The Year of Fear

by Joe Urschel

  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.

  The wire story hit the AP offices and newspaper newsrooms throughout the South and Midwest late that evening, and editors snapped to attention. But as fast as the news moved across the wires, it couldn’t match the speed with which information sped across the telephone tree of the criminal network that stretched across the western United States, from Dallas, Texas, to St. Paul, Minnesota.

  Even as editors were ripping the bulletin off their wire machines and preparing stories for insertion into their next editions, plans were being made in the opulent Fred Harvey restaurant in Kansas City’s Union Station to “snatch” Nash back and hide him away in Chicago, or St. Paul or some other city where the underworld hospitality was impervious to incursions from the feds and the few stoolies in law enforcement who were dumb enough to work with them.

  Late that evening, Verne Miller sat down for drinks at Fred Harvey’s with Johnny Lazia, the underworld fixer for the notorious Kansas City political machine of Tom Pendergast. Except that Verne Miller didn’t drink. He didn’t curse either. Neither did he whore around, gamble or partake in any of the other vices that his tablemate, Johnny Lazia, was paid to protect. What Verne Miller did was kill people. He’d kill people who would stupidly try to stop him from robbing a bank. He’d kill people who double-crossed him. He’d kill people for money when Al Capone’s mob in Chicago needed a mess cleaned up or if the Jews running the Purple Gang in Detroit wanted somebody to disappear after a deal gone bad. Or he’d kill people who ran afoul of his twisted form of chivalry, which dictated that all women were to be treated with utmost respect and none of his friends or trusted criminal associates were to be harmed in any way.

  Miller had a penchant for knocking off other hired killers who had the misfortune to be hired to rub out one of the members of his tight circle of friends. This had earned him the title of “Assassin of Assassins.”

  Miller was smart enough to know he needed Lazia’s blessing before pulling any kind of caper on Lazia’s turf. With time so short, though, he also needed Lazia’s help. Miller didn’t have time to recruit his own muscle for the job. He’d need some backup, and he was hoping Lazia could provide it. Nash’s pretty young wife, Frances, had called Miller the previous night in tears and explained that Frankie had been snatched at gunpoint out of the White Front Tavern in Little Rock, a place that was supposed to be safe.

  The White Front was a cigar store and pool hall used as a social club by gangland elements from around the Midwest. It was a place where they would hook up to plan jobs, grab a beer, gamble and relax. It was owned and operated by the city’s crime lord, Richard Galatas, and it was protected by his top enforcer, the city’s Chief of Detectives, Dutch Akers.

  Frances pleaded with Miller to get Frank back. She couldn’t stand the thought of him going back to prison.

  “Don’t carry on like that,” said Miller. “You’ll see Jelly again soon.”

  Lazia sat across from Miller and offered up the names of local shooters who could provide backup for Miller in case somebody got trigger happy—but that was unlikely, since federal agents travel unarmed, relying on the local law for armed support, and Lazia could virtually guarantee that no cop on the Kansas City police would interfere with one of his sanctioned operations. He suggested two out-of-towners who had checked in earlier, Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd (also known as “Choc”) and his partner, Adam Richetti. Miller didn’t think much of the hayseed Floyd. And Richetti was an unreliable drunk. Miller went off hoping to persuade a couple of Lazia’s men to help him out, and Lazia phoned in instructions to his inside men at the cop shop.

  In the morning, when Kansas City police officers W. J. “Red” Grooms and Frank Hermanson reported for the early shift, they were given what sounded to them like a routine, though somewhat incongruous, assignment: go down to the train station and assist two federal officers in the transfer of a prisoner from the Missouri Pacific, arriving at 7:15 a.m., to Leavenworth prison. Assist the feds? Since when did the Kansas City police start working for Washington? And weren’t the feds supposed to assist local law enforcement?

