by Joe Urschel
On November 29, 1933, a motorist discovered a naked, mutilated, unrecognizable body on the side of the road on the outskirts of Detroit and notified the authorities.
They determined that the dead man had been struck in the head thirteen times with a hammer. His skull was crushed and flattened. His cheeks and face had been punctured multiple times with an ice pick. He’d been choked with a wire.
The body was so pummeled and mutilated that police had to identify it using fingerprints. It was Miller.
His body was shipped back to his hometown in South Dakota, where he was buried with full military rites, his casket draped with the American flag. Uniformed servicemen carried his casket through the overflowing crowd that had flocked to his funeral.
Hoover had concluded that Miller’s partners in Kansas City had been Pretty Boy Floyd and his partner, Adam Richetti. The search shifted to them and the nation’s new Public Enemy Number One, John Dillinger. With his bold and bloody bank robberies and daring jailbreaks, he’d become the new fascination of the nation’s headline writers.
After his release from Indiana State Prison on a minor robbery conviction, Dillinger robbed his first bank in June 1933, about a month before the Urschel kidnapping. Then he and his gang went on a tear, robbing a half-dozen more before being arrested and jailed in Lima, Ohio. Members of his gang broke him out, shooting a sheriff in the process. Purvis and his team bungled an attempt to trap him at a gangland “resort” called the Little Bohemia in northern Wisconsin, resulting in a wild shootout and Dillinger’s escape. Purvis and his Chicago agents later redeemed themselves in the public’s mind when they famously shot and killed Dillinger while he was leaving the Biograph Theater in Chicago.
Purvis and his men also tracked down Pretty Boy Floyd and shot him in an Ohio farmer’s field as he tried to escape. As he lay on the ground bleeding to death, they tried to extract information and a confession for the Kansas City Massacre.
“Fuck you!” was all he would say.
Agents captured and convicted his partner, Adam Richetti, who would be executed in 1938 for his alleged role in the Kansas City Massacre. He maintained his innocence to the end.
Doc Barker, Harry Dutch Sawyer, Volney Davis and Bill Weaver drew life sentences for the kidnapping of Edward Bremer Jr., the heir to the Schmidt Brewery fortune, and had joined Kelly on Alcatraz. So had Alvin Karpis. (Ma Barker and Doc’s brother Freddie were killed in a six-hour gunfight with federal agents in Florida.)
Purvis solved the Charles Boettcher II kidnapping, the one that had inspired Kathryn Kelly, when he tracked down and captured Verne Sankey and his partner, Gordon Alcorn, in February of 1934, interrupting their plans to kidnap Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey. Sankey hung himself in a Chicago holding cell. Alcorn pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life.
The days of criminals racing across state lines into the friendly protection of mobbed-up towns had ended. There was a new sheriff, and he sat behind a desk in Washington, DC. But his agents were seemingly everywhere, and, for the most part, were incorruptible. Empowered by new laws, courtesy of Attorney General Homer Cummings and the Roosevelt administration, the Bureau of Investigation had tamed the Wild West after eighteen hectic months of on-the-job training. The spate of high-profile kidnappings of wealthy individuals by gangsters and racketeers virtually disappeared, and although no reliable records were kept, kidnapping in general was reduced by an estimated 80 percent.
While his agents were busy rounding up and shooting down America’s outlaws, Hoover was busy ramping up an extraordinary publicity machine to exploit their triumphs—and his.
Hoover continued to use his expertise at planting stories with friendly members of the press, who would use their “exclusives” to further the Bureau’s glory. On the advice of one of his favorites, national columnist Drew Pearson, Cummings hired respected Washington correspondent Hugh Suydam from the Brooklyn Eagle to establish the Bureau’s public affairs department.
