by Amy Reading
At the station, Norfleet sent a telegram to District Attorney Jesse Brown in Tarrant County: “Have Joe Furey. On way to Texas. Have good man meet me in New Orleans at police station.” He then booked them a drawing room on the train to New Orleans. He and his son hustled a bleary Furey onto the train and collapsed, their adrenaline spent.
As the train began its steady journey, Pete revived and related his afternoon’s experiences. As Furey had instructed him, he went to room 1000 of the Mason Hotel, where he found several men crating up an enormous array of equipment, the props of yet another phony stock exchange. Pete asked for Weintrot. “He is not here,” one of the men answered. “I think he is downstairs. I’ll go get him for you.” Pete waited and waited, until another man noticed Pete and asked if he could help him. Pete repeated his request for Weintrot; the man repeated the line about fetching him from downstairs and departed. This continued until the room was empty of bunco men, and Pete realized he needed to speed back to the clearing before his father executed Furey. They later learned that fully twelve rooms in the Mason Hotel had been vacated that day.
Furey listened intently to Pete’s story. The image of those vanished men seemed to work on him, and he stood and began to pace, a big man caged in a small car fueled by anger. Suddenly he opened the door to the aisle and raised his voice to the other passengers. “Women! Men! Oh, women!” he cried, and he unfolded a tale of the deprivations to which his captors were subjecting him. No food, no drink all day. “For God’s sake help a dying man!” They could all see his silver bracelets, but even in captivity Furey was the consummate con man, and he excited the sympathy of a pair of old women, who stopped a passing snack vendor and began choosing a colorful pile of fruits for the starving prisoner. Norfleet and Pete came to the door, and a conductor ambled over to see what the drama was about.
With everyone’s attention thus fixed, Furey showed what he was made of. He stepped back into Norfleet’s car, put his palms together, raised his arms, and dove through the plate glass window of the moving train. Before anyone quite knew what had happened, Furey was free.
The crowd at the car door was almost as fast as Furey. The conductor pulled the brake cord. As the train slowed, Pete leaped out through the jagged window. Norfleet tossed him his gun, then made his way out of the train to the baggage car, where a porter uncovered his luggage and tossed it next to the tracks. Minutes later, the train continued on its way, and Norfleet saw Pete running back toward him, gasping for breath and Fureyless. “Dad,” he breathed, “a switch engine picked Furey up and he is gone!”
Norfleet looked around him and spotted a man in a signal tower. He shouted up to him, asking him to wire to Jacksonville to send detectives out to the switch engine heading their way. Then Norfleet found another engine a few tracks over and asked if they could hitch a ride, explaining as quickly as he could the saga of the escaped prisoner. The engineer leaped at the challenge, so Norfleet and Pete swung up and they thundered off toward Jacksonville. Soon they had Furey’s train in sight, and for five or six miles the two trains raced in place toward the station. Norfleet saw Furey’s train stop and a policeman approach. He waited, helpless, to see what the officer would do. The officer spoke to the engineer, then brought Furey down off the train and delivered him into Norfleet’s custody. Furey was bleeding from his forehead where he’d smacked a railroad tie and limping from a substantial leg injury. Norfleet sent Jesse Brown another telegram: “Furey jumped through train window. Badly injured. Do not know when we can leave with him.”
For three more days, their journey continued in this manner as they hustled their prisoner onto and off of trains, in and out of temporary holding cells. Furey kept devising increasingly clever ways to escape, and Norfleet kept scrambling to keep up with and corral his desperate charge. The reversals of fortune that Norfleet relates in his autobiography are so incredible and so relentless that in the retelling they become almost tedious, but they exhilarated Norfleet, each one an instance of his besting a master swindler at his own game. By this point, Norfleet’s transformation was complete, and he was taking extreme pleasure in his new persona. Back in Jacksonville, Norfleet booked Furey into the jail for the night, but Furey wasted no time in securing a lawyer and beginning to prepare habeas corpus papers, so Norfleet was forced to repossess his prisoner at midnight. They spent a gothic night in the attic of an imposing colonial mansion where they stopped and asked for shelter. They paused the next evening at another southern city and again stored Furey in jail for the night. When they came to get him in the morning, he was missing; the Humane Society had discovered him in poor health and had brought him to their hospital for care. When Norfleet and Pete showed up, the society claimed Furey could not leave for fifteen days, but Pete brandished a six-shooter and Norfleet pulled out the handcuffs, and they were soon on their way again.
