Authors: Joe Urschel
The Year of Fear (4 page)
The female hostage was doing little to dissuade the townsfolk from returning fire in her direction. Bullets tore past her head until she was finally released as the gang jumped inside the escape car and started returning fire into the crowd.
Mrs. Emil Johnson was standing on the corner holding her two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, Annette Ruth, in her arms when a bullet tore into her. Her daughter screamed. As she tried to drag her mother and daughter into the safety of a doorway, she, too, was hit. A third round hit the bag the child was holding.
As the cars sped away back to St. Paul, they were peppered with gunfire from the vigilantes strategically positioned along the way. One round shattered the rear window of one of the getaway cars and hit Steinhardt in the back of the head. He slumped forward and passed out as blood splattered the car’s interior and sent shards of glass shrapnel into the other occupants.
Still, the gang eluded their pursuers and fled back to the Twin Cities with $142,000 in cash and securities.
The next edition of the
Minneapolis Journal
was topped with bold headlines reporting the raid:
MACHINEGUN BANDITS RAID WILLMAR
S
TREETS
S
PRAYED
W
ITH
B
ULLETS, 3 SHOT
Citizens Held at Bay Before Machinegun While Gangsters Scoop Up Currency—Townspeople Fire Upon Fleeing Auto
“The robbery,” said the
Journal,
“was one of the most daring in the history of the Northwest. The outlaws used a modernized version of the Jesse James practice of half a century ago to shoot up the town after the holdup.”
“The bandits certainly were thorough in their work,” one eyewitness noted. “They were not amateurs. I just saw one of them. He appeared about 35 or 40 years old and was fairly well dressed.”
The
Journal
noted that the Willmar raid was the thirteenth successful holdup on Minnesota banks since the beginning of the year. And at $142,000, it was the biggest theft to date.
To Bailey it was totally botched. He vowed to only work on jobs he planned himself in the future. He’d taken the job as a favor to Dutch, but it seemed every time he agreed to help someone out, there was trouble. And he hated trouble. Trouble brought notoriety and notoriety brought the law. Bailey liked to keep a low profile, and stay as anonymous as possible. Other people had often been suspected of pulling the jobs he’d executed. But Bailey didn’t care who got the credit as long as he got the money.
In the Willmar robbery, nobody had cased the place. Nobody had staged it, nobody had mapped out alternative escape routes, so everybody got confused once they got inside. It took eight minutes to get in and get out, and that was way too long. (By contrast, when Bailey and company robbed the Denver Mint, it took all of ninety seconds.) Worse, there was gunplay and people got hurt. That was something the cops could not ignore, no matter how well they were being paid off.
Within days of the Willmar job, the Bankers Association of Minnesota and the Dakotas began urging county officials to band their sheriffs’ departments together into a unified police force and join with citizens’ groups to arm up and fight the gangster scourge. The Saint Paul
Pioneer Press
announced the initiative with a banner headline.
3 N.W. STATES MAP WAR AGAINST BANDITS
“Preparing for the greatest crime drive in the history of the northwest, organizations in three states have evolved plans by which they hope bank bandits will be an expression of the past.”
At a special meeting of county officials, E. F. Riley of the North Dakota School of Science urged the arming of special deputies with machine guns and high-powered rifles in every town, city and farm community in the state.
“We are going to war on bandits and meet them with the same poison they use in staging their holdups—machine guns, high powered rifles, special automobiles with mounted guns and airplanes,” he declared. “Every garage and filling station along main highways will be equipped to meet the invasion of bank robbers.” He also suggested that machine guns be mounted in second-story offices across the street from local banks.
Dutch Sawyer did not like the heat that the Willmar job was bringing. Still, in the northern Plains states, crippled by drought and the Depression, he knew there were precious few funds available to supply the states with the kind of armaments they would need for their grand plans.