Meanwhile, Courtney Ryley Cooper had been grinding out magazine stories about the Bureau’s heroic exploits, all orchestrated by its brilliant director, who got star billing in all accounts. Hoover loved Cooper’s work so much that Suydam decided to bring him in-house and put him to work ghosting stories that would go out under Hoover’s byline. Simultaneously, Cooper went to work on what would turn out to be a masterpiece of agency propaganda, a book called Ten Thousand Public Enemies. Its dust-jacket copy read: “a detailed account of American crime—where criminals come from, what they do and how they are caught.”
Hoover wrote the introduction, and in it he laid out the complications of bringing the bad guys to justice:
Primarily, there is the maze of politics, ranging from the vote-getting influence of a resort owner, which sometimes encompasses life and death, to the man who controls the election destinies of a crime-ridden city. There is the impediment thrown up by well-meaning but non-thinking folk who believe that crime is none of their business and that it is not their duty to aid those entrusted with the task of law enforcement. There is the morass of ineffectual laws, many of them created in legislatures by those directly concerned with the fortunes of the criminal. There is the innate urge of human nature to picture the widely publicized criminal in the role of a Robin Hood when the facts reveal him as exactly the opposite.
In 1935, Hoover was seeking a more distinctive name for his bureau. There were several Bureaus of Investigation and Divisions of Investigation in the various government departments. He and Cummings went to the President with a suggested name change, something that would mark the agency as the nation’s premier law enforcement arm. FDR liked the idea, and later that year, on March 22, Congress officially recognized the Division as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI. Hoover’s expert branding efforts continued to fall into place.
Hoover’s experience with the newsreel depictions of the Urschel kidnapping and the Kelly trial had convinced him that, more than anything, the nation’s attitudes were shaped by what people saw in movie theaters. As long as Hollywood was making charismatic heroes out of gangsters, lawmen would remain as their simple foils. Hoover, himself a movie fan, started a personal campaign to turn movie lawmen into the heroes and gangsters into the villains.
In April 1935, the movie G-Men, starring James Cagney, was released with great fanfare and public acclaim. Four years earlier, Cagney had starred in the hit movie The Public Enemy, in which he played a Capone-style gangster. Hoover had complained personally to Cagney, who he thought was glorifying major criminals and helping to make them popular heroes. Hoover threw his support in with the Catholic Church and other moralists and social critics who were trying to ban depictions of violence in movies, along with a host of other sins. The negative reaction to The Public Enemy was so strong that Hollywood panicked. Fearing that censorship and legal bans were impending, the industry instituted its own code in 1934, which, among other admonitions, banned gangster films entirely. But Hoover and Cummings worked the back channels to help carve out an exemption for the studios that were suddenly prohibited from producing one of their most profitable products. Studios would be allowed to continue making a small number of gangster films as long as an FBI agent was portrayed heroically. Hoover added his own rider to the exemption. No portrayals of FBI agents would be allowed unless he got a look at the script first.
Cagney, and the studios he worked for, had gotten the message, and they pursued the exemption with a vengeance. In G-Men, Cagney played a brilliant lawyer-turned-tough FBI agent who does battle against dangerous kidnappers of the criminal underworld.
G-Men was so successful that it spawned a series of a half-dozen imitators, which Hollywood rushed onto the market by the end of 1935, including Let ’Em Have It, starring Richard Arlen as an FBI agent who tracks a kidnapper who snatched his girlfriend. Hoover had harnessed the power of the motion picture industry and turned it into his personal propaganda machine.
But the G-Men screenwriters had also inadvertently given Hoover’s caree
r an added boost. They wrote the role of the attorney general out of the script. So Attorney General Homer Cummings, the man who launched the nation’s War on Crime, wrote the legislation to expand the number of federal crimes and empower the Justice Department’s army to enforce them, all but disappeared. Overnight, Hoover became more famous than his boss, and would quickly use that fame to make himself more powerful, as well.
Ten Thousand Public Enemies was published right on the heels of G-Men and shot to the top of the bestseller lists.
The G-Man brand was established, and J. Edgar Hoover was anointed as the nation’s top cop. FBI agents were the heroes, and the outlaws and gangsters who once fascinated the public were denigrated to “dirty rat” status.
