The Kidnap Years:

by David Stout

  Not all kidnappings stirred public revulsion. On the contrary, a juicy gangland kidnapping could be as entertaining as a newspaper photo of a slain mobster with his head resting in a bowl of pasta and his blood mingling with spilled wine.

  Newspaper reporters and editors indulged in considerable levity as they chronicled the snatches and ransom negotiations involving people on the wrong side of the law. Even the New York Times, that stuffy bastion of good taste and prudery, got into the spirit now and then. Reporting on one case in the thirties, the Times noted lightheartedly that Basil Banghart, a Chicago gangster and machine-gun artist known to friend and foe as “the Owl,” had been sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison for his role in a kidnapping. (A fellow mobster explained Banghart’s nickname: “He had big, slow-blinking eyes—and he was wise.”)3

  Around the same time, the newspaper noted breezily, another Windy City miscreant, Charles “Ice Wagon” Connors, was kidnapped and “taken for a ride” to a patch of woods where he was shot to death by former associates after a falling out—over money, of all things. (In mob legend, Connors acquired his nickname as a good-natured joke: a getaway car he was driving collided with an ice-delivery truck after a robbery. The historical record is unclear as to whether he got away anyhow.)

  The laughter stopped on the night of March 1, 1932, with the most famous kidnapping in U.S. history, that of twenty-month-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., stolen from his parents’ home in Hopewell in rural west-central New Jersey. It was called “the crime of the century.”***** It is hard to imagine, in our age of debunking and social media sniping, the adoration that was heaped upon Charles Lindbergh after his epic 1927 flight to Paris. He was idolized for his great courage in flying alone over the Atlantic Ocean, for his matinee idol good looks, for a half smile that suggested an underlying modesty and not the aloofness that really lay behind the façade.

  “Had not Charles A. Lindbergh flown the Atlantic…a federal kidnapping statute might not yet have been enacted,” a commentator observed4 after the anti-kidnapping law was passed by lawmakers and signed by President Herbert Hoover in June 1932.

  Yes, the ordeal of the Lindberghs roused Congress from its torpor. But well before March 1, 1932, it seemed that people who were not necessarily famous nationally but were well-to-do—brewers, bankers, builders, and merchants—were in danger, as were their children.

  While there is no empirical way to gauge a nation’s collective emotion, it may be that the kidnapping and slaying of the golden-curled Lindbergh baby caused more grief, revulsion, and yearning for retribution than any other crime against a private citizen, adult or child, ever.

  Charles Lindbergh Jr. was an adorable baby. His heroic father was the son of a former congressman. Charles Lindbergh’s shy, pretty wife, Anne, was the daughter of Dwight Morrow, a wealthy banker, former ambassador to Mexico, and briefly a Republican senator from New Jersey before his unexpected death in 1931 at age fifty-eight.

  Before the Lindbergh horror, enactment of a federal kidnapping law was hardly a sure thing. The U.S. attorney general, William D. Mitchell, argued against it on grounds that it would increase federal spending and make the states too dependent on Washington.

  But with the discovery of the Lindbergh baby’s body on May 12, 1932, things changed literally overnight. On May 13, President Hoover, ignoring the reality that the U.S. government had no jurisdiction over kidnappings, ordered federal law enforcement agencies to aid state and local investigators “until the criminals are implacably brought to justice.”5

  Representative Charles Eaton, a New Jersey Republican, was similarly outraged, declaring after the baby was found dead that the Lindbergh family was “the symbol of all that is holy and best in our nation and civilization.”6

  The chaplain of the House of Representatives, the Reverend J. S. Montgomery, offered a prayer for the child, then urged lawmakers to “arouse the public conscience, that a slight atonement may be made, by smiting murderers and outlaws into the dust.”

  At the dawn of the 1930s, taking a kidnapping victim across a state line was a smart tactic. In that predigital era, there wasn’t much coordination and cooperation among the police and courts of the states. Most states did not have statewide police forces. Potential witnesses in a state to which a victim was taken were beyond the subpoena reach of courts in a state where the kidnapping had taken place. Laws against kidnapping varied from state to state. Extradition was cumbersome. Fewer than half of American households had telephones.

  And sadly, some local cops augmented their modest incomes by taking money in return for not chasing criminals too aggressively.

  What became known as the Lindbergh Law was sponsored by Missouri lawmakers Senator Roscoe Conkling Patterson, a Republican, and Representative John Joseph Cochran, a Democrat from St. Louis. A number of kidnappings had taken place around Kansas City and St. Louis. Both cities were influenced by, some would say run by, organized crime. A lot of kidnappings were carried out by professional criminals who had branched out from gambling, bootlegging, and other illicit enterprises.

  But some kidnappings were the work of amateurs, driven to desperation because they had no jobs and no prospects. And some people plumbed the depths of human cruelty by posing as kidnappers, sending ransom demands to relatives of the victims while knowing nothing of the victims’ whereabouts.

