Authors: Joe Urschel
When Warren G. Harding took office in 1921 he appointed his campaign manager, Harry Daugherty, as Attorney General. Daugherty purged the department of the hangers-on from the previous administration and peopled it with a collection of political appointments and partisans who were eager to do the administration’s dirty work, as long as there was good money in it. Daugherty found Hoover’s lists handy material for political blackmail, so Hoover managed to keep his job. Before long, the Bureau had succumbed to the corrupting influences of the Harding administration and was jokingly referred to as the “Department of Easy Virtue”—much to the chagrin of the prim and moralistic Hoover, who nevertheless found himself up to his neck in the nefarious practices that Daugherty allowed the Bureau to engage in. In fact, those activities he undertook during the Harding administration nearly torpedoed his career when Roosevelt was swept into office.
Just months after the election, Hoover was in the crosshairs of FDR’s first choice for Attorney General, Montana Senator Thomas Walsh.
Walsh had a long history with Hoover, and it wasn’t a good one. When Walsh and his fellow Montana senator Burton Wheeler were investigating corruption in the Harding administration, Hoover, then second in command at the Bureau, organized a campaign to discredit them on orders from the Bureau’s director. Hoover’s tactics included tapping their phones, intercepting their mail, tailing their family members and breaking into their offices. He tried to lure Wheeler into a hotel room with a comely female, but the ploy failed, Wheeler having been forewarned. Walsh made no secret of the fact that upon taking over as attorney general, one of his first official acts would be to clean house and fire that miserable son of a bitch J. Edgar Hoover.
Before heading to Washington, though, the seventy-two-year-old Walsh, a widower for sixteen years, married a young Cuban debutant. On the train ride from Miami to Washington, the young bride woke up in North Carolina, but her new husband didn’t. The old civil libertarian may have died a happy man, but he never got his revenge on Hoover.
FDR’s next selection for Attorney General was Homer Cummings. With both a Ph.D. and a law degree from Yale, the sixty-three-year-old former mayor of Stamford, Connecticut, was one of FDR’s intellectual and political heavyweights. Originally tapped to become ambassador to the Philippines, FDR put him in the Justice Department as an emergency replacement for Walsh after his untimely death. It was a fortuitous choice. Cummings had big ideas for raising the profile of the Justice Department, which at the time, in 1933, was but a minor player in the small government world of Washington, DC. FDR was articulating a vision for his administration. He was going to war against the forces of the Depression. Cummings liked that positioning. He would prosecute a “war on crime” to raise the profile of his adopted department and make it a major player in the new administration’s ambitious efforts to federalize the nation’s governance. He crafted a plan to merge the Prohibition Bureau’s 1,200 investigators, who would soon have diminished responsibilities with the end of Prohibition in sight, with the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation and Bureau of Identification. With that as a start, he hoped to begin crafting the kind of national police force the public and the President were clamoring for. He also began to craft a major crime bill that would give that force greater powers and tough federal laws to enforce. And he started zeroing in on his first targets.
In the hellish landscape of the drought-plagued and Dust Bowl–afflicted states out West, gangsters plied their trade with virtual impunity. In that part of the country, bank robbers and bootleggers enjoyed not only the popular support of the citizenry, but the tacit support of the local government and police forces, as well. In many cities and towns, it would not be too much of a stretch to say that the local mob not only ran the criminal activities, but the government and law enforcement, too.
Closer in time to the Civil War than the present, the rural areas of the “criminal alley” that stretched from Texas to North Dakota had evolved only marginally in political and social attitudes. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was so enmeshed in parts of Oklahoma that the governor was forced to declare martial law to fight its influence. Race riots proliferated. Socialists and communists spread anti-government paranoia in their attempts to organize farmers. Anarchists spread terror in cities and towns with random bombings and assassination attempts.
The gangland elements that worked the West were a breed apart from the organized mobs that built their empires in the big cities in the eastern states. Those rackets were built on an organized—though violent—business model. In the West, criminals largely mirrored the political attitudes of their environment—they were fiercely independent, roguish and tough. They were loosely organized when they had to be, but preferred the go-it-alone life of a freelancer whenever it was possible. They didn’t want to take orders from a boss—criminal or otherwise—just as the states they roamed through did not want to take direction from the federal government in Washington. The Western gangster had more in common with the outlaws of the Old West than he did with his modern big-city brethren back East.