* * *
Convinced that he’d never escape Alcatraz and that there was no one left on the outside who could spring him or buy him out, Kelly decided to use his rhetorical skills in pursuit of greater freedom. In February 1936, Kelly hatched a wild-card scheme to get himself off the island by offering to do scientific research at some remote post owned by the government. He wrote to Attorney General Cummings on February 3.
Dear Sir:
I am writing you regarding a plan I have had in mind for several months. I realize it is unusual and that no precedent has ever been set for such issue but I understand that as Attorney General it is within your power to designate the place a Federal prisoner must serve his sentence.
As you know I am serving a life sentence for kidnapping, without any possible chance of ever being paroled.
The United States Government has uninhabited Islands in the Pacific, smaller than Wake or Midway. There is Admiral Byrd’s abandoned camp at the South Pole, also extremely isolated outposts in Alaska. I feel certain there is at least one of these or some other place where the Government would like the atmospheric conditions studied over a long period of time. I know with the proper instruments and books I could make a meteorology survey of such a place that would be of benefit to science and the government.
My idea is, that such a place that has never been thoroughly studied, would be too lonesome and desolate for any free man to care to stay there longer than a few months even if he had company.
I could be taken from here secretly, placed on a boat in the Bay and transported with what supplies I would need. This could be managed in such a way that the crew need never know who I was or even that I was a prisoner from Alcatraz. Some kind of arrangements could be made for a boat to stop say every year or two, leave supplies and take back what data I had accumulated.
By this method I would be doing some useful work, serving my sentence and I believe by the time I was eligible for parole I would be shown some consideration.
With rapid strides that aviation is making, wind conditions and air currents will have to be studied all over the world. Two years ago the Islands the China Clipper is using on its flights to Manila were practically useless, but today they are the stepping-stones to the Orient, and Meteorology conditions must be known at such places, and lots of time and money would be saved by knowing these conditions in advance.
This may seem like a hair-brained [sic] proposition to you, but I think it altogether feasible.
Hoping something can be done along these lines, I remain yours truly,
Geo. R. Kelly—#117
The attorney general’s office, not accustomed to receiving relocation requests to conduct research in Alaska or the South Pole from jailed gangsters, dismissed the offer out of hand as completely loopy and bizarre. They had Kelly right where they wanted him.
Where Kelly got such an idea is unknown, as is any reason why he thought it might have any chance for success. But he was desperate and bored and, like most literate inmates, enjoyed writing letters, especially from Alcatraz, where so little information from the outside world was allowed into the prison.
What he craved was news from Kathryn.
When he landed on The Rock, he was not allowed to correspond with her for the first three months, and after that only two letters a year, each only three pages long. No other inmate suffered such a restriction, and Kelly protested constantly.
It was not until November 1935 that Kelly’s contact with Kathryn was increased to once every two months. A year later, it was upped to once a month, and he was permitted to write on both sides of two of the three pages he was allotted. All of his correspondence, of course, was heavily edited and censored.
This particularly irked Kelly, who bristled at having his eloquent and romantic prose reduced to sloppy drivel by the prison censors.
At one point, he wrote to Kathryn proposing that they discontinue their correspondence because he could no longer stand having their letters abused so, and that the interference left him angry and depressed for days. He longed for the time when they wrote lengthy tomes to one another while he was doing time in Leavenworth before their wedding.
Do you remember the twelve and fourteen page letters you used to write me daily when I was serving that other “bit.” I even recall one that was twenty pages long, and every page as sweet as you are.
It is almost needless for me to repeat how much I love you. To me you are the grandest girl in the world, and I will love and adore you if I live to be a hundred. I hope you get transferred this month and have a pleasant trip. Give Ora my love and don’t forget the one who worships you. All my heart will always be yours, angel. Lots of hugs and kisses. As ever, your very own, Geo.
