by David Stout
Regulars at the Green Lantern and Hollyhocks included members of the Barker-Karpis gang, along with other Midwestern lowlifes.
In the spring of 1933, Sawyer is believed to have approached Karpis and suggested that Hamm was an ideal kidnapping target.
The FBI ought to have learned all this earlier, but again, intelligence gathering wasn’t their strong point. And in fairness, a lot more was going on in 1933.
*The least gregarious of the brothers, Lloyd Barker was released in 1947 and married. He spent two years in the straight life as an assistant manager of a bar and grill in Denver before being shot dead by his wife in 1949.
**The Green Lantern still exists in St. Paul and boasts of its colorful past, as do many long-time restaurants and watering holes in cities where organized crime flourished.
***Five men were eventually arrested and imprisoned for the Gleckman kidnapping.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A SHERIFF TAKEN PRISONER
Bolivar, Missouri
Friday, June 16, 1933
Sheriff Jack Killingsworth and his wife, Bernice, were early risers. It was hard for them not to be, since their living quarters were in the same building as the Polk County jail. Nor did they mind getting up at sunrise; Jack liked to make his rounds in the cool part of the day.
The weather was promising on Friday, June 16. The temperature was in the mid-sixties at dawn, so it probably wouldn’t go much above eighty during the afternoon. As they finished breakfast, Jack had a thought: maybe the couple’s two-year-old son would like to come along.
“No,” Bernice said. “Don’t wake him. Let’s just let him sleep.”59
So the sheriff, who was thirty-six, set off alone on his daily tour. It was more about socializing than looking for trouble, since few bad things happened in Bolivar, about 120 miles southeast of Kansas City and at the time a community of just over two thousand. Jack Killingsworth knew a lot of people in town. Before being elected sheriff the previous year, he had been a salesman at Bitzer Chevrolet on the corner of Broadway and Missouri Avenue.
Of course, Jack Killingsworth liked cars, and he liked the people at Bitzer Chevy, so he usually started his patrol, if it could be called that, by hanging out there.
Just after 7:00 a.m., Killingsworth parked his car next to the Chevy dealership and walked into the garage section. Right away, he saw proprietor Ernest Bitzer sitting on a bench, talking to another man and looking very nervous. Several mechanics in coveralls were standing against a wall, also looking ill at ease.
Before Killingsworth could say hello, a man shouted, “There’s the law!”
The sheriff recognized the man. He was Adam Richetti, a Bolivar native in his midtwenties who had moved away to embark on a career as a gunman and bank robber.
When the sheriff saw the face of the man sitting next to Ernest Bitzer, he was stunned. It was Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, whose image had been on wanted posters all over the Midwest. The cherubic, apple-cheeked features were misleading, for the twenty-nine-year-old Floyd was one of the most notorious killers and bandits in the country. Born in Georgia, raised in poverty on a farm in Oklahoma, he had turned early to crime. By the early 1930s, he was a celebrated bank robber, even seen as a hero by some Americans. There were stories, likely apocryphal, that he sometimes burned the mortgage documents in banks that he robbed, thus offering relief to debt-strained homeowners.
It took only a couple of seconds for the sheriff to note that Floyd and his friend Richetti were armed with a Thompson submachine gun and a pair of pistols. The sheriff was not armed, which may have been just as well. Had he been carrying a weapon and reached for it, he probably would have been killed.
There are conflicting accounts of what happened next, but it went something like this:
“Give me that machine gun,” Richetti said to Floyd. “I’ll kill him right now.” He meant the sheriff. Then he added, “I’ll kill everybody.” It was clear that Richetti, a habitual drunk, had been imbibing heavily at an hour when normal people were having breakfast.
Floyd was a calming influence, an unusual role for him. So was Richetti’s brother Joe, who was a mechanic in the garage.
Floyd and Adam Richetti had stolen a car in Oklahoma and driven into Missouri. They had robbed a bank in the town of Mexico, netting about $1,600, then headed toward Bolivar, about 170 miles to the southwest. On the way, the car broke down. Soon, a friendly farmer happened by in a truck and said he’d give the pair a ride and tow the car into Bolivar for repairs.
