“I’m sorry,” he said. “You must have me confused with someone else. My name is George Miller.”
The man who had spoken slowly shook his head and smiled. He gave Frank a quick glance at his credentials: L. Joseph Lackey, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“And you gentlemen?” Frank asked.
Lackey pointed with his thumb at the two men. “Special Agent Frank Smith and Police Chief Otto Reed of McAlester.”
Frank guessed that the three of them were in Hot Springs without the knowledge of the local police or he would have been warned.
“A bit out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you, Chief?” Frank said. “Last I heard, McAlester was in Oklahoma.”
“I’d go a long way to catch you, Frank,” Reed said.
“I’m sorry to have put you to so much trouble.”
“No trouble,” Reed said.
“May I ask how you knew I was here?”
“The gunmen you busted out of Leavenworth, Keating and Holden, we grabbed them up a while back in K.C.,” Lackey said. “They ratted you out. Told us you had contacts here, told us that you received protection here. We’ve been waiting for you to show ever since.”
“It’s true what they say, then.”
“What’s that?” Lackey said.
“No good deed goes unpunished.”
Smith cuffed Frank’s hands in front of him. “Now I know how you got your nickname,” he said.
Frank flashed on the spare tire around his belly. “Nickname?”
“The Gentleman Bandit.”
“Well, there’s no reason to be uncivil, is there? We’re all professionals.”
Lackey took Frank by the arm and directed him toward the entrance to the store. “Nice toupee,” he said.
“I paid a hundred dollars for it in Chicago. You do what you can.”
“I notice that you also had some plastic work done on your nose.”
“Makes me look thinner, don’t you think?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
Out on the street, Dick Galatas was watching intently. Frank Nash had sat in on many of Galatas’s high-stakes poker games over the years, had been a welcomed guest at his pool hall. When he saw Frank crossing the street earlier, he had moved to say hello, but held back when he spied the three men following him. Now he watched the agents escorting Frank from the cigar store to a waiting sedan. Frank saw his old friend and smiled, gestured at him with his chin. Galatas watched the Feds put Frank into the backseat and drive out of town—they weren’t even thinking about contacting the Hot Springs Police Department. Good for the FBI, not so much for Frank.
A few minutes later, Galatas explained the situation to Frances. Frances was frightened and she was angry, but she did not panic; she and Frank had discussed this possibility often. She went to the phone and called Louis Stacci. She didn’t know who Stacci was or what he did; she only knew that this was the number she was told to dial. After he was made to understand the situation, “Doc” Stacci told Frances not to worry and hung up. A few minutes later, word went out to all of Stacci’s underworld contacts—Frank “Jelly” Nash had been taken by the Feds.
June 17, 1933
Kansas City, Missouri
From her perch behind the desk of the Travelers Aid Society at Kansas City’s Union Station, Lottie West could easily observe the four men who had come to meet the Missouri Pacific Flyer. They stood in a loose circle on the platform, nervously surveying the area around them, studying the train passengers that came and went with intense curiosity. Even so, Lottie probably would not have noticed them at all—it was Saturday and the station was busy—if it hadn’t been for the shotguns.
Agent Lackey appeared and spoke briefly with the leader of the four men. He was R. E. Vetterli, special agent in charge of the Kansas City office of the FBI. With him were Special Agent Raymond Caffrey and two of the few members of the Kansas City Police Department that Vetterli could trust—Detectives William “Red” Grooms and Frank Hermanson. Lottie didn’t know their names, of course. She wouldn’t learn their identities until she read about them in the paper the next morning.
Lackey disappeared into the train. A few minutes later, he returned with three other men: Chief Reed, Frank Smith, and a man who was sporting a set of handcuffs. The seven men surrounded the prisoner and slowly walked him past Lottie’s desk toward the entrance to the train depot. She would remember later that the prisoner was the only one who was smiling.