  Whatever the case, Grooms and Hermanson got into their “war wagon,” a specially fitted, armored vehicle the Kansas City police used to quell riots and other disturbances that might spring up among the labor groups, unions, communists, blacks or disenchanted farmers who were going broke and getting thrown off their farms across the state. Curiously, the machine guns that normally were mounted in the car were missing. They drove to the station, parked and went inside to meet up with federal agents from the Department of Justice, Reed Vetterli, a 29-year-old, straitlaced Mormon, and Ray Caffrey, his young charge, who’d just arrived from Nebraska.

  They would also meet two other federal agents, Joe Lackey and Frank Smith, and McAlester, Oklahoma, Police Chief Otto Reed, the veteran cop who’d gone along with the federal agents to assist in snatching Nash and make the arrest, since the federal agents lacked the legal authority to do that on their own.

  Union Station was crowded that Saturday morning. Nearly a dozen trains were arriving between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m., and the parking lot was filling up with people and cars.

  The bright prairie sun was climbing in the eastern sky and the temperature was rising right along with it. The lawmen flanked their captive as they hustled him through the station. The curious crowd parted as the group moved toward Caffrey’s car like a “flying wedge” down a football field.

  Miller and his two backups had taken their places in the parking lot, strategically aligned to close in on the agents when they got to the Chevrolet that was parked facing south in front of the station.

  As Miller edged along a row of cars, shielding himself and getting a better angle, he saw the large group of men hustling out of the station and he did not like what he was seeing. Not only were the men armed, but they had their weapons drawn.

  Grooms and Hermanson, stripped of their automatic weapons, had their .38-caliber handguns in plain view. One federal agent carried a .45. Lackey and Reed carried shotguns. Miller watched as Lackey and Reed climbed in the backseat and Nash climbed in beside them. But then Lackey told Nash to get up front, where he could watch him. Smith then climbed in the back between Lackey and Reed. Nash got in the front seat and Caffrey closed the door and began walking toward the front of the car to get into the driver’s seat.

  It was time for Miller to move. With most of the agents’ firepower now bottled up in the car, Miller and a second machine gunner began closing in from two angles. With the clear advantage of firepower and surprise, it should have been easy enough to grab Nash and go without ever having to fire a shot.

  Miller set his machine gun across the hood of the car he was using for cover and aimed directly at the lawmen while his partner inched closer, setting up the crossing fire line.

  “Put ’em up! Up! Up!” he screamed.

  Lackey pulled up the riot gun that had been nestled between his seat and the car door and furiously began trying to cock the unfamiliar weapon without releasing its triggering mechanism. When he finally stumbled on the release, the gun discharged unexpectedly, blowing off half of Nash’s head, killing him instantly. The blast shattered the car’s windshield and hit Caffrey in the back of the head as he stood near the front of the car.

  The panicked Lackey jerked the gun to the left as it discharged again, hitting Hermanson in the head before tearing into the Plymouth p
arked in the adjacent space.

  Reactively, the machine gunners unleashed a fusillade of return fire. Two bullets hit Grooms in the chest as he attempted to return fire, killing him. Vetterli, who had ducked to the ground for cover after taking a bullet in the arm, sprang to his feet and ran toward the station with a spray of machine-gun fire following him and slamming into the station’s granite walls.

  Miller trained his sights on Lackey, hitting him three times.

  Chief Reed, hit by multiple rounds, crumbled to the floor.

  The furious firefight was over in less than ninety seconds.

  With his gun trained on the car, Miller approached cautiously. Hermanson and Grooms lay in an expanding pool of blood on the passenger side of the car. Caffrey was sprawled next to the driver’s door with half his head blown away.

  Miller peered in at the blood-soaked front seat and the body of his longtime friend.

  “He’s dead,” he said to his partners. “They’re all dead.”

  With that he reached into the backseat, pulled Lackey’s gun from his hands and threw it to the ground. The unharmed Smith lay on the floor next to Lackey, playing possum.

  Miller and company ran back to the getaway car and sped off as the early morning crowds at Union Station looked on in horror.

