by David Ward
Less than one year later, Bailey had led a sensational escape from the prison, during which the warden and several guards were taken as hostages.39 After the break from the Kansas penitentiary, Bailey had robbed a bank in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, and hidden out for several days in the Cookson Hills. He had then driven to the Shannon farm to return a machine gun he had borrowed from George Kelly. At the farm, Boss Shannon handed Bailey an envelope containing $1,000, which was Kelly’s repayment of a loan Bailey had given Kelly two years earlier. Because he was tired from the long drive, Bailey had decided to stay the night at the farm but when he awoke the next morning, three FBI agents were standing over his bed, each with a machine gun pointing at him. The money the agents found in Bailey’s possession included the $1,000 from Kelly, which had been taken from the Urschel ransom money.
Boss Shannon’s protest that Bailey had nothing to do with the Urschel kidnapping was simply disregarded, since he was seen as a friend and confederate of kidnappers and bank robbers. The Justice Department and Hoover’s FBI needed a big arrest since no one had been charged in the Union Station massacre that had occurred a month earlier in which Bailey had been identified as a suspect. In addition, the Urschel case was, up to that point, unsolved. Attorney General Homer S. Cummings sent his chief assistants to Oklahoma to prosecute the case. The problem, as they would discover, was that Bailey did not intend to wait for his trial to take leave of federal authorities.
Harvey Bailey was held in the Dallas County Jail, where he established extremely cordial relations with several guards and inmate trusties. On September 4, with their assistance, he escaped. The subsequent investigation revealed that a deputy sheriff had paid a jail employee to smuggle hacksaw blades and a gun into Bailey’s cell, claiming that “Bailey is one of the finest men I ever met and he is just as innocent as he can be.”40 Bailey was soon recaptured by a local police chief, but the Department of Justice and FBI Director Hoover were outraged by the manner in which the county jailers had handled the federal government’s notorious prisoner.
Once Bailey was back in custody at the Oklahoma County Jail in Oklahoma City, Hoover ordered that special precautions be taken to guard him and Albert Bates, who was already being held there along with the elder Shannons and their son. Since local jailers were regarded as “thoroughly unreliable,” Hoover notified Attorney General Cummings that he had instructed his men to take complete control of the prisoners even though they were held in a county jail, not a federal facility. Hoover ordered that even attorneys were not to be allowed to visit Bailey, Bates, or the Shannons; if a federal court subsequently ordered otherwise, he instructed his agents to search any attorney visiting these prisoners, and their interviews would have to be conducted with an agent present.41
Bailey and Bates were restrained at all times in special handcuffs; their legs were shackled, and the chains were attached to the floor. They were clothed only in undershorts and were denied reading and writing materials along with physical exercise. An armed FBI agent was stationed in front of their cells twenty-four hours a day. On the lower floor of the two-story jail an FBI agent and a deputy sheriff armed with machine guns guarded the entrance to the jail. Three additional machine guns were strategically placed across the street from the entrance to the jail, and the whole area was lighted by floodlights. No other prisoners were allowed in the jail, and Bailey, Bates, the Shannons, and their cells were searched each day.42
With federal authorities during the 1930s determined to demonstrate to the country that swift and certain punishment was the consequence of serious criminal wrongdoing, the federal criminal justice process moved rapidly. In an era before suspects received Miranda warnings and public defender offices were established, prosecution could be expedited. Nor did thoughts of plea bargaining enter the minds of the 1930s bank robbers and kidnappers after they were apprehended; these men held to the fatalistic view that after committing a long string of robberies and getting away with them, your number just might come up. Thus, being awakened in the early morning hours at the Paradise farm and finding three gun barrels pointed in his direction, Harvey Bailey threw up his hands and said simply, “Boys, you’ve got me.” In contrast to today’s criminal subcultures, the Midwest gangsters during the 1930s were prepared to plead guilty to their own complicity in criminal activities, and they were not about to take friends, associates, or even foes down with them. The tradition of never cooperating with the police and never betraying any associates, manifest in the example of Frank Gusenberg’s refusal, while he lay dying, to name his own killers, was firmly fixed in the tenets of the outlaw or convict code. And in this era of criminal justice, federal prosecutors and FBI investigators had not become sophisticated in the use of charge and sentence reductions or promises of concurrent rather than consecutive sentences, let alone witness protection, to break down the prohibition against informing that was deeply rooted in men like Harvey Bailey.
