by David Stout
And Chicago tough guy Roger Touhy and his lawyers could give thanks, at least for the moment. During a three-week trial, the basic weakness of the government’s case against Touhy for the kidnapping of William Hamm became obvious. The several reliable witnesses that prosecutors had promised to produce turned out not to be so reliable.
Worst of all for the prosecutors, Hamm acknowledged on the witness stand, as he had earlier, that he wasn’t really sure he could identify the men who had abducted him.
On Tuesday, November 28, the jurors deliberated several hours before acquitting the defendants. Afterward, some jurors made it clear that they considered the defendants to be unsavory characters, but that Hamm’s shaky identification of his kidnappers was a fatal flaw in the government’s case. “That, to my mind, was the climax of the case, even though it happened on the first day of the trial, when Mr. Hamm was on the stand,” one juror said.108
“I think most of us would have preferred to have found them guilty,” the jury foreman, T.O. Sundry, told reporters, “but we couldn’t do it on the evidence the government placed before us.”
The chief prosecutor, Joseph B. Keenan, who was in charge of Washington’s war on racketeering in general and kidnapping in particular, was less than gracious in reacting to the federal government’s first defeat in cases tried under the Lindbergh Law. “If a jury of citizens decides to turn these men loose upon the community, there is nothing we can do about it,” he said, asserting that the Justice Department was still convinced the defendants were guilty.109
But perhaps not everyone in the DOJ was convinced. On its website today, the FBI proudly recalls how it eventually solved the Hamm kidnapping. “Using a then state-of-the-art technology now called latent fingerprint identification, the FBI Laboratory raised incriminating fingerprints from surfaces that couldn’t be dusted for prints. Alvin Karpis, ‘Doc’ Barker, Charles Fitzgerald [another gang member], and the other members of the gang had gotten away, but they’d left their fingerprints behind—all over the ransom notes… The silver nitrate method and its application in the Hamm kidnapping was the first time it was used successfully to extract latent prints from forensic evidence,” the bureau declares with pride, explaining how the silver nitrate solution reacted with leftover perspiration to form silver chloride and thus made the prints visible.**110 “There they were: hard evidence that the Karpis gang was behind the kidnapping.”
What a stellar example of the scientific approach to law enforcement that the FBI was pioneering and promoting!
But wait. The FBI says the prints were lifted on September 6, 1933. If so, Hoover and the lab officials knew two months before Touhy and his pals even went on trial that they had nothing to do with the Hamm kidnapping. Yet Keenan, the prosecutor, seems not to have known about the lab’s finding, or why would he have said afterward that the Justice Department was still convinced Touhy and his associates were guilty?
If the FBI website is correct that the fingerprints of William Hamm’s kidnappers were lifted on September 6, 1933, then Hoover and his top aides withheld that all-important information from prosecutors and let a trial proceed, knowing all the while that the defendants were not guilty.
But there was more. On May 6, 1935, more than a year and a half after the fingerprint discovery, the Chicago Tribune carried a brief report noting that $65,000 of the ransom in the Hamm case had been found in the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank, having flowed there from various cities, including Chicago, Cleveland, and Toledo, Ohio. The finding, the Tribune said, was “new evidence pointing to the Barker-Karpis gang as the kidnappers of William Hamm.”111 Remarkably, at least in my opinion, the newspaper did not bother to point out that the finding was further evidence, if any was needed, that Roger Touhy and his bunch had had nothing to do with kidnapping Hamm.
All this suggests that Hoover and a select few in the FBI concealed for many months their knowledge that the Karpis-Barker bunch were the real culprits in the Hamm case. But why the secrecy? If Hoover hid the knowledge so as not to tip off the Karpis-Barker gang that the FBI was on to them, Touhy and his associates still should not have been subjected to a trial. Again, the suspicion arises that Hoover just thought Touhy et al. belonged behind bars for…something.
