The Year of Fear (37 page)

After years of living in a single cell, he had trouble adjusting to life in Leavenworth with five cellmates.

He got a job as a clerk and was able to earn money for commissary items, which he saved up and sent to Kathryn. He was also allowed to write her longer letters, and more often.

And he could read uncensored newspapers and listen to the radio which he so loved, though the great jazz and blues which served as the soundtrack to his adventures in crime were increasingly being eclipsed by rhythm and blues, country western and something they were calling rock ’n roll, which the younger inmates inexplicably loved.

But the years on Alcatraz had ruined his health. He was in and out of the prison hospital with heart and respiratory problems. On New Year’s Day 1951, he wrote to Kathryn from his hospital bed.

I got up for about five minutes today but I was a lot weaker than I thought so I had to crawl back in bed. I think in another week I’ll be able to go back to work.… Like you said, Angel, after this is over we will be immune to anything and nothing can hurt us … Excuse the poor notes lately, sugar, because your husband isn’t up to doing a very good job of writing just now. I’ll do better next week. I’ll write as usual Sunday and in the meantime, I’ll be thinking of you and loving you with all my heart. My love to your Mother and lots of kisses to my adorable wife.

Yours,

Geo

On July 17, 1954, Kelly was checked into the prison hospital suffering from chest pains and shortness of breath, most likely from a heart attack. The prison doctors gave him a shot of morphine and put him on oxygen. By midnight, the pains intensified. Shortly after, he began to vomit and suffocate. Twenty minutes later he was dead.

He was fifty-four years old. It was his birthday.

Leavenworth authorities notified Kathryn at the Alderson Reformatory for Women in Alderson, West Virginia, where she and her mother were being held. She arranged to have his body shipped to Boss Shannon, who was back at the farm in Paradise.

She wrote the warden asking for a keepsake from his personal effects.

“I thought you might be able to mail a few little keepsakes of his personal property home for me,” she wrote. “I know he had a fountain pen he loved, which he wrote me with, that I would like to have.”

Boss buried the infamous machine gunner in the family plot at Cottondale Community Cemetery. His headstone was immediately stolen by souvenir hunters, as would several others that he replaced it with.

The news reports of his death and the obituaries that followed it described him as “the most notorious of the hoodlums who terrorized the Midwest,” a man who could write his name on a wall with a machine gun, and who pleaded, “Don’t shoot, G-men!” at his arrest in Memphis.

He would be remembered throughout history for something he never was, things he never did and words he never said.

EPILOGUE

After George Kelly’s death, Kathryn and her mother continued to serve their time and protest their innocence from prison in West Virginia. Also serving time there was Mildred Sisk Gillars, who was convicted in 1949 of treason. Gillars was the notorious “Axis Sally” who had done radio broadcasts for the Nazis during the war.

Gillars introduced Kathryn to her attorney, James J. Laughlin, who went to work on her behalf seeking parole, which Hoover continued to oppose and Urschel continued to fight.

Laughlin then changed strategies and asked for a new trial, claiming that the government had used false evidence to tie Kathryn to the threatening letters that had been sent to Urschel. Laughlin also charged that during the trials, Kathryn and Ora Shannon suffered from “inadequate assistance of counsel, use of testimony known to be false, denial of compulsory service of process, and conduct of the trial in an atmosphere which prevented a fair and impartial trial.”

Perhaps fearing that his files did contain evidence of false testimony, Hoover refused to release them. The government’s case was further hampered by the inexplicable fact that no transcript of the original trial could be located.

Much to the surprise of Kathryn and her mother, the frustrated judge granted their request for a new trial and released them on a $10,000 bond on June 16, 1959.

A new trial was never scheduled, in part because the Justice Department and Hoover wanted to avoid embarrassment over the content of their files and their conduct in the case. So Kathryn and her mother remained free.

Kathryn took a job at the Oklahoma County Poor Farm, where she earned $200 a month, which she used to support her mother.

She continued to proclaim her innocence and that of her mother. She died in Tulsa in 1985. She was eighty-one. Ora had died five years earlier at age ninety-one.

*   *   *

Urschel went back to running his oil company and did everything he could to put the ordeal behind him and avoid publicity of any sort—and instructed his offspring to do the same. He continued to secretly fund Pauline’s education through college, providing her with money for tuition, room and board and clothing.

He and Berenice traveled the world collecting antiques and fine art. He served on a number of boards and helped his stepson, Tom Slick Jr., establish the Southwest Foundation for Research and Education. The research center, now called the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, is one of the largest independent biomedical research institutes in the world.

Urschel died on September 26, 1970, four months after Berenice. He was eighty.

*   *   *

In 1958, the legendary B-movie filmmaker Roger Corman released his classic underground hit
Machine Gun Kelly
. In it, the murderous, machine-gun-wielding Charles Bronson, in his first leading role, is manipulated by his domineering wife into kidnapping the child of a millionaire. The film has little in common with the actual facts of the Urschel kidnapping, but it seared the image of a violent, psychopathic George Kelly into the popular consciousness that persists today. Made in just eight days, the film launched the career of Bronson, who for years was one of Hollywood’s highest paid actors.

