Alcatraz (10 page)

While the government was prosecuting Bailey, Bates, and the Shannons in Oklahoma City, George and Kathryn Kelly had been moving rapidly
from state to state, from city to city, changing cars, hotels, and the color of their hair. Finally, acting on a tip, FBI agents and local police raided a house in Memphis, Tennessee, and apprehended the Kellys.
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On October 7, 1933, a week after the Kellys had been brought to Oklahoma City for trial, U.S. District Court Judge Edgar Vaught sentenced Bailey, Bates, and Ora and Boss Shannon to life terms in prison; Shannon’s son, who had cooperated with federal authorities, was given a ten-year sentence that was then suspended.
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Two Minneapolis businessmen who had fenced the ransom money received five-year prison terms. With the nation’s press already gathered in town for the trial of Bailey, Bates, and the Shannons, the Justice Department wasted no time putting the Kellys on trial. George refused to testify but after listening to the damaging testimony, Kathryn took the stand to tell her side of the story. The jury, however, had no difficulty finding the Kellys guilty, and on October 12, only two weeks after their arrest, Judge Vaught sentenced them to life imprisonment.

After the trial, the FBI’s public relations campaign moved into high gear. The account of the capture of Machine Gun Kelly was embellished by the allegation that when he saw armed federal agents in the hallway of the house in Memphis, Kelly shouted, “Don’t shoot, G-men.” Yet not one report by the arresting agents to FBI headquarters, not one newspaper account at the time of Kelly’s arrest, and not even the highly sensationalized account based on interviews with the special-agent-in-charge that was released through the magazine
Startling Detective Adventures
included this statement.
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The special security measures taken to guard Bailey, Bates, and Kelly reflected a lack of confidence by the Department of Justice and the FBI in the ability of any county jail or state prison to contain and control lawbreakers with such outstanding records of escape and risk taking. Furthermore these prisoners were just beginning life sentences and had plenty of gangland friends inside and outside of jails and prisons ready to help them obtain earlier releases than the law allowed. Homer Cummings, appointed attorney general by Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, and the new director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, were determined that high-profile felons who survived gun battles with federal agents and received long sentences after highly publicized trials would not escape from the federal government’s penitentiaries. But the matter of providing security confinement for Kelly, Bates, and Bailey in McNeil Island, Atlanta, and Leavenworth—the existing federal prisons—was complicated by an embarrassing history of escapes from these institutions in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Prison escapes had become common by the late 1920s. Baby Face Nelson had escaped from the Illinois State Prison at Joliet; Harvey Bailey, James Clark, and three other prisoners had forced their way out of the Kansas State Penitentiary; and ten Dillinger gang members had broken out of the state prison at Michigan City, Indiana. The federal prisons at Atlanta, Leavenworth, and McNeil Island were supposed to be more secure, but even they proved incapable of holding the more daring and ingenious inmates.

On January 25, 1927, an Illinois gangster, Basil “the Owl” Banghart, and two other prisoners removed bolts from an interior ventilator window at the Atlanta Penitentiary, cut a bar in an outside window, climbed through an opening, and jumped to the ground ten feet below. A guard spotted the escapees as they ran from the building; he opened fire but failed to stop the three men, who disappeared into the nearby woods. Prisoner Joseph Urbaytis and another convict were found at the window ready to join the others but had been deterred by the sounds of gunfire. The five prisoners had been released from their cells by an inmate turnkey. Bang-hart remained free for almost a year and a half before he was apprehended by Bureau of Investigation agents (later Federal Bureau of Investigation).
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In July of the same year Atlanta prisoners Roy Gardner, Joe Urbaytis, and John Boyd succeeded in getting two pistols, one hundred cartridges, and a quantity of nitroglycerin smuggled into the prison. After determining that they could not blow a hole in the prison wall, the inmates built a ladder, took the captain and two guards as hostages, and went to the yard, where they tried to convince a tower guard to throw down his gun and allow them to climb up the ladder and escape over the wall. The tower guard refused to cooperate. Although the plot failed, it revealed serious flaws in the security: the success of convicts in obtaining weapons and smuggling explosives in from outside the prison represented the greatest breach of security in any penitentiary.
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The July escape attempt was only the latest by Roy Gardner, who had gained fame in California for escaping twice from U.S. marshals en route to federal prison. After he had been recaptured and federal authorities finally succeeded in placing him in McNeil Island Penitentiary, Gardner told the warden that he “would not be staying long.” Five months later he escaped. Until he was recaptured two months later while robbing a train in Arizona, Gardner’s ability to get away from government agents
was a source of acute embarrassment, as one marshal complained in a letter to the attorney general:

