactly in twenty ten.

He's like the liberal version of kid rock.

That's right. Yeah, that's right.

He's on the trail for Biden.

Not that's why he's seen the ways he used to be right now he's bar leve. So he was on the trail to become one of the most wanted criminals in America. So Kid Curry, a very liberal man of the twenty tents, and his friends started their outlet ways with a little cattle rustling. But bustling did you say that, yes, sir, I rustling, I said, I said, well, which I assume

I was just like the.

Hair your little cow. But it turns out but stealing cows didn't really scratchy itch for him.

Right.

The more they got away with it, the more they wanted to try.

You know, cows are like they're like pringles. You can't just can't.

It's like, we can only do about fifty a night.

Once you pop, you can't stop.

That's right. So Kid Curry heard of another outlaw named Butch Cassidy that had pulled off an eight thousand dollars heights from a coal mine, and they were super inspired. Maybe that's because the mind company was called castle Gate. So that heist became known by the badass name the castle Gate Robbery. And that, my friends, is brandame baby. Wow, all A Sadden didn't have somebody like Pikes Landusky or whatever being like can we name it after me? Like no, fucking no.

They finally got it right with some branding. Yeah.

So for the target of his first big robbery, Kit Curry and his gang picked a bank in South Dakota. They knew it well because it was a place where cattle drivers would get together to deposit their money right, so the gang expected it would hold about thirty thousand dollars, which is about a million dollars in today's money. So three days after the reunion, Kit Curry and five of

I feel like like saloon's gotten away over a lot of bit, Like how many.

Saloons would were they just in their place everywhere?

I mean when I imagine the Old West, I just imagined saloons and like saloons porches. Yeah, everything has all just people shooting you from a slightly elevated porch in front of you from like winging awkwardly elevated.

But it's not like not high enough where you have to take a big step, but it's just like a step from there. That's exactly what it was.

And why the swinging doors. I have a lot of questions for them, but.

That's why we will answer all of them after the show. So without this guy, the robbers didn't They just rushed into the bank with their guns drawn, demanding money. You know, they didn't know what to expect, so they ordered everyone to put their hands up, but then they just had no idea what to do next. So afterwards, the bystanders said that they look really confused, like they didn't expect

Think you're supposed to wave the gun around all of us. It would make us I'm not feeling really threatened back here, sorry, can we? There's just your voice lacks like a confidence. You need to own the room, you know yourself.

That's right, call me a low life again, exactly like they started collecting money from from all the customers in the bank, but that took way too long because bystanders started to notice them from the outside, right.

Right, So now I'm sorry to stop you here, but they're in a bank. Isn't there a vault? Like they're going around a forgot each person.

One, one by fucking one. They asked them to give them their money, which doesn't make any sense, right because.

They could have won to any They could have gone to the saloon and done that. That's right.

But they're like, why is this fucking taking so long? I was like, because he didn't go to a fucking mault. Man Like, because you're literally there.

Yeah.

I love to imagine somebody be like, oh no, sorry, and they're like, okay, moving on. That one didn't work.

You know, I only have a one? Is that okay? Or can you can you change the change?

Okay, give her change and make it snappy. So this is when the drunk lookout finally sprung into action for some reason. Finally, you know, he was super drunk. So he's when when the bystanders from the outside started noticing. He just started shooting randomly at them right right in the street bystanders, and the bystanders looking into the bank like, oh, what the fuck's going on in the bank. So he's just like, ah, nothing to see here, shoot shoot at

Uh, so they started.

Shooting wildly out of the windows, and then they ran off before they could get into the bank safe. Right, So it was just a complete confusion caused by moonshine whiskey. So they rushed outside, they jumped on their horses and galloped out of town. They came away with less than one hundred dollars in cash, which is I don't know, like three thousand something in today's money.

Right, so when they went between them, not a big not a big no no.

So when the shooting started, though, it scared the drunk lookouts horse, which ran away.

Of course, there it goes, there goes.

That's that's the actual sound of the actual horse actually, and that horse's name was Sandwich McGillicuddy. Yeah, that's right. So it left him to get caught, right, Like, if you're the drunk guy by this point, and what do you what do you think you do? Like your horse ran away?

Like you're like, I mean I'd go back into the saloon. I feel like I have friends in there. You know, you didn't shoot anybody in there, right, yeah, but.

He did something similar but way like less discreet. He tried to act like he wasn't involved by running into an outhouse and throwing his gun and his knife down the hole, right, but like the townspeople have just watched him shoot at them, So.

Make an id this guy.

Yeah, he took four steps to the outhouse. We're like, we just saw you. So he pushed over the outhouse. They raked through the ship, collected his weapons, and forced him to confess to the crime and describe the outlawst plans. I can imagine being like, fine, I'll tell you. Also, just stop waving that shitty gun in my face. That's fucking nasty, you know.

