The Year of Fear

by Joe Urschel

  George Kelly told the agents that Jarrett was the “finger man” on the kidnapping. He’d been their inside man, who’d shared the Urschels’ schedule and habits and tipped them off about the infamous bridge game. He said he’d met with Jarrett on the Fourth of July at the Hopkins Hotel in Oklahoma City and then later again at the Blackstone. He said he had worked out a code with Jarrett about where his Pierce Arrow automobile should be parked to indicate that the time was right to pull the job. Though Nathan had his doubts, he put Jarrett under surveillance, but found no evidence to back up Kelly’s claim. Kelly was probably attempting to get some measure of revenge on Jarrett for cooperating with the Bureau’s agents and testifying against Bates and the Shannons. Also, if Kelly could tie Jarrett to the kidnapping, the highway robbery charge with its death penalty would no longer be a viable option for the state authorities in Oklahoma. (After his conviction, Kelly would back off this claim and admit that Jarrett had nothing to do with the kidnapping.)

  * * *

  On Sunday, October 1, agent Rorer and four others loaded the Kellys in an army plane and flew them to Oklahoma City. When they landed, a phalanx of machine gunners lined the runway and the path into the terminal. Several hundred curious onlookers crowded behind chain-linked fences, gawking and yelling at the celebrity gangsters as they deboarded the plane.

  Agents, fearing another Kansas City–style rescue attempt, scanned the crowd over machine-gun barrels while Kelly made his way down the staircase to the runway with his wrists and ankles shackled and his trademark Lucky Strike dangling from the corner of his mouth.

  Seeing the crowd, he brightened.

  “Hello gang. Nice trip,” he yelled as the unshackled Kathryn walked down the runway in a fashionable black silk coat and black hat.

  With two machine guns trained on Kelly, the agents marched him over to Charles Urschel, who was standing next to his car on the runway.

  “That’s the man,” said the laconic oilman. Berenice looked out the window of the car and said, “That face will haunt me as long as I live.”

  With that, the agents yanked Kelly away toward the motorcade of ten heavily armed cars that would race him back to the Oklahoma City jail to await trial. As they did, Kelly complained that he couldn’t keep up with his legs shackled together. “I can’t walk fast in these things!”

  After locking Kelly up, Deputy Marshal Elman Jester asked Kelly about the threatening letter he had sent earlier to Urschel.

  Kelly said he intended to make good on everything he said. “I wouldn’t sell Urschel any insurance,” he added. “He hasn’t got long to live.”

  * * *

  While the Bureau’s agents caught and shuttled Kelly back to Oklahoma, the proceedings against Bailey, Bates, the Shannons and seven others, who were charged with a variety of offenses—from laundering the ransom money to conspiring to aid the kidnappers—continued.

  The kidnapping and subsequent manhunt had captured the imagination of the nation in ways that even the far more brutal massacre in Kansas City had not. In part, that was because the investigation there was going nowhere, and Hoover was deflecting attention away from it and toward Kelly. The President’s attention had been drawn to the case in part because of his association with Urschel during his efforts to promote regulation of the oil industry to help stabilize pricing and drilling, but also because the children of his son-in-law, Curtis B. Dall, had been threatened with kidnapping.

  Kirkpatrick had talked with Dall about the experience on August 15, after which he fired off a telegram to Roosevelt.

  As the man who personally contacted and paid off in their appointed place, the kidnappers of Charles F. Urschel, I implore you to exert immediately the entire energy and powers of the Federal Government to the stamping out of kidnapping, racketeering and gangsterism. I am convinced that the city, county and state police, limited by territorial boundaries and lack of finances are helpless in the warfare against this appalling menace, which unchecked, will threaten even the White House. In my opinion there is one force, and only one, which can wipe out this insidious threat. My intimate contact for three weeks with this force, convinces me that it is seriously handicapped by lack of personnel and finances. Give to [the Bureau of Investigation] unlimited power and money and it will hang or imprison every gangster.

