Description
Timmy Overton of Austin and Jerry Ray James of Odessa were football stars who traded athletics for lives of crime. The unique rebels with out causes, nihilists with Cadillacs and Elvis hair, the Overton gang and their associates formed a ragtag white trash mafia that bedazzled Austin law enforcement for a few of the 1960s. Tied into a loose network of crooked lawyers, pimps and used car dealers who was referred to as the “traveling criminals,” they burglarized banks and ran smuggling and prostitution rings all over the place Texas. Writer Jesse Sublett presents an in depth account of those Austin miscreants, who rose to folk hero status regardless of their violent criminal acts.