  Patrolmen in the station raced to the parking lot, guns drawn. Flashbulbs popped as news photographers, who were at the station in force, having been tipped off by the wire story, went to work. In no time, they were rearranging the scene, moving people and evidence to get more graphic shots, as their polished leather shoes soaked up blood from the pavement and splashed it onto the cuffs of their trousers.

  Bedlam had broken out among the bystanders, some of whom fled screaming, while others ghoulishly picked up spent shells and casings from the ground for souvenirs.

  The Kansas City police began rounding up witnesses to the shooting. There were nearly sixty in all. All, it seemed, had wildly different stories about what they had just seen.

  * * *

  News of the shootout reached J. Edgar Hoover, within minutes. Hoover was an obsessive workaholic who was never really off the clock. “Married to his job,” is how his colleagues would describe the young bachelor. He preferred agents who had a similar relationship with their work and drove them to work harder, faster and better.

  The Bureau had just received a telegram from Kansas City.

  Director, United States Bureau of Investigation, Wash DC—Ott Reed Chief Police McAlester Oklahoma special agents Frank Smith and Lackey with Frank Nash were met at Union Station this morning, seven fifteen by agents Vetterli and Caffrey and two local detectives. Nash was taken to Caffrey’s automobile in front Union Station when unknown parties believed four altho definite number unknown opened up with submachine guns killing two local police officers Chief Reed Frank Nash and shooting agents Caffrey in head fatally. Lackey shot right side not believed fatal. Frank Smith escaped uninjured Vetterli nipped in left arm license number of shooting car obtained doing everything possible. Vetterli.

  Hoover had set the whole debacle in motion when he’d offered a reward for information leading to the arrest and capture of Nash, who had “escaped” from the Federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, nearly three years earlier. His escape was an embarrassment and an outrage to Hoover, who blamed the bleeding hearts and social reformers who ran the nation’s prisons for their lax security.

  In the three years since, Nash had reteamed with his old St. Paul gang and had been plundering banks throughout the upper Midwest.

  When Hoover offered a cash reward for information about his whereabouts, there was the usual flood of tips from all manner of chiselers and hustlers looking to scam their way to the reward money. But one tip had the feel of authenticity to it. It came from a corrupt cop in Hot Springs, Arkansas, who claimed Frank Nash was vacationing there. Hoover was leery of any police officer in the mobbed-up city of Hot Springs. He could be setting a trap, or he could be looking to make some easy money.

  Hot Springs in the ’20s and ’30s was the destination of choice for the nation’s criminal class. Gambling had been the town’s chief industry since the end of the Civil War, along with its famous “healing waters.” The city’s strongman was Leo Patrick McLaughlin, who’d come to power in 1926 running on the promise that if elected, Hot Springs would be run as an open city, and for the next twenty years it was. In the ’30s, Hot Springs boasted more than a dozen high-end casinos, brothels, race tracks, pool halls, spring training facilities for major league baseball teams, off-track betting—in short, a functional service industry for any vice you might enjoy. The money flowed from the underworld, to the police that protected it, to the political structure that allowed it. Al Capone maintained a year-round suite at the Arlington Hotel. Chasing down Nash in the Hot Springs environment was a grand, but dangerous, play. No one on the local police force could really be trusted, and that made Joe Lackey and Frank Smith in the Bureau’s Kansas City field office a little uneasy, but, nevertheless, they had wanted to pursue the tip.

  Hoover was even itchier to make something happen. He had a tenuous hold on his job and needed something to show the new administration’s architects, who were pushing to replace him with a political appointment, that he was up to the job.

  The precocious and ambitious Hoover joined the Justice Department in 1917 after working his way through law school as a clerk at the Library of Congress. The job at Justice had a draft-exempt status, a designation Hoover appreciated because his father had recently suffered a nervous breakdown and lost his job. The young J. Edgar felt he could not afford to serve because he had become his family’s breadwinner and his mother was desperately in need of his support. In less than a year’s time, Hoover had been promoted twice and, at the age of twenty-two, found himself in charge of the Bureau’s Enemy Alien Registration Section. During and immediately after World War I, the country learned to hate all things German, all things alien and anything that smacked of radicalism, socialism or communism.