  Hoover himself couldn’t have put it any better and, in fact, some of the language was suggested to him by Jones and his agents. In any case, the War on Crime had some powerful new proponents, and FDR was too good of a politician to let a crisis go to waste, especially when he had the eyes and ears of the nation focused on it.

  In a few months, Hoover, Cummings and Raymond Moley, a member of FDR’s Brain Trust, would go before Congress and ask for sweeping new powers. They wanted new federal statutes to help prosecute the War on Crime.

  The federal government’s efforts against crime were strictly limited to violations of customs, internal revenue laws, postal laws and counterfeiting. Prior to the Lindbergh Law, the Justice Department Bureau of Investigation was only empowered to go after stolen cars that had been taken across state lines and women transported across state lines for prostitution, termed “white slavery” at the time. Treasury enforced the tax laws and had its corruption-laden Prohibition Squad, and the Secret Service protected the President, to a degree.

  Cummings was looking to expand the Justice Department, and he needed legislation to do it. He wanted it to be a federal offense to kill a federal officer. Similarly, he wanted it to be a federal crime to flee to another state to avoid arrest. He wanted it to be a federal crime to rob a federal bank, or to take stolen property across state lines. He wanted tough federal regulation of the sale of firearms, especially machine guns.

  Most of all, he wanted to strengthen the Lindbergh Law to make kidnapping a federal offense punishable by death. In short, he wanted the federal government to take over the policing of serious crime throughout the country.

  * * *

  When the trial of Bates, Bailey and the Shannons began on Monday, September 18, the security measures around the courthouse gave the city the look of an armed camp. Streets around the courthouse were either blocked off or lined with machine gunners and law enforcement officers with sawed-off shotguns and rifles. All those entering the courtroom were searched, patted down and their packages emptied. The elevator was taken out of service so that anyone headed to the courtroom had to climb two flights of stairs lined with armed guards.

  The city’s leading citizens stood in line in the Oklahoma heat to get a seat in the courtroom, wearing suits and ties and fine dresses, as the etiquette of the time dictated. They carried food in sacks so they would not lose their seats at lunchtime. As the 90-degree heat wafted up to the second-floor courtroom, they sweated out the proceeding in rapt attention as they smoked cigarettes and fanned themselves incessantly.

  In his opening statement, Oklahoma District Attorney Herbert Hyde laid out the allegations that the government was about to prove over the coming days as the trial sped on. It gave just a small preview of the massive amounts of evidence the Bureau had gathered in the previous months as they had tracked the Kellys across the country. The sheer volume of the allegations Hyde outlined swamped the defense attorneys, who had had little or no time to prepare for the case.

  “The evidence will show that two men went into the home of Mr. Urschel under the cover of darkness, that they kidnapped him and sped into the night, out of Oklahoma County and into Pottawatomie County, to the home of a relative of George Kelly, one of the defendants, and then to Texas.

  “The proof will show that the defendant Kelly was, on or about July 15th, or 16th in Dallas, Texas, that he sent a wire to his friend Bates, who was in Denver, and that wire said, ‘When and where will I meet you in Oklahoma City?’

  “It will show that Bates wired back to Kelly under the name of R. G. Shannon, and that he said, ‘I’ll meet you on July 19th at the Biltmore Hotel,’ which was just three days before the kidnapping.
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br />   “The proof will show that they met in Oklahoma City, and that Bates at that time had the car they hauled Urschel away in. It was a Chevrolet, 1933, with an Indiana tag.

  “We will show that Bates owned that car in Denver.

  “We will show by the apartment house owners in Denver, where he stayed under the name of Davis … that he had a Buick car and that they changed to his car after hauling Urschel away.”

  Hyde spoke on and on to the rapt jurors and spectators, referencing the enormous amount of detail and data that the agents had gathered from the hundreds of interviews they had conducted, from the telegrams they’d obtained and the mail they’d intercepted. He seemed to know exactly where the defendants had been and when they’d been there. He knew what had been said, and to whom.

