The Year of Fear

by Joe Urschel

  UNCLE SAM, DETECTIVE.

  It must have been a good moment for Attorney General Homer Cummings when he was able to announce the capture of Harvey Bailey one of the king pin criminals of the Nation. Not only is this the man who led the break from the Kansas Penitentiary on Memorial Day, when a warden and two guards were kidnaped; not only is he the man who has been identified as the ring leader in the Kansas City Union Station massacre, when five men were mowed down by machine gun bullets; this Harvey Bailey is the kidnaper of Charles F. Urschel, who was snatched from his home in Oklahoma City and held until his family had paid $200,000 ransom.… The most important feature about the Bailey arrest, however, is the credit which it reflects on the Federal machinery for crime detection. Definite steps have been taken by the Roosevelt administration to strangle the kidnaping racket by means of a central agency in Washington. Nothing feasible offers such promise of relief from this national disease as the establishment of confidence among the people in the ability of the United States Government to crush the kidnapers. When such confidence is achieved, the families of kidnap victims may no longer try to hide their dealings from the proper authorities, as they now do most frequently in the hope of negotiating directly with the criminals. The successful handling of the Urschel case should go far to impress the public with Uncle Sam’s superior ability to deal with kidnapers.

  The Courier-Journal got a similar note of appreciation from the Bureau’s director.

  While Hoover was accepting the praise for his department and ramping up its publicity machine, the hunt for Kelly spread out across the nation. A motorcycle officer in Oklahoma City came forward and revealed that he had formerly had a drinking buddy who was an ex-con. One night, on a drunk, the ex-con told the officer that he had information about “something that may do you some good.”

  The con said, “I was a cell mate in the penitentiary with a boy named George Kelly. Two days before those officers and Frank Nash were killed in Kansas City, I met George Kelly and another man in Tulsa. They went to a house where they cleaned and oiled two machine guns and said they were then on their way to Kansas City.”

  It was just about all the Bureau had in trying to tie Kelly to the Kansas massacre, but despite their efforts they could not locate the ex-con and were too stretched to chase down the lead.

  * * *

  On Thursday, August 17, five days after the raid at Paradise, rumors that gangsters were planning to spring Bailey started hitting the papers. The Dallas police boasted that extra patrols were guarding the roads in and out of the city. Even so, Bailey had already bragged to reporters that no cell could hold him.

  On August 18, The Dallas News answered these threats and boasts with a proud description of just how tough it would be for Bailey to slip free from the new jail. Under the headline Seven Barred Doors or Grills Face Gangsters if they try to Spring Bailey from Jail, the story contained a detailed description of what “a gang of gangsters or a mob of mobsters” would encounter in their attempt to even get to Bailey:

  On the first floor they would have to fight their way through the lobby of the Criminal Courts Building to reach the heavy door that gives into the outer lobby of the jail. Similar difficulty would be encountered if they approached from the rear through the alley at the entrance of which is a high, barred gate.

  If they succeeded in reaching the door they would have to crash it and then fight their way another fifteen feet to reach the ceiling-to-floor heavy steel grill in the main lobby of the jail. Then they would have to crash that door and fight their way to another door in the elevator corridor.

  Should they succeed in riding the elevator to the floor where the prisoner is held, then they would face another ceiling-high grill of heavy steel bars. Still between the raiders and the cell block would be a barred door. Passing this door there would yet be between them and their quarry the heavy bars surrounding the corridor, and the inside corridor, the cell door itself.

  Jones wanted to leave Bailey in the Dallas jail until he was ready for trial in Oklahoma City rather than risk losing him in transit or putting him in the far less secure jail in Oklahoma.

  * * *

  The U.S. Attorney had told Jones that even if the judge ruled speedily on the extradition of the Shannons, they could appeal. The appeal would be scheduled for a later date, and who knew when he’d be able to get them out of Texas. Hoover and the team in Washington were intent on bringing this case to a successful climax fast and decisively. Jones knew all too well how the law worked in Texas. He hatched his own plan for getting his captives out of the state, and fast. It had its own elements of Texas-style law.