The most dramatic contrast to contemporary criminal justice processes was the speed with which events moved when federal agents wanted to prove how quickly they could catch, convict, and send crooks and desperadoes to prison. A little more than a week after the arrests of the Shannons, Bailey, and Bates, a federal grand jury in Oklahoma City returned kidnapping indictments against the four. Also indicted, although not yet apprehended, were George and Kathryn Kelly and seven underworld figures accused of laundering part of the ransom money. Three weeks later, while the search for the Kellys went on, the trial of the other principals began in Oklahoma City before Federal District Judge Edgar S. Vaught.
The kidnapping of Charles Urschel, the capture of Bailey and Bates, Bailey’s escape from the Dallas County Jail, and the nationwide search under way for Machine Gun Kelly and his wife, Kathryn, attracted national attention. Newsmen poured into Oklahoma City from all over the country to cover the trial. Heavy security surrounded not only the defendants, but the jury, the judge, Assistant Attorney General Joseph Keenan (who had been sent out by Attorney General Cummings to manage the prosecution’s case), and the local U.S. attorney. Bailey’s reputation as an accomplished jailbreaker and Bates’s record of escape from prison added an element of suspense that was enhanced by rumors that associates of both men had arrived in Oklahoma City with plans to liberate them.
George Kelly’s true name was George Barnes. He was born in Chicago on July 17, 1895, to parents considered to be upstanding citizens; his father worked as an insurance agent. He attended the University of Mississippi, where he studied engineering and agriculture for three years. Despite a university education Kelly claimed that he never held a “legitimate” job in his entire life, although he operated cabarets for a number of years and had an interest in a cabaret in Chicago. Shortly after he met Kathryn Thorne, he was convicted of violating federal liquor laws and, on February 11, 1928, he was sent to Leavenworth Penitentiary to serve a three-year sentence. On his release from Leavenworth on July 3, 1930, Kelly traveled to Minnesota, sent word to Kathryn asking her to join him; they were married in Minneapolis but returned to Ft. Worth to live in Kathryn’s house. From 1931 to 1933 Kelly, in the company of Albert Bates, Edward Bentz, and other gangsters, built his reputation by robbing banks in a number of localities, from Tupelo, Mississippi, and Colfax, Washington, to Blue Ridge and Sherman, Texas.43
While the government was prosecuting Bailey, Bates, and the Shannons in Oklahoma City, George and Kathryn Kelly had been moving rapidly from state to state, from city to city, changing cars, hotels, and the color of their hair. Finally, acting on a tip, FBI agents and local police raided a house in Memphis, Tennessee, and apprehended the Kellys.44
On October 7, 1933, a week after the Kellys had been brought to Oklahoma City for trial, U.S. District Court Judge Edgar Vaught sentenced Bailey, Bates, and Ora and Boss Shannon to life terms in prison; Shannon’s son, who had cooperated with federal authorities, was given a ten-year sentence that was then suspended.45 Two Minneapolis businessmen who had fenced the ransom money received five-year pr
ison terms. With the nation’s press already gathered in town for the trial of Bailey, Bates, and the Shannons, the Justice Department wasted no time putting the Kellys on trial. George refused to testify but after listening to the damaging testimony, Kathryn took the stand to tell her side of the story. The jury, however, had no difficulty finding the Kellys guilty, and on October 12, only two weeks after their arrest, Judge Vaught sentenced them to life imprisonment.
