The Year of Fear (7 page)

Hoover knew that if he allowed gangsters to get away with the murder of federal agents, none of his men would be safe. He told Jones in no uncertain terms that he wanted the Kansas City killers brought to justice by any means necessary.

Jones was on a plane to Kansas City by 11:30 the morning of the massacre. On his arrival, he studied the collected evidence, most of it from eyewitnesses whom he knew to be unreliable even in the best of circumstances. This was a 30-second volley of gunfire in which hundreds of bullets were spent, and any sensible witness would have been ducking for cover. The accounts all differed.

Even the number of shooters was in doubt. People reported seeing from two to seven machine gunners, men and women.

A month earlier, on Memorial Day, there had been a spectacular escape from the nearby Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing led by Harvey Bailey. Bailey, Keating and Holden had been recaptured while playing golf in a foursome with Nash. Nash eluded capture by slipping off into the woods. He aided Bailey from the outside by smuggling guns into the prison for the break, in which the escapees had kidnapped the warden and fled over the prison walls. Bailey had been shot in the leg during the escape. His picture, along with the other escapees’, had been all over the Kansas City papers. Several witnesses said one of the machine gunners was limping and believed him to be Bailey. Another identified Pretty Boy Floyd. When Jones got to Kansas City, there were more than fifteen names on the list.

The crime scene didn’t yield much evidence either.

With not much to go on, Jones was playing his hunches. The job had the markings of a professional operation. Any one of the Lansing prison escapees could have pulled this off, and Bailey was a close friend of Nash’s. But the rest of Bailey’s profile didn’t fit the crime. Bailey was all about planning and stealth. Gunplay, murder, innocent victims? Those things brought the heat. Bailey never wanted to be associated with anything violent. Why bother? In most cases it was so unnecessary. And when it was necessary, he’d pin it on somebody else.

Despite the identification from several witnesses noting the limping gunner, Jones didn’t like Bailey for this one.

“The Kansas City Massacre was a stupid crime, committed by stupid criminals—and nobody would ever accuse Harvey Bailey of being stupid,” Jones told the agents.

“Besides, Bailey is no killer. A thief, yes—but never a killer. The men who pulled this job were killers, first and foremost. They could never have expected to take Nash away from those officers without killing some of them. They came to kill. Harvey Bailey would never in the world have had any part of a job like that.”

Still, Jones really wanted to bring Bailey in. And his hunch told him that it was members of the escaped crowd that had gone to free Nash as payback for his help springing them. But why waste a crisis? Bailey would remain a suspect, as would everyone else from the prison break: Bob Brady, Jim Clark, Ed Davis, Wilbur Underhill and Frank Sawyer. Any one of those hard cases could have done it and not thought twice.

Similarly, Jones doubted Pretty Boy Floyd had anything to do with it. Floyd was a loner and an outlier. He never worked with the Keating-Holden crowd. He didn’t owe Nash any favors. But if Washington wanted his name on the list, no harm in that. George Kelly was often misidentified as Pretty Boy Floyd, perhaps because of his good looks. Kelly had served time at Leavenworth with Nash, and had helped Keating and Holden escape. But Kelly’s tough-guy image was largely the creation of his clever wife, newspaper reporters and pulp fiction writers. He’d robbed a lot of banks and run a lot of gin, but had never been clearly identified in anything murderous. Kelly, a handsome charmer, rarely needed to even pull a gun on a bank job. He could talk money right out of the vault and many a female teller was left smitten by the dreamy clotheshorse who’d relieved them of all the cash in their drawer. Kelly had learned the trade from his good friend Harvey Bailey. Kelly had never been charged with anything violent. Jones wouldn’t waste any time trying to tie him to the shootout. Instead, he turned to his mental Rolodex of underworld fixers and operators. If the crime started in Hot Springs, Arkansas, Dick Galatas would be involved one way or the other. Fly out to Hot Springs, he told his agents. Follow Galatas. Backfill his movements. Get his phone records. Where was he when they grabbed Nash? Where did he go afterward? If somebody sent shooters to spring Nash, Galatas would have to be involved. He’ll lead us to him.

