The Year of Fear

by Joe Urschel

  Dunhill wanted to serve notice on Sawyer, so he arrested two of Harry’s patrons on a minor charge. The next day, Sawyer confronted Detective Fred Raasch and let him know that the delicate balance of the O’Connor System had been violated. If the cops were going to bring heat to him, he would bring it to the cops.

  “I wonder how Dunhill would like a couple of snatches in this town?” asked Sawyer. And with that, he began putting the team together to kidnap one of St. Paul’s leading businessmen.

  * * *

  Around lunchtime on the afternoon of June 15, William Hamm Jr., president of St. Paul’s Hamm Brewing Company, was walking home for lunch, as was his usual practice. Things were going well for the handsome millionaire. He sat on the boards of several successful corporations and was the president of a local department store. But the real source of his riches, the business he inherited from his grandfather, was back in business minting money after a twelve-year downturn during the Prohibition years. The Hamm Brewing Company was back doing what it did best: brewing, distributing and selling one of the most popular beers in the nation.

  If Hamm had any idea that his every move had been studied for weeks as he was followed and tracked by some of St. Paul’s most nefarious criminals, he didn’t show it as he crossed the street in front of his downtown brewery.

  He was approached by a well-dressed elderly man who extended his right hand.

  “You are Mr. Hamm, are you not?” he asked.

  Hamm extended his hand to the stranger and said, “Yes.”

  With that, the man grabbed Hamm’s hand tightly and seized his elbow with his left. A second man grabbed Hamm from the other side and pushed him roughly toward the curb.

  “What is it you want?” cried Hamm.

  A car sped to the curb, its rear door open, and the two men pushed Hamm inside. A pillowcase was dropped over his head and his assailants shoved him to the floor of the car as it sped away. They told him to keep his mouth shut and everything would be all right.

  Hamm realized he was being driven around on unpaved dirt and gravel back roads. After about an hour, they stopped and met a second group of men in another car. They forced him to sign a series of ransom notes, put him back in the car and drove him out of state to a house in Bensenville, Illinois.

  The Hamm kidnapping was organized by Jack Peifer, Sawyer’s partner in crime. He ran the Twin Cities’ finest gambling casino, the Hollyhocks Inn. He also ran a loan sharking operation and a makeshift bank for the gangsters who frequented his casino and were loath to keep their money in a commercial bank. With underworld connections like Peifer’s, the money was a lot safer sitting in his second-floor safe than in any real bank, vulnerable as they were to marauding thieves. He used a couple of Green Lantern regulars, Fred Barker and Alvin Karpis, to pull the kidnapping off. Karpis recruited two of Capone’s shooters who had taken part in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, George “Shotgun” Ziegler and Monty Bolton, along with Fred’s brother, Doc, and Chuck Fitzgerald.

  Peifer knew Hamm from his visits to the Hollyhocks, and also knew that with Prohibition ending, the Hamm brewing company was flush with cash now that real beer could be manufactured once again. Brewers and distillers immediately became a target of underworld kidnappers. During Prohibition, many had made unholy alliances with criminals and bootleggers to keep their companies afloat by supplying the ingredients that could be easily remixed by bootlegging operations to create quality intoxicants that could then be resold to the high-end hotels, resorts and other establishments that demanded them. Once freed of the governmental restraints on their trade, brewers and distillers no longer saw the need to include the underworld in their lucrative endeavors. Those who were being cut out felt they had legitimate reasons for finding another way to get their share.

  The Barker-Karpis gang was able to extract a cool $100,000 for Hamm’s release and disappear seamlessly back into the St. Paul underworld, aided in no small part by their inside man at the police department, none other than Tom Brown, head of the police department’s Kidnap Squad.