It seems to me that the government should exert every effort to recapture Roy Gardner, who escaped from McNeil Island Penitentiary on the fifth. The fact that he has escaped from federal officers so often had created a great deal of sympathy for him, generally the comment being that he was “so clever getting away that they ought to let him go,” and talk along those lines; this from good citizens. On the other hand the fact that he is still at large gives considerable satisfaction to the criminally inclined.
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Like Atlanta and McNeil Island, the federal government’s maximum-security penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, experienced a series of embarrassing escapes in the early 1930s. At about ten o’clock on the morning of February 28, 1930, Thomas Holden and Francis Keating, serving twenty-five-year sentences for mail robbery with firearms, appeared at the south gate of the penitentiary carrying counterfeit trusty gate passes. They were stopped by guard Charles Miller, who allowed them to walk through the gate when they showed their passes, containing their physical descriptions and names and photos. Their escape was not discovered until three o’clock in the afternoon, when a guard noticed that Keating was absent from his job in the kitchen. At first the searchers assumed that the two men were hiding within the walls, but then the passes and prisoners’ clothing were discovered outside the prison near an intersection, where the escapees had presumably been picked up by prior arrangement.

Subsequent investigation revealed that the trusty passes were relatively easy to obtain and had been produced in the prison print shop. In the months that followed, the identity of an inmate in the print shop who helped produce the bogus passes was rumored among the convict population to be George Kelly.
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Several months later, another well-known offender left Leavenworth Penitentiary before his official release date. Frank Nash had been in and out of prison since 1913 for crimes that included murder and burglary with explosives. He had been sent to Leavenworth to serve a twenty-five-year federal sentence for assaulting a mail custodian. After serving six years, he had been appointed trusty in the deputy warden’s residence. On October 19, 1930, he simply walked away from the prison. At the time of his escape, Nash was a well-known outlaw who had formerly been connected with the Al Spencer gang, and he was known to have many contacts in the underworld.
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His name, however, would go down in the annals of crime when in June 1933 he was killed during an effort
to liberate him from federal authorities that came to be called the Union Station massacre.

While on escape status, Nash met up with Holden and Keating and the three were implicated in a number of bank robberies in the Midwest, as well as several murders. Among these was the October 1931 Kraft State Bank robbery at Menominee, Wisconsin, in which $10,000 in cash and $140,000 in securities were stolen; the vice president of the bank was shot and killed when he resisted the robbers.

Even though on the run, Frank Nash and a recent Leavenworth releasee, Harold Fontaine, carried out a plan to help some friends they had left behind the prison walls. According to Charles Berta, one of the participants in this plot, Nash had given Leavenworth inmates Stanley Brown, George Curtis, Will Green, Thomas Underwood, Grover Durrill, and Earl Thayer an escape plan before he walked away from the warden’s house. The plan involved knowledge Nash had gleaned working outside the prison as a cook for the warden: fifty-two-gallon barrels of glue used in the prison shoe factory were left overnight on a loading dock at the railroad station in Leavenworth.

Nash and Fontaine, possibly with the financial assistance of Thomas Holden and Francis Keating, obtained a barrel similar to those used to transport glue. Inside the barrel they placed a formidable arsenal—a rifle, a sawed-off shotgun, five pistols, ammunition, and fifteen sticks of dynamite with caps and fuses. The weapons and dynamite were sealed inside cut-up rubber inner tubes used in tires and the rest of the barrel was filled with glue.

