by Joe Urschel
I hate and despise the government for their crooked dealings and do not wish them to convict people as innocent of that crime and guilty of one thing—talking to me. I can take care of my end and will the way I want to. You might state for Mr. Keenan’s benefit that he has never come anywhere near catching me, although I have been in Oklahoma City four nights and up town each day.
We will see how the trial progresses and can adjust our end accordingly. I am putting my prints on this so you will know it is genuine.
Yours truly,
Geo. R. Kelly
Nathan had reunited the Arnolds, bringing Flossie Mae into Oklahoma City, where he waited for the Kellys to make contact. On Thursday, September 21, they did. Kathryn penned a letter to Flossie Mae writing in coded language about what a good job Luther had done arranging the legal team to defend her in court.
Dear Midge,
How are you? I am just fine, so is the baby. She has a lot of new clothes. Shoes, and etc. She is having a nice time. Tell the “boy friend” I want him to drop me a letter to the below address and tell me what is needed when he wants to meet me, etc. Tell him his friend has been swell in my estimation, and I believe I will have my part here fixed within the next week anyway as I am waiting on some New York people. If he wants me at any time write that address, below, and tell him anything he can do for those people, to do it.… I am taking care of the baby honey. She’s never out of my sight, and be careful to take care of my clothes for they are all I have so don’t lose them … Communicate with—Burt Edwards, 1150 S. Michigan Ave. Chicago, Ill.
After weeks of near-misses, the Bureau finally had a solid lead on the Kellys. Nathan called Purvis in Chicago. He gave him the address of the Michigan Tavern and told him the Kellys were using it as a communications center. Stake it out. When they show up, grab them.
By then, Caplan had obtained a car from Joe Bergl for the Kellys and dropped it off at a tire store so that it could be equipped with four new tires and two spares. He told the Kellys to meet him at the tavern at 9:30 a.m.
On September 21, George, Kathryn and Geraldine went into the Michigan Tavern and told the bartender they were there to see Caplan. They then took a seat in a booth and ordered two beers, some pretzels and a soda for Geraldine. Caplan joined them a few minutes later and plopped a whiskey bottle down on the table, giving Geraldine a quizzical look.
“She’s all right,” said George. “She’s a nice little girl.”
Caplan told Kelly the car was ready and could be picked up at the General Tire Company at Twenty-third and Cottage Grove. Kelly handed over $265, shook hands, grabbed Kathryn and Geraldine, got in a taxi and drove off to get their new ride.
That very morning, Purvis finally got around to following up on his instructions to stake out the Michigan Tavern. He put two agents on it, but before heading to Michigan Avenue, they went to the post office to interview the tavern’s mail carrier and see if they could intercept any interesting deliveries. They were too late. The carrier was already on his route.
When they managed to catch up to him outside the tavern, they quizzed him about suspicious special deliveries going in and out. Of course, no postal clerk servicing the Michigan Tavern would last very long giving information to the cops, so not surprisingly, the postman gave up nothing the agents found useful. They got back in their car and returned to the Bureau downtown.
Had they gone inside the Tavern to look around, they would have found the Kellys sitting in the booth with Geraldine.
When Hoover discovered what had happened he went ballistic. His favorite agent had blown the best tip they’d had for nabbing Kelly. Why had he waited? What reason was there for the delay? Time was of the essence and he let a notorious kidnapper slip through his grasp. This was unconscionable. “This,” lamented Hoover in a note he put in Purvis’s file, “was a miserable piece of work.”
Purvis and his men were about to let a second prized capture slip through their fingers. Purvis had received a tip that a close friend of Verne Miller’s girl, Vi Mathias, was living at the Sherone Apartments on Sheridan Road. They put the apartment under surveillance and discovered that Mathias herself had moved in. One of Purvis’s junior agents, Johnny Madala, moved into the apartment building to keep her under surveillance. When a man answering to Miller’s description showed up, Madala phoned in the information and agent Ed Guinane arrived with a team of agents and Chicago policemen. They surrounded the apartment and waited.
