The Year of Fear

by Joe Urschel

  With that information in hand, Urschel offered to borrow a plane from one of his friendly competitors. They could retrace the American Airways flight path from a lower altitude and see if they could spot the farm from the air.

  It didn’t take long until they were focused on Wise County, Texas, and the farms around the oxymoronically named town of Paradise. From the air they spotted a locale that matched Jones’s drawing.

  Jones sent agent Edward Dowd in under the guise of a banker offering to refinance farm mortgages under more favorable terms. The agent found himself on a farm that matched Urschel’s description to the letter and the map in his pocket almost to the inch.

  He talked with Boss Shannon as he made mental notes on the farm and its makeup. Boss mentioned that he had a smaller farm just a short piece down the road, run by his son. Dowd said he’d like to see it. Once he got to Armon’s place, he chatted up the teenager and feigned thirst. Armon drew water up from the well. The pulley squeaked horribly and the water had a disgusting mineral taste. The agent wondered where a lonely guy might find some female companionship in the area.

  Armon said there was a sixteen-year-old hooker not a stone’s throw away and he’d be happy to put him in touch. Bingo. The animals and their various counts also matched Urschel’s description.

  Dowd took out his handkerchief and mopped his brow, complaining that the sun was killing him. Could he take a look inside and get out of the blistering heat for a minute or two?

  Once inside, Dowd cased the room. He saw the iron bed and the high chair to which Urschel had been chained. He saw a long wooden bench and the cracked mirror Urschel had used to shave. He checked the floorboards. They ran east to west, just as Urschel had described. There was no doubt in his mind. This is where the kidnapping victim had been held.

  Dowd nonchalantly finished up his conversation with Armon and casually headed back out of the farm. Once out and enough distance away that he would not arouse suspicion, he raced straight to the first pay phone he could find and filled Jones in on what he’d found. Jones immediately called Hoover and gave him the good news.

  Hoover told Jones to move in and move fast. Use whatever force necessary, but try to take them alive. Hoover wanted a big, showy trial to put his handiwork on display for the nation to admire, and he couldn’t do it if everyone ended up dead. Jones understood and set to planning the assault.

  Dowd had not noticed any fortifications at the Shannon farm, and its occupants appeared rather nonthreatening. Boss was wily, but old and rather frail. Armon, the simpleton, seemed harmless. Still, their place had been used to hide the nation’s most famous kidnapping victim and was as notorious as a safe house for bootleggers and bank robbers. Who knows what, or who, they would find there on their return. The little digging that they’d had time to do confirmed the fact that there had been a lot of traffic in and out of the farm by big, fancy cars not usually found in rural Texas. Shannon had a somewhat nefarious reputation, but had never been associated with anything felonious or violent. His stepdaughter, however, was married to the man whose name was on the list of suspects wanted in connection with the massacre at Union Station in Kansas City, George Machine Gun Kelly.

  Jones needed to assemble a raiding party fast, and he wanted it to be big and well-armed. He brought in two legendary Bureau agents, James “Doc” White and Charles Winstead, both former Texas lawmen who were known for their skills with a variety of weapons. (A year later, it would be Winstead’s bullet that would bring down John Dillinger.) He then recruited Deputy Sheriff Bill Eads of Oklahoma City and a cadre of policemen from Fort Worth and Dallas whom he thought he could trust. But Jones was taking no chances. He told them he needed their help making an arrest, but he could not say who they were going after or specifically where they were going. He did not want any information leaking out and giving the farm’s residents a chance to bolt. He also called J. T. Faith, the sheriff of Wise County, and asked him to join the force he was assembling to make an arrest in his county.

  The group was told to meet in Denton, Texas, and the plans would be made from there.

  Urschel insisted on going along, as well, and although Jones went through the formalities of trying to talk him out of it on professional grounds and for matters of his own personal safety, he was happy Urschel refused to back off.

  Urschel was the only one who could make a positive identification of whoever they found when they got to the farm. Also, Urschel was an expert marksman, a trained soldier and, most of all, motivated to bring his kidnappers to justice—the very qualities Jones would look for in any assault team member.