After the trial, the FBI’s public relations campaign moved into high gear. The account of the capture of Machine Gun Kelly was embellished by the allegation that when he saw armed federal agents in the hallway of the house in Memphis, Kelly shouted, “Don’t shoot, G-men.” Yet not one report by the arresting agents to FBI headquarters, not one newspaper account at the time of Kelly’s arrest, and not even the highly sensationalized account based on interviews with the special-agent-in-charge that was released through the magazine Startling Detective Adventures included this statement.46
The special security measures taken to guard Bailey, Bates, and Kelly reflected a lack of confidence by the Department of Justice and the FBI in the ability of any county jail or state prison to contain and control lawbreakers with such outstanding records of escape and risk taking. Furthermore these prisoners were just beginning life sentences and had plenty of gangland friends inside and outside of jails and prisons ready to help them obtain earlier releases than the law allowed. Homer Cummings, appointed attorney general by Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, and the new director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, were determined that high-profile felons who survived gun battles with federal agents and received long sentences after highly publicized trials would not escape from the federal government’s penitentiaries. But the matter of providing security confinement for Kelly, Bates, and Bailey in McNeil Island, Atlanta, and Leavenworth—the existing federal prisons—was complicated by an embarrassing history of escapes from these institutions in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
ESCAPES AND CONCERN ABOUT
SECURITY IN FEDERAL PRISONS
Prison escapes had become common by the late 1920s. Baby Face Nelson had escaped from the Illinois State Prison at Joliet; Harvey Bailey, James Clark, and three other prisoners had forced their way out of the Kansas State Penitentiary; and ten Dillinger gang members had broken out of the state prison at Michigan City, Indiana. The federal prisons at Atlanta, Leavenworth, and McNeil Island were supposed to be more secure, but even they proved incapable of holding the more daring and ingenious inmates.
On January 25, 1927, an Illinois gangster, Basil “the Owl” Banghart, and two other prisoners removed bolts from an interior ventilator window at the Atlanta Penitentiary, cut a bar in an outside window, climbed through an opening, and jumped to the ground ten feet below. A guard spotted the escapees as they ran from the building; he opened fire but failed to stop the three men, who disappeared into the nearby woods. Prisoner Joseph Urbaytis and another convict were found at the window ready to join the others but had been deterred by the sounds of gunfire. The five prisoners had been released from their cells by an inmate turnkey. Bang-hart remained free for almost a year and a half before he was apprehended by Bureau of Investigation agents (later Federal Bureau of Investigation).47
In July of the same year Atlanta prisoners Roy Gardner, Joe Urbaytis, and John Boyd succeeded in getting two pistols, one hundred cartridges, and a quantity of nitroglycerin smuggled into the prison. After determining that they could not blow a hole in the prison wall, the inmates built a ladder, took the captain and two guards as hostages, and went to the yard, where they tried to convince a tower guard to throw down his gun and allow them to climb up the ladder and escape over the wall. The tower guard refused to cooperate. Although the plot failed, it revealed serious flaws in the security: the success of convicts in obtaining weapons and smuggling explosives in from outside the prison represented the greatest breach of security in any penitentiary.48
The July escape attempt was only the latest by Roy Gardner, who had gained fame in California for escaping twice from U.S. marshals en route to federal prison. After he had been recaptured and federal authorities finally succeeded in placing him in McNeil Island Penitentiary, Gardner told the warden that he “would not be staying long.” Five months later he escaped. Until he was recaptured two months later while robbing a train in Arizona, Gardner’s ability to get away from government agents was a source of acute embarrassment, as one marshal complained in a letter to the attorney general:
It seems to me that the government should exert every effort to recapture Roy Gardner, who escaped from McNeil Island Penitentiary on the fifth. The fact that he has escaped from federal officers so often had created a great deal of sympathy for him, generally the comment being that he was “so clever getting away that they ought to let him go,” and talk along those lines; this from good citizens. On the other hand the fact that he is still at large gives considerable satisfaction to the criminally inclined.49
Like Atlanta and McNeil Island, the federal government’s maximum-security penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, experienced a series of embarrassing escapes in the early 1930s. At about ten o’clock on the morning of February 28, 1930, Thomas Holden and Francis Keating, serving twenty-five-year sentences for mail robbery with firearms, appeared at the south gate of the penitentiary carrying counterfeit trusty gate passes. They were stopped by guard Charles Miller, who allowed them to walk through the gate when they showed their passes, containing their physical descriptions and names and photos. Their escape was not discovered until three o’clock in the afternoon, when a guard noticed that Keating was absent from his job in the kitchen. At first the searchers assumed that the two men were hiding within the walls, but then the passes and prisoners’ clothing were discovered outside the prison near an intersection, where the escapees had presumably been picked up by prior arrangement.