Had the farmer looked more closely at the stranded motorists, he might have recognized Floyd. But the farmer took no notice, which was probably lucky for him.
Once in Bolivar, Floyd and Richetti planned to get the stolen car fixed and get out of town. But the appearance of the sheriff forced a change in plans, so they gassed up Joe Richetti’s new 1933 Chevy, transferred their arsenal to it, and ordered the sheriff to get in the back seat.
Then they sped out of Bolivar, with Floyd and Richetti taking turns behind the wheel. The bandits told the sheriff he’d be safe if he helped them elude pursuers. So Killingsworth steered the pair onto back roads throughout the region.
Richetti was drinking from a bottle for part of the trip, now and then talking in a slur about killing the sheriff. Floyd kept telling him to calm down and shut up.
Suddenly, the sound of a siren behind them. Get rid of them, Killingsworth was told. He waved his panama hat out the window, signaling the chasers to cease and desist. They did, to the relief of the sheriff. He was sure local cops would be no match for Floyd and Richetti, who had better weapons (and colder blood) than the pursuers.
Killingsworth tried small talk, volunteering the information that he had a wife and a little boy. Floyd said he too had a son, Jack Dempsey Floyd, who was eleven. Though the notorious bandit spoke fondly about his boy, he didn’t seem like much of a family man. Floyd and Richetti talked about a couple of women they hoped to hook up with in Kansas City. Point us there, the sheriff was ordered.
Killingsworth obeyed, directing his captors north and west.
After a while, the duo decided to change cars to further frustrate anyone chasing them. The sheriff was ordered to get out and flag down a motorist.
Soon, a car approached. Seeing the sheriff’s star, the driver stopped. Too late, he realized the situation. Move over, he was ordered. He complied.
Leaving Joe Richetti’s car by the roadside, the bandits transferred their arsenal to the car they’d just seized and away they went, with two hostages now. At long last, Killingsworth and the other hostage were set free, unharmed, about twenty miles southeast of Kansas City, Missouri.
An embarrassing footnote had been added to Killingsworth’s career. As for the motorist whose car had been commandeered, he had an adventure story to tell for the rest of his life. Not many honest men got to keep company with Pretty Boy Floyd and live.*
But the lingering question for lawmen as the sun set over Missouri that Friday, June 16, 1933, was: What kind of mischief might Pretty Boy Floyd be planning in these parts?
*For information on the kidnapping of Jack Killingsworth, I am indebted to Larry Wood, author of Murder and Mayhem in Missouri (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2013).
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
FROM HOT SPRINGS TO SLAUGHTER
Hot Springs, Arkansas
Friday, June 16, 1933
On the very day of Sheriff Killingsworth’s misadventure, local cops and two FBI agents caught up with the fugitive named Frank Nash in Hot Springs, Arkansas, a playground for gangsters some four hundred miles southeast of Kansas City. Nash, who had escaped from Leavenworth federal prison in northeastern Kansas in 1930, was nabbed in a cigar store and pool hall run by Dick Galatas, gambling czar of Hot Springs.
In 1913, Nash was sentenced to life in prison in the state penitentiary in McAlester, Oklahoma, for murdering his accomplice in a robbery, presumably because he didn’t want to share the loot. When America entered the Grea
t War, Nash was granted early release so he could enlist in the army.
Nash fought in France, came home, and resumed his criminal career. In 1920, he was sentenced to twenty-five years for burglary with explosives—in other words, safecracking. Somehow, he became a trustee, which meant he could leave the walls now and then on errands, and was turned loose late in 1922. He joined a gang that robbed banks and trains. Captured in 1924 after taking part in a postal-train robbery in which a mail custodian was badly beaten, he was sentenced to twenty-five years in Leavenworth. Astoundingly, he charmed prison officials into making him a trustee again.
On October 19, 1930, he went on an errand and never returned. While at large, Nash managed to marry three times, with each of his wives apparently unaware of the other two. He robbed banks throughout the Midwest with a gang that included a Tennessee-born ex-bootlegger and robber formally named George Kelly Barnes. For some reason, Barnes dropped his surname and began to go by his mother’s maiden name, Kelly. (Eventually, he became known as “Machine Gun” Kelly for his supposed acumen with that deadly weapon.)