  What made Kansas City, Missouri, and St. Louis such hotbeds of kidnapping? The first city, of course, is next door to the identically named city in the state of Kansas. St. Louis, which sits on the Mississippi River, was even more ideally situated. Kidnappers could take a bridge across the river and be in Illinois in minutes. And for kidnappers with boats, the mighty river offered access to the entire Midwest. Thus, St. Louis, which was known in frontier days as the “Gateway to the West,” could have been dubbed “the Kidnap Turnstile” in the 1930s.

  “Kidnapping is the feature crime of the present time,” Walter B. Weisenberger, president of the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce, told the Senate Judiciary Committee as he urged federal anti-kidnapping legislation days after the Lindbergh infant was stolen. “It is a crime that men with some of the best brains in this country have gone into, because it offers big returns and reasonable safeguards.”7

  Some of the best brains in the country? Perhaps Weisenberger exaggerated the intellects of most kidnappers. But there was no denying that they were an industrious lot. The St. Louis police chief, Joseph Gerk, claimed to have collected statistics from cities nationwide in 1931. He told Congress he had counted 279 kidnappings that year, in the course of which thirteen victims were killed and sixty-nine kidnappers captured and convicted.8

  But those numbers were unreliable, as Gerk acknowledged. He had sent questionnaires to the police in 948 cities but received replies from just 501. States and cities did not routinely share information with one another, as indicated by the limited cooperation for Gerk’s survey.

  The day after the Lindbergh kidnapping, a New York Times article offered a partial list of the most recent kidnappings in various states: Illinois, 49; Michigan, 26; California, 25; Indiana, 20. And so on. The following day, attributing its figures somewhat vaguely to “authorities,” the paper reported that more than two thousand persons had been abducted in the country in the previous two years.9

  No doubt, many kidnappings went unreported, as some of the victims were criminals themselves, grabbed by rival gangsters, then sold back to their own gangs if they were lucky.

  And if they weren’t lucky? A Chicago detective testifying before the House Judiciary Committee in February 1932 let the lawmakers imagine what could happen if negotiations fell through. He told of a raid on a kidnapping ring’s lair that included a “torture chamber,” which apparently had been used frequently and which “hinted at almost unbelievable horrors,” as the Times put it.10

  Items found in the lair included vats of lime, cans of gasoline, and diving suits.

  Why diving suits? Apparently, a captive would be stuffed
into one, then lowered to the bottom of the Chicago River and “only infrequently allowed to have air,” the Times reported. Upon being brought up from the cold and total darkness, the victim would presumably have been willing to do whatever his captors desired: agree to stay out of his captors’ territory, beg his employers to pay a big ransom, or both.

  And here, the inescapable question: were some kidnappers mean-spirited enough to leave victims at the river bottom until the bubbles stopped?

  Justice was more streamlined in the 1930s. The courts were far less cluttered by appeals; defendants’ rights that we take for granted today did not yet exist. And if numbers are any indication, there was far less ambivalence about capital punishment. In the 1930s, there were 167 executions a year on average, more than in any other decade before or since, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington nonprofit organization that collects and analyzes data on capital punishment.******

  Here, some numbers are illuminating—and startling. In 1935, there were about 127 million Americans; in 2018, there were about 328 million. If executions were carried out nowadays at the same rate as they were in 1935, about 430 prisoners would have been put to death in 2018—roughly eight a week. But since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, after a four-year hiatus, the highest total of executions in a single year was “only” 98 in 1999, as the Death Penalty Information Center notes.*******

  Why such a parade to the gallows, gas chamber, or electric chair at that point in history? Again, there were fewer grounds for appeals. Probably more important, some criminologists argued that the death penalty was necessary to prevent society from disintegrating.********

  In the 1930s, the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley in Buffalo by an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, was fresh in the memories of Americans of middle age and beyond. In Europe, dynasties had been toppled and social norms shattered by the Great War. The Russian Revolution had enflamed fears that “radicals” and “Bolsheviks” were working their mischief within the United States. In fact, there were left-leaning Americans who wanted to bring about fundamental changes in government and society, although it is likely that few wanted to see blood running in the streets.

  As a proud alumnus of the New York Times, I was struck by the tone of some of the newspaper’s coverage of events during the 1930s.*********

  Riots in “Negro” neighborhoods stirred speculation that communists and other social agitators were responsible. The lynching of “a Negro” typically merited a few paragraphs, especially if it occurred in the South, where lynchings were too common to be newsworthy. If there was much reporting on whether racial unrest might be linked to the evils of segregation, bigotry, and poverty, I missed it. This was a time when the Ku Klux Klan was still thriving—and parading—and not just in the Old Confederacy.

  Labor unrest was also blamed on communists rather than the desire of workers to have more job security and benefits, more food on the dinner table, and an extra sandwich in the lunch pail. Strikers and union organizers were beaten by company thugs who were euphemistically called “security guards.”

  There was a man who both contributed to the harsh law-and-order atmosphere of the 1930s and fed off it. He was a dour Washington bachelor who had to overcome a childhood stutter and began his career as an obscure clerk. But he was anything but an unimaginative paper shuffler. He had a gift for organization. He also sensed that one could acquire power, sometimes great power, by filling a vacuum and by throwing himself into seemingly menial tasks that others avoided.