Jones also knew that nothing happened in Kansas City without the blessing of the Pendergast machine’s underworld fixer, Johnny Lazia. Nobody would have the nerve to walk into Kansas City and pull a caper like this without Lazia’s blessing. But getting information from Lazia would be all but impossible, and the notorious Kansas City police would be of no help either. In one way or another most worked for or with Lazia. In fact, the Kansas City police director, Eugene Reppert, who’d been a golf partner of Bailey’s and whose photograph with him on the course at Mission Hills had touched off the raid that sent Keating and Holden back to prison, flat out told the federal agents that, despite the death of two of his officers, it was up to the feds to solve the case. The feds were an annoyance. In his opinion, they had brought this disaster to Kansas City through their ineptitude and their failure to work through the well-established system in the city that could have prevented it. And now that system was going under a national microscope, which was making things uncomfortable for people like Reppert and the men he worked for. The bumbling feds would get no help from the Kansas City Police Department. Such was the level of police professionalism in Kansas City in 1933. And such was the weakness of Hoover’s Bureau and its agents that they were powerless to do anything about it.

But the sleuthing by Jones’s men turned up a solid connection between Nash and Miller in the days before the massacre. Phone records showed Frances Nash had called Miller several times immediately after Nash’s arrest. After some intense interrogation by Bureau agents, Frances gave Miller up, but said she had no idea where he had gone after the shooting.

When the story hit the press that one Verne Miller was the primary suspect in the Union Station massacre, it got the attention of a Fort Worth detective named Ed Weatherford.

Weatherford had been watching Kathryn Kelly for years, suspicious of her extravagant lifestyle and the fancy cars she and her husband would park in front of their home on East Mulkey Street. Weatherford had duped Kathryn into thinking he was a crooked cop who’d help her out if she and her gregarious husband should ever get in a jam.

Weatherford would run into Kathryn when she made her rounds of the local taverns and speakeasies, where she was constantly boasting about her husband, saying he could shoot walnuts off a fence line with his machine gun and write his name with it on the sides of barns. She’d brag about all the big-shot gangsters he worked with. The notorious Verne Miller was a name she had constantly bandied about.

Weatherford passed his information to agent Frank Blake in the Bureau’s Dallas office, who moved it along to Jones in Kansas City, noting that George Kelly was reputed to be an expert machine gunner, who could “write his name with bullets discharged from such a gun.”

Harvey Bailey, it turned out, was right. Kathryn’s loose lips had just put her husband’s name on the list of the most wanted men in the country.

3

THE KIDNAPPING SCOURGE

Organized crime in the major cities of the country had used kidnapping for decades as they built their empires. They did it to filch money from rival gangs. They did it to get inconvenient characters off the street at appropriate times. They used it to threaten or intimidate balky cops and politicians who might not otherwise play along with the racketeers who needed their protection and cooperation. But as long as the kidnappings, payoffs and murders were confined to the underworld, few really cared. But in the ’30s, it was happening to good citizens and national heroes. Anybody with money was growing uneasy, especially as the national press reported stories of “kidnapping syndicates” that were operating around the nation and compiling lists of prospective victims and their families.

When they took office in the spring of 1933, President Roosevelt and Attorney General Homer Cummings inherited the kidnapping case that newspaper columnists were calling the greatest story “since the resurrection”: the Lindbergh case. For more than a year it had lingered on, with no end in sight and no good leads to pursue.

In the ’30s, Charles Lindbergh was about the most famous and revered American in the nation, and perhaps around the world.

On May 20, 1927, when Lindbergh took off from New York and landed thirty-three and a half hours later in France, he had successfully set the record for sustained flight by flying over the Atlantic Ocean and winning the $25,000 Orteig Prize after six other better-known aviators had died trying.