Yeah, it weren't the outlaws plans clear at this point, like why did why are these the townspeople asking him to explain the plan? The plans? What did they want to do? Did we went in to that bank with those guns? What did you want?

Well, they wanted you saw it, you were there, you gave them suggestions and still how to do it. I don't know why you're asking me about it. So the authorities across the West were on the lookout for kid Curry, and he was recognized in Montana two months later while buying camp supplies, so soon a posse was on his trail. The posse was heavily armed and they caught up with Curry and the Sundance kid while they were setting up camp. Sundance was too far from his gear to make an escape,

Do you think they went to the saloon too or their restaurants.

They went to the saloon and then they went to rob a bank real quick, and then they they checked literally it.

They went to buy new swinging doors.

Honey, what do you like these doors? They're kind of swinging.

I feel like our doors don't swing, like, Oh, get you some swing doors, Jesus Christy they are so After the day, they chicked in on the prisoners and he saw that they were still locked in the building, but they had somehow gotten out of their cells.

When he ordered them back inside so he could lock them in, they said that their cells were closed and that they were locked out. So confused the jailer, God bless them. The jailer opened the prison to check the locks on the cell doors, and the prisoners jumped him, which was not anticipated by anybody in history.

Obviously, were so dumbe.

What the fuck? He's like, hey, get back in there, Sorry, we're locked down. I was like, okay, I'll come in and lock you on our system. Yeah okay, yeah you get I'll come and figure it out for you. List once, but next time it happens again, you do it by yourself. So they beat his ass and they locked him and his wife in the cell. Thankfully they didn't know. They went on the date they got to go on, the date they got into day, and like afterwards, they're like,

Oh okay, there you go there, very cool.

Thank you, very cool. So the fact that Kid Curry's first bank heist didn't go very well didn't keep him from planning more robberies, right, So him and the Sundance Kid were treated to Utah, where they were welcomed by a new part in crime, their bandit hero Butch Cassidy.

Right right there we go.

We get famous people here, betchay, what's going on? He's like, guys, I just met a guy called Salvatory Peninsula. So when Curry's gang arrived at Butch Cassidy's hideout. It was the first official meeting of the group that would become the Wild Bunch, and for the next four years, Kid Curry, Butch and the Sundance Kid would carry out a string of the biggest, most balls out heists in American history. It started in July and eighteen ninety eight with a

There's a safe on the train.

There's a safe on the train, and that's the money.

That the people paid to get on the train.

I'm sure it's like they're transporting money.

They're transporting money. It's going from one place to another. Yeah, this is a specific train. They didn't specific train. They weren't like trains have a lot of money. Let's go rob a train. I'm tied.

These banks, man, these trains they're just like the banks, so predictably lucrative let me make it, let me work for it, let me work for this.

Let's take a chance, maybe this train.

So newspaper said that they made off with anything from nine thou to twenty six thousand dollars, which in today's world would be almost a million dollars. So that's not bad.

And there's thilly of them, right.

Yes, well, listen, listen. If this show was named the Greatest Heists, we might go into detail about them, but I'm just gonna quickly name you what they were. Okay, Okay, So we have the Wilcox train robbery. Sh there you go, the Fullsome train robbery, the Tipton train robbery, the Exeter Creek train robbery, and all the other train robberies. Okay,

I would have paid fish to come play in my backyard and not do that whole thing all over again, y two K and everything. So listen.

So between jobs, the gang would split, it would split up, right, Kid Curry would travel from town to town playing cool, drinking apricot brandy and telling people that he met that he was a railroad man. What can we assume with a dude who drinks apricot brandy, Like, I don't know.

Day, Yeah, it's very And that was pretty sophisticated.

Yes, he'sds twirling his mustache and you know, in my he really had a sick ass mustache.

I mean didn't I guess everybody had a mustache back then. Yeah, you know, they had different trademarks.

And that was one of his.

Why are they why are they both? Kid? By the way, what's the deal? Like? How old are these guys? Do you know?

Seventy two?

Geriatric? Kid?

Kid Curry actually partied the hardest. He was the kind of a bad boy of the wild Bunch, and he got a reputation both as the infamous killer of the crew but also as the most frequent lover. Yes yeah, women across the West claim that he was the father of their children, and if all the stories were true, he would have had like eighty five kids. Wow, oh my god, that fucking thing plays in my head if I play, Like if somehow I leave the computer on and I hear that in the middle of the night,

And by the way, I have two children, and I can't stand babies, and I hate and that sound is trauma regering for me too.

Oh man, So this guy's this guy's going around.

He's banging left and rights, he's having sex.

He's a railroad man. He's drinking.

She's got the Is he the one with the appercop Brandy?