The smile annoyed Frank’s captors. He had been so damn pleasant as they spirited him out of Hot Springs and drove at breakneck speed along U.S. 64 to Fort Smith, Arkansas. He had been positively cheerful when they transferred him from the car to a stateroom on the Flyer en route to Kansas City. Frank had asked politely where he was being taken, and they answered Leavenworth Penitentiary, to serve out the sentence he had escaped three years earlier. His many other crimes, they said, would catch up to him there. Frank replied that he had been to Leavenworth before and didn’t expect to stay long.
The lawmen and their prisoner paused briefly when they emerged from the depot into bright sunshine; Frank brought his manacled hands up to shade his eyes. Seeing nothing that aroused their suspicions, they moved gingerly toward a new 1933 Chevrolet and a 1932’s Dodge sedan that were parked directly in front of the east entrance of Union Station. The Chevy was owned by Agent Caffrey. He opened the right front passenger door and shoved Frank inside. Lackey, Reed, and Smith settled into the backseat while Vetterli, Grooms, and Hermanson waited between the Chevy and the Dodge—it was their intention to use the Dodge to escort the Chevy to the prison. Caffrey circled the car and had set his hand on the driver’s door latch when a booming voice shouted, “Up! Up! Get ’em up!”
Two men carrying machine guns were sprinting toward the Chevy from behind. Three others, similarly armed, appeared in front. The one who had shouted, a heavyset man, was standing on the running board of a green Plymouth. He was aiming his chopper at the lawmen standing between the Chevy and the Dodge. The identities of most of the gunmen would be debated for decades—especially that of the heavyset man standing on the running board—but the identity of at least one remains indisputable: Verne Miller.
Frank grinned and shook his head with wonder at the sight of him. The last time he had seen him, Miller bawled Frank out for his excessive drinking. Miller was like that, a teetotaling, nonsmoking nongambler who simply would not abide profanity in his presence. He and Frank had become fast friends largely because of the sensibilities they shared. Both were unfailingly polite even during the course of a robbery, both respected women, both were notoriously meticulous when planning and executing their spectacular crimes, and neither tolerated gratuitous violence. If there was a difference, it was this: Verne Miller was one of the most proficient and sought-after hit men of his era, working with the Purple Gang in Detroit, Capone’s syndicate in Chicago, and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter’s Murder Incorporated on the East Coast.
It must have seemed to Frank at that moment that he would escape this disaster just as he had so many others in the past. Then the fragile peace that existed for an instant when the gunmen first faced the officers was broken when Red Grooms jerked his pistol out and squeezed off two rounds at the heavyset man, hitting him in the arm. “Let ’em have it!” the man shouted even as he opened up on the lawmen. His companions did the same.
Grooms and Hermanson were killed instantly.
Vetterli was shot in the arm. He dropped to the pavement and slid under a car for cover.
Caffrey was shot in the head; he was dead before he fell.
Inside the car, Chief Reed took a chest full of slugs and died while reaching for his gun.
Lackey was shot three times in the spine—but did not die. He slumped on top of Smith. Only Smith would escape the massacre unscathed.
Frank was appalled by the slaughter around him. “Verne, have you gone crazy?” he shouted. The shooting continued. Machine-gun rounds splattered
the Chevy. Frank began frantically waving his cuffed hands at the gunmen. “For God’s sake, don’t shoot me.”
A moment later, much of his head was blown away.
Watching it all, Lottie West began screaming, “They’re killing everyone.”
Officer Mike Fanning, who patrolled Union Station for the Kansas City Police Department, came running. He saw the gunfight but didn’t know who was shooting at whom or why.
“Shoot the fat man, Mike,” Lottie shouted. “Shoot the fat man. It’s Pretty Boy Floyd.”
Fanning aimed at the heavyset man and fired. The man whirled and fell to the ground, but he got up and continued firing, and Fanning didn’t know if he hit him or if the fat man merely dove to avoid being shot.
One of the gunmen ran to the Chevy and peered inside. “They’re all dead,” he announced. The killers began running, all except Verne Miller, who stood in front of the Chevy, apparently transfixed by the shattered windshield his friend had been sitting behind. One of the gunmen grabbed his arm and pulled him away. “Let’s get out of here,” he cried. The gunmen piled into the Plymouth and a light-colored Oldsmobile and raced out of the parking lot, heading west on Broadway.