  When he took a low-level job in the Department of Justice, he saw a need for reliable, centralized information on crime. He also saw a national leadership vacuum in law enforcement. He would move deftly to fill it and to compile statistics that would eventually be helpful to criminologists and lawmen across the country—and to himself as he massaged numbers to attest to the importance of his own job.

  He would use his considerable talents to become one of the most famous law enforcement officials and arguably one of the most important public figures in American history.

  *Originally, the law gave the FBI jurisdiction when a victim was missing for seven days on the presumption that the victim might have been taken across state lines. In 1956, the law was amended to shorten the FBI’s waiting period to twenty-four hours. If it is learned that the victim was never taken out of state, the FBI will defer to local authorities, although nothing prevents the FBI from offering its help. The law does not apply when a child is taken by a parent, as in a custody dispute, unless a child is taken abroad. The law has evolved in other ways that I shall touch upon.

  **I can hear some lawyers clucking in disapproval, as though I don’t know what I’m talking about. I think I do.

  ***Prohibition, the law of the land from 1920 to 1933 after ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, was also driven by political and social factors, like prejudice against immigrants from countries where drinking was the norm. After World War One, this bias was especially pronounced against people of German descent. Prohibition’s enabling law forbade the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States or importing and exporting them. But possession or consumption was not forbidden. Thus, some pharmacists were happy to dispense “prescriptions” for medicinal whiskey, and grape growers profited from selling wine for “religious” rites. And while home stills were officially illegal, they were not hard to buy or build. By the early 1930s, there was a growing recognition that the “noble experiment” had failed, even though alcohol-related deaths had declined. The Eighteenth Amendment was repealed by the Twenty-First Amendment, ratified on December 5, 1933.

  ****Reported by the Associated Press on March 29, 1933, and published in numerous newspapers.

  *****The Lindbergh crime inherited that title from the 1924 abduction and murder of a Chicago boy by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two spoiled young men from rich families who wanted to experience the thrill of killing. They were saved from the electric chair by famed lawyer Clarence Darrow and sentenced to life plus ninety-nine years in prison. Loeb was stabbed to death by another inmate in 1936. Leopold was paroled in 1958 and died in 1971.

  ******The organization is opposed to capital punishment, and its leadership has included people who are outspoken against the death penalty. But I have found the organization’s data to be unfailingly reliable.

  *******For more information, see www.deathpenaltyinfo.org.

  ********Public support for capital punishment in the United States has fluctuated since the Supreme Court restored the death penalty in 1976 after a four-year hiatus. A Pew Research poll taken in June 2018 showed that 54 percent of Americans said they favored capital punishment, while 39 percent were opposed, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The percentage in favor was up five points from the record-low 49 percent found by Pew Research in 2016. But the long-range trend shows a decline in support for the death penalty since 1996, when support peaked at 78 percent.

  *********As a subscriber to the Times, I have access to the newspaper’s microfilm. In every instance in which I cite the Times as a source, I have read the article or articles cited.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE ORGANIZATION MAN

  J. Edgar Hoover was born in Washington, DC, on New Year’s Day, 1895, the youngest of three children of Dickerson Hoover, who worked for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, and his wife, Annie. Dickerson Hoover was hospitalized for a time because of mental illness, a taboo subject at the time, and Annie Hoover dominated the household, instilling in her children her own uncompromising ideas of Christian morality and right and wrong.

  Young Edgar’s first job was as a messenger boy in the Library of Congress. Soon, he was promoted to cataloger, then to clerk, a position in which he mastered the Dewey decimal system, which later became the basis for the filing system of the agency he would rule.

  Attending classes at night, he earned his law degree from Geor
ge Washington University in the capital and passed the bar exam. On July 26, 1917, when he was twenty-two, he became a clerk in the DOJ’s Bureau of Investigation.* One of his initial tasks was assembling a card file on suspected radicals and Bolsheviks.

  Fears of these shadowy and threatening people were heightened on June 2, 1919, when a bomb exploded in front of the Washington home of the U.S. attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, demolishing the front of the house and rattling windows for many blocks around. The only casualty was the bomber himself, over whose remains Palmer’s neighbor, Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt, had to step as he rushed to make sure Palmer was unhurt.

  The incident helped to spur the attorney general’s “Palmer raids,” in which federal agents, acting with no regard for constitutional rights, arrested, harassed, and even deported people who were deemed radical, subversive, or…well…not sufficiently American.

  In his new job in the Bureau of Investigation, Hoover impressed those around him by assembling a file of some 450,000 such people. He also impressed with his utterly serious demeanor and his impeccable wardrobe. He seemed marked for bigger things. His chance came with the 1923 death of President Warren G. Harding, under whose lax administration the Bureau of Investigation had been a haven for political hacks.

  In fairness to Harding, the bureau’s sorry state predated his lamentable tenure. Founded in 1908 during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, the bureau was supposed to be the DOJ’s main weapon for combatting crimes that threatened national security so that the department would not have to “borrow” investigators from other agencies, like the Secret Service.** But the bureau quickly became a swamp of incompetence as its “investigators” devoted themselves to crimes on Indian reservations and other obscure cases.