His accomplishment transformed the nation—and the very idea of winged flight. When Lindbergh boarded his plane that rainy morning, much of the nation thought the very idea of flying was an affront to the Almighty. In that year, European airlines were flying hundreds of thousands of passengers. The United States had virtually none. But after Lucky Lindy set down in Paris, greeted by a crowd of 150,000 joyous fans, the irreligiosity of aviation melted away. Superiority in the sky became a national aspiration as an industry was launched on Lindy’s accomplishments, and the nation became transfixed by the possibilities of flying. It was the ’20s equivalent of “Man Walks on Moon,” and Lindbergh became its standard-bearer.

President Herbert Hoover awarded Lindbergh the Medal of Honor, and New York went wild with ticker-tape parades. The previously unknown U.S. Air Mail pilot had, in a matter of hours, become arguably the biggest celebrity in the world.

Lindbergh flew the
Spirit of Saint Louis
around Europe, mesmerizing crowds and promoting the idea of air travel.

Back in the States, he took to the air and the lectern to add his promotional gravitas to the infant aviation industry, which was trying to launch itself in the sparsely populated, wide-open spaces Lindy called home.

President Hoover appointed Lindbergh to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and he embarked on a cross-country tour paid for by the Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics. The 1927 “Lindbergh Tour” was the country’s first truly national celebrity tour—bigger and bolder than even those of men campaigning for president. It hit every state and virtually every major city. Lindbergh delivered speech after speech and rode in hundreds of parades. At the conclusion of the tour, Lindbergh spent a month penning a book about his transatlantic flight titled
We,
and it became an instant bestseller.

The massive publicity surrounding him and his flight boosted the aviation industry and made a skeptical public take air travel seriously. Within a year of his flight, an estimated 30 million Americans personally saw Lindbergh and the
Spirit of Saint Louis
as he and his flying machine toured the country. The effects of his accomplishments were transformative. Over the remainder of 1927, the number of licensed aircraft quadrupled. The number of U.S. airline passengers grew by an estimated 1,000 percent per year for the next three years, and investment in American aviation topped $100 million. Air travel was beginning to shrink the vast nation, pulling it together like nothing since the final spike was pounded into the transcontinental railroad. Lindbergh’s exploits spawned an explosion in the number of daredevil pilots trying to set new records for distances traveled and heights achieved. Their exploits gave the national media one of the few upbeat stories to follow to leaven their coverage of crime, Depression and loss.

But on the evening of March 1, 1932, even Lucky Lindy’s story would become part of the nation’s nightmare.

Around 9:30 p.m., Lindbergh was sitting in his library and thought he heard a noise. Half an hour later, his panicked family nurse told him that his infant son, Charles Jr., was gone.

Lindbergh grabbed his gun, searched the house and found a white envelope on the windowsill in the baby’s room. It was a ransom note demanding $50,000 for the return of his son.

On March 3, 1932, two days after the Lindbergh kidnapping, the normally reserved
New York Times
ran a deck of headlines that would have been right at home on the pages of any of its more sensational rivals.

KIDNAPPING WAVE SWEEPS THE NATION

Lindbergh Crime Is Climax of Development of Abductions Into Major Racket

Ring’s Center in Midwest

Leading Citizens in Chicago Are Compelled to Band for Self-Protection

The kidnapping of Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. topping a long list of kidnappings in recent years serves to emphasize the fact that abduction for ransom has become a “big money crime,” taking its place beside the liquor, vice and drug traffic among the prominent “rackets” of the country.

Authorities pointed out yesterday that there had been a big wave of kidnappings during the past two years, when more than 2,000 persons were abducted for ransom. During these two years kidnapping syndicates have arisen and have extorted millions of dollars from their victims or their relatives and friends by means of torture or terrorization.

It is estimated that in Illinois alone during 1930 and 1931 there were 400 kidnappings, according to Alexander Jamie, chief investigator for the “Secret Six,” a Chicago organization devoted to fighting organized crime.

By 1933, the Snatch Racket and the abductions of prominent citizens had grown so widespread that companies began marketing a new product—kidnapping insurance. Wealthy businessmen hired bodyguards and private security details. In Hollywood, celebrities traveled in bulletproof limos with armed guards in the passenger seats. A national paranoia had hatched among the nation’s fragile moneyed class, and it was pressuring its new president to do something about it.