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When Houston police reporters sniffed out the arrest, Chief Heard offered to give them an "off-the-record" account of what had happened. They refused, and the chief produced his prisoners for an interview. "I could just see the suitcases full of $1,000 bills," Cook told the newsmen, describing his visions. "Frankly, I was intending to make fools out of you boys. I got to thinking of the headlines there would be." Cook's opposition paper, the San Antonio Light, was delighted to give him an eight-column headline across Page One: S.A. SCRIBE, FIGHT PROMOTER, CONFESS HOLDUP. His own paper gave the story only three inches, noted pointedly that Cook had been a member of its staff.
But Reporter Cook made fools out of the boys anyway. Three days later, the police admitted that there had indeed been a safe robbery totaling $300,000 in cash and securities—and they charged Auto Salesman Hamlett, an ex-convict, with burglary as one of the culprits. Hamlett led eleven officers to the San Antonio home of his ex-jailmate, Harvey Marley, 31, where they found $6,220 behind a bedroom chest, $59,000 in a buried tin box and coaxed his wife into producing another $29,000 from a cache outside. They jailed Marley with Hamlett on the burglary rap. Reporter Cook, out on $10,000 bail and firmly back on the News staff, enjoyed a triumph beyond his own dream: to front pages all over Texas, the A. P. carried his byline account of how at last "I've been able to sit down at a typewriter and write my own story . . ."