  Two weeks after the Hamm abduction, John Factor, the brother of cosmetics king Max Factor, was kidnapped as he walked to his car late at night after visiting a gambling casino in the Chicago suburbs. After his release twelve days later, he told police his family had paid $70,000. Factor had been abducted near the Des Plaines, Illinois, headquarters of Roger Touhy’s operations. Touhy had been battling with Capone’s operatives, who were trying to make inroads on Touhy’s territory. Factor was a shady businessman who was wanted in Britain on embezzlement charges and was fighting extradition. So the whole thing looked to the local authorities like it was a gang kidnapping or shakedown, and they never showed much interest in solving it. Instead, they kicked it over to Melvin Purvis at the Chicago office of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation. Purvis was trying to learn the ropes in Chicago, and the mild-mannered Southern gentleman was having a tough time of it. But he’d been watching the Touhys—the “Terrible Touhys”—as the newspapers called them—a gang of six brothers, sons of a corrupt Chicago policeman, who were alleged to have successfully staged some thirty kidnappings in Chicago.

  So when the Factor kidnapping came his way, Purvis immediately suspected the Touhys. “We assumed from the start, with no material evidence, that the Touhy gang was responsible,” Purvis said.

  Within days, Purvis got a call from the chief investigator for the Illinois state’s attorney in Chicago, Dan Gilbert. Gilbert told Purvis that he had information that the Touhys were behind the kidnapping of Factor, and also had orchestrated the kidnapping of William Hamm, the wealthy brewer up in St. Paul. Not only that, but Gilbert also told him that Roger Touhy had just been jailed in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, on a weapons charge.

  Touhy and his men were up in Wisconsin vacationing when they lost control of their car and knocked out a telephone pole. When police arrived to investigate, they discovered the trunk was full of expensive fishing gear and equipment, but it also contained a goodly supply of rifles, handguns and ammunition.

  Purvis pounced on the tip and dispatched two of his agents to Wisconsin, who did some kidnapping of their own: without bothering with an extradition hearing, they brought Touhy and his men back to Chicago for questioning.

  They led Roger Touhy in shackles to Purvis’s office, where he was questioned by Purvis himself. But the veteran gangster just laughed at the questions or refused to answer. Finally, Purvis accused him of the Hamm kidnapping.

  “What do you mean by ham, Mr. Purvis?” he scoffed. “A ham sandwich? Or did I kidnap a ham steak?”

  Purvis put Touhy and his three associates behind one-way glass and brought in Factor and Hamm to see if they could make an identification.

  Factor identified one of the four, William Sharkey, as being among those who’d kidnapped and tortured him. But Hamm didn’t recognize anybody. Nevertheless, Purvis shipped his evidence off to prosecutors and had the group tried for both kidnappings. The rash move was indicative of Purvis’s desire to please his demanding boss in Washington, who was increasingly emphatic about the need to successfully solve an important case and bring some glory to his beleaguered Bureau.

  The jury failed to convict any in the group of the Hamm kidnapping because the evidence was so slim and shoddy.

  By the time Factor’s trial came around, he’d become emboldened. He identified the remaining three as being among his kidnappers, as well. A parade of other witnesses also came forward to falsely tie Touhy to the job. After one hung jury, the second voted to convict, and the judge sentenced the three to ninety-nine years in prison. Touhy’s lawyers appealed the case to the Illinois Supreme Court, which upheld the conviction. (Touhy maintained his innocence as he languished in prison for nearly twenty-five years. After a retrial, he was acquitted and released in 1959. Less than a month after his release, he was standing at the doorway to his sister’s home, where he’d been staying. Two men, identifying themselves as Chicago policemen, pulled shotguns out of the
ir coats and fired five times into Touhy, who died a short time later.)

  In fact, Touhy’s crew had nothing to do with the Hamm kidnapping. Touhy had been set up by Factor and Gilbert. Touhy was Capone’s main rival for control of Chicago’s labor unions and their fat pension funds, and they wanted him out of the way. Touhy controlled large portions of the criminal scene in the north and western Chicago suburbs, and he’d been successfully fighting off Capone’s Chicago boys from moving in. It had been Touhy who Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak had recruited to help him fight the Capone mob in the city. The mayor couldn’t trust his own police force, the majority of whom had ties to Capone. So when Cermak needed reinforcements to his own private force, he hired them out from Touhy. That effort ended when Cermak was assassinated in Miami. There were many at the time, including the President himself, who believed Cermak had been the target all along, the victim of a Capone-orchestrated hit.