At 8:30 on Friday evening, June 16, just hours after his capture, Nash was escorted onto a Missouri Pacific train in Fort Smith, Arkansas, by two FBI agents, Joe Lackey and Frank Smith, and Otto Reed, the forty-nine-year-old police chief of McAlester, Oklahoma, who was familiar with Nash from his earlier crimes and detested him.
The train arrived at Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri, at 7:15 Saturday morning, just a quarter of an hour behind schedule. Waiting were two young FBI agents, Reed Vetterli, in charge of the bureau’s Kansas City office, and Ray Caffrey, plus two seasoned Kansas City detectives, Bill Grooms and Frank Hermanson.
The lawmen made an impressive-looking wedge formation as they led the handcuffed Nash through the station, which was teeming with travelers arriving and departing. FBI agents were not yet authorized to carry firearms, but this morning, Lackey was toting a short-barreled shotgun and a pistol. Smith carried two pistols and Caffrey one. Reed carried a short-barreled shotgun and a pistol. Both Kansas City detectives carried pistols, as usual. Vetterli was the only lawman who was unarmed.
The seven lawmen and their prisoner emerged from the station into the sunshine of the parking lot and walked to the two cars that were to transport Nash and his keepers to Leavenworth. Nash was put into the front seat of one car, positioned behind the steering wheel for a moment, so that the right passenger seat backrest could be folded forward to let Smith, Lackey, and Reed climb into the rear seat. The plan was to slide Nash over to the front passenger seat so the three lawmen in the rear could keep watch on him while Caffrey drove.
Meanwhile, several men were leaning casually against another vehicle parked nearby. Suddenly, the men were walking with deadly purpose toward the lawmen. Just as Caffrey was about to get into the car, the air exploded in “a rat-tat-tat of machine-gun fire,” as the New York Times described it.60
“The sounds lasted only a few seconds,” the Times account continued. “Mown down like grain in a field, the handcuffed prisoner and guards were all prostrate. The gunners leaped into their car and sped away, while the bystanders stood rooted to their places, horror-stricken.”
Detectives Grooms and Hermanson lay dead on the pavement. Frank Nash was dead in the car, as was Otto Reed. Agent Ray Caffrey was mortally wounded and would die hours later. Lackey and Vetterli were wounded. Only Smith was unscathed.
The sickly sweet aromas of blood and gun smoke blended in the air. A crowd of sightseers, reporters, and news photographers swarmed over the scene, their feet slip-sliding through the gore. For dramatic effect in one photo, a lawman’s bloody straw hat, with a hole blown through the front, was placed on the right front fender of the car that held the corpse of Frank Nash. Some people grabbed souvenirs. By the time police arrived, the crime scene had been hopelessly compromised.
The carnage would be known forevermore as the Kansas City Massacre or the Union Station Massacre. Although this book is primarily about kidnappings, the Union Station event demands to be explored—because of how the FBI bungled the transfer of Frank Nash, then covered up its mistakes, and because of a weird link to a kidnapping only days before.
Newspaper reporters occasionally refer to their craft as writing “the rough draft of history.” Some drafts are rougher than others. Five men died at the train station. But what really happened?
The initial front-page account in the New York Times quoted Kansas City detective chief Thomas J. Higgins as stating confidently that the ambush was staged to free Frank Nash, who was killed accidentally by his would-be liberators.61 Higgins noted that Nash was a friend of the notorious Harvey Bailey, who was serving a term of twenty years to life for murder and bank robbery when he and ten other prisoners escaped from the Kansas State Penitentiary on Memorial Day 1933 during a baseball game between two American Legion teams.
The Associated Press also quoted Higgins as saying that the station ambush was meant to free Nash. But the AP also observed cautiously that other officials “were divided as to whether the killings were the result of an effort to free Nash or to ‘rub him out.’”62
The FBI at once asserted that Pretty Boy Floyd, who after all had kidnapped a Missouri sheriff only the day before, must be behind the slaughter. Thus, one of the most significant passages in the Times initial account was a reference to Higgins, who was said to “cast doubt on reports that Charles ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd, the Oklahoma desperado, was involved” in the train station bloodshed.63
An AP account published in the Times under the headline “No Clue to Killers in Kansas City” also noted Higgins’s doubts. It noted too that Sheriff Jack Killingsworth, who had been kidnapped by Floyd and Adam Richetti, was doubtful that Floyd was linked to the massacre.