  When they met up in Denton, they waited and waited for J. T. Faith. That was worrisome. Had Faith double-crossed them? Had the Shannons been alerted that something was up? If so, had they fled the scene, or were they arming up for a fight?

  The group loaded into three cars and headed toward Paradise, the final destination being known only to Urschel, Jones and his agents. When they got to Decatur, still short of their destination, Jones pulled over. The sun was getting low, and he worried about running out of sunlight.

  “Boys, we’ve got about twenty-six miles to go over slow roads. We might reach the place to finish the job before dark, but even if we did I doubt if we could finish the job before it got black. I’ve done enough shootin’ in my time not to want to go barging into a strange place where the odds are all on the other side. My judgment is to back off, go down to Fort Worth and get a little sleep, then hit this place at sunrise.”

  He picked up a stick and started drawing in the dust.

  “This is the way that place is laid out: there is only one road into it, and that is plain as the devil. We can’t creep in on the place because it is so flat you can see an ant a mile off. The only way to get in there is to just bang straight in, and for that we need daylight. We’ll back off now and hit her in the morning,” Jones concluded.

  They drove to Fort Worth and checked into a hotel and prepared for the next day’s work.

  In the morning, Urschel got into the lead car with Jones and cradled his double-barreled shotgun across his legs. A young Fort Worth detective in the backseat wondered out loud about where they were going and who they were going after.

  With that, Charles turned around.

  “I thought you knew. I’m Charles Urschel, the man Machine Gun Kelly kidnapped. We’re going after him.”

  They stopped about a mile from the farm and waited for the sun to come up, pacing quietly behind their parked cars and smoking cigarettes nervously. The plan was pretty simple. The cars would drive slowly and quietly until they got close to the farmhouse. The lead car would then speed to the farmhouse and the men would jump out and get it surrounded. The second car would race to the barn and be ready to take on whoever might be stationed there. The third car would be stationed in between, ready to react to whatever developed at the other two locations.

  Jones told them to expect some “fireworks,” and the teams loaded into their assigned cars and drove silently toward the Shannon farm as the Saturday sun began to rise.

  When he got within sight of the farm, Jones gunned the engine for the final approach. In the driveway, he stopped quickly in front of the house as his men jumped off the running boards and out of the car to surround the house.

  As Jones and Urschel approached the front porch, an angry Boss Shannon came around the corner, hurriedly pulling suspenders up over his shoulders. “Hey, what do you think you are doing here?” he barked.

  Urschel leveled his shotgun at Shannon’s forehead. “That’s the old man who guarded me,” he said as Shannon froze in his tracks and went white. As the agents moved in to cuff the protesting old man, Jones warily trotted off toward the backyard, wielding his submachine gun.

  There was a man in his underwear lying motionless on a cot. His clothes were folded neatly at the foot of the cot. Beside the cot was a Winchester rifle and a Colt .45. Jones rounded the cot to get a look at the man’s face. It was unmistakable:
the graying, thick, wavy hair, the handsome jawline. Damn. It was Harvey Bailey. What a prize. The most successful bank robber in modern history. A man so wily and clever he walked in and out of jails and prisons with virtual abandon. It seemed as if Jones and his colleagues had been hunting Bailey and his gang their entire careers. And there he was. Sleeping like a baby under the Texas stars. Jones brushed Bailey’s nose with the business end of his submachine gun.

  Bailey didn’t move a muscle as he blinked his eyes open and looked over the barrel of the machine gun at Jones’s expressionless face.

  “Go ahead. Reach for it,” said Jones.

  Bailey didn’t move.

  “Get up, Harvey,” said Jones. “Who’s here with you?”

  Bailey just kept staring in silence.

  “Harvey,” said Jones bobbing the machine gun. “If a head pops up anywhere around here, or a shot is fired, I promise, I’ll cut you in half with this.”

  Bailey smiled, sat up and stretched his long frame.

  “I’m here alone,” he said. “You have me. Hell, a fella’s gotta sleep sometime.”

