Jelly's Gold

by David Housewright

  “Is Lieutenant Dunston around?” I asked. I deliberately projected a degree of formality because I didn’t want to compromise his command position. Shipman didn’t seem to mind.

  “Nope,” she said. “Bobby must have seen you coming and snuck out the back.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  Shipman swung around the receptionist’s desk and slid out of my sight behind a wall. A moment later the secured door on my right opened. She held it for me, and I slipped inside the inter sanctum of the homicide unit. There wasn’t much to see. If you didn’t know where you were, it could have been an insurance company, advertising agency, newspaper office, law firm—any place where professionals work side by side and carry guns.

  “How are you, Jeannie?” I asked.

  She flashed a two-second smile at me. “Excellent. You?”

  “Good as gold.”

  “What brings you by? Nostalgia?”

  “In a manner of speaking. I want to take a look at your files.”

  “No, no, no, no, no, I don’t think so.”

  “Not current files.”

  “Not any kind of files.”

  “Jeannie—”

  “McKenzie, no. Bobby would have a heart attack. You know that. You know better than to even ask.”

  “I’m not looking for open cases, or even cold cases.”

  “What cases?”

  “Anything and everything between, say, January 1930 through May of ’33.”

  That slowed her down.

  “You’re kidding, right?” she said.

  “I could fill out an Information Disclosure Request form, but I figured this would be easier.”

  Shipman led me to her desk. She sat behind it while I settled in a chair in front. Morning sunlight streaming through window blinds illuminated artfully tangled hair that was the same color as her freckles. Shipman was an attractive woman when she smiled, not so much when she frowned. She was frowning now.

  “What are you up to this time?” she asked. Another woman who knew me well.

  I came this close to telling her the truth, then thought better of it. There were already too many people who knew about the existence of Jelly’s gold; I probably should have sworn Nina to secrecy.

  “Nothing even remotely illegal,” I said.

  “That would be a nice change of pace,” Shipman said. “Seriously, McKenzie.”

  “Seriously, Jean—I’m doing research on the gangsters that used to roam the city back in the day. I went upstairs, but records doesn’t have anything. The department purged all of its files in the early eighties. Except for homicide.”

  “I think we have stuff in old boxes from back then, but I don’t know what’s there.”

  “Is there a problem with me taking a look?”

  “Probably, if I thought about it long enough.” Shipman studied me from across the desk as if she were indeed thinking about it. “Why are you doing this?”

  “A friend asked me for a favor. A lit major at the U. He thought I might get better cooperation over here than he would.”

  “A favor for a friend. I should have known. C’mon, McKenzie, let’s see what we have.”

  Surfing through several boxes, it didn’t take long to discover that despite the O’Connor System, there were plenty of homicides committed in and around St. Paul in the early thirties. Three Kansas City mobsters were slain near White Bear Lake. Bank robber Harry “Slim” Morris (a.k.a. “Slim Moran,” “Slim Ryan,” or “Slim Ballard”) was killed in Red Wing. Murder Incorporated hit bootlegger Abe Wagner and his partner in St. Paul’s Midway District, not far from where I live now. The Barker-Karpis gang killed two police officers during a bank heist in Minneapolis, and Fred Barker murdered an innocent bystander in St. Paul’s Como Park while they were switching getaway cars. None of them involved Frank Nash, which wasn’t a surprise to me. Murder wasn’t his game.

  Yet there was a tiny fragment of information that made my hands tremble as I read it.

  The SPPD had conducted surveillance on an auto dealership located on University Avenue not far from the state capitol that was suspected of supplying heavily armored getaway cars to the gangsters. The cars would come equipped with police radios and quick-release bolts so the crooks could change license plates in a hurry. The cops were hoping to get a line on “Shotgun” George Ziegler, a Chicago killer with ties to Al Capone’s syndicate; they suspected that he had been involved in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and was now working freelance for the Barker-Karpis gang. Instead, they came across something else.