Silverman had gone to the Green Lantern to get Dutch to provide him with a team and Dutch had obliged, for his usual cut of the proceeds. He knew Silverman was a trigger-happy hothead who shot a policeman and four bystanders when he robbed a bank during the Republican National Convention in Kansas City in 1928. But that was not something that concerned Dutch. What did concern him, however, was his discovery that Silverman had cheated Dutch’s team out of their fair share of the take from the Willmar job. He sent Verne Miller out to square things up.
On August 14, a double-deck, seven-column headline in the
Saint Paul Dispatch
announced the end result of that misguided slight.
3 GANGSTERS MURDERED
ON ROAD NEAR WILDWOOD
Verne Miller tracked down Silverman and two of his hoodlum buddies near a resort at Lake Minnetonka, popular among the gangster crowd for R & R unmolested by local law enforcement. Miller killed all three and hung their bodies from a tree near a desolate road that was popular as a trysting spot for young couples visiting a nearby amusement park.
George Kelly was getting quite an education in the way banks were robbed and business was conducted in the new Wild West. Although the murderous gunplay terrified him, robbing banks was a lot less work than running booze, and the payout was exponentially better.
Following the Willmar fiasco, Bailey took Kelly under his wing and taught him how to rob banks without all the drama and fireworks of the Willmar job.
Two months later, Bailey took Kelly, Miller, Holden and Keating to hit the Ottumwa Savings Bank in Iowa. It went off without a hitch. With one in the getaway car and one on the door, Holden, Keating and Bailey burst through the door and Bailey jumped the counter to grab a clerk who was going for his gun.
“We won’t hurt anyone, but do as we say,” he explained.
Holden grabbed the bank’s vice president, H. L. Pollard, and put a gun to his temple.
“Open the vault door and don’t stall, or it goes through your head.”
They were out the side door, into the getaway car and on their way before the alarm even sounded.
Kelly continued to team up with members of the group throughout the year and into the next until his education was complete. Then he started branching out on his own, and turning his criminal pursuits into a family affair. In doing so, he would be breaking one of the cardinal rules of the Bailey bank-robbing system. “Don’t ever work with women,” Bailey had told him. “They can’t keep their mouths shut.”
* * *
At Leavenworth, Kelly had been introduced to a comely young Texan who’d come to the prison to visit her incarcerated uncle. She’d caught his eye and he bulldozed an introduction. She responded in the way that women had always responded to the rakish George Kelly. From prison, they struck up a pen pal relationship, and once he got out and established himself with his new bank-robbing buddies, Kelly decided to take it to the next level.
At that time, Kathryn was shacking up with a bootlegger named “Little Steve” Anderson in Oklahoma City, sharing in both his affections and his business. Kelly, who’d managed a successful multi-state liquor-running business before his little misstep on the Indian reservation, offered his expertise and assistance to the duo, and in no time he was sharing in their profits and Kathryn’s affections, as well.
She was smitten with the smooth-talking ex-con. In almost every way, Kit was the classic gangster moll. The hardscrabble Texan was a schemer who’d spent her life getting by on good looks and bad attitude.
Kathryn was born in Saltillo, Mississippi, as Cleo Brooks in 1904. At age 15, she married a field hand named Lonnie Frye and gave birth to a daughter, Pauline. Soon after, she divorced Frye and took off with Pauline.
She then changed her name to Kathryn because it had more of a movie-star sound to it than the frumpish Cleo. She married again, but left her new husband right about the time her mother, Ora, extricated herself from Kathryn’s father, J. E. Brooks. With no love lost between Kathryn and her father, she was thrilled when her beloved mother finally left him.
Ora remarried a connected Texas county politico named Robert Shannon, who preferred to go by his nickname “Boss.” Boss owned a farm in Paradise, Texas, where Kathryn soon relocated, set up a little bootlegging business and started renting out space at the farm to criminal associates who were on the run or needed to lie low. She continued trading up husbands, and the next rung on her ladder was a bootlegger and small-time crook named Charlie Thorne.