  Gilbert, who was known around Chicago as the “richest cop in the world,” was the Capone mob’s inside man at the prosecutor’s office. During his tenure there, he had managed to stave off conviction of any of Capone’s men who came before the courts.

  Purvis had nailed the wrong men in the Hamm and Factor kidnappings. In fact, he’d been played for the fool in the prosecution of Touhy by the Chicago mob. And he was getting nowhere with the kidnapping case that really mattered, the one which, other than Lindbergh, was generating public hysteria and garnering the biggest headlines throughout the country and in Europe. Charlie Boettcher’s kidnappers had gotten away clean, and no one had a clue where they had gone.

  Purvis could not have known it, but another sensational abduction of an even more prominent and moneyed citizen was about to knock the Boettcher case off the front pages and relegate its significance to a historical footnote.

  4

  THE ABDUCTION

  On the evening of July 22, 1933, the air in Oklahoma City was hot and lifeless. During the day, the winds would blow the furnace-like air off the plains surrounding the city, but did nothing to relieve the discomfort that permeated everything. Heat records were being broken on an almost daily basis. The Daily Oklahoman had taken to running a graphic of a thermometer on its front page, and the mercury was regularly sitting above the 100˚ mark.

  Occasionally, the wind would ease and the humidity would build to such a level that even the simplest movement or task would produce a rolling sweat that would bind wet clothing to the body and bleed bodily fluids and caused the elderly and infirm to pass out and die as they sought relief sitting in front of pathetic electric fans. Oklahoma City’s destitute and desperate citizens were leaving their “community camps” in ambulances bound for the hospital or the morgue. The humidity was baffling—and frustrating. It would hang in the air, but rarely turn into rain. For three years, the stubborn drought had wrung Oklahoma, and all of the Great Plains, dry.

  Charles Urschel’s oil empire, divided among a variety of names and partnerships, had nearly five hundred thousand acres of that land locked up in oil leases, and in 1933, oil was about the only thing that the land was producing. The worldwide Depression had driven the price of wheat so low that farmers were no longer even putting seeds in the ground.

  Having grown up in Ohio and Indiana, Urschel was well aware of what hard times were like on a farm. But the misery that surrounded him now was unprecedented. More than a third of the farmers in the Southwest had lost their land to foreclosure. Many were left huddling in shacks, grinding wheat for cereal and bracing themselves against the increasingly violent dust storms that would stop cars in their tracks and blow so much fine silt through the cracks and windows of their wood-frame houses that cribs needed to be covered in wet sheets to protect sleeping infants from choking. With the blowing dust stinging their faces, farmers would wander their formerly lush lands carrying shotguns and revolvers, shooting squirrels, prairie dogs and any other surviving rodents to put food on the table for their families, who were wasting away before their eyes.

  Those were the farmers who still had land to hunt on. Or a shack to live in. As the Depression wore on, banks, desperate for cash, collateral—anything—were foreclosing on farmers with a vengeance and chasing them off the land. With nowhere else to go, some families remained on the land in the deteriorating wood-frame homes that no one else would want. But the cruelty would continue. The squatters would often discover a bank-dispatched tractor attaching cables to its framework and pulling it down while the wife and kids cried in the yard and Dad and Grandpa held their hunting rifles exercising every degree of restraint they had left to keep from shooting as the sheriff eyed them warily.

  It was an American nightmare that pitted one proud citizen against the next in county after county, state after state, from one shore to the other, like nothing else had since the Civil War.

  Things had gotten so desperate in Iowa, which suffered more farm foreclosures than any other state, that a group of farmers broke into a courthouse in Le Mars and demanded the judge not allow any more so that they could at least hold on to their land until better times rolled around. They were proud men. They’d fed the nation, and when war broke out in Europe, they’d fed the rest of the world, too. They did not want to be put out on the road like a bunch of homeless vagrants.