The next morning, Miller emerged and disappeared down a hallway as the lawmen in Madala’s apartment delayed while trying to make a positive identification as their frustrated junior agent kept insisting in a stage whisper, “It’s Miller! It’s Miller!”
By the time Miller was jumping in his car, agent Lew Nichols caught up to him and ran after the fleeing car shouting, “Stop!”
Miller turned and fired two shots at Nichols, uncharacteristically missing with both. Nichols returned fire as panicked pedestrians screamed and ran for cover. A state trooper sprayed the car with a burst of machine-gun fire, but it sped away. Despite a citywide police alert, Miller disappeared.
(While the agents had earlier been chasing Miller in cities like Chicago, Detroit and New York, he’d been on a cross-country road trip visiting the nation’s top resorts and playing golf on some of its finest courses.)
* * *
On Monday, August 31, signed confessions from Ora, Oleta and Armon Shannon were handed over to the prosecutor. Salter said they would be included in the evidence presented on Wednesday by U.S. Attorney Herbert Hyde. In Washington, DC, Joseph Keenan boarded a plane headed for Oklahoma City.
(The kidnapping scourge continued unabated even as Keenan was headed toward the airport. Dr. E. L. Beck, a noted Texarkana surgeon, had just started up his car and was leaving the hospital when a masked man jumped on his running board, stuck a gun in through the window and ordered him to stop. Another man jumped in the passenger seat and the gunman got in back and ordered him to drive away.)
In Dallas, reporters pressed the Bureau’s agents for details about the confessions, but they stayed mum.
“No person outside the government service knows what is in those statements and no one can know until the proper time. It is our policy when a statement is given to us to protect it. We must on account of prospective witnesses and the like and we do, even if it tears the hide off,” said agent Frank Blake.
“We have to do one thing above all else: to stop this kidnapping business. We have to make victims realize they can tell us whatever they want to and that their confidence will be respected. We have got to treat the statements of witnesses—codefendants or otherwise—in the same way. We have to protect them to that extent. It might be bad indeed for certain persons on the outside to find out who made this or that confession and what they said.”
Blake was well aware that witness intimidation and witness elimination were part and parcel of the gang business. The Bureau had a cooperative witness and victim in Charles Urschel. With everything that was going on, they did not want him getting cold feet. He, his wife and their associates were ready and eager to testify in the most important case in the Bureau’s history. Nothing was being left to chance.
On Monday, the county sheriff’s department ordered in twenty machine guns for the guards who would surround the courthouse when the grand jury convened on Wednesday. Six deputies had spent two weeks being trained to operate the weapons expertly. Each witness would be guarded by federal agents armed with submachine guns and automatics. U.S. Attorney Hyde announced that the grand jury would deliberate behind an armed wall, which “will result in an impregnable barrage of gunfire should any desperate effort be made to approach witnesses or principals in the Urschel case.”
Hyde also announced that if indictments were handed up by the grand jury, he would seek an immediate trial.
“While this is a matter completely discretionary with the court,” Hyde said, “I will ask that it be given precedence over all pending cri
minal matters. I hope to see it go to trial not later than the first week in September. We will not wait for the arrest of George Kelly. Evidence on hand is sufficient to convict nearly all of those now held, even if we do not ask Urschel or others who contacted the kidnappers to testify.”
Meanwhile, Keenan had arrived in Kansas City to assess the case the county prosecutors there had against Bailey. They wanted to tag him for murder in the Kansas City Massacre. If they could, they would send him to the chair. Keenan wanted Bailey taken down by the federal prosecutors in the Urschel case and he was virtually certain of success. Conversely, the county prosecutor in Kansas City had very little evidence to go on. His case was weak. Nevertheless, he wanted to take a crack at it on the basis of just two eyewitnesses that could identify Bailey as one of the shooters.