For a woman with so many husbands and the occasional foray into the “escort” business, Kathryn was an insanely jealous wife.
While she was away on business, she discovered that Charlie was cheating on her. She headed back home, telling one of her associates, “I’m bound for Coleman, Texas, to kill that god-damned Charlie Thorne.”
When she confronted Charlie with accusations of his philandering, an enormous row ensued and Charlie ended up dead on the floor with a bullet through his head.
Kathryn called the police, and when they arrived there was a neatly typed suicide note next to the illiterate bootlegger. If the police were suspicious, they didn’t bother to investigate. Why investigate the murder of a man most people wouldn’t miss and wanted dead anyway?
Kathryn, who’d seen her share of tough, charmless gangsters, had never met a man like George Kelly. He was classy, smart and he dressed like a million bucks. Better yet, he had money in his pocket and connections with a lot of big shots up north.
One September afternoon when Steve was out of town, George invited Kit out to dinner. Over drinks, he interrupted the small talk with a startling proposal.
“Let’s get married!” he blurted.
Kit didn’t miss a beat. “All right, big guy. When?”
George grabbed his fiancé and hustled her out of the restaurant in a delirious rush. They sped back to Anderson’s house, where Kit picked up her belongings—along with Anderson’s prized bulldog, whom she loved—and headed up to St. Paul, where Kelly’s connections could arrange the hasty nuptials without all the bothersome paperwork, legal documents and irksome questions about all those outstanding warrants for his arrest.
After the nuptials, they drove down to Dallas for a short honeymoon and some long days of shopping. George wanted his bride wearing a brand-new wardrobe of the latest fashions. Kit was an absolute clotheshorse, and she was never happier than when she was acquiring new baubles and adornments. And when Kit was happy, George was happy.
George often told people he was in the banking business when they asked what he did for a living. So on their honeymoon Kit and George played the roles of a banker and his wife on a shopping spree. They’d spend their way through the finest stores in town and dine at the best eateries while pounding down shots in gulps from George’s flask and the bottles in their room.
They were madly in love—with each other, with money, with booze, with cars and with the kind of lifestyle that could be yours if you were a successful criminal in Depression-era America.
On the evening of June 16, 1933, an enterprising reporter walking through the train station in sleepy Fort Smith, Arkansas, noticed something curious—two neatly dressed men in suits, ties and snap-brimmed hats standing beside a disheveled, older, mustachioed man in casual clothes wearing shackles and a cheap wig.
He identified himself to the dapper men and inquired about the man in their custody. He feigned nonchalance as the two suits boasted about their prisoner.
After gleaning enough details, he wished them luck, excused himself and hustled to the nearest pay phone to dictate the elements of a story that would be racing across the regional Associated Press wires within minutes.
FT. SMITH, ARK. June 16 (AP) Frank Nash, one of the last surviving members of the notorious Al Spencer gang of bank and train robbers that operated a decade ago, was recaptured today at Hot Springs, Ark., by three Department of Justice agents—who “kidnapped” him on the streets of the resort city.
Nash had been at liberty since his escape from the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, in October 1930. He was serving a 25-year term for robbing a mail train at Okesa, Okla., with Spencer and five others of the gang.
The Department of Justice men moved with utmost secrecy after rushing Nash out of Hot Springs in their automobile. They revealed the identity of the prisoner for the first time here, although they were stopped by officers at Little Rock following a report from Hot Springs that three men had kidnapped a man known there as “Doc.”
The agents left their automobile here and boarded a train for Leavenworth shortly after their arrival here from Little Rock tonight in an effort, they said, to block a possible attempt at rescue by Nash’s confederates. Nash was heavily manacled and the agents were armed with rifles.
The secret service men refused to discuss details of how Nash was trailed to Hot Springs. They said they “kidnapped” him because of the danger of a clash with Nash’s men in making an open capture.
It was indicated the agents had been “shadowing” Nash for some time, waiting for an opportunity to capture him when he was alone.