There were three framed photographs in the master bedroom as well. On the table next to the bed was a head-and-shoulders shot of Kathryn looking both lovely and earnest. I recognized her immediately from the photo she had taken with Frank Nash in Guardino’s Italian Restaurant. A second was placed on a dresser. It showed Kathryn and Messer dressed in what can only be described as a rich man’s idea of cowboy garb; she was sitting on the running board of a car with Messer posed next to her as if they were both intrepid adventurers. The third, a much larger photograph, was taken on their wedding day and was mounted on the wall. Kathryn was radiant, her veil flapping in the breeze, her arm hooked around Messer’s. He was dressed in a tuxedo cut in the English style and clutched a top hat in his free hand. He looked indescribably happy.
I caught Dahlin staring at the photographs and wondered what he was thinking. I was surprised when he told me.
“My mother gave all this up to sleep with a gangster,” he said. “What the fuck?”
Finally we were standing in Messer’s office, the six of us plus most of the tour group; the rest were forced to peek into the small room through the doorway. There was a large partners’ desk, the kind with drawers on both sides, a Jacques Garcia Tuileries chair and ottoman, scroll book boxes, a floor lamp, an ivy pot, a smoking stand, an hourglass, a framed clock, and a stuffed owl. Yet what I was staring at—what all six of us were staring at—was the waist-high oak wainscot paneling behind the desk.
The guide said something about the strong, masculine feel of the room and quiet contemplation and escaping the pressures of the day, but we weren’t listening. Nor did we follow when she shooed the rest of the tour out of the office and down the corridor. Instead, we stood there, just stood there, mute, staring at the wall for what seemed like a long time.
“What if it’s not there?” Nina said.
“What if it is?” Heavenly replied.
“The residence has a pretty sound security system,” I said. “Just in case anybody is considering a little breaking and entering. We might have to add another partner.”
“The man who bought the house?” Dahlin said.
“It’s his property.”
Whitlow stepped forward. We were warned before the tour began to not touch anything, but his hands were all over the wall searching for a switch to open the magic door.
“Why don’t you yell open sesame,” I said. “Abracadabra.”
“Oh, hell,” Dahlin said. He stepped around the desk, took Whitlow by the arm, and pulled him away. Without a word, he kicked the paneling with the flat of his shoe—and kept kicking it.
“No,” I said. “Mr. Dahlin—”
He didn’t do much damage. A moment later Allen joined him.
“Fellas!”
His heavy foot brought the young guide running.
“What are you doing?” she said. “Are you crazy?” Her pretty voice was not made for screaming. It had a high-pitched, whining quality that was almost laughable, and when she started chanting, “Stop it, stop it,” I did laugh. “I’m calling the police,” she shouted and ran in horror from the office.
“Oh, well,” I said.
Dahlin and Allen, with Whitlow adding a kick or two, smashed in the wood paneling—it was a false wall, as Kathryn’s letter had predicted—and they began prying it away with their hands. It gave slowly, with a long, painful cry followed by a resounding snap. Dahlin and Allen fell back against the desk, a thin chunk of oak in their hands. Whitlow reached in and grabbed another board and pulled. It gave, but not without a struggle. Dahlin and Allen pulled on a board on the other side of the hole. They had an easier job of it.
The three of them stopped abruptly.
The hole was now about two feet wide and three feet high.
Nina, Heavenly, and I crowded forward.
“Oh. My. God.” Nina said.
There, neatly stacked in four rows between the wall studs, eight bars to a row, shrouded in a thick layer of dust, yet glistening all the same, was Jelly’s gold!
I remember Nina hugging me. I think Heavenly did, too. It seemed to me that Dahlin sat down in Messer’s chair and said nothing while Allen and Whitlow whooped it up and exchanged high fives. I could be mistaken. My memory of those few minutes is all kind of jumbled. The only thing I’m sure of is that the tour guide entered the office soon after we found the gold and said, “You’re all going to get it.”
Just So You Know
One and a quarter percent. That’s what we each earned for our efforts. A lousy 1.25 percent of the $9,233,536 in gold that we recovered. For those keeping score at home, that amounted to a measly $115,419.20. Okay, not measly, but still. Half of my share went to Ivy Flynn as per our agreement, and 20 percent of what was left to me was divided between Genevieve Antonello and Mike—he had no use for his share, but a deal is a deal. Meanwhile, the Ramsey County Historical Society received 5 percent, and so did the new owners of Presswood House. The United States Treasury Department claimed the rest.
“A total of fifteen percent,” I told Nina. “That’s not even a decent tip.”
“I thought you didn’t care about the money, that you did it for the fun.”