  Hoover found himself a busy man, helping to stage raids on organizations suspected of radical or socialist ideals and labor unions of almost any stripe, all the while compiling a master list of suspected radicals, terrorists and draft dodgers that would expand to include hundreds of thousands of names.

  After the war, with new Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, Hoover established the General Intelligence Division, which expanded his anti-radical operations to include more general intelligence gathering at home and abroad, as well as work to prevent labor disputes and strikes. Under Palmer’s tutelage, Hoover became an early architect of “Red Scare” propagandizing, and helped his attorney general stage coordinated raids that resulted in as many as ten thousand arrests of suspected radical aliens and suspected communists in a single day—most of whom were not aliens or communists or guilty of anything whatsoever. Hoover made himself the country’s leading authority on communist activities and how to fight them.

  When Warren G. Harding took office in 1921 he appointed his campaign manager, Harry Daugherty, as Attorney General. Daugherty purged the department of the hangers-on from the previous administration and peopled it with a collection of political appointments and partisans who were eager to do the administration’s dirty work, as long as there was good money in it. Daugherty found Hoover’s lists handy material for political blackmail, so Hoover managed to keep his job. Before long, the Bureau had succumbed to the corrupting influences of the Harding administration and was jokingly referred to as the “Department of Easy Virtue”—much to the chagrin of the prim and moralistic Hoover, who nevertheless found himself up to his neck in the nefarious practices that Daugherty allowed the Bureau to engage in. In fact, those activities he undertook during the Harding administration nearly torpedoed his career when Roosevelt was swept into office.

  Just months after the election, Hoover was in the crosshairs of FDR’s first choice for Attorney General, Montana Senator Thomas Walsh.

  Walsh h
ad a long history with Hoover, and it wasn’t a good one. When Walsh and his fellow Montana senator Burton Wheeler were investigating corruption in the Harding administration, Hoover, then second in command at the Bureau, organized a campaign to discredit them on orders from the Bureau’s director. Hoover’s tactics included tapping their phones, intercepting their mail, tailing their family members and breaking into their offices. He tried to lure Wheeler into a hotel room with a comely female, but the ploy failed, Wheeler having been forewarned. Walsh made no secret of the fact that upon taking over as attorney general, one of his first official acts would be to clean house and fire that miserable son of a bitch J. Edgar Hoover.

  Before heading to Washington, though, the seventy-two-year-old Walsh, a widower for sixteen years, married a young Cuban debutant. On the train ride from Miami to Washington, the young bride woke up in North Carolina, but her new husband didn’t. The old civil libertarian may have died a happy man, but he never got his revenge on Hoover.

  FDR’s next selection for Attorney General was Homer Cummings. With both a Ph.D. and a law degree from Yale, the sixty-three-year-old former mayor of Stamford, Connecticut, was one of FDR’s intellectual and political heavyweights. Originally tapped to become ambassador to the Philippines, FDR put him in the Justice Department as an emergency replacement for Walsh after his untimely death. It was a fortuitous choice. Cummings had big ideas for raising the profile of the Justice Department, which at the time, in 1933, was but a minor player in the small government world of Washington, DC. FDR was articulating a vision for his administration. He was going to war against the forces of the Depression. Cummings liked that positioning. He would prosecute a “war on crime” to raise the profile of his adopted department and make it a major player in the new administration’s ambitious efforts to federalize the nation’s governance. He crafted a plan to merge the Prohibition Bureau’s 1,200 investigators, who would soon have diminished responsibilities with the end of Prohibition in sight, with the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation and Bureau of Identification. With that as a start, he hoped to begin crafting the kind of national police force the public and the President were clamoring for. He also began to craft a major crime bill that would give that force greater powers and tough federal laws to enforce. And he started zeroing in on his first targets.