Blackjack knew how to work metal

Police were baffled after someone used a cutting torch to open the vault in a store in the LaHaye building in Ville Platte early in the morning of June 21, 1962. The culprits got away with $20,000 — which may still be the biggest robbery ever in Evangeline Parish.
The police might have stayed baffled if one of the robbers, disgruntled over his share of the loot, hadn’t decided to tell all.
John Wade Fontenot was the one who tipped off the police. He said the mastermind was an ex-con named Earl (Blackjack) Dupre, and that the third man was a guy named Joe Young.
Blackjack could have made a good living as a metal worker. He wielded the torch that opened the vault, later fashioned a piece of a metal bed into a crowbar and nearly pried himself out of the Evangeline Parish jail, then used his skills to land a job stamping license plates in the low-security metal shop at Angola, from which he promptly disappeared. The other two acted as lookouts in the Ville Platte affair.
The trio broke into the LaHaye building through a side door, then cut into a steel vault, then cut into a safe that was inside the vault. It took hours to do all of that, and they nearly ran out of time. They fled the scene not long before Lee D. Fontenot opened his store about 5:30 a.m. He said the vault metal was still hot and soft drink cans they left behind were still cool.
It was a low budget operation. Their torch was stolen from the Pitre Junk Yard in Ville Platte, the acetylene to fuel it came from a welding shop next to the store, and a tarpaulin they put up to hide behind came from a nearby cotton gin. The soft drinks were taken from the store itself.
Sheriff Bruce Soileau called in crime lab experts who “took fingerprints and ran other tests … but turned up nothing substantial,” according to the Ville Platte Gazette.
That’s how things stood until Fontenot called the sheriff from Mexico City, where he was holed up, and said he would “spill the whole thing” if Evangeline Parish officers came to get him. That took some wrangling involving the U. S. State Department and the American Embassy in Mexico City, but they finally got the credentials they needed to make an arrest in Mexico.
When they finally got to him, Fontenot said he was broke, that his buddies wouldn’t give him any more of the stolen money, and that he was $100 in debt to the hotel where he was staying. Deputies had to borrow $100 from the U.S. Embassy to pay the bill before they could bring Fontenot back to Ville Platte.
Acting on his information, Joe Young was promptly arrested at his sister’s home in Lake Charles. He “expressed great surprise” when police showed up. He said the $7,300 he was holding came from a lucky bet on a horse race.
Blackjack Dupre was arrested in Morgan City. He also said he knew nothing about any Ville Platte robbery, and had no idea how an envelope holding several hundred dollars got taped to the back of a picture hanging on his living room wall.
The sheriff locked Dupre and Young in the Evangeline Parish jail, but Fontenot was allowed out on bail. The judge thought Dupre and Young weren’t to be trusted, since at the time of this robbery they were free on bail and awaiting trial for a burglary in Baton Rouge.
They stayed in the Evangeline jail until two days before their Ville Platte trial was scheduled to begin. That’s when, the Gazette said, they “came perilously close to escaping.” They’d used a piece of a hacksaw blade — nobody knew how they got it — to cut the bolts to their cell door and used pieces of a bunk to pry it open.
They were hiding under a stairway just a few feet from freedom when they were caught. They had been put in the same cell because it was the only maximum-security cell in the Evangeline jail. This time they were locked up in the St. Landry Parish jail, in separate cells.
Despite their earlier denials, both men decided to plead guilty just before their trial was set to begin. Dupre was given nine years at Angola, Young got five. Fontenot, who’d been the first to confess, stayed free on five years’ probation.
Dupre didn’t stay in Angola for long. He was seen at work in the license plate plant at 1 p.m. on May 16, 1963, but then, according to the warden, he “just disappeared.” It was a bit unclear why nobody knew he was gone for at least three hours. He was ultimately recaptured and kept under closer watch.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.