Yeah, he loves the apracom venny.

So okay.

Every now and then the Wild Bunge would get back together and for some harmless fun, right Like in December of nineteen hundred, Kid Curry, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid all got together with a few of the other friends for a wedding where they took the now very

These guys are adorable. They're so cute.

So the string of successful robberies by the Wild Bunch was of course drawing a lot of attention, and that included the attention of the railroad's favorite protection service, the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which I don't know why they spoke like that, but that's historically accurate. When the photographer gave his negatives to the Pinkertons, that famous photograph became the wanted poster for the Wild Bunch. It was printed all across America.

You know.

I heard some people started to send their loved ones the picks that they want used if they ever go missing. You know. But I'm wondering, like, is there one that you would not want to be stuck with ever?

Yeah? I mean, if you google image me pre two thousand, let's say nine, any of those pictures that was just a.

Huge yes, you can smell the X bodiespoke exactly.

It was ever mean. Everybody was a disaster back then, but I I was not the exception.

So once everyone started to recognize their faces, members of the Wild Bunch started to get picked off. Some were killed, others were caught and locked up for their crimes, and eventually Butch and the Sundance Kid decided to take their money and leave the country. They thought if they could make it to South America, they could become like legitimate farmers there. So in March of nineteen oh one, they boarded a ship for Argentina carrying twelve thousand dollars.

In gold, which I imagine is heavy.

Yeah, that's right. They probably had a bunch of chests. And I love that people in the steamer are being like, I don't know, they seemed perfectly normal to have twelve chests of heavy shot.

They don't seem to change into a lot of different clothes, but they packed a lot.

I don't know what kept striking that pose of that of those wild Wold Bunch guys.

They were taking picture.

They came once with the Apple brand. Another picture again, Yeah, carry on the other side. Yeah, he believed this one at sunset. Yeah, this whe in moonlight.

The guys are adorable.

So Kid Curry, on the other hand, believed that there were still places in the United States where he could hide out, living under a false identity, and he might even try to pull off another heister through things had gone according to Plant so far, so he thought he was untouchable. But he was wrong. So with Butch and the Sundance Kid off the scene, Kid Curry became the biggest name of the Wild Bunch still at large in

By the way, you asked me what I would do if someone just dumped a bunch of money into my lap. I think Kid Curry and I would be would be pretty similar hotel.

Also, also, I'm noticing that nineteen oh one now has pool hall, So we moved on from Saloons and that was there's Brothels pool How is the diversifying.

Yeah, it's just sort of an old Vegas. It just sounds like everything.

It's just everything goes. But Kid Curry ran into some trouble.

Don't don't dunt.

He was traveling with a girlfriend when she was arrested at a Nashville bank trying to exchange some of the money that they had stolen from a train. The Pinkertons and the police they had kept a strict account of the numbered bills that they were missing, right, so now they knew someone connected with the train robberies was attempting to spend money in Nashville, so they closed in. So when his girlfriend didn't come back from the bank, Kid

Maybe write a musical? Is that? Yes?

Yes? And that's what he did? Okay, f.

Music The One Man's show yey.

Hey, welcome everybody to that huh came.

Out whoaa, And this is how Oklahoma started exact hu Jegman started that in nineteen oh one.

So he waited until he thought that the investigation had blown over, and he decided to go for another round of good times in Knoxville. On Friday, December the thirteenth, Curry was at the Knoxville Central Bar when he had some mad luck For Kit Curry, he made the trouble himself. So he was playing cards with other regulars when something set him off and he attacked two of the other players, choking and hitting them, and they just started Yeah, there

And what terrible aim he has if they're close enough to club him.

Yeah, why are he's getting well across Brandy? I think is to blame him much afric Yeah, so one even splintered his club over Curry's head, but both men ended the fight with bullet wounds from Curry. So Kid Curry ran out into the dark knight trailing blood. The local shaff brought in dogs and tracked him through the night, and police calmed the area. Kid Curry was finally caught thirty miles north walking the railroad tracks, and once he

I'm so silly because I'm expecting this sort of andy de frame kind of like like smart shawshank, you know, escape and no, this is my man, kid, He's gonna be it's gonna be blunt force.

He's not gonna be bothered by the mathematics.

No math, yeah, no, no crawling.

I'm gonna reach for that shoe. Oh so, police station, you have your shit in like a shoe box like thing, and like it's in visibility for other prisoners. Probably not the best idea. So he pulled it over and now he had a cold forty five and then he waited. A second guard had the prison keys. So at four point eighty that afternoon, the man arrived and kid Curry was held on the second floor and as soon as the jailer reached the top of the steps, he was

Like? Why take the share him a horse? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, I said a course, and I was like, of course, this is this dude's.

I needed to take a quick course on how to.

