Wrong Side of the Law (7 page)

Verne Sankey:

Kidnapper

P
ublic
Enemy Number One! During the crime-ridden early years of the Great Depression, that dubious honour fell to some of the most notorious bandits in American history. Outlaws like John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd didn’t want it. Psychopath Baby Face Nelson gloried in it. But even though these and a few other “celebrity” criminals in turn topped the list of men most wanted by J. Edgar Hoover’s fledgling Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), none of them was the first. That distinction went to an American-born naturalized Canadian citizen whose criminal career was somehow overlooked by the mythmakers of outlaw and gangster legends.

Verne Sankey, the Canadian Pacific Railway engineer who became a kidnapper and America’s first Public Enemy Number One.
Colorado Historical Society.

Verne Sankey was born in Avoca, Iowa, in 1891; the youngest son in a homesteading family. He grew up in a frontier environment and fell in love with the lore of railroading. While young Sankey worked as a farmhand, he dreamed of being an engineer.

In 1914, twenty-two-year-old Sankey married his boyhood sweetheart, nineteen-year-old Fern Young. He took his bride north to Canada, where railroading was booming because of a flood of immigration to the West. The couple settled in Melville, Saskatchewan. Sankey soon found a job with the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway.

Sankey started out as a watchman in the railyards, looking out for thieves and train-hopping hoboes. He was eventually promoted to fireman, shovelling the coal that kept the locomotive running. Then at last Sankey’s childhood dream came true: he became an engineer.

Just like the riverboat pilots of Mark Twain’s day, early twentieth-
century railroad engineers had a special mystique. There was an aura of adventure about them that Sankey liked. Engineers were also relatively well-paid. That became especially important to Sankey when in 1919, Fern gave birth to a daughter whom the proud parents named Echo.

Life in Melville was good for the Sankeys. They owned an attractive home, and every year Verne bought a new Nash automobile. The family went on vacations that most of the neighbours couldn’t afford. By the time the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway merged with the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1923, Verne had become a naturalized Canadian citizen.

Most of the people who knew Sankey found him friendly and outgoing. He enjoyed bowling and was a fan of the local hockey team, the Melville Millionaires. He was charming, intelligent, and a gifted storyteller. He could juggle and would perform for kids. He enjoyed a drink, but was never seen drunk. Sankey was of stocky build, and not tall — only five-foot-seven. But his boyish features, soft blue eyes, and winning smile complemented his pleasant personality. Not everyone, however, was won over. Some of Sankey’s railway colleagues considered him a show-off and a braggart.

Sankey did indeed like to flash his money and be seen as a high roller. He and Fern both had expensive tastes. They dressed in fine clothes for social occasions and Verne often gave his wife gifts of expensive jewellery. But their love for the good life wasn’t the biggest drain on the family finances. Sankey was a gambler!

Sankey would bet on almost any game of chance, but he was especially addicted to cards and dice. When Sankey was winning, he liked to tip generously and squander money like a big shot. When he lost, he was compelled to keep playing in the hope of hitting another hot streak. Sankey also liked to play the stock market, investing in commodities the same way that he bet on horses or the turn of a card. An engineer’s pay couldn’t support that kind of lifestyle. Like many other people looking for fast, easy money, Sankey became a bootlegger.

Prohibition had made the United States into a legally “dry” country, but it had done nothing to dry up the American thirst for alcoholic beverages. If anything, many people were drinking more simply because it was forbidden. Canadian beer and liquor flowed across the border, smuggled by anyone willing to take the risk of arrest. The potential profits were too great for a man like Sankey to ignore.

Sankey established an extensive bootlegging enterprise. He ran whiskey into Michigan, Minnestoa, Colorado, Wyoming, and North and South Dakota. Sometimes the booze was hidden in the boxcars of the trains he drove. Other times Sankey drove across the border in an old Tin Lizzie with cases of whiskey stowed in a secret compartment. He would pose as a railroad man visiting his home in the United States. He often took Echo along his rum-running trips. Sankey enjoyed the little girl’s company and he thought that the border guards wouldn’t suspect a man travelling with his young daughter of smuggling liquor.