  “The proof will disclose,” Hyde continued, “that while Urschel was held prisoner down on the farm, Kelly was present until Friday, the day of the second note, and that Kelly warmed up and got kind of chummy. We’ll show that Kelly said: ‘This place is as safe as it can be. We used it in the old days as a hang-out when we were running liquor from Mexico to Chicago. All the boys use it. After they pull a bank job or something, they come down here to “cool off.”’

  “We’ll show that Harvey Bailey, Bob Brady and Jim Clark had been at the farm—that he told all about the Kansas City Massacre. We’ll show that Bates said they gave Shannon $200 or $300 to use the place as a hang-out.”

  Then he turned his attention to the Green Lantern gang that had laundered the ransom money.

  “We’ll show that the day these defendants were arrested at St. Paul, a wire was sent from Minneapolis to Cleveland, Ohio, to George Kelly. We’ll show that the telegram said, ‘The deal is off. Wire me box 631, Denver.’

  “We’ll show that was the box of Albert Bates or George Davis [his alias]. We’ll show that Bates was in Minneapolis at the time of the arrests there after the ransom money showed up. And we’ll show that the Kellys lived there. Further, that these defendants from St. Paul took $5,500 from Bates or Kelly or Mrs. Kelly.

  “Now when these St. Paul defendants were arrested, Bates wired Kelly at Cleveland, where Kelly was paying $1,500 he owed on a Cadillac. We’ll show that wire was sent in care of the Cadillac Motor Company, and we’ll have the dealer here.

  “We’ll show that at the time Bates left Minneapolis by train … going through Omaha, and that at Omaha he sent a wire to Denver to the woman he was living with at 1275 Pearl Avenue, and that wire said, ‘Be home soon.’

  “The evidence will show that this woman was not Bates’s wife, but had lived with him under the name of Feldman, and of Davis in Denver. We’ll show that she had the kidnap car. We’ll show that she had a Pekinese dog, and we’ll trace that dog from January to the day Bates was arrested.”

  He then described the day of the raid on the Shannon farm, the myriad details Urschel had collected there and how he had strategically left his fingerprints all over the house.

  “He turned all this information over to the federal officers who met at the Shannon farm at dawn, August 12th.

  “Shannon walked out and was met with an order to hold up his hands. In a building—the same building where Urschel was kept—we found Harvey Bailey sleeping. And, lo, at the same time we find a machine gun that Kathryn Kelly had bought in a pawn shop in Fort Worth for $250. And, lo, gentlemen, we find it was the same gun that was used in the kidnapping of Mr. Urschel. We find it, gentlemen, on the Shannon farm.

  “We will show that the officers found $700 on Bailey’s person, ransom money paid by the Urschel family. Now we go a step further in the story…”

  He then went after Bailey, detailing how he had paid the Shannons for his lodging, how Bailey had been coming to the Shannon farm since 1930 and how he had been using it as a “post office, a stopover, as a place where he might cool off.”

  The criminal case that Hyde and Keenan had prepared was unprecedented. The mountain of evidence, gathered by dozens of agents across one-third of the nation, was almost too much for the defense team to absorb, let alone refute.

  It had been gathered expertly, using the very latest in the technology of criminal science. The defendants had been tracked over a path twenty thousand miles long. The investigators had gathered receipts, photographs, bills of sale, license plates, fingerprints; they had eyewitnesses, they had confessions and they had cooperation from dozens of participants in the case.

  They had little Geraldine Arnold, whose desperate parents had dragged her into the crime and made her a most unwilling participant. She was now enthusiastically spilling her guts to any lawman who would listen.

  But on top of all of that, they had Charles Urschel, a victim like no other. Not only did he cooperate fully and immediately with law enforcement to track down and capture his kidnappers, he’d led them to the criminal lair where he’d been held. He led the assault team into the fray. While blindfolded, deafened, half-starved and sleep-deprived, he had collected—and planted—a mountain of evidence that the federal prosecutors would use to crush the Kellys and everyone else involved in the case—and some who weren’t.

  It was Hoover’s dream being played out on a stage as if he’d scripted every scene.