  A man identified as Oklahoma gunman Frank “Jelly” Nash was observed returning the 1932 Oldsmobile Series F Roadster he had leased from the dealership three days prior (see report filed 6/6/33).

  The report said that the Oldsmobile had been reinforced according to Nash’s specifications to accommodate a heavy load—as much as an additional one thousand pounds.

  The vehicle in question was returned to the dealership at exactly 8:16 P.M., Thursday, June 8, 1933.

  The same day as the gold heist in South Dakota, I reminded myself.

  “Jeannie, may I use your computer?” I asked.

  Shipman reluctantly allowed it, watching over my shoulder as I asked Ask.com for the weight of a standard bar of gold—approximately 27.56 pounds. I multiplied it by thirty-two (using Shipman’s PC calculator). The extra load in Frank Nash’s car would have amounted to approximately eight hundred eighty-two pounds.

  “Sonuvabitch,” I said. “It was him. He really did pull it off.”

  “Who pulled what off?” Shipman asked.

  I spun, cupped her face in my hands, and kissed her full on the mouth.

  “Be still my heart,” she said.

  By the way it was pounding, it was my own heart that I should have been concerned with.

  Although I become upset—if not downright insulting—whenever I see people talking on their cell phones while driving, I was talking on my cell phone while driving.

  “You believe me now, don’t you?” Berglund said when I told him what I had learned.

  “Let’s just say I’m keeping an open mind,” I told him.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m driving to the Minnesota History Center.”

  “I’ve already read everything the Historical Society has on Frank Nash.”

  “Yeah? What about the fences he might have worked with?”

  “Fences?”

  “A very wise man once said”—actually it was the actor Chris Tucker in a scene from the film Rush Hour 2, but I didn’t tell Berglund that—“behind every big crime is a rich white man waiting for his cut.”

  “So you’re looking for a rich white man?”

  “That pretty much covers it.”

  “Good luck. In the meantime, I’ll be looking into some private collections for letters, diaries, that sort of thing. I’ll contact you later. We’ll arrange a meeting to compare notes.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said.

  “By the way, those men yesterday, I haven’t seen them. Do you think they stopped following us?”

  I watched a red Chevy Aveo cautiously round a corner in my rearview mirror.

  “No,” I said.

  5

  The Minnesota History Center is a sparkling gem of a building located on a high hill overlooking the sprawling State Capitol Campus, the majestic St. Paul Cathedral, the Xcel Center, where the Minnesota Wild play hockey, and much of downtown St. Paul. Still, it was difficult to reach, especially from police headquarters. A lot of corners needed to be turned and a lot of stoplights needed to be waited on. Which made it easy to spot the red Aveo following me. I figured it must have picked me up when I left my home early that morning and tailed me to the cop shop. I cursed myself for being so careless that I didn’t detect it sooner.

  I couldn’t make out the driver or his passenger, but I was willing to take bets that it was Ted and Wally. I could have lost them easily enough—it was hard no
t to—only I didn’t want them to know I had spotted them. Not yet, anyway. Still, they had to speed through a red light to keep pace.

  “C’mon, guys,” I said aloud. “Are you even trying?”

  Eventually, I led them up Kellogg Boulevard into the History Center’s pay-as-you-go parking lot. I might have taken my chances at a meter, except it was Monday morning and you do not want to park illegally in downtown St. Paul in the morning. Parking enforcement officers are expected to document an average of fifty-five violations a day—two hundred seventy-five each week—and for reasons that maybe a psychologist might be able to explain, they just go crazy in the mornings, especially between 9:00 and 11:00 A.M. It’s worse on Tuesday mornings when they write enough tickets to meet over 20 percent of their weekly quota. Not that the local government minds. Since the PEOs generate three million bucks a year in revenue, the City wishes they would become even more fanatical more often.