  Jones had no way of knowing it, but Bailey had stopped by the Shannon ranch frequently in recent days. He had been there before with his compatriots from the Lansing breakout, “Big Bob” Brady and Ed Davis. Bailey had borrowed Kelly’s machine gun to use on the bank job he’d recently pulled with Brady and Davis, and was returning it. Plus, Kelly owed him some money, and Bailey wanted to collect while Kelly was still flush from the kidnapping job. The three had joined the Shannons for dinner the night before. Brady and Davis wanted to move on, but Bailey opted to lie low at the farm for a while, as was his usual method after a bank job. Plus his wounded leg was still hurting and he needed to see a doctor. Had Jones not canceled the raid the night before, he would have been walking right into a house full of gangsters on the run and ready for a fight.

  Inside the house, the agents found two children and Ora Shannon, who was raising holy hell, protesting and spitting out invectives. “Don’t tell ’em nothing!” she screamed at her husband as Jones cuffed him and Bailey to a fence.

  Jones left a few men behind to guard Bailey and the Shannons, and then he, Urschel and the rest of the raiding team headed down to Armon’s farm and the shed where Urschel had been held.

  With the house surrounded, they went in to find a nervous Armon along with his seventeen-year-old wife and their one-year-old baby. Urschel pointed out all the items he had described in his deposition: the metal bed, the bench, the high chair he’d been chained to, which was now occupied by Armon’s screaming infant. There was the cracked mirror he’d used to shave, the places he’d stuck his fingerprints.

  After all the outbuildings had been searched and found empty, Jones pulled the trembling Armon into one of them for a little heart-to-heart. By the end of their “fatherly chat” Armon had given up the names of the kidnappers—George Kelly and Al Bates—and also admitted he and Boss had been the ones who guarded Urschel while he was being held in the shack.

  Before the agents loaded Bailey and the Shannons into their cars for the ride to Dallas, where they were bringing them for booking, Urschel walked up to Ora. With characteristic sarcasm, he doffed his hat and thanked her for the tasty fried chicken dinner she had prepared and served to him the first night he arrived at the farm. Eyeing Armon, he added that it was the only decent thing he’d had to eat all week.

  As the string of cars were driving on the farm road away from the Shannons’, Sheriff Faith was speeding in from the opposite direction. He pulled to the side and hopped out, raising his hand to get the caravan to stop.

  As Jones, driving the lead car, approached, he floored the accelerator and passed within a foot of the sheriff, spraying him with gravel and leaving him in a cloud of red Texas dust. The trailing cars did likewise.

  * * *

  Al Bates, Kelly’s partner, had left town as soon as the ransom was divvied up. He was heading for St. Paul, where he and Kelly were planning to have substantial portions of their loot laundered through the city’s robust gambling scene.

  He boarded a train in Omaha bound for Denver on Friday night, while Bailey, Brady and Davis were feasting with the Shannons. While walking through the car looking for a seat, he passed a detective from the American Express Company who recognized him instantly. American Express had been looking for Bates for nearly a year. Bates had been passing traveler’s checks stolen from a Tupelo, Mississippi bank, and the company had sent their own operatives out looking for him. The American Express detective stayed on the train with Bates until he disembarked in Denver. There, he alerted the local police, hoping they’d make a move on Bates.

  Bates had earlier stolen a late-model Buick Victoria Coupe that he planned to use to duck around the country while trading out his money for some safer bills. He’d picked it up from the safe garage where it had been hidden and drove to the rooming house where he’d rented a room. But his luck was running bad. Another happenstance encounter was about to do him in.

  Two Denver patrolmen recognized the stolen car as Bates sat inside listening to the radio. They took him out of the car and told him they were bringing him downtown for questioning. He had thirty-three bills from the Urschel loot in his pocket and he knew that would not look good. Under questioning, Bates admitted to stealing the car, but also confessed to robbing a bank in Texas, where he said he’d be willing to return to stand trial. This was a common ruse. Confess to a lesser crime to avoid detection on a bigger one. Bates also had more police connections in Texas, and if he could get back there his chance to avoid extradition was good, as was his ability to escape.