On January 24, 1921, Norfleet’s little party arrived in Fort Worth. Police officers assisted Furey from the train to a wheelchair, as he could no longer put weight on his injured leg. Reporters from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram were on hand to meet the train, but Furey pulled his overcoat up and his hat down, denying photographers their shot. A waiting car whisked him to the Tarrant County Jail, where, said Norfleet with finality, “we knew the devil and all of his assistants could not get him out.” It was discovered that Furey was also wanted in Washington and Florida, and a few days later another mark came forward with a tale about a stock market swindle in Biloxi, Mississippi, that had netted Furey $25,000. Over the next few days, newspapers around the country carried accounts of Norfleet’s adventure. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram got Norfleet’s exclusive interview and published it with photographs of the bunco team and a map of Norfleet’s gumshoe adventures. “I can go back now to my ranch life,” Norfleet declared to the reporter Frank Evans. “I’m more contented now. Maybe I can give my time to ranching and farming.”
With Furey in jail, Norfleet had extracted justice for four of his five con men. Furey declined to fight the charges against him, and legal action proceeded swiftly. He made a full confession to District Attorney Brown, and it was his testimony that prompted the surprise arrest of Walter Lips and William Anderson in Los Angeles. He pleaded guilty on two counts of swindling Norfleet, but civil law still offered him the opportunity to defend himself before a judge and jury, and he did so with spirit, acting as his own attorney. On March 14, 1921, Furey’s trial began. Furey hobbled into court on crutches, but he wore an elegant suit and nose glasses, and he projected an air of extraordinary poise and breeding.
The first witness was, of course, Norfleet, and the jury and the audience were so riveted that the Fort Worth Star-Telegram printed his testimony nearly in full. Then Furey stood up to cross-examine his nemesis. In honeyed words of the utmost courtesy, he asked Norfleet if it wasn’t true that the rancher had offered to let Furey go if he would return $20,000 of the $45,000 he’d lost. Norfleet vehemently denied the charge, but then softened under further questioning and admitted that yes, he’d sent his son into Jacksonville to redeem Furey’s check for the stated amount. Furey pressed further. Isn’t it also true, he asked, that you entered into the stock deal in search of profit and that you actually did earn some money, at which point you could have walked away? Once again, Norfleet was forced to answer yes. But Furey’s sophistry earned him no reprieve. The jury took only a few minutes to find Furey guilty on both counts and to dispense the maximum sentence of ten years for each count. Furey asked the judge if he might serve the sentences concurrently, but with a quick glance at Furey’s criminal record the judge denied the request. Furey waived his right to appeal, and a week later he moved from the county jail to the state penitentiary in Huntsville.
As if resigned to his fate, Joseph Furey became a model prisoner. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram was perennially interested in his goings-on and soon reported that he had organized and was leading the largest Sunday school class ever gathered in the state penitentiary, in addition to his excellent performance i
n his job as a clerk. And yet there were troubling little signs that Furey did not view his accommodations with complete favor. In May, just a few weeks after Furey took residence in Huntsville, his cell mate, a man named Mark Wheeler, successfully escaped. Three days later, Governor Pat Neff called the penitentiary in a panic and instructed the guards to put an extra watch on Furey. It seems that Thomas Lee Woolwine, the district attorney in Los Angeles who’d arrested Lips and Anderson, had received a tip that Furey was about to saw his way out of jail. Woolwine forwarded the tip to District Attorney Brown, who instantly called the governor’s office. It was rumored that Mark Wheeler was part of the plot, as was a $30,000 bribe.