This was the enemy Cummings wanted to confront. He was well aware of how entrenched and protected the criminal empires were in Chicago and along the East Coast, his home. You would need an army and the authority of martial law to take them down. But with a few good men, the West might be tamed. It was the soft underbelly, and it was there that he would go first. Cummings and FDR believed the country needed its own national law enforcement agency, patterned after Britain’s skillful and sophisticated Scotland Yard. A force that could sidestep the local police forces with their political and criminal connections and obligations. A force with the legal ability to cross city, county and state lines in its pursuit of lawbreakers. Cummings was enough of a political operative to know he needed to move fast, lest his agency be left, as always, sitting on the sidelines. Could he count on this controversial autocrat who was running the Bureau of Investigation to bust some crooks, grab some headlines and move the Justice Department out front in the rush to nationalize police work? The odds didn’t favor it.
Hoover was an entrenched Washington bureaucrat in an age when that was the last thing anyone with marketable skills wanted to be. He had no police or military experience. He had a law degree, but he had never prosecuted a case or assisted anyone who had. He dressed like a dandy, had an effeminate gait so extreme it had been mocked in the press and lived with his mother.
Collier’s
magazine had scoffed at his efforts to train his “college boy” gumshoes and noted with sarcasm that he was a stylish dresser who favored “Eleanor blue” socks and walked with “a mincing step.” Wags around town noted with raised eyebrows the handsome bachelor he dined with daily and traveled with frequently. To top it off, the President’s wife despised him for his “red-baiting” and obsession with smearing anyone he suspected of communist sympathies. (She would later accuse him of running an American Gestapo. They maintained a lifelong antipathy toward one another.) But Hoover had cleaned up the notoriously corrupt Bureau after his appointment as acting director during the Herbert Hoover administration and remade it with a bunch of guys in his mirror image: well-dressed, clean-cut accountants and lawyers who knew how to organize files to his exacting standards and build reasoned, science-based cases for prosecution. He ran the Bureau as a puritanical dictator who demanded blind loyalty, conformity and a scandal-free performance devoid of political chicanery. Was this the guy to take on machine gun–toting mobsters and bomb-throwing anarchists? Probably not, but he was in place, desperate and willing to do anything to save his job.
So, Cummings decided to stick with Hoover. But he wanted results and he wanted them fast. Hoover, eminently disdainful—and fearful—of politicians, heard the message loud and clear and desperately began looking for a card to play. Snatching Nash out of gangland’s playground could have been it. Instead, Nash, three lawmen and one of his own agents were lying dead in a Kansas City parking lot.
Hoover didn’t realize it, but they were dead not as the result of unprovoked gangland violence, but because of his own agent’s ineptitude with an unfamiliar weapon.
What he did realize was that the whole operation was technically illegal. Hoover’s agents were not authorized to make arrests. In addition, they were not authorized to carry weapons, although that was an admonition they willfully ignored on many occasions. Many agents, especially in the dangerous Southwest, where violent crime was rampant and the murder rate was four to five times higher than even the most dangerous cities up north, would purchase their own weapons and train themselves how to use them.
The Bureau’s agents had turned to Chief Reed for help. Reed had been chasing Nash for years and wanted desperately to be there when an arrest was made. Reed really had no authority in Hot Springs either, but he knew Nash, and he knew there was no one in Hot Springs who’d make the arrest. So the three lawmen hatched a plan for their own “snatch job.” Go in, grab Nash, get him out of the city, out of the state and back to some neutral ground where an arrest could be made. Not very neat and lawyerly, but there really was no other way to get the job done.
At the end of day, Hoover wrote back to Vetterli.
Confirming my several telephonic conversations with you today, it is my desire that every effort and resource of this bureau be utilized to bring about the apprehension of the parties responsible for the killing of Special Agent R.J. Caffrey and the injuring of Special Agent Lackey and yourself, as well as the killing of police officers who were assisting us in this assignment. I cannot too strongly emphasize the imperative necessity of concentrating upon this matter, without any let-up in the same until the parties are taken dead or alive.