But, even though they were separated by thousands of miles, prison walls and restricted communication, the couple was still capable of a grand marital fight. Despite the sweetness of the letter, Kathryn snapped back an angry response, upbraiding him for going soft and letting the situation frustrate him so. If he didn’t want to write to her anymore, fine. She angrily suggested they should get a divorce and he could do like Bailey and Bates, who just forgot about their women on the outside.
The threat and the scolding panicked Kelly, who couldn’t respond because he’d used up his quota of letters allowed to go to Kathryn. He enlisted the prison chaplain, Roman Catholic priest Father Joe Clark to intercede on his behalf to keep Kathryn from taking any precipitous action on divorce before he had a chance to explain himself.
Kathryn, who had no restrictions on her correspondence, wrote back a letter of contrition and assurance.
Sept. 11. 1940
Mr. Dearest, Bear:
I have thought in vain of how to word a reply to you that would express exactly how I feel about “us.” And I find that it is most difficult to do. Your letter touched my heart. In fact I cried when I read it as I expected quite a different wording. I shrink from hurting you. That is the farthest desire of my heart.
Naturally, I did not think that you would be very hurt, as long as you had cancelled your correspondence to me …
She went on to explain that if she were freed from prison she would live the straight life and give up her cravings for the lifestyle of the rich and fashionable, and urged him to do the same.
I know you thoroughly honey, so don’t think I’m harsh. What you need to do is forget “Machine Gun” Kelly and what he stood for and interest yourself in being plain, kind George who is just another “con” like myself. I have shared all the lead with you I intend to. We are not kids, we’re quite aged …
Take care of yourself and think a few things over, and tell me, whether you are nourishing any hair-brained [sic] schemes, in that brain of yours to further spoil our peaceful old age together, or not? You should have found your true honest self by now. You were never bad, we both simply “thought wrong.” … I will write you on the 1st, so keep smiling, and try to see our problem as I see it.…
Now don’t worry, and be sweet; and let’s do this bit of time with the best of grace and cheerfully …
Wish I could see you, I do, I do … Now settle down and be happy heart of my heart.
Devotedly,
Your Katrinka
In the spring of 1940, Director of Prisons J
ames V. Bennett visited Alcatraz and sought out Kelly for a chat. Bennett explained how he had been in contact with Urschel and noted that Urschel seemed to bear no personal hostility toward Kelly. Had he ever considered writing to Urschel, Bennett asked.
Inmates at Alcatraz lived under a strict prohibition against writing to anyone but family members. Given the extraordinary difficulty Kelly was having getting correspondence through the censors, even to his imprisoned wife, he certainly had not considered writing Urschel—particularly since most of his earlier correspondence to Urschel involved threats to kill him.
Bennett told Kelly that if he—or Bates—decided they did want to correspond with Urschel, his office would arrange for the letters to get through. Bennett’s motivation was somewhat driven by the fact that a good chunk of the ransom money had not yet been recovered. A dialog between the kidnappers and their victim might open an avenue of cooperation or reveal some clues as to the whereabouts of the money. Plus, in any eventual discussion of parole, Urschel’s cooperation would be essential. This fact was not lost on Kelly.
On April 11, responding to Bennett’s suggestion, Kelly sent a letter to Urschel through Bennett. Eloquent and insightful, it is considered to this day to be one of the most perceptive descriptions of the deprivations of prison life, and one man’s effort to endure them.
Dear Mr. Urschel,
I hope I am not pulling a prize blunder … in writing to you. I have two reasons for doing so. First, I wish some information; second, I want to appease my curiosity. In respect to the latter, it all came about this way: Several months ago I had a talk with Mr. Jas. V. Bennett; in the course of our discussion, he mentioned that you had paid him a visit and asked me if I ever wrote to you. Of course my answer was no. Another of his remarks was: Mr. Urschel mentioned you and spoke well of you “considering the circumstances”—or something to that effect. I have pondered over his remarks quite a bit, and often wondered if for some unknown reason you did wish to hear from me.