Just three days after the governor’s call, two dozen prisoners mutinied and escaped from Huntsville in a volley of gunshots. The riot started when six prisoners charged at their guards with pistols. Then they broke into the prison armory, loaded up on shotguns, and barreled back inside, shooting their way through more guards as they rounded up their friends and escaped through a side entrance. Norfleet claims that Dede Furey and Mabel Harrison worked together to smuggle those first pistols in their handbags during weekly visits to their caged beloved, but this touchingly romantic scene never happened. His colorful account muddles together Governor Neff’s phone call and the prison riot, and he puts himself squarely at the center of events. He says Woolwine called him to warn of Furey’s escape, and he raised the alarm in Texas, though he gives no convincing reason why a district attorney would involve a private citizen in an attempted jailbreak. Norfleet asserts that through his concerted action, Furey was placed in solitary confinement while “convicts, resembling stampeding zebras, ran amok, leaped from the high prison walls and, shooting down obstructing guards, fled north, south, east and west.” In a nearby field, two women and an airplane languished, their plans thwarted, their hopes unfulfilled. But as the newspaper stated, “Prison authorities said they were unable to establish any connection between the prison [escapes] and the Joe Furey case.” And in fact Furey remained securely in jail throughout the fracas, quietly passing through the halls between his cell and the dining hall. According to legend, one of the mutineers offered Furey a pistol, but the swindler looked down his nose at it and replied that he did not run with rabble—he would escape on his own at a later date.
Despite all this nefarious activity that swirled around Joseph Furey that May, when he died the following year, it took a full week before anyone raised an eyebrow. On July 29, 1922, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram mourned the death of its favorite outlaw, breaking the news that Furey had died of a tumor in the insane ward, where he’d been committed the previous January after becoming mentally unbalanced. Because his wife had long repudiated him, his body was being shipped to Oakland to lie next to the grave of his mistress, Mabel Harrison, who had died a few months earlier (Norfleet declares that she contracted pneumonia in Huntsville while trying to free Furey). Mabel’s daughter, Mrs. J. E. Mannberger of New York, was paying the $400 bill for his funeral expenses.
It was a deputy working under the Los Angeles district attorney, Woolwine, who first pointed out that Furey had died at least once before. Then the Fort Worth Star-Telegram suddenly remembered something Furey had said as he left Fort Worth for Huntsville. “Some day you will read of my death at the penitentiary,” he was supposed to have said, “and there will be a new grave in the penitentiary cemetery, but old Joe won’t be in it—I’ll be gone elsewhere.” Woolwine telegrammed District Attorney Brown and asked him to make a positive identification before shipping the body west. Brown replied that unfortunately the coffin was already en route. Identification would have to wait until the shipment reached its destination, which was not Oakland but a funeral home on Sutter Street in San Francisco.
As the body made its way to California, newspapers all over the country traded fact for speculation. Was Furey dead? “I doubt it,” retorted Woolwine. For his part, the warden at Huntsville snapped, “I’d hate to be as dead as Joe Furey,” asserting that they had performed an autopsy at the prison and that Furey had most definitely died of bladder cancer. No, make that stomach cancer. Or was it a hunger strike that killed him? The New York Times mentioned that he’d shriveled down from 200 pounds to a mere 115. No further mention was made of Furey’s insanity.
While each newspaper advanced its own theory of Joseph Furey’s latest con, it was suddenly discovered that the body had already been buried on August 1. The undertaking firm of Halsted and Company announced that it had buried Joseph Furey near San Francisco in Cypress Lawn Cemetery without a service. Only a few people had stood by the grave, including a young woman who represented herself as Furey’s niece and who herself became a sudden object of curiosity. It was soon revealed that she was the same woman who had paid for Furey’s body to be shipped west, and that she had traveled from her home in the East to take up residence in the Hotel St. Francis several days before Furey died. Woolwine now took to calling Furey’s death “greatly exaggerated,” but the fact remained that he was legally dead in the state of Texas. There was nothing for it but disinterment. While San Francisco and Los Angeles authorities bickered over jurisdiction, Dede Furey stepped into the conversation, testifying in court that if her husband was indeed dead, her son should inherit his estate, valued at $8,000. She was named administratrix for Marc Furey’s estate, and the court ordered that she be paid $25 a month for his support.
