Authors: Joe Urschel
(On the day the Kellys were convicted in Oklahoma, the state legislature in Texas passed a law making kidnapping punishable by death. The bill was sponsored by Grady Woodruff, who had been one of the attorneys for the Shannons in their trial with Bates and Bailey. Woodruff said his experience there convinced him that gangsters thought no more of kidnapping and holding someone for ransom than they would “going to the coast for a vacation.”)
In the remarkable ninety days since Berenice Urschel woke J. Edgar Hoover from his sleep with her urgent call about her husband’s kidnapping, Hoover had achieved what three months earlier would have been thought of as impossible: he captured and convicted the perpetrators of the most notorious kidnapping since the Lindbergh baby abduction. He incontrovertibly demonstrated the need for a national law enforcement agency whose authority was not limited by locale or boundary. The national melodrama that had played out over the nation’s radio networks and on the pages of its newspapers gave the Roosevelt administration not just proof positive of the need to expand the powers of the federal government, but the first real victory of his administration—a demonstrable triumph in his offensive against the forces that were dragging down the country.
Although the War on Crime was merely a bit player in FDR’s ambitious first hundred days of legislative and policy initiatives, it was now made a first priority. Hoover’s Bureau of Investigation, previously viewed as a dumping ground for incompetents and the hopelessly corrupt, was now, in the public’s mind, the model of efficiency and relentless pursuit—dragon slayers in business suits. Hoover, under Cummings’s tutelage, had become a skilled practitioner of managing the message and building an image. Questions about his age, competence and fastidious fashion all but disappeared. Cummings would reappoint him as director, and he would continue in that position for the next forty years.
While the other members of FDR’s Brain Trust were fighting a battle against an abstract enemy—the economic calamities of the Great Depression—Cummings and Hoover were fighting a real war against a definable enemy armed with real bullets and the actual accoutrements of modern warfare. Their success was measured by arrests and convictions, and they had just run the score up in an impressive display of crime-fighting capability, bringing to justice a notorious criminal gang without firing a shot.
They had won their case in the court of public opinion, as well. Their accomplishments were celebrated episodically by virtually every newspaper chain, radio network and movie theater. America would get its version of Scotland Yard, with crafty investigators using the latest in scientific criminal-detection methods, and it would be headed up by the most unlikely of candidates: J. Edgar Hoover.
Later, when arguing for expanded federal laws and increased power for the Justice Department, Attorney General Cummings would cite the Urschel case as a prime example of the need for federal forces to fight crime “between the federal and state jurisdictions,” where there existed “a kind of twilight zone, a sort of neutral corridor, unpoliced and unprotected in which criminals of the most desperate character found an area of relative safety … the unholy sanctuary of predatory vice.”
In the Urschel kidnapping case, Cummings told the Continental Congress of the Daughters of the American Revolution on April 19, 1934, “the operations of the criminals took place in seven states; and it was necessary for the agents of the Department of Justice to go into nine additional states before their efforts to solve the crime and bring its perpetrators to justice proved successful. The seven states referred to have an area of about 683,000 square miles, which exceeds in extent the combined areas of Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, England, Scotland, and Wales.… This accentuates the need of a nationwide approach to the problem.… Crime today is organized on a nationwide basis … in many localities there exists an unholy alliance between venal politicians and organized bands of racketeers … Undoubtedly crime costs our country several billion dollars each year; and it is conservative to say that there are more people in the underworld carrying deadly weapons than there are in the Army and the Navy of the United States.”
* * *
Immediately after the Urschel trial, Keenan went straight to the microphones to crow about his department’s victory. FDR’s War on Crime had won its first battle.
“This is just a skirmish,” he declared. “We are going right on down the line until every predatory criminal and gangster in the United States is exterminated. The new law has proven a powerful weapon and we are eager to use it to the finish.”