Keenan knew how things worked in Kansas City, the biggest organized crime empire west of Chicago. Bailey’s connections could buy an acquittal if they didn’t simply decide to spring him from jail. In Oklahoma City, the shoe was on the other foot. It was the victim who had the courts on his side. It was the victim whom the police wanted to protect. No, it would be in Oklahoma City where Bailey would go on trial with Charles Urschel’s longtime friend and hunting partner, Edgar Vaught, sitting on the bench. Keenan, with the force of the federal government behind him, made it clear Bailey would not be moved to Kansas City. He’d stand trial in Oklahoma, where the kidnapping occurred. And the federal government would get the credit for bringing down the nation’s most notorious bank robber.
The next day, he made the announcement that Bailey and ten others would be tried in Oklahoma City. He would seek life sentences for every one. On the morning the grand jury convened, three county sheriffs in suits and ties appeared on the front page of the newspapers showing off their new weaponry. The caption gave the details: “George Kerr is shown demonstrating a Thompson submachine gun similar to those used by Charles F. Urschel’s kidnappers. [Tom] Miler in the center, is holding a heavy Browning automatic rifle of a type especially developed by the army to pierce armor plates. Bullets from this gun will rip through the armored cars used by many eastern gangsters. [Earl] Gordon is demonstrating a new gas gun, with its seven-inch cartridge. One shot would start tears in the eyes of every person within fifty yards. These are the types of guns that will be used by officers during the federal grand jury quiz of the Urschel kidnap suspects which opens Wednesday.”
The grand jury’s decision didn’t take long. Twenty-one witnesses, including the Urschels and the Jarretts, testified. The jury deliberated and handed up indictments for fourteen people, including Kelly, Bates, Bailey, the Shannons and five underworld figures from St. Paul who’d been caught passing or laundering Urschel ransom money.
Keenan took to the stage immediately to announce the government’s “new deal” in the War on Crime, which he said would soon lead to the “hanging and electrocution” of the nation’s racketeers. The case would go to trial in two weeks.
The measured Ivy Leaguer said the federal government intended to stamp out organized crime even if it had to use the United States Army to do it. With a hint of a smirk, he added that that would not be necessary.
“We are ready to meet the challenge of these gangsters fearlessly and with our own weapons. We are in deadly earnest and this statement is made with no desire to be melodramatic,” he said.
“Representatives of the federal government in Washington are very much pleased with the cooperation received locally in this case. They are pleased with the dispatch with which the matter was handled, with the earnest attention given it by Judge Edgar S. Vaught, Herbert K. Hyde, the U.S. Attorney and the grand jury.
“We appreciate fully the patriotic response of Mr. Urschel in casting aside personal considerations. It is encouraging to the government in its drive to wipe out gangster depredation in which he offered his services as a witness. The federal government will respond by giving Mr. Urschel and his family full protection. Neither Mr. Urschel nor anyone else will be left to further fear attacks of the underworld,” Keenan concluded.
* * *
As he was speaking, William F. Wood, a cousin of President William Howard Taft, was being held captive by kidnappers in California. Howard Meek had kidnapped Wood, and tortured him relentlessly while trying to determine the extent of his wealth. After learning Wood had large amounts of cash and securities in his safe-deposit box, Meek took him to the bank and forced him to withdraw it.
With more than $10,000 in his pockets, Meek decided to indulge himself as he and his captive walked through San Francisco’s crowded Market Street. He bought a bag of walnuts and, as he struggled to crack one open, Wood shouted to a nearby policeman, “Get that man! He’s got a gun!” and started running away.
Patrolman Michael McDonald looked over at the gesticulating Wood, but before he could respond, Meek drew his gun and fired, hitting McDonald three times as pedestrians on the crowded street scrambled for cover. The wounded McDonald chased Meek, who was firing wildly over his shoulder, wounding an elderly woman in the process. McDonald continued his pursuit, chasing Meek as he unknowingly ran toward two other officers, who shot him dead. McDonald, a forty-year-old father of six, died a short time later.
* * *
Kidnapping out West had been so rare prior to the ’30s that states rarely saw the need to address it with stiff penalties. Armed robbery, however, was quite another matter. On the roads that traversed the wide-open prairies and high deserts, holding up travelers at gunpoint was a practice that had a long tradition dating back to the early settlers. As automobile travel exploded in the ’20s and ’30s, hijackings and holdups proliferated, and the sparsely staffed, underfinanced sheriff’s departments could do little to stop it.