*   *   *

After coming so close to losing his job in 1930 at the hands of FDR’s ill-fated first choice for attorney general, Thomas Walsh, Hoover hung on to his job with amazing tenacity. When he reached the government’s mandatory retirement age of seventy in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed an executive order exempting him from compulsory retirement. Calling Hoover “a hero to millions of decent citizens and an anathema to evil men,” Johnson noted that the nation could not afford to lose the services of the man who had created “the greatest investigative body in history.”

On May 2, 1972, Hoover died in his sleep, still at the FBI after fifty-five years of government service, having served under ten presidents as its director. By then, his reputation had been irreparably damaged by his blackmailing of politicians, abuses of power and relentless hounding of individuals and organizations he suspected of having communist ties, ranging from Eleanor Roosevelt to Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress on Racial Equality and many of the leading civil libertarians of the time.

Even so, obituary writers and eulogists could not ignore his remarkable accomplishments in building the FBI into a law-enforcement agency that was both feared and envied around the world and promoting the idea of professionalism in American law enforcement.

Jack Anderson, the nationally syndicated investigative reporter whom Hoover had characterized as one of the “lowest forms of human beings to walk the earth,” paid homage to him, noting that “when [Hoover] took over the FBI forty-nine years ago, it was loaded with hacks, misfits, drunks, and courthouse hangers-on. In a remarkably brief time he transformed it into a close-knit, effective organization with the esprit de corps exceeding that of the Marines.” He also noted that “not a single FBI man has ever tried to fix a case, defraud the taxpayer, or sell out his country.” That unblemished record would not last long.

The New York Times
was equally impressed with Hoover’s accomplishments, particularly those early in his tenure.

Hoover’s power was a compound of performance and politics, publicity and personality. At the base of it all, however, was an extraordinary record of innovation and modernization in law enforcement—most of it in the first decade or so of his tenure.

The centralized fingerprint file (the print total passed the 200-million mark this year) at the Identification Division (1925) and the crime laboratory (1932) are landmarks in the gradual application of science to police work. The National Police Academy (1935) has trained the leadership elite of local forces throughout the country. Mr. Hoover’s recruitment of lawyers and accountants, although they now make up only 32 percent of the special agent corps, set a world standard of professionalism.

The National Crime Information Center enables 4,000 local law enforcement agencies to enter records and get questions answered on a network of 35 computer systems, with its headquarters at the F.B.I. office here.

From the start, Mr. Hoover got results. His bureau rounded up the gangsters in the nineteen-thirties. It made the once epidemic crime of kidnapping a rarity (“virtually extinct,” as the director’s friends like to say). It arrested German saboteurs within days after their submarines landed them on the Atlantic Coast. And, in one of its most sensational coups, the F.B.I. seized the slayers of Mrs. Viola Gregg Liuzzo only hours after the civil rights worker’s shotgun death in Alabama in 1965.

Mr. Hoover always understood the subtle currents of power among officials in Washington better than anyone knew him. Not a New Dealer at heart, he had nonetheless dazzled President Franklin D. Roosevelt with his celebrated success against kidnappers.

In catching the Kellys and hunting down the rest of their ilk
—
Dillinger, Floyd, the Barkers, Karpis and others
—
Hoover had launched one of the most remarkable careers in American government. His mastery of image-making and media manipulation turned the public’s attitude on its head. No longer were outlaws automatically romanticized and admired. Lawmen gained new stature as heroes in the ongoing story of American criminality. He’d meticulously crafted their tough-guy confidence and their investigative invincibility until, in the public’s mind, the FBI had become the elite force of American law enforcement. He’d made enlistment in that force the aspiration of millions.

In the eighteen months following the Kansas City Massacre, Hoover fought a war on Western outlaws and won. But Hoover was more a warrior of words than of weapons. And, as history is written by the winners, Hoover did not shy away. The story was as clear as it was long-lasting: The Wild West had been tamed and he, J. Edgar Hoover, was the man who tamed it.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alix, Ernest Kahlar.
Ransom Kidnappings in America, 1874–1974: The Creation of a Capital Crime
. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University, 1978.

Barnes, Bruce.
Machine Gun Kelly: To Right a Wrong
. Perris, California: Tipper, 1991.

Bjorkman, Timothy W.
Verne Sankey, America’s First Public Enemy
. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007.

Burns, James MacGregor.
Roosevelt, the Lion and the Fox, 1882–1940
. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1956.

Burrough, Bryan.
Public Enemies, America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34
. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.

Congdon, Don.
The 1930s: A Time to Remember
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962.

Cooper, Courtney Ryley.
Here’s to Crime
. Boston: Little Brown, 1937.

^______
.
Ten Thousand Public Enemies
. Boston: Little Brown, 1935.

Cummings, Homer, and Carl Brent Swisher.
Selected Papers of Homer Cummings: Attorney General of the United States, 1933–1939
. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939.

Denton, Sally.
The Plots against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right
. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012.

Egan, Timothy.
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.
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Ellis, George.
A Man Named Jones
. New York: Signet Books, 1963.

Esslinger, Michael.
Letters from Alcatraz
. San Francisco: Ocean View Publishing, 2013.

Felt, Mark.
A G-Man’s Life
. New York: Public Affairs, 2006.

Floherty, John J.
Our FBI: An Inside Story
. Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1951.

Ganz, Cheryl R.
The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair: A Century of Progress
. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2012.