  On the morning of the hearing, Jones arranged a chartered flight to fly them directly to Oklahoma City immediately afterward. Before the proceedings began, Jones’s men pulled their cars up to the base of the stairs in front of the courthouse, leaving the doors open and the engines running. Timing would be all-important. A speedy departure was critical to the success of his plan.

  Jones pulled the court clerk aside for a private conversation. He explained what was about to happen and how the clerk should behave. The Shannons’ attorney would almost certainly be filing an appeal. The clerk would be responsible for making certain all of the documents were properly prepared. Jones did not want the clerk to rush the process. In fact, he made it clear the clerk should delay as long as possible. Stall.

  When the judge ruled in the government’s favor, Jones’s men hustled the three Shannons out of the courtroom toward the waiting car.

  As they did, the Shannons’ attorney leapt to his feet and told the judge he intended to file an immediate appeal.

  Go right ahead, said the judge. “There’s the clerk right over there.”

  “But, your honor, those federal agents are rushing my clients out of the courtroom.”

  The judge explained that the agents were perfectly within their rights and there was nothing he could do about it until the appeal was filed.

  The attorney then hustled across the room with the appeal papers and demanded the clerk hurry up and stamp them for approval.

  The clerk, affecting an officious air, explained that he would have to examine them carefully and make sure they were in the proper order. He doddled, while the attorney fumed. When he finally stamped the approval, the attorney grabbed them, raced across the courtroom and handed them to the bemused judge. He leafed through the papers, stalling a little longer then looked down at the lawyer and announced that the appeal was granted.

  With that, the attorney grabbed the bailiff and raced from the courtroom to chase down Jones, who was already driving the Shannons to the airport.

  Jones drove his captives onto the runway where the plane was waiting, propellers churning. Armon was hustled onto the plane, but Boss and Ora were protesting wildly. They’d never been on a plane and were terrified of the prospect.

  Ora clung to the car door and screamed as the agents pried her loose and carried her onto the aircraft. As they closed the doors and taxied down the runway, the bailiff’s car was entering the airport with the Shannon’s fuming attorney riding helplessly inside.

  After Jones had successfully spirited his prey out of Dallas, Hoover fired off a memo to Cummings crowing about the shrewd maneuvers of his agents.

  MEMORANDUM FOR THE ATTOREY [sic] GENERAL

  I thought you might be interested in a development which arose at Fort Worth, Texas, incident to the removal of the Shannons from Fort Worth to Oklahoma City for trial for the kidnaping of Mr. Urschel. The day when Judge Wilson granted the order of removal for the Shannons to be taken to Oklahoma City, the defense attorneys had a writ of habeas corpus prepared to be filed immediately following Judge Wilson’s decision. However, in the interim, the United States Marshal and Agents of this Division executed Judge Wilson’s order of removal by taking the Shannons from the Federal Building to the Municipal Airport and placed them in a plane. They were in the air within fifteen minutes after Judge Wilson’s order of removal was issued.�
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  As a matter of fact, the officers departed from the Federal Building at Fort Worth, Texas, at 12:20 p.m., and at 1:50 p.m. the Shannons were safely lodged in the Oklahoma County Jail two hundred miles away. The move of the attorneys for the defense was simply one in which they hoped to get the removal case before the Appellate Court and thereby cause a delay in removing them to the jurisdiction of the Federal Court in Oklahoma.

  Respectfully,

  J. Edgar Hoover

  Director.

  Cummings had the high-profile case in hand that stood to be his first big battle in the War on Crime, and he was tasting victory. From Washington, the focus on the case was becoming intense from the highest levels of the government. On Thursday, August 17, President Roosevelt ordered Leslie Salter, special assistant to the attorney general, to Oklahoma City to prepare indictments for the grand jury. Salter was the toughest and most successful prosecutor on Cummings’s team. In court, he was considered almost unbeatable, and his demeanor was described as that of a “vengeful, wrathful, terrible god of the Old Testament.” In New York he’d won a string of 99 convictions in the 101 cases he prosecuted. Cummings had sent him to Chicago months earlier as he was preparing to launch his War on Crime. Salter was to become a specialist in preparing cases against gangland elements, and Cummings wanted him in crime’s capital. But that would have to wait. The kidnapping case was the first in which the newly passed Lindbergh Law would be employed and he wanted it employed with eminent dispatch. If the case could be prosecuted successfully, Cummings planned to use it as an example of the need for expanded federal anticrime laws. It would become the focal point in his argument for the passage of the crime bill he was preparing, and a primary demonstration of the need for the federal police force he hoped to create.