  The parking lot is cut into four tiers on the side of a hill. I managed to find a spot on the top tier nearest the door. The Aveo parked at the bottom. I pretended not to notice it as I made my way to the History Center.

  A wonderfully wholesome-looking blue-eyed blonde, a true Nordic princess, sat just two tables away from me in the Weyerhaeuser Reference Room of the Minnesota History Center Research Library. She was examining the contents of several file boxes scattered around her. Normally I would have given her a nod and a smile, for I believe that true beauty must always be acknowledged (even if Nina disagrees), except I was enthralled by the astonishing cache of 1930s data available for the perusing to anyone who took out a free library card.

  Much of the information had been gathered by St. Paul historian Paul Maccabee, who donated eleven years’ worth of research to the Minnesota Historical Society after writing his remarkable book John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crooks’ Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920—1936. Yet there was so much more as well—books, magazine articles, monographs, diaries, reminiscences, vocal histories, and an untitled, unpublished manuscript penned by some unnamed historian about Richard O’Connor, the man who started it all. Whether or not you consider St. Paul a small town today—and most of the people living across the river in Minneapolis do—it most certainly was a small town back then. Everyone seemed to know everybody else, and apparently a lot of so-called movers and shakers lived in each other’s pockets.

  December 6, 1928

  Ryan Hotel, St. Paul, Minnesota

  Dick O’Connor was having difficulty focusing. Part of it was a product of age, though he tried to deny it as he slowly crept toward his seventieth birthday. Part of it was his complex personal life. He had married Julia Taylor, and together they had lived happily at the Hotel St. Paul until she discovered that he had been sleeping with Nellie Stone for many years, even fathered a daughter by her. Julie immediately left O’Connor, his legitimate daughter in tow. She offered to divorce him, but he begged her not to; O’Connor even gave her forty thousand in cash and bonds as incentive because he didn’t want to marry Nellie. When Julia died unexpectedly, he was compelled to make Nellie his bride, and together they moved to the Ryan Hotel. Now he was wondering how he could arrange to ship her off to California so he could spend more time with Margaret Condon, the enchantress who ran the hotel’s beauty salon. If that wasn’t trouble enough, he had to spend the afternoon listening to this young man whine about the latest crisis to befall the city.

  “They killed Dan Hogan,” the young man said.

  “I know,” O’Connor said. How could he not? The event was announced in thick black type on the front page of the St. Paul Pioneer Press and supported by photos of his body and the Paige coupe he drove under the headline: “DAPPER DAN” HOGAN AND HIS BOMB-WRECKED CAR.

  “What are you going to do?” the young man asked.

  “I’m not going to do anything.”

  “But you’re the Cardinal.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “We need you.”

  The “we” the young man referred to was the aristocracy of St. Paul, the rich and powerful who benefited from the system that O’Connor had set in place decades earlier, men who now feared its collapse—Crawford Livingston, president of the gas company; Chester R. Smith, the real estate tycoon; Otto Bremer, who owned the Jacob Schmidt Brewing Company, and his nephew Edward, president of Commercial State Bank; Louis Betz, head of the State Savings Bank; wealthy land man Fred B. Lynch; John J. Dahlin, who owned the construction company that bore his name; William Hamm, who ran his father’s brewery; Thomas Lowry, who owned and operated the city railway; architect Brent Messer; and so many others. Yet, while they might need him, the Cardinal, as O’Connor had been labeled, certainly didn’t need them. He was rich, he was old, and he was retired.

  Richard O’Connor had been a deputy city clerk before the turn of the century, and nearly every citizen of prominence would come into his office seeking permits for one project or another. O’Connor, who was good with a joke, greeted each with a smile and a sympathetic ear. Over time he accumulated a fund of knowledge about the scandals, secrets, personal habits, characteristics, and weaknesses of these men. He used it to introduce graft into the St. Paul Courthouse.