Knowing that the prison sent a truck to the railroad loading dock to pick up the glue barrels in the middle of the night, Nash and Fontaine added their barrel to the others. A note was sent to one of the prisoners to alert the group of the shipment: “Aunt Emma very ill, leaving St. Louis tonight.” The barrel was trucked inside the prison and left in the shoe factory freight room where it was identified by the plotters.

Two weeks later, on December 11, 1931, five of the convicts used fake passes to make their way to the front entrance. There, they produced the weapons they had removed from the barrel and ordered the guard to open the gate. Guard Dempsey refused to follow the prisoners’ demand, telling them that he was an old man and to go ahead and shoot. Meanwhile, the other two prisoners arrived at the front gate with Warden T. B. White and his office staff, who they had taken as hostages. The prisoners threatened to light a stick of dynamite and kill everyone. Warden White ordered the gate to be opened.

The prisoners, however, were without transportation. They had planned on securing Warden White’s car but, as Charlie Berta related later, “T. B. White outfoxed us. He had the car key in his desk. When we came in he dumped it in the waste basket.” The escapees, guns trained on their hostages, exited the front door of the prison as White told the tower guard not to shoot. The group made its way up the road to an intersection, where they stopped an approaching automobile. The vehicle contained five soldiers from Fort Leavenworth army base who were going rabbit hunting. The prisoners took possession of the vehicle and the soldiers’ guns and piled into the car with the warden as a hostage. Berta drove down the country road and then onto a dirt road that was muddy after heavy rain the previous night. The car became stuck and the escapees split up. Berta, Brown, and Underwood left the other four men with Warden White. After the prisoners told him they were going to kill him, White tried to grab the gun away from Will Green, but one of the other prisoners hit him on the head and Green shot him. Leaving the warden for dead, the four convicts ran to a nearby farmhouse, which was soon surrounded by soldiers sent from Fort Leavenworth. Earl Thayer, dressed as a farmer, walked out the back door of the farmhouse and got away.
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What happened next is an example of convict thinking in the early 1930s. According to Berta the three men in the house took “ ‘the Dutch route’ [because] when you go out of the institution with firearms and anytime you take an official, like a Warden or Deputy Warden, out of an institution don’t ever come back because if you do you are going to have a hard, hard time.” Following this credo, one of the prisoners shot and killed the other two and then shot himself. Berta along with Brown and Underwood, soon surrounded by soldiers, made their own attempt at suicide:

Brownie had six sticks of dynamite, he tried to set them off, but he couldn’t light the fuse. If he had set it off that would have been it. But the funny part is that when we got back to the institution they never laid a hand on us. Warden White was a hell of a man, he left strict orders, “No hands on these people, leave them alone. Treat them just like the rest of the prisoners.” All we got was Isolation. Otherwise we’d have got our heads broken in. We got a light sentence for escaping—five years. Of course, I lost good time on the 25 [his original sentence]. I’d have to do 25 flat and five on top of that. We were lucky. They had just organized the BOP and they didn’t want no publicity. We went to court and pled guilty because they wanted to get it over quick.
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In the subsequent investigation by federal agents, three guards were identified as having assisted the prisoners: two committed suicide before they could be prosecuted and the third was tried and convicted. Although J. Edgar Hoover and Bureau of Prisons Director Sanford Bates defended White’s handling of the escape attempt, Attorney General Mitchell was critical of White’s leadership:

The general tenor of the reports would suggest that he has been deficient in executive ability in the administration of the prison by the lack of training of his subordinates and failure to establish discipline and proper methods to detect and avoid trouble of this kind.
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After Warden White recovered from his injuries, Bates transferred him to a new federal penal farm and appointed a warden at Leavenworth who was to implement new training procedures.

The plan to aid their inmate associates having failed, Nash, Holden, and Keating were busy trying to elude federal agents. Through confidential sources in St. Paul, Minnesota, the FBI learned that Thomas Holden had been living with a paramour in a nearby suburb, and that he and the other escapees, Francis Keating and Frank Nash, frequented certain nightclubs and restaurants in St. Paul, sometimes with other Leavenworth convicts, including George Kelly. Nash was identified by a waitress, who reported that he appeared to be wearing a wig. Holden, Keating, and Harvey Bailey were said to have played golf frequently on a course in St. Paul.