Yet less than three weeks later, on July 7, 1933, a maddeningly brief AP report appeared deep inside the Times to the effect that Hoover had demanded the capture of Floyd (and several of the Kansas prison escapees) in connection with the train station slaughter.64 The brief news report did not describe Floyd’s exploits, but there was no need. By mid-1933, Floyd was wanted as a killer as well as a bank robber (his victims included several lawmen, along with rival criminals) and a prison escapee.
Reading the accounts these many years later, a journalist like myself wants to ask, “Did Higgins and Killingsworth say why they thought Floyd was not involved in the Kansas City violence? What reason did Hoover give for suddenly concluding that Floyd was involved? Why didn’t someone in the Times Washington bureau question Hoover?”
But back then, the FBI chieftain did not submit to sharp questions from journalists. So was Floyd involved in the train station carnage? Maybe it doesn’t matter now. Back then, it mattered a great deal, especially to Hoover.
In the summer of 1933, the Lindbergh kidnapping was still unsolved, and the FBI had largely been relegated to the sidelines in the case, despite Hoover’s eagerness to help. Other kidnappings were being committed with dismaying frequency. Floyd was running and robbing amok. Perhaps most infuriating for Hoover, the notorious John Dillinger was cutting a dashing figure in the Midwest, sticking up banks and seemingly toying with FBI agents and local cops.
So the image of the FBI badly needed burnishing. If the Union Station slaughter could be pinned on Floyd and if FBI agents could catch him—or, preferably, kill him—then Hoover could claim a major triumph in his war on crime, and the FBI would have avenged the death of one of its own, agent Ray Caffrey.
Floyd made a convenient villain, even a credible one, since he had told Sheriff Killingsworth that he and his pal Richetti were on their way to Kansas City. Soon, another man was being mentioned as a likely accomplice of Floyd and Richetti: Verne Miller, the former sheriff from Huron, South Dakota, who had abandoned his law enforcement career to become a bank robber, bootlegger, and gunman.
But a different theory about the train station episode has persisted, and it is too plausible to be dismissed.* In this version, the Hot Springs gambling k
ingpin Dick Galatas contacted Kansas City crime boss John Lazia on Friday evening to tell him that Nash had been arrested. (“Brother John” Lazia, it will be remembered, was head of the muscle department for the Tom Pendergast political machine and had been instrumental in securing the release of the kidnapped millionaire dressmaker Nell Donnelly in December 1931.)
After hearing from Galatas, Lazia supposedly tapped into his extensive police sources and learned that a train carrying Nash was to arrive at Union Station on Saturday morning. On Friday night, Lazia is said to have met in a restaurant with Miller to discuss what to do.
Lazia apparently conscripted two of his most efficient gunmen, the brothers Homer and Maurice Denning, to help Miller on a mission—not to free Nash but to kill him so he couldn’t tell what he knew about organized crime in Hot Springs or Kansas City or both.
The possibility that Miller was joined in the ambush by the Brothers Denning rather than Floyd and Richetti was given credence by a witness to the shooting, a gangster named James Henry “Blackie” Audett, who knew Floyd and Richetti by sight and who happened to be in the station parking lot that Saturday morning.
Years later, having left his life of crime, Audett recalled watching the train station bloodbath from less than fifty yards away and clearly seeing the killers. He insisted that they included the Dennings but not Floyd nor Richetti.
But why would the FBI insist that Floyd and Richetti were there? “The FBI had to solve the case fast because one of their own men got killed,” Audett said, “so they pinned it on two guys who were already wanted and widely known.”
There is another aspect of the Union Station Massacre that must be told. Early news accounts reported what seemed self-evident, namely that Nash and the four lawmen were slain by the ambushers armed with machine guns. Indeed, Grooms and Reed were both hit with machine-gun bullets, as was Lackey.