  After a while, O’Connor left city government for the more lucrative job of actually running city government, becoming St. Paul’s undisputed “fixer.” So vast was his influence that the Great Man Himself—James J. Hill—once summoned O’Connor to his Summit Avenue mansion. Hill was supporting Robert Dunn for governor and asked O’Connor for advice on how to get him elected. Hill disagreed with what O’Connor told him and began to explain why. O’Connor said, “Mr. Hill, you asked for my opinion. I gave it to you. I did not come here to argue.” He walked out, figuring that Hill might know how to run the Great Northern Railroad better than he, but the Cardinal sure as hell knew more about politics and Hill would call again—and so he did. Shortly after, Dunn won the Republican Party’s nomination. Only O’Connor wasn’t finished. He arranged for John A. Johnson to receive the Democratic Party’s nomination and saw to it that he defeated Dunn in the general election to become just the second Democratic governor in the history of Minnesota. When he was later asked why he did it, the Cardinal replied, “Because I could.”

  O’Connor smiled at the remembrance of it. He enjoyed the role of kingmaker. Still, he tended to ignore state politics to concentrate on his city—emphasis on his. He saw to it that all of the city’s most important positions were filled with his cronies and that his brother John was made chief of police in 1900, a position that “the Big Fellow,” as John was dubbed, would hold for nearly twenty years. O’Connor made every corporation, contractor, or individual doing business with St. Paul pay for the privilege—starting at twenty-five hundred dollars each. Heads of departments paid one hundred to one-fifty for their jobs annually, members of honorary boards paid one hundred, and the breweries were expected to supply free beer and line up their employees and saloon owners behind whatever initiatives O’Connor favored.

  For additional income, O’Connor established the Twin Cities Jockey Club and organized horse races at the state fairgrounds, ran a book out of the Fremont Exchange on Robert Street, and operated a numbers game modeled after the Louisiana Lottery. He also skimmed a percentage of every dollar earned by the city’s many saloons, brothels, and gambling establishments, much of which also found its way into the pockets of St. Paul police detectives, aldermen, grand jury members, judges, and prosecutors. In exchange, the city honored a “layover agreement” ensuring that criminals would receive police protection if they followed three simple rules: check in with Chief O’Connor, donate a small bribe, and promise to commit no crimes within the city limits. The Big Fellow enforced the system with ruthless efficiency. As a result, St. Paul became one of the safest cities in America. A punk snatching a woman’s purse would be tracked down and taught a lesson by other criminals; a man who had the audacity to rob a bank in the Midway District was turned over to the police the very next day
by his colleagues in crime. All this two full decades before Prohibition and thirty years before the city would become a home away from home for killers like John Dillinger.

  Of course, the O’Connor System didn’t apply to surrounding communities. Gangsters sworn to keep their noses clean in St. Paul thought nothing of raiding neighboring cities. The Minnesota Bankers’ Association would later report that 21 percent of all the bank holdups in the United States in 1932—an amazing forty-three daylight robberies—occurred in Minnesota. As long as they didn’t occur in St. Paul, O’Connor didn’t care.

  The original liaison between the criminals and the O’Connors was a red-haired Irishman named Billy Griffin who held court at the old Hotel Savoy on Minnesota Street. When he died of apoplexy in 1913, Dapper Dan Hogan replaced him. Now, with Hogan’s murder, a vacuum existed. Not only had he been a mob peacekeeper who helped make sure the O’Connor System operated smoothly, Hogan was the city’s most accomplished fence. He could launder any amount of cash stolen with either gun or pen; he offered criminals thirty-five to forty cents on the dollar for stolen railroad bonds and security bonds and eighty-five to ninety cents for Liberty Bonds.

  What, though, did they expect the Cardinal to do about Hogan’s departure from this earth? The Big Fellow usually dealt with that end of the O’Connor System, and he had died four years earlier.

  “If you don’t step in to help us fill the void that now exists, we believe that Leon Gleckman will,” said the young man.

  “Gleckman,” said O’Connor. “The bootlegger?”