As a bootlegger, Sankey was a sharp businessman. He dealt only in top-quality Canadian spirits. He undercut the prices of rival bootleggers, many of whom were peddling watered-down whiskey and home-brewed moonshine. Wherever Sankey went, he made a point of making friends with people in influential positions. Mayors, police chiefs, bank presidents, and the members of the social elite of communities like Denver were all listed in Sankey’s book of contacts. He even sent them Christmas cards.

Sankey was also a careful operator. On one occasion he was in a diner in a North Dakota town, with a carload of booze parked out front. He spotted two men he thought were Prohibition agents watching him from across the street. Sankey finished his lunch and then went out the back door. He took a train out of town, abandoning the car and the liquor.

Bootlegging was so profitable for Sankey that he began to lose interest in railroading. He took long leaves of absence from his job with the CPR. He moved his family to Regina in 1930. From there he ran liquor over the border in two big Nash cars that were equipped with truck springs to carry the heavy loads. Amazingly, Sankey’s criminal record for that period was almost spotless. He was arrested for bootlegging once, in Fergus Falls, Minnesota. He posted bail and then skipped.

Sankey’s bootlegging was no secret. He often told friends colourful stories about close calls with the cops. Officials on both sides of the border turned a blind eye because they’d been bribed or because they disagreed with the whole idea of Prohibition. However, when the wild decade of the Roaring Twenties went out with a whimper and the crushing Dirty Thirties began, Sankey’s bootlegging business faltered.

The slide began with powerful crime syndicates that didn’t like competition from freelancers. The syndicates were run by ruthless criminals who operated on a corporate scale. One crossed them at one’s own peril. In one American city after another, Sankey was literally run out of town.

The Great Depression made things even worse. Many people no longer had money to spend on illegal booze. Prohibition would be in effect until 1933, but most of the criminals who profited from it could see in advance that their cash cow wasn’t going to last and they’d have to find other ways of making a dishonest living. Verne Sankey decided to gamble on bank robbery.

Sankey was an avid reader of true crime magazines. He concluded that most criminals got caught because they were stupid. He believed that a smart man, like himself, could commit a felony and get away with it simply by planning carefully.

On February 28, 1931, Sankey was the engineer on a train that took the Melville Millionaires to Regina for a hockey game. That morning Sankey and another man, masked and armed, robbed the Royal Bank of Canada at the corner of Albert Street and Thirteenth Avenue. They forced manager Douglas Melklejohn to open the vault at gunpoint, and then tied up him and teller David Slinn, covering their eyes and mouths with tape. The bandits looted the vault of $12,000 and made their getaway in a car. According to one story, the bag containing the stolen money was among the bags of hockey gear loaded onto the train for the team’s trip home.

A month after the Regina holdup, Sankey took his last leave of absence from the CPR. He never returned. The lure of easy money taken at the point of a gun overwhelmed his love of railroading.

By this time the Sankey family included a son, Orville, born in 1929. Sankey bought 320 acres of farmland in Buffalo County, South Dakota, eleven miles from the village of Gann Valley. He put the title to the land in Fern’s name. Sankey built a three-room clapboard house with an unusually elaborate basement. Then he set himself up as a farmer, raising corn, cattle, and turkeys.

But the farm was really a well-planned robber’s lair. It was remote. The only way in from the road was by a mile-long grassy path. No one could approach the house unnoticed. The door was at the back, which meant the occupants could slip out into a ravine, unseen by anyone coming in from the road.

As always, Sankey made friends with his neighbours, the nearest of whom were three miles away. He pitched in when they needed help with farm work. His winning ways made him popular in Gann Valley and the nearby town of Kimball. Nonetheless, there were oddities about Verne Sankey that raised some of his new neighbours’ suspicions.