Would the director have been so ruthless? Knowing what has been revealed about him since the 1930s—how he rewarded sycophants and rooted out critics, how he tried to crush people he perceived as his enemies—we can only conclude that he would have done almost anything to cling to power.
By this time, Hoover had established the FBI as his own fiefdom, answerable only in theory to the heads of the Justice Department. The attorney general at the time, Homer Cummings, who headed the DOJ from 1933 to 1939, was no friend of Hoover. In fact, when Cummings took office after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration, he planned to oust Hoover and replace him with a former department official named Wallace Foster. Fortunately for Hoover, Foster died before Hoover could be jettisoned.
Then, just over three months into FDR’s first term, came the Union Station Massacre, prompting the president to begin a much-publicized campaign on bank robbers, kidnappers, and killers who seemed to roam at will, especially in the Midwest. In those dark days of the 1930s, journalists had access to far less information than they do today. Government agencies and the police could dole out information—or withhold it—as they chose.
Still, by that time—no, long before—sharp journalists should have been saying to one another, “The Justice Department contradicts itself from one month to the next. It sounds like Hoover is the keeper of the secrets, cherry-picking the information he’s willing to share, even with his so-called bosses. Who’s really running the show?”
The fast-changing and conflicting accounts given by various officials, especially Hoover, were succulent, low-hanging fruit, ripe for picking by industrious reporters, not just for their own glory but for the public good. Instead, Hoover and his bureau got coverage best described as idolatry.
Occasionally, the journalists of the day became near contortionists in portraying the FBI as triumphant. Debacles were transformed into momentary setbacks that only inspired the bureau to go ever higher and further in pursuit of the truth. A reprise of the Hamm kidnapping, published in the New York Daily News on August 16, 1936, after the Justice Department had cleared up its own mess, called the eventual solution of the case “a brilliant victory—more brilliant, in a way, than any other triumph in the drive on the snatch racket, for at one time in this case the Government appeared to have been counted out… But we know now that the federal forces kept right on fighting. Their comeback bout has been a masterly one.”112
But what about the ordeal of Touhy and his friends, who were no doubt guilty of a lot of things but were innocent of the kidnapping?
“This was not a defeat for American Justice,” the article went on. “As a matter of fact, it was a magnificent triumph, for time was to prove that the Touhy mobsters had nothing whatever to do with the kidnapping of William Hamm.”
If the Touhy acquittal was a “magnificent triumph,” it was not because of the FBI. It was because of the conscientious Minnesota farmer who served as jury foreman and his fellow jurors. They saw through the government’s case. If the FBI really did manage to lift the fingerprints of Alvin Karpis and his accomplices two months before Touhy even went on trial—and the FBI boasts that it did—justice was done not because of the FBI but despite it.
*Again, the holiday was still celebrated on the last Thursday of November, not the fourth. In 1933, Thanksgiving Day fell on November 30.
**Hoover recognized the potential of fingerprint analysis early on. From the mid-1920s, the FBI had been collecting prints from local law enforcement agencies. By the time the FBI laboratory was established in 1932, the bureau had a collection of several million fingerprints.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE PEOPLE’S FURY UNLEASHED
San Jose, California
November 1933
In the
first half of the twentieth century, San Jose, California, was a small city in Santa Clara County near the southern end of San Francisco Bay. The city’s population was a tiny fraction of what it would become in the twenty-first century, when it would surpass a million people.
In small-town San Jose, the wealthy Hart family was royalty. The Harts were well liked, for they were civic-minded, philanthropic, and friendly.
The patriarch, Leopold Hart, came to the United States from his native Alsace-Lorraine in the middle of the nineteenth century, eventually settling in San Jose and opening a dry goods and clothing store in 1866. In 1902, he started the L. Hart & Son Department Store in downtown San Jose. By 1920, it was the biggest department store between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Leopold and his wife, Hortense, had a son, Alexander, and five daughters. Alexander, or Alex, as he was often called, gradually took over control of the store as his father aged and assumed full command when Leopold died in 1904. And Alex’s son Brooke was groomed to take over from his father. On Thursday, November 9, 1933, Alex was expecting Brooke, who was twenty-two, to drive him to a meeting at his club; Alex himself didn’t drive. The designated meeting time, 6:00 p.m., passed with no sign of Brooke. But the father was not alarmed, figuring that Brooke may have had car trouble—although Brooke’s car was a new Studebaker roadster. If indeed the car had broken down, the Studebaker company would have some explaining to do!