In Oklahoma, the state legislature tried to solve the problem by passing a draconian law designed to instill fear in any criminal who would contemplate holding up some innocent traveler on the road. They made highway robbery a crime punishable by death in the electric chair. The irony of the fact that Kelly and Bates could fry for stealing $50 from Jarrett, but not for kidnapping Urschel, holding him against his will for nine days and ransoming him for $200,000, was not lost on Joseph Keenan. But there was no way he was going to allow two notorious outlaws to be convicted for a $50 highway robbery and be sentenced to death before he got the chance to put the power of the federal government on display on the national stage. Keenan, Cummings and Hoover needed a big victory in their first prosecution to fuel their drive for federal laws and federal law enforcement. They were not about to let some county prosecutor take that opportunity away from them.
Nevertheless, Keenan would not let the gross incongruity go to waste. On Monday, September 11, he announced that following the federal kidnapping trial, he would assist County Attorney Lewis R. Morris in seeking the death penalty for Bates and Kelly for the armed robbery of Walter Jarrett during his abduction from the home of Charles Urschel the night of the kidnapping.
“This offense carries the death penalty in Oklahoma and we feel that the good citizens of Oklahoma would not be averse to bringing the desperate criminals to the bar of justice in that court,” he stated.
* * *
George had learned from his brief stay in Chicago that his usual contacts could not, or would not, be of much help to him. In fact, they wanted him gone. Capone’s lieutenant, Frank Nitti, had put the word out that Kelly was “too hot.” So with their plans to lie low in Chicago thwarted, the Kellys, with their adopted daughter in the backseat, got back on the road and headed to the city where Kelly had launched his criminal career: Memphis, Tennessee.
While Kelly was driving south, Alvin Karpis was putting to work the armor-plated car that Joe Bergl had customized for him. With the Barkers, George Ziegler and Bryan Bolton, he handily stole a cartload of sacks thought to contain cash and securities from two bank employees under armed guards who were wheeling them out of the Federal Reserve Bank. They pulled the heist off flawlessly, but in his haste to get away qui
ckly, Karpis slammed into an oncoming car. The accident happened right in front of two Chicago cops walking their beat. As they approached the cars, Bolton began firing his submachine-gun, killing one of the patrolmen.
Within hours, news of the machine-gun murder and bank robbery was blanketing the Chicago papers and blaring from the radio. Purvis and the Bureau announced that the prime suspects were Machine Gun Kelly, Verne Miller and Pretty Boy Floyd.
The investigation led them straight to Joe Bergl and turned up a pair of octagonal glasses, the very type known to be worn by Kelly.
Based on the very slim evidence he had, Purvis called a press conference and announced that the machine gun that had killed Chicago police officer Miles Cunningham was the same one that had been used in the Kansas City Massacre. The nationwide hunt for Kelly and his fashionable wife had just intensified tenfold.
The Kellys made it to Memphis a few days later and moved back into Tichenor’s house on East Raynor Street. Once there, they no longer needed the kid for cover. What they were going to need was a lot more money. Once again, Kelly turned to his brother-in-law, Langford Ramsey, for help.
Kelly persuaded Ramsey to drive back to Texas with Geraldine as his guide to retrieve the rest of the ransom money, which was buried at the Coleman farm. After that, Kelly wanted him to reunite Geraldine with her parents at the boardinghouse in Oklahoma City and bring back the rest of Kit’s wardrobe, which Flossie Mae was holding there.
So Geraldine, who had just endured a six-hundred-mile journey in the backseat of the Kellys’ car bouncing along back roads, got back into the car with a perfect stranger for the final leg of her summer road trip, heading back to the desolate prairies of wasted West Texas. After two days on the road, they arrived at the Coleman farm at 5:00 a.m.
Ramsey tried to introduce himself to Coleman and explain what he was after. But Coleman, realizing he was being watched round the clock, was not about to tell some clean-cut “lawyer” whom he’d never met where the Urschel ransom was buried, especially one that was traveling with an exasperated twelve-year-old kid.