Probably a course like a part of a meal, you know, like, oh, the guy had to prepare him.

He wanted to.

Make me a bo bay.

Yes, he wanted a course on musical theater writing skills. So once a horse was ready, Kid Curry jumped into the saddle and trotted out of town. He was seen by people all along the road. Some of them didn't recognize him, but since he was riding slowly, he didn't raise suspicions. There's some accounts that a few Knoxville residents didn't know who he was and called their friends to come and see. As the infamous Kit Curry rode out of town. As usual, pose gathered, but they weren't able

Yeah.

After one Colorado train robbery in nineteen oh four, sheriff deputies arrived quickly on the scene. More than one hundred men with horses and bloodhounds hunted down the bandits, and rainfall made their tracks easy to follow in the mud with the posse close after them. The bandit stopped at arranged to steel fresh horses, but the owners somehow didn't like that weird, so the men exchanged gunfire with the bandits and one of the robbers was hit in the chest.

Guys.

And the second is that the body had the scar of a bullet wound on his right wrist. Motherfuckers, my goodness. But people just didn't want to believe that kid Curry was dead, you know. They wanted to believe that he made it through the firefight and that he lived on in secret. A lot of denial, you know. So one story says that Kit Curry actually died in an asylum in nineteen thirty seven. Another one says, no, no, actually he settled down in Spokane, Washington and lived until the

Ah, I knew it.

The records of the burial plot were lost. And that's a story of Kit Curry. Everybody, ye ya, wow.

Well, okay, I'm still stuck on how old is this? How old is kid? Because he's he's doing all these robberies and everything, and at the turn of the century, and then some accounts have him living until mid century nineteen.

So let's say he was doing the robberies robberies in his uh late teens or eighteens, it would have to be well, but you're right, though, because if he was arranging for ten years, he must have been older than that. So let's say, like from twenty five to thirty five, and then if he died in the fifties, he must have been.

What if he's a bunch of people, you know, like what if he's not just one guy eight algamation like doctor Strange, like Doctor Strange or Shakespeare. But isn't that fascinating? That is that's pretty that's pretty crazy. And his buddies who I know who I've heard of way more are just off in South America ranching and they just have accents now and they took like this and they like it, like they immediately adopted the accents immediately.

What do you think?

What are what are ridiculous Latin names that you think they chose as their alias?

Dansa they didn't really like high round.

They didn't do they didn't change.

You know, like they really they.

Added maybe one more syllable that was about it.

Then how can people find you?

Do you want my address? Yes?

How can How can people.

Coming from the one oh one?

Is there anything you'd like people to check out or or be aware of?

No? I mean there's the things that I've done. There's things I've got coming up that I that aren't talk about able yet. I mean, I've got a I've got an animated show called Monsters at Work on Disney. It's super that's the Monster's univer Monsters And that's awesome.

I wrote, Yeah, I love the monsters.

It so fights me and and it's all that you know, It's like Billy Crystal and Jen Goodman and all the it's like Mindy Kayling and I Winkler.

It's such a cool of course, sweetest guy in the world, and he is the best listen. I always believe that, like old timey Western country songs are just kind of describing what you're doing at that present moment. You know, this is like a comedian said this joke before. But what what I've noticed is that they're just running out of shit to say about their days. So now it's

Would you be up for that? Yeah, it's just stuff we're doing right now.

Stuff we're doing right now. What we think about the episode, fuck it whatever, that's, whatever goes. If it doesn't work, we'll totally cut it out.

Sure, No, we won't.

Okay, Ben, give us some good So this is like old timey country, but it's like Neil Young kind of.

Okay soft, there's heart to it.

Yeah, yeah, Argentina in the distance, can you see it?

Butch oh? Are we the characters from the story?

Yes? Butch can you see what I see? I see the hole in your wrist. It's getting deeper and deeper. But a day should put a bend aid on in rapper called whiskey, the Apricott whiskey. I've had all the fruits. I've tried with cranberry and it didn't work. That Brandy t is nice Apricot Brandy for live.

Man.

God, this has been such a pleasure, Ben, Thank you so much, brother, And we'll give you the rights of the music once we played.

Oh, that song is gonna be huge. That's gonna be I'm gonna have to I'm gonna have to come up with like a music like I'm Kid Feldman.

Now you're kidman who likes Kurt.

Massamon Feldman.

Brady's Escapes is a production of iHeartRadio and Film Nation Entertainment in association with Gilded Audio or Executive producers for me or Turo Castro, Alyssa Martino and Milan Papelka from Film Nation Entertainment, Andrew Chug and Witning Donaldson from Gilded Audio, and Dylan Fagan from iHeartRadio. The show was produced and edited by Carl Nellis and Ben Chug, who are also respectively, are Research Overlord and Music Overlord. Our associate producer is