It would astonish Lottie West later when she learned that the entire Kansas City Massacre, as the shooting would soon be infamously dubbed, had taken less than thirty seconds. To her it seemed to last forever.
My research took me well past the death of Jelly Nash. Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd was killed following a shootout with federal agents on a farm in Clarkson, Ohio. His partner, Adam Richetti, was arrested and executed for his part in the massacre, even though he vehemently denied that he and Floyd had had anything to do with it. Dick Galatas, Louis Stacci, and two others were found guilty of conspiracy to cause the escape of a federal prisoner and were themselves sentenced to two years in Leavenworth. Frances returned to her home in Aurora, Minnesota, with her daughter, Danella, and tried as best she could to live down her life with Frank. However, for years afterward, every time one of Frank’s former associates was suspected of a crime, the Feds would knock on her door and ask questions. Following testimony in a conspiracy trial three years later, she would scream in open court, “I’m tired of talking about gangsters.”
After the massacre, Verne Miller drove to St. Paul, where he picked up his longtime girlfriend, Vivian Mathis, the daughter of a Bemidji, Minnesota, farmer. They quickly made their way to New York. Vivian would say later that Verne had planned to escape with her to Europe; he seemed to have plenty of cash, although she didn’t know where he got it. Only New York was closed to him. He was being hunted now with a vengeance, not only by the FBI but by the underworld as well. Public outrage over the massacre had made life difficult for every gangster in the country, and even his closest associates were gunning for him. It became a race to see who would get him first, organized crime or the Feds.
Before the Kansas City Massacre, most people treated gangsters like latter-day Robin Hoods, mostly because their targets were banks. This was the middle of the Great Depression, and bank failures had wiped out the savings of hundreds of thousands of depositors even while other, more prosperous banks were busily foreclosing on the homes, farms, and small businesses of thousands of others who had been forced out of work. Still, killing four peace officers and severely wounding two others in broad daylight in a public place—that was something else again. Many historians credit the massacre with finally turning public sentiment against the gangsters. Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover used it as evidence that the FBI required broader police powers to deal with the gangster threat, including the ability to chase criminals from one jurisdiction to another without impediment, and Congress gave it to him with a series of nine major crime bills.
Finally, Miller’s nude and mutilated body was found in a ditch along a highway near Detroit. He had been strangled with a garrote, his skull had been crushed, and he was tied into a cheap Saxton auto robe with a fifty-foot cord. He had been so severely beaten that the FBI could identify him only through his fingerprints.
That was the end of that. Except in all the documents I read, in all the research materials I studied, there hadn’t been a single mention of Jelly’s gold.
“You’re wasting your time,” I said aloud.
Just the same, early the next morning I drove to the St. Paul Police Department to waste some more.
4
There was an ancient plaque just inside the front door of the James S. Griffin Building. It used to be called simply the Public Safety Building, except the St. Paul Police Department took possession a couple of years ago, remodeled it into its new headquarters, and renamed it after a deputy chief. I read the plaque while I was waiting for my turn with the desk sergeant. It stated that the original building was built in 1930 by the John J. Dahlin Construction Company and listed the names of the mayor and aldermen who were in office back then, including Chief of Police Thomas A. Brown. Brown was a crook in uniform that had helped the Barker-Karpis gang kidnap William Hamm; he was paid twenty-five thousand of the one-hundred-thousand-dollar ransom for his efforts, three times more than what was earned by each of the rats who actually pulled the job. Yet that wasn’t what held my interest. It was the name of the chief architect—Brent Messer. Wasn’t that the name of the man Jelly Nash partied with after he stole all that gold? my inner voice asked. I made note of it with the intention of asking Berglund later.
The woman behind the thick glass partition in the records unit wore a loose-fitting polyester dress with a pattern that made her look like a pudgy leopard. Reading glasses were perched on top of her short orange hair like a tiara; I was amazed they didn’t fly off when she shook her head, which she did repeatedly.