  Salter was given explicit instructions to move the case to trial as quickly as possible. Even as reports of Kelly sightings were pouring in from Laredo, Texas, to the Canadian border, the decision was made to proceed with the prosecution of Bailey, Bates and the Shannons immediately and prosecute the Kellys separately when they were apprehended. Hoover and Cummings wanted a quick victory and a showy trial to put their agency’s handiwork on display for the nation to behold.

  Linked under the same headline that announced Salter’s return to Oklahoma City was a second story from the Associated Press out of Springtown, Arkansas, that brought news of the death of another of Bailey’s confederates. It also underscored the dangers inherent in working as a lawyer on behalf of your gangster client. It read:

  Gene Johnson, alleged confederate of Wilber Underhill’s gang of escaped Kansas convicts, was wounded fatally Thursday by a posse of officers from three states in a surprise attack at his farm.

  The posse had surrounded Johnson’s car and painted it with machine gun fire as Johnson slumped over his wife to protect her. She survived with minor wounds and Johnson’s partner Glenn Leroy Wright escaped into the woods.

  Another story out of Tulsa dissected the duo’s criminal pedigree:

  TANGLED UNDERWORLD CONNECTIONS LINK GENE JOHNSON AND GLENN LEROY WRIGHT WITH HARVEY BAILEY AND MORE DESPERATE MEMBERS OF THE SOUTHWEST’S CRIMINAL ELEMENT

  Wright is more closely connected with Bailey, now held as the brains behind the Charles F. Urschel kidnapping. He and Harry Campbell, also a fugitive [,] are wanted here as suspects in the slaying of J. Earl Smith, formerly attorney for Bailey.

  Smith was taken for a fatal ride when he failed to appear as counsel for Bailey in the Fort Scott, Kanas, bank robbery case on which Bailey was sentenced to the Kansas state penitentiary at Lansing, and from which he escaped last Memorial Day.

  Officers have advanced the theory that Bailey may have obtained the services of Campbell and Wright to dispose of Smith either because he knew too much or because he failed to act as Bailey’s lawyer after having conferred with him.

  Tulsa officers have expressed the opinion that Wright and Johnson are lesser members of the region’s most dangerous criminal ring, of which Bailey and Wilber Underhill are leaders.

  As the feds prepared their case in Oklahoma, word came from Denver that two-and-a-half bars of the cell that Bates was being held in had been sawed through. A metal pipe with a weighted end that could be used as a club was found hidden nearby. Consequently, a round-the-clock machine gunner was assigned to guard him, and he was moved to a new cell each day. The Denver police had earlier gotten reports that Kelly was headed back to Denver to free his partner. Kelly’s picture had been all over the Denver papers in conjunction with the Bates arrest. None other than Anna Lou Boettcher, whose husband’s kidnappers were still at large, reported seeing Kelly sitting in a car outside the Brown Palace Hotel. In addition to his possible escape, Jones was also worried about whether he’d even be able to get Bates out of Denver for trial in Oklahoma City.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, Salter wasted no time cutting through legal technicalities and the mountain of evidence that had been gathered by the Bureau’s agents. After conferring with Judge Edgar S. Vaught, who was holding court in New Mexico, Salter announced that a grand jury would be impaneled and indictment papers charging eleven people with complicity in the kidnapping were being prepared.

  On August 21, Agent Colvin received a tip that Kelly and other members of his gang had driven into the Henry Gramm ranch, a notorious criminal hangout in the farm country between Pawhuska and Ponca City, Oklahoma, in a Buick automobile, and were believed to still be there. Colvin immediately organized a raiding posse. He called in the sheriff of Pawhuska, who agreed to round up three or four men and meet Colvin and his agents at the Jens-Marie Hotel in Ponca City, where they would be joined by another posse from Ponca.