Hoover knew he would have to meet this challenge to his authority head-on. He had wanted to build an army of agents molded from the same cast he had set for himself: businesslike investigators who wouldn’t have to get their hands dirty with the nasty elements of real police work. But now, experienced police professionals were the very types he would need. Fortunately, he’d hung on to a number of old-time lawmen who were running the Bureau’s field offices in the wild outposts of Texas, Oklahoma and the crime-infested Midwest. But out of a force of more than three hundred agents, in eighty-eight field offices across the country, he found less than a dozen who had the experience and training to go up against the type of machine gun–toting murderers who had massacred the lawmen in the Union Station parking lot. By 11:30 that morning Hoover had assembled a special task force of agents from that veteran staff to descend on Kansas City and bring the murdering outlaws to justice.
To head the task force he turned to Agent Gus “Buster” T. Jones who was in charge of the Bureau’s Texas office in San Antonio. Jones was not modeled on Hoover’s image of the modern agent. Jones was old school, a career lawman whose biography was the stuff of legends. Jones had worked as town marshal, deputy sheriff, customs agent and Texas Ranger. Unlike Hoover’s East Coast agents, who dressed in fashionable suits, starched shirts and polished wingtips, Jones would most often be found wearing a 10-gallon hat, cowboy boots and a holstered sidearm on his hip.
Jones was born in the Texas frontier town of San Angelo in 1881. His father had died when a Comanche arrow went through his chest as the Frontier Battalion, as the Texas Rangers were formerly known, were furiously fighting to evict the tribe from the barren landscape that they had inhabited for centuries.
On his twelfth birthday, his mother gave Jones his father’s cedar-handled, .45-caliber Colt—“the gun that won the West.” He then adopted the town sheriff, Rome Shields, as his substitute father. Shields had molded him into an expert marksman and an adoring student of how the law was administered, Texas style. At sixteen, he ran off and joined the Texas militia to fight in the Spanish-American War. When the malaria-weakened teenager returned to San Angelo, he had little interest in returning to high school. Instead, he took a job with Shields as an undercover agent spying on members of Black Jack Ketchum’s gang, which included several members from San Angelo. Ketchum was making a fine living robbing trains and mail carriers across the Southwest. Evidence gathered by Jones helped lead to the arrest and capture of much of the gang. When the remnants of the gang joined up with Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch, Jones continued his work and helped capture three of its key members. In 1901, Cassidy fled to South America with his longtime associate, Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid.
By then San Angelo was beginning to sink under the weight of its success as a trading center and transfer point for cattlemen who drove their herds into town and onto the railcars for their journey north. To entertain the visiting businessmen, cowboys and drovers, the town had developed a bustling saloon, prostitution and gambling business that was getting out of hand. The town fathers were growing fearful of venturing out at night and were looking for someone who could keep a lid on the nighttime revelry but not screw the lid down so tightly that the profitable wages of sin would dry up.
Jones was soon walking the darkened streets, Wyatt Earp–style, with pistols on his hips, as the town’s night watchman and building a reputation as a quick draw and an expert marksman. Stints with the Texas Rangers and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol soon followed. In 1916, he joined the Justice Department as Special Agent in Charge of the El Paso office, which he quickly populated with a crew of like-minded pals from the Texas Rangers, men who were familiar with the ways of the underworld and who knew when to get involved or, more importantly, look the other way. When he was promoted to the San Antonio office, he brought even more of his old law enforcement buddies into the Bureau.
By putting Jones in charge of the investigation, Hoover was making a conscious decision to sideline his sycophantic pets in favor of the hard-drinking, hard-charging, gun-toting Western toughs who’d been living in and outside the law for their entire careers. Jones’s knowledge of the underworld was expansive. He knew every thief, bank robber, gangster and hit man west of the Mississippi and south of the border. Jones’s network was so wide that when things were going poorly for Pancho Villa, it was to Jones he turned for help negotiating a truce. He also knew the legitimate cops and reliable politicos he could trust in an emergency. Chief Otto Reed had been one of those. Now, he was a gangland victim lying dead in the Kansas City morgue.