“Our records only go back to the 1970s,” she insisted for the second time. “We have nothing from the twenties and thirties.”
“How is that possible?” I asked for the third time.
She spoke slowly, like someone explaining a difficult concept to a child. “The files were lost in the early 1980s with the renovation of the central police headquarters,” she said. “Everything went into the trash.”
I had a hard time getting my head around it. Every page of every file concerning John Dillinger, Alvin Karpis, the Barkers, Harvey Bailey, Machine Gun Kelly, Leon Gleckman, Scarface Capone, Bugsy Siegel, Verne Miller, Baby Face Nelson, Frank Nash, and all the others had been destroyed. So had the names and files of the corrupt police and political figures who took bribes from them, as well as all the wiretaps, surveillance reports, and “mail covers” that were conducted on the civilians who socialized with them. I don’t know why I was surprised. In the SPPD-commissioned history The Long Blue Line, published in 1984, the only reference to the gangster era was an anecdote about how the local cops almost captured Dillinger.
“They probably thought that the files were unimportant,” the clerk said. “None of them were pertinent to ongoing investigations. They were just taking up much-needed space.”
“You don’t think it looks bad?” I said.
“I guess you could argue that the department destroyed the records to avoid embarrassment over its involvement with criminals, but when they switched to a computer system in the early seventies, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension shredded hundreds of documents from that era, and I promise you, those people, they couldn’t care less about our reputation. Besides, it’s not like the police are the only ones anxious to edit history. There are a lot of prominent citizens, people who have buildings named after them, and their children—well, it’s all in the past, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said. I’m not sure why I was so surprised. Americans have always had short memories, haven’t they? It’s like there’s a statute of limitations imprinted on our brains. What occurred ten years ago doesn’t matter much to us. Fifty years ago? That’s too far back to remember. Seventy-five years? It might as well be the Peloponnesian Wars. I suppose it’s because as a people we are constantly reinventing ourselves.
“Uh-huh.”
“Of course …” She was staring up and to her left now, as if experiencing a moment of inspiration. “We still have the homicide files. You could request those.”
“Homicide files?”
“There’s no statute of limitation on murder.”
The bright red card the desk sergeant gave me allowed access to RECORDS UNIT ONLY on the third floor. Just the same, I rode the elevator down to the second floor, where the homicide unit resided.
There were two secured doors right and left when I stepped off the elevator and a glass partition in front of me. A woman sitting behind the glass smiled. If the receptionist in records was a lumpy leopard, this one was a black panther, sleek and powerful.
“May I help you?” she asked.
“I wish you would,” I said. Perhaps I sounded too flirtatious—sometimes I can’t help myself.
The receptionist grinned at me as if she had heard it all before but didn’t mind. Unfortunately, our budding relationship was interrupted when a woman strolled up behind her.
“McKenzie? What the hell are you doing here?” she said.
I was smiling at the receptionist when I answered. “Looking for help.”
“Yeah, you need it.” Detective Sergeant Jean Shipman rested a hand on the receptionist’s shoulder. “Lisa, this is Rushmore McKenzie.”
Lisa looked from me to Shipman and back again. “Really?” she said.
“In the flesh,” Shipman said.
Lisa smiled again, but it wasn’t as much fun this time. “You’re him?” she asked.
“’Fraid so.”
“Cool.”
Or not so cool, depending on your point of view. I had been a good cop, spent eleven and a half years on the job; the Ranking Officers Association once even named me Police Officer of the Year. Yet most of the officers who knew my name didn’t remember me for that. To many I was the guy who hit the lottery, the cop who quit the police department in order to collect a three-million-dollar reward from a grateful insurance company on an embezzler I tracked on my own time nearly to the Canadian border. In moments of frustration they would sometimes invoke my name—if I could get a deal like McKenzie, I’d be out of here so fast! To the others I was the asshole who sold his shield for cash. I often wondered which side Shipman was on.
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