  Colvin’s men left Oklahoma City at 2:30 p.m. When they arrived in Ponca City at 5:00 p.m., they were shocked to find special editions of the local papers on the stands with an Associated Press story announcing that a large concentration of federal officers were heading to Osage County, where the notorious Machine Gun Kelly was believed to be hiding. By then, the Buick had left the ranch and the raid was called off.

  In a subsequent letter to Hoover, Colvin noted that the Associated Press story had a Pawhuska dateline and that the only person who knew the details of the raid was the Pawhuska sheriff.

  It appears … that we can have absolutely no faith in anyone, even officers, to treat in confidence matters which we tell them, and we will in [the] future be more discreet than ever with respect to divulging confidential information to them. You will, no doubt, realize that it is dangerous and difficult to conduct a raid or other expedition into a county without taking the county officers more or less into our confidence, especially if we ask their assistance. No one regrets more than this writer the dangerous publicity which has been had in this case.

  The Kellys had been working their way south to get back to Texas so Kathryn could find a lawyer with enough clout to get her mother and stepfather released. Along the way, the twosome tried to disguise themselves by donning worn-out clothes and farmer’s garb. Kathryn wore a red wig and George dyed his hair blond. The Kellys drove to West Texas, where Kathryn’s uncle, Cass Coleman, owned a dried-out, barren ranch. There, they buried their share of the ransom money in a large thermos and a honey jar beneath a tree behind the barn.

  The next day, Kathryn bought an old Chevy in the nearby town of Brownwood. George hid out at Cass Coleman’s place in Coleman County. Kathryn dressed in some farm-girl clothing and went off on her own in an old Ford pickup truck. On August 20, Coleman, who was getting nervous about his dangerous houseguest, arranged for him to rent a shack on the farm of his good friend Will Casey, who lived a few miles away.

  While the Kellys were hiding out in Texas, Hoover’s team was picking up evidence of Kelly’s trail from Chicago to Juarez, Mexico, but always a day or two behind his actual movements. Plus, with Kelly’s name and face featured so prominently in the national press, it seemed that every third person in the country had seen him and was phoning in a tip. The
y sent men to the border crossings into Canada in Washington State, Detroit and Buffalo, New York. Even with more than 300 agents around the country, Hoover’s men were overwhelmed and working round the clock trying to cover the vast expanse that the Kellys were believed to be passing through.

  On August 23, Casey told Kelly that he’d heard some feds were in the area asking questions. With that, Kelly packed his belongings into the Chevy sedan, drove to Coleman’s place and handed him an envelope.

  “Give that to Kathryn and tell her, ‘Mississippi.’” Then he jumped back in his car and sped away.

  A few days later, the police chief of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, called the Special Agent in Charge of the New Orleans bureau and said a man had registered at a Hattiesburg hotel under the name of R. C. Kelly of 221 South Liberty Street in New Orleans, an infamous red-light district.

  Kelly had gone to the railway express office in New Orleans and asked to buy $1,400 in traveler’s checks. The clerk didn’t have enough checks, so Kelly left. He returned at 6:00 p.m. and bought $200 in traveler’s checks in $20 denominations and a money order for $71 made out to the Ray Motor Company. The clerk became suspicious when Kelly began signing the checks using the alias W. R. Rawles. Kelly’s behavior was peculiar. He would sign one check, then go to the door and look up and down the street and then come back and sign another.

  By the time agents from New Orleans got to Hattiesburg, though, Kelly was gone. Employees at the hotel positively identified Kelly from his description and picture. They said he was neatly dressed, wearing a straw hat. He had left at 6:30 p.m. the day before in a new Plymouth Coupe with Texas license plates.

  A day later, Kelly checked into the Avilez Hotel in Biloxi, Mississippi. Fearful of being recognized if he stayed in one place too long, he moved to the Tourist Hotel three days later. There, he made the mistake of cashing some American Express traveler’s checks. A clerk identified him and alerted the police.

  Hoover scrambled his forces and sent in a team from New Orleans. But the press, triple-teaming the biggest story of the summer, got word. Kelly was walking down a Biloxi street when he heard a newsboy hawking the top story of the latest edition: “Machine Gun Kelly in Town!”