Where, in the middle of the Depression, did he get the money to buy the farm? Why was he always flush with cash when everyone else was broke? Where did he go on his frequent trips away from home? How could he afford a brand-new 1932 Ford Model 18 V8 sedan?

Other things made some of the South Dakota farmers uneasy about the newcomer. He associated with men whom the police knew to be shady characters. Planes occasionally landed on his land in the dead of night. There was an incident in which Sankey shot and wounded an alleged intruder. He said the man was a turkey thief, but then, strangely, didn’t press charges. Meanwhile, Sankey was still bootlegging, though not on as big a scale as he had done previously.

On October 4, 1932, three men robbed a bank in Vayland, a town near Gann Valley. They escaped in a car after grabbing a paltry $900. One day later, a bank in the nearby community of Winner was robbed, possibly by the same gang. Suspicion eventually fell on Verne Sankey as the leader of the robbers, but nothing was ever proven. However, if Sankey was involved in the South Dakota robberies, it’s possible that one of his accomplices — who might also have been the other man in the Regina stickup — was a Canadian named Gordon Alcorn.

Born in Welwyn, Saskatchewan, in 1905, Alcorn came from a railroading family. He knew Verne Sankey from boyhood and grew up admiring the colourful engineer who told such wonderful stories and always had a wallet full of money. Alcorn even worked for the CPR as Sankey’s fireman.

A tall, gangly youth, Alcorn was easygoing and shy. The only time he was ever in trouble with police in Canada was when he was fined two dollars for using abusive language. But Alcorn was easily led and Sankey took advantage of that. Whether or not Alcorn was in fact involved in armed robbery, he would be a key participant in the events that made Verne Sankey notorious.

One of the most highly publicized crimes in twentieth-century America was the kidnapping on March 1, 1932, of aviation hero Charles Lindbergh’s baby son. The snatching of an innocent child for ransom outraged the nation. Even convicted gangster Al Capone, from his prison cell, offered his services in getting the little boy home safely. The child was eventually found dead. More than two years later, a man named Bruno Richard Hauptmann was arrested and charged. He was tried, convicted, and executed. But before the Lindbergh kidnapping case was finally stamped
CLOSED
, it created a logistical nightmare for American law-enforcement agencies. It also opened a new door to fast money for criminals.

At the time, American legal jurisdiction was divided among federal, state, and municipal authorities. The various law enforcement agencies jealously guarded their own turf. Communication among them was poor and co-operation sometimes non-existent. The Bureau of Investigation, a branch of the Department of Justice, and the forerunner of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), was a small, almost insignificant agency with extremely limited authority. Its new director, J. Edgar Hoover, was an ambitious, publicity-hungry autocrat who would use any means, fair or foul, to extend his department’s power. He was delighted when the American government passed the Lindbergh Law, which made kidnapping a federal crime. During the early 1930s, Hoover would capitalize on other sensational crimes in his quest for power and glory.

The Lindbergh kidnapping touched off a rash of abductions in the United States. The victims were nearly all very wealthy men. The whole nation sympathized with the Lindberghs, especially after the discovery of the decomposed little body. But many people in Depression-stricken America felt little empathy for rich adult males. They and their families, living in opulence while others lost their homes and went hungry, were hardly touched by the Depression. Some of the wheelers and dealers among them had even profited from the misfortunes of others. Criminals saw them as fair game. Holding a rich man for ransom could be much more lucrative than armed robbery, and not nearly as dangerous.

By April 1932, Gordon Alcorn had joined the ranks of the unemployed, having been laid off by the CPR. He was in Winnipeg, living hand-to-mouth while he looked for work. Alcorn had made friends with a man named Arthur Youngberg, a Minnesota native of Swedish background. He was over six feet tall and powerfully built, but, like Alcorn, naive in the ways of the world. Youngberg had worked for the CPR for thirteen years and had even known Verne Sankey. He, too, had been laid off.