  When the indignant judge refused, the men dragged him out to the county fairgrounds and threw a rope around his neck before coming to their senses.

  It was no wonder people cheered when gangsters blew up bank vaults and shot up their lobbies. Out West, a popular sentiment prevailed: “The government stole my money with taxes and the banks stole my land in court.”

  A sense of anarchy was in the air. Unions threatened revolt and state legislatures debated secession. Farmers plowed under crops and dumped milk in the ground rather than sell at a loss. Meanwhile, back East, people stood in breadlines, picked through garbage and still starved. The head of the American Farm Bureau told Congress that unless something was done to help the American farmer there would be “revolution in the countryside.”

  A revolution of sorts had begun with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In his inaugural address, he lashed out at the banking industry. Millions of Americans sat around radio sets and cheered as loudly as those in Washington, DC, as FDR gripped the podium and scolded the moneychangers who had “failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence.”

  “They have no vision, and where there is no vision, the people perish,” he intoned. “There must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing.”

  On March 9, his first day in office, FDR rammed the Emergency Banking Act through both houses of Congress and signed into law strict new regulations. A month later, he signed the Federal Emergency Relief Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act for the refinancing of farm mortgages. Two weeks later, it was the Truth-in-Securities Act, which required full disclosure of facts in all stock issues. Then he abandoned the gold standard and signed the National Industrial Recovery Act with a $3.3 billion public works program; the Glass–Steagall Banking Act, which separated commercial and investment banking and guaranteed all bank deposits; the Farm Credit Act; the Emergency Railroad Transportation Act and the Home Owner’s Loan Act.

  The era of an activist, aggressive federal government had arrived in a flash, and its scope surprised even its most ardent supporters. The legislative accomplishments of the first 100 days of the Roosevelt administration would set the standard for all presidencies to follow. “It’s more than a New Deal,” said Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. “It’s a New World.”

  Urschel was an ardent Democrat and strong Roosevelt supporter, just like almost everybody else in Oklahoma and Texas. But Urschel had a particular interest in the New Deal apart from hoping it could lift the country out of the desperate state it had sunken into. Urschel needed Roosevelt to help bring some control and conservation to the nation�
��s booming oil business before the ruthless competitors who drove it pushed the price so low that nobody could make any money. Urschel and his companies had been leaders in the push for self-regulation, as was the legendary oilman by whom Urschel’s operations had been built, Thomas B. Slick, who discovered Oklahoma’s Cushing oil field and owned the Prairie Oil and Gas Company.

  But Urschel and his competitors in Texas and Oklahoma were finding so much oil that the price per barrel was going through the floor. From 1932 to spring 1933, the price of oil had fallen from eighty-seven cents a barrel to forty-four cents. Then, big oil companies, in an attempt to drive independents like Urschel out of the market, escalated their overproduction to bring the price down to a quarter, and then a dime. The independents needed FDR to step in and establish price controls and production quotas. The President eventually would come to Urschel’s aid, but not in the way he was hoping, or even imagining.

  * * *

  Tom Slick was the best thing that had ever happened to Charles F. Urschel, a poor farm boy from Ohio who worked his way out of the Midwest by translating his love of numbers into accounting skills and a number of jobs that allowed him to polish his craft and save enough money to leave the farming life behind. Barely twenty years old, he packed what little he had, boarded a southbound train and headed to Oklahoma to make his fortune in the oil business. There he found a job with oilman Charles B. Shaffer, with whom Slick had also gone to work.

  Slick was coming off a string of spectacular failures and had teamed up with Shaffer, who was about the only other oilman who believed in the potential of the Cushing oil fields. Slick was buying up leases and drilling as secretly as it is possible to drill, hoping to strike gold and buy up the surrounding land before the competition could get word of the find. When he hit a gusher in the middle of winter in the middle of the night in 1912, he capped it off quickly and told his crew to hold tight and spread the word that the well was proving a disappointment. But the shroud of secrecy could only hold for so long, and when word leaked out the industry pounced.