Keenan’s choice of the word “exterminated,” rather than “incarcerated,” was an odd choice for a man of the law, but it would prove to be prophetic, as the Bureau’s men would soon prove as adept at killing gangsters as arresting and prosecuting them. (The following year, during the nationwide hunt for John Dillinger, Cummings would remove any ambiguity from his policy directives, telling his agents to “Shoot to kill—then count to ten.”)
With the Urschel trial behind it, the Bureau would begin to arm up heavily. Hoover began buying his agents automatic weapons and submachine guns and hiring new crack-shot agents. He would bring in instructors who could teach them how to use the latest weaponry effectively—and with deadly accuracy.
Hoover, realizing his vision of creating an elite force of investigators armed only with law degrees and accounting skills was unrealistic, added marksmanship to his list of requirements. He built a gym in the Bureau’s office building so his men could get fit and train in the martial arts. He installed a firing range and brought his old-line field agents into Washington to teach his college boys how to shoot. His “Briefcase Army” would now be packing heat. And lots of it.
Hyde announced that the Urschel case convictions would “serve as a notice to those who would violate and set aside our federal laws that no individual or group of individuals is more powerful than the federal government.”
The government’s decision to allow cameras in the courtroom proved a brilliant stroke in their campaign to burnish the image of their agents into the public’s mind as invincible detectives who would stop at nothing until they brought the bad guys to justice.
Before the Kellys were even on their way to prison, movie theater audiences were standing and cheering the newsreel accounts of the trial and its sensational verdict as the narrator announced: “Uncle Sam Wars on Kidnappers!… Abductors of Charles Urschel, oil millionaire, are sentenced for life under the new so-called Lindbergh federal law … Machine Gun Kelly, mastermind of a snatch gang and desperado extraordinary, gets life too … a telling blow to gangdom’s rule!”
The clip featured actual courtroom scenes, re-creations of the crime and the Shannon farm, with an actor playing Urschel being chained to the high chair at Armon’s place. It concluded with a shot of the Kellys being taken from the courtroom to the armored car that would take them away as the narrator claimed: “Thus, Uncle Sam rolled up his sleeves and dealt gangland a swift, decisive blow. They are going for a ride, and with the federal government at the wheel.” Over a shot of Leavenworth prison, he concluded, “And here’s the end of the road—and oblivion—the inevitable destruction of the lure of easy money.”
Reporters and headline writers had a field day with the colorful quotes and descriptions they were being fed by Hoover and his publicity machine. They described Kelly as “one of the most vicious and dangerous criminals in America,” a “known killer,” the “machine gunner for the underworld of the Western badlands.” And, taking the Hoover line, they convicted him in printed innuendo for the Kansas City Massacre.
The G-man image was hatched, but the actual story of Kelly’s arrest lacked the drama Hoover was looking for, and six months later, when it was fed into the Bureau’s publicity machine, it was quickly enhanced. Hoover’s friendly inside man at
The
Washington Star,
Rex Collier, who’d formerly worked as “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s public relations man, embellished Kathryn’s quote and attributed it to Kelly in a colorful story he crafted at Hoover’s bidding and published in July 1934. In all subsequent official accounts of the capture, the Bureau would claim that when their agents surprised Kelly in Tichenor’s Memphis home, he dropped his gun, cowered in a corner and pleaded, “Don’t shoot, G-men! Don’t shoot!”
Hoover latched on to the G-man moniker that would define his brand for the next forty years. It would soon be on movie marquees, books and comic books that would portray his agents as smart, handsome detectives equipped with the most modern contrivances and scientific technology to bring criminals to their knees. From then on, Hoover would go to extraordinary lengths to make sure his agents were portrayed as the heroes, and the outlaws as scum.
Six of the nine defendants in the Urschel kidnapping were sentenced to life. Cass Coleman and his neighbor, Will Casey, would be tried later in San Angelo, Texas, for harboring known criminals. Langford Ramsey, Tichenor and two others were under arrest in Memphis and awaiting trial. Clifford Skelly and Edward Berman of Minneapolis were sentenced to five years each for laundering the Urschel ransom money. It was quite a takedown, and it not only saved Hoover’s foundering career, but burnished the image of the nation’s top lawman that he was creating for himself.