  From his jail cell in Denver, he was able to smuggle a note to a prison trusty. “Get this to my wife. She’s got money and will pay you handsomely if you do,” Bates’s note explained. The trusty was able to get the note to Bates’s alleged wife, one Clara Feldman. Clara was guarding a large portion of Bates’s take on the Urschel kidnapping. The cryptic note said: “There is nothing you can do for me. Move.”

  Feldman prepared to flee Denver, but before she did she sent a telegram to Ed Weatherford in Fort Worth, who Kathryn Kelly had claimed was sympathetic and on the Kellys’ payroll. Weatherford turned the telegram over to the local Bureau agents, who alerted the Denver office. The agents sped to the Denver jail, where they identified Bates’s cash as part of the Urschel ransom and claimed the prisoner as their own, aborting the plans for extradition to Texas. Instead, several days later, they put the shackled Bates in an airplane and flew him to Oklahoma City.

  There to greet him were Charles and Berenice Urschel, who immediately identified him as one of the two kidnappers who’d burst onto their sunporch just a few weeks earlier.

  “That’s him all right,” said Berenice. “I’m so glad to see him like that,” she said eyeing the heavy chains. “He didn’t have on those gold-rimmed spectacles that night, but he is the one.”

  Charles walked up to Bates, looked him in the eye, and said, “Hello, Albert.”

  Bates looked at him coolly and said with mock haughtiness, “I don’t believe I know you.”

  Charles stared back and, after a moment, began to chuckle. In response, Bates did too.

  7

  THE MANHUNT

  Jones raced his captured prey from Paradise straight to Dallas, where he put them in jail and immediately got the U.S. Attorney to begin the removal proceedings to get the group extradited to Oklahoma City, where they could be tried in federal court. Boss Shannon was well connected locally, and Jones knew if he stayed in Dallas long enough his friends would work the system to find a friendly judge, or one that could be bought. Jones was not one of Hoover’s law-degreed gumshoes, but he’d been around the criminal justice system his entire life and he knew how it worked, especially in Texas.

  Harvey Bailey, an escaped federal prisoner with a murder warrant hanging over his head in the Kansas City Massacre case, could not fight his extradition back to Oklahoma City. What Jones worried about wit
h Bailey was that he’d escape, or that a collection of his criminal buddies would bust him out somehow. Dallas boasted an “escape-proof” new jail, and Jones moved Bailey there until the kidnapping trial could get under way in Oklahoma.

  Jones had just made the biggest arrests in the new attorney general’s War on Crime, but he wasn’t doing any victory laps. He knew there would be hell to pay if he allowed his captives to escape or avoid trial on some shady legal maneuver. He still had doubts about Bailey’s involvement in the Kansas City Massacre, but tying him to the kidnapping was fortuitous indeed. Plus, the Kellys and Bates were still on the lam. Soon, their names and descriptions would be blaring on every police radio in the nation and carried in newspapers from New York to Los Angeles. Once that happened, he feared they’d disappear into the protection of some criminal mob, or flee the country altogether.

  On Hoover’s instructions, Jones asked the local press to hold news of the raid for 48 hours to give his men a chance to nab the Kellys and Bates before they went into hiding. It was a big ask, but after some forceful negotiation, they agreed. Hoover also made it clear that Jones should release only the bare facts about the raid and how they found the farm. Specifically, he did not want any of Urschel’s statements from his interview about the plane flights over the farm or the hidden fingerprints or the fact that Urschel had been with the agents during the raid released. Hoover was trying to build a case and he wanted to keep as much information under wraps as he could before the trial began. He also wanted to protect his star witness.

  The raid on the Shannon farm had turned up a receipt from Kelly’s friendly Cleveland Cadillac dealership. Colvin had called Washington immediately after the raid to report that “Kelly, with two other men and a woman, was traveling in a sixteen-cylinder blue-black Cadillac, a 1932 model, motor number 1400263, a nine-passenger, specially constructed, very large car, which was purchased by Mrs. Kelly under the name of Mrs. Ora L. Shannon.” He said he had intercepted a letter that indicated the Kellys planned to return there on August 10 or August 11 to purchase a twelve-cylinder convertible coupe on which they’d already made a $500 deposit. He had alerted the Cincinnati office and they had dispatched agents to “cover the Cleveland angle.”