Alcatraz (9 page)

While the search went on for Hamm’s abductors, other prominent citizens fell victim: an Atlanta banker was taken in an unsuccessful effort to get $40,000 in ransom; John J. O’Connell, Jr., the twenty-four-year old son and nephew of several New York politicians, was kidnapped and $250,000 demanded for his return; August Luer, an Alton, Illinois, banker, was abducted and then released without the $100,000 being paid. In response to the Luer kidnapping and others, forty Chicago millionaires were placed under twenty-four-hour police protection to prevent them from becoming kidnap victims as well.
³⁵

The fifth ransom kidnapping during this five-week period in the summer of 1933 attracted the attention of the entire nation and catapulted Machine Gun Kelly to a place in American popular culture. It also helped to establish the image of FBI agents as relentless, efficient, incorruptible gang busters—“G-men”—who would save the country from the outlaws, bank robbers, and ransom kidnappers who were outwitting, outgunning, outrunning, and corrupting local police and county sheriffs.

On a Saturday evening in July Charles F. Urschel, a wealthy oilman, was playing bridge with his wife and their friends, Mr. and Mrs. W. R. Jarrett, on the screened porch at the back of their home in Oklahoma City. At about 11:15
P.M.
, a Chevrolet sedan pulled into the driveway, and two men, one with a pistol, the other with a machine gun, got out and quickly stepped through the porch door demanding to know which man was Urschel. When no one responded one of the men said, “Well, we’ll take them both.” Urschel and Jarrett were forced out of the house at gunpoint and into the back seat of the sedan, which then sped away. Within five minutes Mrs. Urschel, recalling the instructions of J. Edgar
Hoover in a
Time
magazine article concerning the wave of kidnappings across the country, called the director’s office to notify the bureau of the abduction of her husband and Jarrett.

With this latest in a string of ransom kidnappings, the pressure was on the FBI to demonstrate that it could bring the perpetrators to justice—not just for reasons of punishment and deterrence but also to showcase the effectiveness of the Department of Justice’s campaign to subdue the “criminal element.” In addition, Charles Urschel was not just a prominent citizen of Oklahoma City, he was a personal friend of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The special agents in charge of FBI offices in San Antonio and Dallas, additional agents from Dallas and El Paso, and all but one agent in the Oklahoma City office were ordered to work on the case.

On Wednesday July 26 an oilman and close friend of Urschel, E. E. Kirkpatrick, received a package from a Western Union messenger containing a letter written by Urschel asking that he act as intermediary with the kidnappers. The Urschel family paid a ransom of $200,000—a huge sum during the Depression—and at 10:30
P.M.
on July 31 Charles Urschel walked in the door to his home, having taken a taxi from Norman, Oklahoma, where his captors had released him. He was interviewed briefly by federal agents and allowed to rest; the following day he made a detailed statement that provided many clues about the kidnappers and the places in which he had been kept during the nine days of his captivity.
³⁶

The investigation that followed brought two Fort Worth detectives to the home of Kathryn Kelly, an attractive woman known to consort with gangsters. They noticed in the yard a Cadillac registered to Kelly’s mother, Ora Shannon, who lived on a farm in nearby Paradise, Texas. The detectives were well acquainted with Kathryn, who had a record of arrests for robbery, had been the chief suspect in the murder of her first husband, and had been linked to an ex-Leavenworth prisoner named George Kelly. The detectives notified federal agents that Kathryn and George should be considered suspects in the Urschel case and that Urschel may have been held captive at the Shannon farm. The FBI immediately put the farm under surveillance.

At 6
A.M.
, ten days after the victim had been released, fourteen men—four federal agents, four Dallas detectives, four Ft. Worth detectives, a deputy sheriff from Oklahoma City, and Charles Urschel himself—surrounded the farm of Ora Shannon and her husband, R. G “Boss.” One of the men called out Kathryn’s stepfather’s name, and he came out of the house.
FBI Agent Dowd noticed a man sleeping on a bed in the yard and asked Shannon who he was. Shannon replied, “Bailey.” Dowd realized that they had happened to come upon Harvey Bailey, one of the nation’s most successful bank robbers and an escapee from the Kansas State Penitentiary. According to Dowd’s report,

Special Agent in Charge Jones rushed over with a machine gun and put it close to Bailey’s head. . . . On the bed along side of Bailey was a fully loaded 331 Winchester Automatic Rifle and a Colts .45 Automatic Pistol. . . . Bailey had been sleeping in his BVDs [underwear] and his pants and shirt were at the foot of the bed. In Bailey’s pants were found $1,200.00 in paper money, $700.00 of which consisted of $20.00 bills, being part of the ransom money paid by Charles F. Urschel.
³⁷

Bailey, Boss and Ora Shannon, and their son and his wife were taken to the Dallas office of the FBI where all but Bailey and Shannon’s daughter-in-law quickly made statements admitting their participation in the detention of Charles Urschel. They placed the responsibility for the whole episode on the shoulders of George Kelly and Albert Bates, another man well known to federal authorities. Harvey Bailey, the elder Shannon claimed, had nothing to do with the kidnapping and had only appeared at his house the previous evening and asked to spend the night. The Shannons and Bailey were lodged in the Dallas County Jail, with Bailey booked in under a false name and placed in the solitary confinement section of the jail to avoid publicity about his arrest. Albert Bates was arrested in Denver a few days later on suspicion of passing stolen checks and was quickly transported to Dallas to stand trial for the kidnapping.

Harvey Bailey had robbed banks for more than a decade. He was movie-star handsome and was reputed to have nerves of steel. He liked robbing banks for the money, but he also enjoyed the sheer excitement of engaging in this highly dangerous activity—a trait he shared with many other bank robbers. He talked about the “kick” that accompanied bank robbery, particularly during the getaways that followed.
³⁸
Bailey’s careful planning and calm demeanor paid off not only in the money gained from robbing dozens of banks, but in the fact that he had carried on this dangerous trade for twelve years without making a serious mistake. His FBI rap sheet listed an arrest on March 23, 1920, for investigation of hijacking and burglary; the next entry on his arrest record did not
appear until July 7, 1932, when he was finally charged and convicted of bank robbery and received a sentence of ten to fifty years in the Kansas State Penitentiary.

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