Alex got a ride to his meeting, then a ride to the family’s palatial home. He discovered that his wife, Nettie, hadn’t heard from Brooke, nor had Brooke’s younger brother, Alex Jr., nor had their sisters, Aleese and Miriam.
Around 8:00 p.m., Alex called the police, asking if his son had been in an accident. No, he had not, was the reply. “Then my son is missing,” Alex said.
At once, the police arranged to intercept phone calls to the Hart’s home. Around ten o’clock, a call came in. Pay $40,000 “if you want to see your boy alive again,” a man told Alex, warning him not to call the police.113
But since a tap was already in place, the call was immediately traced to a public phone booth in the lobby of the Whitcomb Hotel in San Francisco. There was nothing Brooke’s family could do except wait for instructions.
The next morning, Brooke’s roadster was found on a remote stretch of road some twenty-five miles northeast of San Jose. The lights were still on.
At once, newspapers speculated that a big kidnapping ring from the East had come to the West to find fresh victims. The papers also feasted on rumors that Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, the gangster with several killings and robberies to his credit, was in the area. Soon, he was reported to be a prime suspect in the abduction of Brooke Hart. There were numerous abandoned silver-mining shafts and deserted cabins around San Jose that would make good hiding places. But searches turned up nothing.
Still, Brooke’s father expressed optimism, noting that his son was strong and athletic.
Then, an apparent breakthrough. On Friday, Brooke’s wallet was found on the guard rail of an oil tanker ship that had serviced the ocean liner Lurline in San Francisco harbor. Had the kidnappers dragged Brooke onto the Lurline, then thrown away his wallet? Or had Brooke himself managed to throw his wallet onto the tanker ship to aid searchers?
By the time the wallet was discovered, the Lurline was sailing overnight from San Francisco to Los Angeles on its way to Hawaii. When the vessel docked in Los Angeles on Saturday morning, the passengers were scrutinized, one by one. Now, investigators were checking a report that two stowaways might have boarded the ship. Were they the kidnappers?
Brooke Hart was not on the Lurline, nor was anyone who seemed a likely kidnapper.
But Brooke’s family was heartened when two letters arrived at the Hart home over the weekend, one from Sacramento, the other from San Jose. Your son is all right, the letters said.
On Monday, November 13, investigators announced that telephone calls to the Hart house would no longer be intercepted. The announcement was meant to encourage the kidnappers to communicate instructions for Brooke’s release. The next morning, federal and state investigators withdrew from the home entirely to further encourage the abductors.
A kidnapper called on Wednesday, November 15. Put $40,000 in a satchel, take the Malibu highway south toward Los Angeles, and look for a guy standing on the running board of a car, a man told Brooke’s father. Give him the money, and he’ll tell you where to find your son.
The call was traced to a nearby garage.* Sheriff William Emig and Police Chief J. N. Black raced there and arrested Thomas Thurmond just as he was hanging up. Thurmond, who was single and twenty-eight, directed the lawmen to a hotel, where they arrested John Holmes, whom Thurmond identified as his partner. Holmes, twenty-nine, was married and had two young children, although his marriage was strained because of his philandering.
Holmes had recently lost his job. Thurmond operated a San Jose gas station with his father. The suspects were interrogated separately for hours on end. When they finally cracked, they told what they had done.
They had become familiar with Brooke Hart’s habits and travel and had talked about seizing him for ransom. Finally, as the young man was leaving a parking lot near the department store on November 9, Thurmond and Holmes were ready to act.
