The Year of Fear

by Joe Urschel

  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 fo
r 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.

  Hoover knew that if he allowed gangsters to get away with the murder of federal agents, none of his men would be safe. He told Jones in no uncertain terms that he wanted the Kansas City killers brought to justice by any means necessary.

  Jones was on a plane to Kansas City by 11:30 the morning of the massacre. On his arrival, he studied the collected evidence, most of it from eyewitnesses whom he knew to be unreliable even in the best of circumstances. This was a 30-second volley of gunfire in which hundreds of bullets were spent, and any sensible witness would have been ducking for cover. The accounts all differed.

  Even the number of shooters was in doubt. People reported seeing from two to seven machine gunners, men and women.

  A month earlier, on Memorial Day, there had been a spectacular escape from the nearby Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing led by Harvey Bailey. Bailey, Keating and Holden had been recaptured while playing golf in a foursome with Nash. Nash eluded capture by slipping off into the woods. He aided Bailey from the outside by smuggling guns into the prison for the break, in which the escapees had kidnapped the warden and fled over the prison walls. Bailey had been shot in the leg during the escape. His picture, along with the other escapees’, had been all over the Kansas City papers. Several witnesses said one of the machine gunners was limping and believed him to be Bailey. Another identified Pretty Boy Floyd. When Jones got to Kansas City, there were more than fifteen names on the list.

  The crime scene didn’t yield much evidence either.

  With not much to go on, Jones was playing his hunches. The job had the markings of a professional operation. Any one of the Lansing prison escapees could have pulled this off, and Bailey was a close friend of Nash’s. But the rest of Bailey’s profile didn’t fit the crime. Bailey was all about planning and stealth. Gunplay, murder, innocent victims? Those things brought the heat. Bailey never wanted to be associated with anything violent. Why bother? In most cases it was so unnecessary. And when it was necessary, he’d pin it on somebody else.

  Despite the identification from several witnesses noting the limping gunner, Jones didn’t like Bailey for this one.

  “The Kansas City Massacre was a stupid crime, committed by stupid criminals—and nobody would ever accuse Harvey Bailey of being stupid,” Jones told the agents.

  “Besides, Bailey is no killer. A thief, yes—but never a killer. The men who pulled this job were killers, first and foremost. They could never have expected to take Nash away from those officers without killing some of them. They came to kill. Harvey Bailey would never in the world have had any part of a job like that.”

  Still, Jones really wanted to bring Bailey in. And his hunch told him that it was members of the escaped crowd that had gone to free Nash as payback for his help springing them. But why waste a crisis? Bailey would remain a suspect, as would everyone else from the prison break: Bob Brady, Jim Clark, Ed Davis, Wilbur Underhill and Frank Sawyer. Any one of those hard cases could have done it and not thought twice.

  Similarly, Jones doubted Pretty Boy Floyd had anything to do with it. Floyd was a loner and an outlier. He never worked with the Keating-Holden crowd. He didn’t owe Nash any favors. But if Washington wanted his name on the list, no harm in that. George Kelly was often misidentified as Pretty Boy Floyd, perhaps because of his good looks. Kelly had served time at Leavenworth with Nash, and had helped Keating and Holden escape. But Kelly’s tough-guy image was largely the creation of his clever wife, newspaper reporters and pulp fiction writers. He’d robbed a lot of banks and run a lot of gin, but had never been clearly identified in anything murderous. Kelly, a handsome charmer, rarely needed to even pull a gun on a bank job. He could talk money right out of the vault and many a female teller was left smitten by the dreamy clotheshorse who’d relieved them of all the cash in their drawer. Kelly had learned the trade from his good friend Harvey Bailey. Kelly had never been charged with anything violent. Jones wouldn’t waste any time trying to tie him to the shootout. Instead, he turned to his mental Rolodex of underworld fixers and operators. If the crime started in Hot Springs, Arkansas, Dick Galatas would be involved one way or the other. Fly out to Hot Springs, he told his agents. Follow Galatas. Backfill his movements. Get his phone records. Where was he when they grabbed Nash? Where did he go afterward? If somebody sent shooters to spring Nash, Galatas would have to be involved. He’ll lead us to him.

  Jones also knew that nothing happened in Kansas City without the blessing of the Pendergast machine’s underworld fixer, Johnny Lazia. Nobody would have the nerve to walk into Kansas City and pull a caper like this without Lazia’s blessing. But getting information from Lazia would be all but impossible, and the notorious Kansas City police would be of no help either. In one way or another most worked for or with Lazia. In fact, the Kansas City police director, Eugene Reppert, who’d been a golf partner of Bailey’s and whose photograph with him on the course at Mission Hills had touched off the raid that sent Keating and Holden back to prison, flat out told the federal agents that, despite the death of two of his officers, it was up to the feds to solve the case. The feds were an annoyance. In his opinion,
they had brought this disaster to Kansas City through their ineptitude and their failure to work through the well-established system in the city that could have prevented it. And now that system was going under a national microscope, which was making things uncomfortable for people like Reppert and the men he worked for. The bumbling feds would get no help from the Kansas City Police Department. Such was the level of police professionalism in Kansas City in 1933. And such was the weakness of Hoover’s Bureau and its agents that they were powerless to do anything about it.

  But the sleuthing by Jones’s men turned up a solid connection between Nash and Miller in the days before the massacre. Phone records showed Frances Nash had called Miller several times immediately after Nash’s arrest. After some intense interrogation by Bureau agents, Frances gave Miller up, but said she had no idea where he had gone after the shooting.

  When the story hit the press that one Verne Miller was the primary suspect in the Union Station massacre, it got the attention of a Fort Worth detective named Ed Weatherford.

  Weatherford had been watching Kathryn Kelly for years, suspicious of her extravagant lifestyle and the fancy cars she and her husband would park in front of their home on East Mulkey Street. Weatherford had duped Kathryn into thinking he was a crooked cop who’d help her out if she and her gregarious husband should ever get in a jam.

  Weatherford would run into Kathryn when she made her rounds of the local taverns and speakeasies, where she was constantly boasting about her husband, saying he could shoot walnuts off a fence line with his machine gun and write his name with it on the sides of barns. She’d brag about all the big-shot gangsters he worked with. The notorious Verne Miller was a name she had constantly bandied about.