It was the first victory in the nation’s fight against gangland forces and Western outlaws, and it was described in the press as “the finest piece of detective work in modern times.”
But, other than desk-jockeying the case from his perch in Washington, DC, Hoover had very little involvement in catching the Kellys or prosecuting their case. However, he had no hesitancy taking credit for it or allowing his name and image to become the trademark for the Bureau. The public would come to regard him as Public Hero No. 1, the perfect antidote to the Public Enemies that were prowling the country and making it unsafe for good, law-abiding citizens.
The agents who had worked the case in the field were a bit taken aback that no credit at all was being given to the victim in the case, who had stood up to the kidnappers and led the agents to his place of captivity, participated in the arrest of Bailey and the Shannons, gathered a wealth of evidence for the prosecution and testified in court—all under threats to his life and his family’s. When Colvin, who described Urschel as “brilliant” and “cool-headed,” suggested to Hoover that Urschel at least ought to be thanked or celebrated for his participation, Hoover did nothing publicly, but instead fired off a terse letter of appreciation to Urschel privately.
Perhaps I should have at an earlier date advised you of my gratification because of your wholehearted cooperation with this Division in its conduct of the investigation of the kidnapping of which you were the victim. The convictions on Saturday, I am sure, bear ample testimony to the wisdom of the advice given by this department to the families and friends of persons who have been kidnapped and I am quite sure that if the government enjoyed the same measure of cooperation which you have afforded it from all others who are visited by this despicable crime, kidnapping would no longer be popular in the underworld.
I thank you sincerely for your cooperation and extend to you my congratulations upon the successful presentation of this case, to which you contributed in no little degree.
With expressions of my kindest personal regards, I am
J. Edgar Hoover
Director
Hyde was more to the point and more self-effacing in his appreciation of Urschel’s role: “The credit goes most to Mr. Urschel chiefly because of his courage and his ability to distinguish what was going on under a blindfold,” he said. Years later, he would laud Urschel as a “wonderful witness.”
“It was nothing to my credit,” Hyde added. “Any young lawyer could have tried it as well.”
Meanwhile, Hoover went to work to insure that in this, and in all future victories, he indeed would get the credit. Cummings’s team was all over the papers and the airwaves after the verdict. Hoover felt his Bureau—particularly with himself representing it—should have been out front, in the spotlight and taking the applause.
He started courting friendly members of the press and stars of the new radio networks. He would lure them with exclusive tips and leaks in return for favorable treatment and able assists in building his myth of invincibility. First in the door was pulp magazine crime writer Courtney Ryley Cooper, who loved a good detective story and had the narrative skills to turn it into a great one, even if it meant sidestepping some of the messy facts of the matter. That summer he began a series of stories for
American Magazine
that would turn the androgynous, fussy bureaucrat into not just the most admired lawman in the country, but a national celebrity, as well.
ALCATRAZ AND THE IRREDEEMABLES
While Hoover and the Bureau of Investigation were busily hunting down the Kellys and the rest of their ring, Attorney General Cummings had been working a parallel track to create a prison strong enough to hold them and the rest of the criminal underworld they hoped to bring to justice. If they were to escape, yet again, it would undo all the trust they’d just won from the adoring public.
Bailey and Bates had been sent to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary by plane, guarded by ten heavily armed officers. From the military airfield where they landed in Leavenworth, Kansas, they were taken by armored car to the prison. Leavenworth was just eight miles away from the Kansas State Prison in Lansing, which Bailey and eleven others had broken out of in spectacular fashion just four months earlier, on Memorial Day. The irony was not lost on anyone. As the guards were escorting Bailey into Leavenworth, he looked up at the walls and dryly observed that they were “pretty high.”