Holmes jumped into Brooke’s car, pointed a pistol, and told him to drive. Thurmond followed in a separate car. Some miles away, Holmes told Brooke to stop. Then Brooke was forced into Thurmond’s car. According to the kidnappers, he tried to hide his fear with a joke, something about it being the first time he had ever been kidnapped.
The kidnappers drove their captive to a point on the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge over San Francisco Bay and stopped.
By now, it was dark. The kidnappers forced Brooke from the car and put a pillowcase over his head. Holmes struck him on the head with a brick. The young man cried out, and Holmes hit him on the head again, rendering him semiconscious.
“They were pretty good blows, and he didn’t give us much trouble after that,” Thurmond recalled.
Then the kidnappers wrapped their victim with baling wire, tied two cement bricks to his body, lifted him over the bridge railing, and dropped him into the bay.
The shock of the cold water revived Brooke, and he called for help. Thurmond fired several shots at the body, and all was quiet.
“We thought it would be easier with him out of the way,” one of the kidnappers explained matter-of-factly, according to a Justice Department official. “We didn’t want to bother with lugging him around the countryside, and we didn’t want to take the chance of his escaping and giving us away. So we just bumped him off.”114
Before binding Hart and throwing him off the bridge, the kidnappers took his wallet. They split the money inside, pocketing $7.50 each. Then they drove to San Francisco, stopped at a speakeasy for drinks, and tried to phone the Hart home. They couldn’t get a good connection, so they drove to the Whitcomb Hotel to use the phone booth there. Then it was back to San Jose.
So how did Brooke Hart’s wallet wind up on the guard rail of the oil tanker? For some reason, Thurmond had kept the wallet. Then he thought it was best to get rid of it, so he decided to take a ferry across San Francisco Bay the night of the kidnapping and drop the wallet overboard. But instead of boarding the ferry, he had an impulse to throw the wallet off a pier. By the freakiest of chances, the wallet landed on the tanker guard rail and stayed there.
Thus, the ugly truth: Brooke Hart had not been kidnapped and slain by “professional” kidnappers from the East but by two unremarkable local men looking for quick and easy money. They could have had it, too, and without harming their captive, since Brooke’s father would have given anything to have his son back.
Was jealousy a motive too? Brooke Hart had been born to privilege. Photographs of him showed a confident young man with wavy hair and an aristocratic bearing. He looked at ease in expensive clothes. He was everything Holmes and Thurmond were not.
On November 26,
two duck hunters in a boat discovered Brooke’s body floating in five feet of water half a mile south of the bridge. Alex Hart and his wife, Nettie, who had recently undergone surgery, collapsed upon hearing that their son was dead.
By this time, the press had reported that the confessions of Thurmond and Holmes did not jibe in every respect. Could the discrepancies help one or both of the killers avoid conviction and a trip to the gallows? There was also uncertainty as to who had jurisdiction. Was it Santa Clara County, since the victim had been kidnapped in San Jose? Or was it San Mateo County, since the victim had apparently been thrown off the bridge on the San Mateo side? But since the body was found near the bay shore of Alameda County, maybe Alameda should take charge.
When viewed without emotion (which was impossible for the people to do), these were not difficult questions. The issue of which county should have jurisdiction could have been resolved with friendly discussions among prosecutors.
But that would have taken time. The savagery of the killers, the nonchalant way they recounted their crime, had enraged the people of San Jose. They wanted quick justice. Talk of a lynching was in the air days before Brooke Hart’s body was found. And Governor James Rolph said he had no intention of calling in the National Guard to protect a couple of lowlifes.
On the night of November 26, a crowd began to gather outside the San Jose jail. The crowd grew, morphing into a full-throated mob and lusting for blood.
Several times that night, jail officers hurled tear gas grenades to drive back the people. Then some men ripped two sections of heavy pipe, each some thirty feet long, from the construction site of a new post office next to the jail. Using the pipes as battering rams, the vigilantes surged into the jail, beating the sheriff and a deputy. The invaders seized the jailhouse keys and opened the cells that held Thurmond and Holmes.