  Unfazed by the proliferating threats against him and his family, Charles Urschel took the stand and, in his stoic, unemotional style, delivered a data dump of all the information he’d collected during his ordeal. He walked over to the equally icy Bates and identified him as one of his kidnappers. He identified Kelly as the other from a picture shown to him by the prosecution.

  He identified young Armon, “the man with the light blue tie and purple suit,” as one of those who had guarded him. Then he identified Boss Shannon as the other.

  He was asked if Shannon had said anything about Bates and Kelly.

  Urschel told him Shannon had said “that they were both very bad men, that they were desperate, and they were very hot and would never be taken alive. He said they would shoot it out if they met any officers.”

  When he was asked if Kelly had said anything about Urschel’s family, he said Kelly “told me that he knew all about our family; knew all about the children; knew about the cars they drove; that he had been by the house and had seen a trailer set up in our backyard which the boys used in going on a camping trip the week before.

  “I made the statement or asked him whether he didn’t consider they were lucky that they found that door unlocked, and he said they probably were, that it would not have made any difference; they were coming for me that night and would have taken me even if I had been in bed. He also said he knew what room in the house I slept in. He talked a good deal about automobiles. He seemed to know a lot about cars, especially the mechanics of cars. He preferred Chevrolets and Cadillacs.”

  The federal agents let Bailey know that despite the flimsy evidence holding him to the kidnapping, he would indeed be going down for the crime and it would be unwise to fight it too vigorously, since he was wanted in Kansas for kidnapping the warden in the Memorial Day prison escape that had gotten him shot in the knee. He could fry for that.

  He was also wanted in Kansas in connection with the massacre at Union Station. Bailey knew well the benefits of a conviction for a lesser crime, and his lawyer did not dissuade him from that view.

  So he sat bemusedly in the courtroom, chewing tobacco and preening for the society ladies who were photographing him constantly. “Be sure you get a good one, ma’am,” he would quip politely.

  Hyde put Geraldine Arnold on the stand and she recounted her enslavement with the Kellys in expert detail.

  “We left San Antonio to go to Cass Coleman’s but did not go there. A man told us that the law had been to Cass Coleman’s place. George said we would go to Chicago and see Joe Bergl.”

  Bergl ran a garage in Chicago on Twenty-second Street, next to the Chicago branch of the Cotton Club, which was run by Al Capone’s older brother, Ralph. (Although he was the lesser brother, Ralph, aka “Bottles,” was quit
e successful in his own right. He ran a large bottling company that not only made the containers for his younger brother’s illegal liquor operation, but also for his legitimate business selling soda water, ginger ale and other mixers that would dilute the rotgut gin sold during Prohibition. During the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933, he had cornered so much of the concession business that his company was second only to Coca-Cola.)

  Bergl’s garage specialized in obtaining and customizing cars for gangsters and bootleggers. Bergl had figured out ways to alter the suspension on cars and trucks so they could carry heavy loads of liquor and still maneuver nimbly without looking suspiciously loaded down. He could soup them up so they would run faster than their Detroit designers could imagine. For Capone and his lieutenants, he would add bulletproof windows and armor plating. He also experimented with police-evading features, such as oil-dumping tanks in the undercarriage that could be released to create slicks behind the vehicle to cause pursuers to spin out of control and smoke-producing exhaust pipes that would create a noxious screen to frustrate shooters chasing those vehicles.

  For liquor and gun runners, he would add larger gas tanks so they could speed through the back hills and roads without having to stop for gas.

  “We went to Chicago,” Geraldine continued. “Kathryn wrote a letter to Mother on the way. Before we left Texas we changed cars and had to have our battery changed too.”

  “Where did you stay in Chicago and what was done there?” asked Hyde.

  “We stayed in an apartment and they tried to phone Joe Bergl, but they could not get him for two or three days.”

  At that point, Bergl didn’t want anything to do with Kelly. He knew Kelly was being tracked by the feds, and he didn’t want to become collateral damage. Eventually, though, Bergl provided Kelly with a new car, a Chevy coupe, $200 and a quart of whiskey and told him to get out of town. The Kellys then headed to Memphis.