Do you recognize the name, Frank Hamer? Frank Hamer was a man who paid close attention to the details that everyone else overlooked. In 1934, he made a bold move based on those details and became the most famous man in America.

Frank Hamer lived in Texas at the turn of the twentieth century. These were the waning days of the wild west, where lawlessness had overtaken many of the towns of south Texas. Frank signed on as a lawman. He had a reputation for restoring law and order by making a corpse out of anyone who stepped outside the law. He was involved in over 100 gunfights. He was wounded seventeen times and he killed fifty-three men. After serving as the peace officer in several small towns, he signed on as a Texas Ranger. This is where he honed his skills as a forensic tactician. He studied the patterns of the most notorious criminals across Texas and helped track them down. After 27 years with the Rangers, he retired.

However, in 1934 Frank Hamer was asked to return to take on a special case. A gang of outlaws had been making a mockery of law enforcement agencies, committing robberies and murders in six different states. The last straw for the governor of Texas happened when the gang broke into the Eastham, Texas prison and helped four men escape with them. In a hail of machine gunfire, two guards were shot, one was mortally wounded. It did not stop there. Two young police officers were gunned down in Grapevine, Texas on Easter morning. Another deputy officer was gunned down in Commerce, Oklahoma. The governor re-commissioned Frank Hamer to track down the gang and put an end to their terror. Frank began to piece together all the details of the gang’s activities. He read eyewitness accounts of the murders. He found them to be contradictory and unreliable. One person would say a man shot the police officers on Easter Sunday. Others said it was a woman who continued to pump bullets into one officer while she laughed about the way his head bounced off the pavement every time she shot him. There was a media frenzy to know more about the gang. The gang complied by shooting photos of themselves, posing in front of fast cars holding machine guns, and leaving them behind to be published by the local newspaper.

Frank had to get past the hype to the facts. He pinpointed who he believed to be the leader of the gang: a twenty-five year old man who had been in and out of jail since he was sixteen. Frank learned that the man had done time in Eastham prison, where he had beaten another inmate to death when the inmate tried to sexually assault him. He found out that the leader of the gang had vowed to embarrass the Texas Penal System for what it had done to him. It explained the brazen actions taken to help the four men escape and the murderous activity towards unsuspecting police officers. Frank began to follow the gang, living out of his car. He tailed them while they committed six bank robberies in two months: one in Texas, one in Oklahoma and four in Iowa. He was never more than one day behind them as he tracked their traveling patterns. He learned their names. He knew where their families lived. He realized that they would rob banks near the border of the state and then cross over into another state on their way to visit their families. For three months he studied the details until he was able to pinpoint where their next stop would be.

On May 23, 1934, Frank Hamer assembled a posse of five lawmen and himself and hid along a backwoods road in northern Louisiana. Nearby, they had positioned Ivan Methvin, the father of one of the men busted out of prison, beside his truck with one wheel removed. Frank Hamer had surmised that Methvin was the next family member to be visited by the gang. He was right. Around 9:15 a.m., Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker drove down the road and stopped to see if they could help Methvin. The couple was met with over 150 rounds of ammunition and Frank Hamer became the most famous man in America on that day. His attention to details aided him in putting a bloody end to the reign of terror of Bonnie and Clyde and their gang of murderers and thieves.

You may not be hunting down dangerous criminals in your line of work. However, the lessons from Frank Hamer are still relevant. Can you get past the hype that surrounds the work you do and see the facts? "What hype?” you may be asking yourself. I find there is plenty of it at work. Rumors have legs when someone reads too much into a comment made by email or an off-the-cuff remark. Jealousies arise when someone may be perceived to be getting preferential treatment by management. When the wild assertions begin, you need to ask yourself, "is what I’m hearing factual or just someone’s conjecture about what will happen?” Never make a move based on inconclusive, unsubstantiated guesses.

The other lesson we can learn from Hamer is his attention to details. You can learn a lot about people, especially your customers, if you are willing to sit back and observe them. Most of us are creatures of habits and cycles. If you are observant, you will learn the routine of those clients and it should help you to predict what their next move will be. That sort of information will come in handy when you are trying to sell them a new product or get them to re-up on a contract. If you arrive at the negotiations table prepared, you will be a step ahead.