Subsequent investigation revealed that the trusty passes were relatively easy to obtain and had been produced in the prison print shop. In the months that followed, the identity of an inmate in the print shop who helped produce the bogus passes was rumored among the convict population to be George Kelly.50
Several months later, another well-known offender left Leavenworth Penitentiary before his official release date. Frank Nash had been in and out of prison since 1913 for crimes that included murder and burglary with explosives. He had been sent to Leavenworth to serve a twenty-five-year federal sentence for assaulting a mail custodian. After serving six years, he had been appointed trusty in the deputy warden’s residence. On October 19, 1930, he simply walked away from the prison. At the time of his escape, Nash was a well-known outlaw who had formerly been connected with the Al Spencer gang, and he was known to have many contacts in the underworld.51 His name, however, would go down in the annals of crime when in June 1933 he was killed during an effort to liberate him from federal authorities that came to be called the Union Station massacre.
While on escape status, Nash met up with Holden and Keating and the three were implicated in a number of bank robberies in the Midwest, as well as several murders. Among these was the October 1931 Kraft State Bank robbery at Menominee, Wisconsin, in which $10,000 in cash and $140,000 in securities were stolen; the vice president of the bank was shot and killed when he resisted the robbers.
Even though on the run, Frank Nash and a recent Leavenworth releasee, Harold Fontaine, carried out a plan to help some friends they had left behind the prison walls. According to Charles Berta, one of the participants in this plot, Nash had given Leavenworth inmates Stanley Brown, George Curtis, Will Green, Thomas Underwood, Grover Durrill, and Earl Thayer an escape plan before he walked away from the warden’s house. The plan involved knowledge Nash had gleaned working outside the prison as a cook for the warden: fifty-two-gallon barrels of glue used in the prison shoe factory were left overnight on a loading dock at the railroad station in Leavenworth.
Nash and Fontaine, possibly with the financial assistance of Thomas Holden and
Francis Keating, obtained a barrel similar to those used to transport glue. Inside the barrel they placed a formidable arsenal—a rifle, a sawed-off shotgun, five pistols, ammunition, and fifteen sticks of dynamite with caps and fuses. The weapons and dynamite were sealed inside cut-up rubber inner tubes used in tires and the rest of the barrel was filled with glue.
Knowing that the prison sent a truck to the railroad loading dock to pick up the glue barrels in the middle of the night, Nash and Fontaine added their barrel to the others. A note was sent to one of the prisoners to alert the group of the shipment: “Aunt Emma very ill, leaving St. Louis tonight.” The barrel was trucked inside the prison and left in the shoe factory freight room where it was identified by the plotters.
Two weeks later, on December 11, 1931, five of the convicts used fake passes to make their way to the front entrance. There, they produced the weapons they had removed from the barrel and ordered the guard to open the gate. Guard Dempsey refused to follow the prisoners’ demand, telling them that he was an old man and to go ahead and shoot. Meanwhile, the other two prisoners arrived at the front gate with Warden T. B. White and his office staff, who they had taken as hostages. The prisoners threatened to light a stick of dynamite and kill everyone. Warden White ordered the gate to be opened.
The prisoners, however, were without transportation. They had planned on securing Warden White’s car but, as Charlie Berta related later, “T. B. White outfoxed us. He had the car key in his desk. When we came in he dumped it in the waste basket.” The escapees, guns trained on their hostages, exited the front door of the prison as White told the tower guard not to shoot. The group made its way up the road to an intersection, where they stopped an approaching automobile. The vehicle contained five soldiers from Fort Leavenworth army base who were going rabbit hunting. The prisoners took possession of the vehicle and the soldiers’ guns and piled into the car with the warden as a hostage. Berta drove down the country road and then onto a dirt road that was muddy after heavy rain the previous night. The car became stuck and the escapees split up. Berta, Brown, and Underwood left the other four men with Warden White. After the prisoners told him they were going to kill him, White tried to grab the gun away from Will Green, but one of the other prisoners hit him on the head and Green shot him. Leaving the warden for dead, the four convicts ran to a nearby farmhouse, which was soon surrounded by soldiers sent from Fort Leavenworth. Earl Thayer, dressed as a farmer, walked out the back door of the farmhouse and got away.52