“Joe Furey is dead. His body rests in a cemetery near San Francisco. These facts were positively established when the body of the nationally known swindler was exhumed Thursday,” reported the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and newspapers around the country. Woolwine had succeeded in obtaining jurisdiction to disinter the body, and the fingerprints on the corpse’s right hand and its Bertillon measurements—a series of eleven measurements such as the length of the left little finger and the length of the right ear, which were said to remain constant over an adult’s life—tallied with Furey’s prison records. As the Waterloo, Iowa, newspaper put it, “The king of bunco men did not bunco death.”
Three years later, the story of Furey’s death shifted yet again. The Texas legislature opened an investigation into living conditions in the Huntsville prison in 1925. Dr. E. H. Boaz, a former prisoner who had been convicted of manslaughter but was then pardoned by Governor Neff, testified that in his position as a hospital steward he’d witnessed a number of cruelties against inmates, four of which had directly resulted in death. “Tell this committee what you know of Joe Furey, convict, who died at Huntsville, and who, the record shows, died of bladder trouble,” prompted a state representative. Boaz described how he’d seen Furey in the insane ward, where he was under the care of another convict named Fowler, who gave him food only once a week. Boaz said he began slipping Furey additional food, otherwise he would have died sooner. And then one day when he was passing by Furey’s cell, “I saw him taken from his cell, thrown into a tub of ice water, hit over the head with a stick of wood and then Fowler threw him on the floor and stamped on him, jumping on his chest and abdomen several times.” Boaz said that two or three hours later, Furey died, but he “didn’t report the matter, for ‘convicts don’t talk.’ ” No mention was made in the coverage of Boaz’s testimony of Furey’s previous deaths, exhumations, and resurrections, just as no mention had been made in either the Huntsville autopsy or the San Francisco disinterment of traumatic injuries to Furey’s body.
Six years after his death, Joseph Furey was arrested for impersonating a federal officer. In March 1928, Harry M. Barrentine, an oil company executive, testified in federal court that he met a man named Edward Miller at a hotel in Kansas City, Missouri. Miller offered to sell him some liquor, but when the two men stepped outside the hotel, Miller seized Barrentine, informed him that he was a federal officer, and threatened to arrest Barrentine for selling narcotics unless he handed over $1,500. A Kansas City police lieutenant testified that Edward Miller’s Bertillon measurements matched those of the Joseph Furey who had famously conned Norfleet
nine years previously. Miller, defending himself without a lawyer, admitted that he was Furey. As this news rippled its way across the country, the San Francisco detective who had unearthed the coffin three years previously “became choleric” and could barely choke out his statement: “Furey is dead and buried. I don’t know who the Kansas City man is but he’s not Joe Furey.” Once again, everyone stepped forward with his pet theory. The Huntsville warden continued to defend his prison by claiming that Furey’s identity had been secured at the time of his death. He mused that there was another man sentenced in 1921 who bore a striking resemblance to Furey and who’d been released in 1926—perhaps this man was the new Furey? J. Frank Norfleet could not bear to remain quietly on the sidelines of this controversy. He stated that without doubt his Joe Furey had died in 1922, even though he undermined his own claim by recollecting, “Joe Furey had been ‘dead’ eight years before I met him.” Norfleet believed that the Furey under arrest in Missouri was Edward, Joseph’s younger brother, an assertion that should have been easy to prove with those useful tattooed initials. Whoever he was, the Kansas City prisoner was sentenced to three years, and the newspaper record went forever silent on the confusing chronicle of the Furey crime family.