“Are you crazy? Of course I cared about the money. Man, nine million bucks shot to hell.”
“You know, we never did discuss my share.”
“Your share?”
“I’m the one who told you about the open house.”
“So you did,” I said. “Tell you what. You can have half of what I have left. Only after federal and state taxes, I doubt it’ll be enough to buy Erica a decent secondhand car.”
“It was a nice party, though,” Nina said.
True. The RCHS was delighted by the unexpected boost to its fund-raising efforts and threw a party at Presswood House to celebrate; the owners were pleased, too, and catered the affair. Dahlin scored a lot of media points when he donated his share of the reward—as paltry as it was—to the RCHS. He even volunteered to pay for the hole we had kicked into the wall, but the new owners would have none of it. They said they were going to leave Messer’s office just the way it was.
The highlight of the evening was a recounting of how we discovered Jelly’s gold in the first place. Dahlin, Heavenly, and Whitlow did most of the telling at the party and to the news media; Kelly Bressandes got the scoop I had promised her. Dahlin later included an account in his book that noted his relationship with Brent Messer—but not Jelly Nash—and both Heavenly and Whitlow added magazine articles. Heavenly even scored a movie option; I heard they were negotiating with Naomi Watts to play her part. Personally, I didn’t know what a wonderfully adventurous story it was until I heard their versions—right up there with the tales of Indiana Jones and Dirk Pitt. Nor did I realize, according to the three of them, how very little I had contributed to it all. Dahlin mentioned my name only once.
He didn’t mention Uncle Mike at all. Just as well.
Mike’s confession and the recovery of the murder weapon made all the suspects I had gathered moot. Still, some smart lawyering on G. K. Bonalay’s part, plus his advanced age, earned Mike a deal. He pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter and took a twenty-eight-month jolt, just over half of what the sentencing guidelines recommended, in the minimum-security prison in Lino Lakes, where he soon gained fame as the oldest guest of the Minnesota Corrections Department. Genevieve Antonello visited Mike at least once a week for the thirteen months that he actually served. He died in his sleep two months after his release.
So it goes.
Afterword
Jelly’s Gold is a work of fiction. Frank “Jelly” Nash most certainly was not. Neither was Verne Miller, Tommy Holden, Jimmy Keating, Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, the Barker brothers, Jack Peifer, and all the other ne’er-do-wells who lived in St. Paul—my hometown—during those heady days when it was “an open city.”
Start with the erudite Nash. He actually had an alibi for the Huron, South Dakota, bank heist that I described—he was in Aurora, Minnesot
a, with his wife, Frances, at the time. However, his movements immediately afterward were exactly as I related them. He was in St. Paul on June 9, 1933, and he spent the evening with Alvin “Creepy” Karpis and Doc and Freddie Barker, and they most certainly told him about their plans to kidnap William Hamm—and yes, Frank did blow town the very next day, eventually reaching Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he was arrested.
My account of the Kansas City Massacre, however, is open to debate. I tapped six different sources in my research, so I’m sure it occurred pretty much as I described it. There is some confusion in historical accounts though—not so much about what happened but about why it happened. Most people believe it was a botched attempt by underworld hit man Verne Miller to rescue his friend. (Some are convinced that Nash, Special Agent Raymond Caffrey, and Detective Frank Hermanson were accidentally killed by Special Agent L. Joseph Lackey, who misfired his shotgun.) Still others steadfastly believe that the Pendergast crime family, which operated the rackets in Kansas City, hired Miller to assassinate his friend to keep him quiet. As for me, well, if you’ve already read the book you know that I have an entirely different theory. (Hey, it could have happened.)
I also attempted to faithfully reproduce the city of St. Paul that existed in those days. On this point I expect some argument from local readers.
I have spoken with a lot of people who have tales to tell from that era, many of them passed down from generation to generation like heirlooms. They told me about the gangsters, the bootleggers, the prostitutes, the gamblers, and the cops. Many even bragged—yes, bragged—that their long-dead relatives were involved in various criminal mischiefs.
Most of these people are absolutely convinced of the rightness of their stories, but many of them simply are not true. At least my research can’t confirm them. (For example, I have uncovered no evidence to suggest that Al Capone set foot anywhere near the place, although Bugsy Siegel most certainly did.) On the other hand, some stories were presented with crystal clarity and contained details that even newspaper reports from that time were vague about. Still other stories have reached the level of myth. Yes, the local cops did shoot it out with John Dillinger at the Lincoln Court Apartments on Lexington Parkway (there are guided tours that will take you to all the old gangster haunts)—but some yarn spinners made it sound like a scene from the Die Hard movies with Bruce Willis playing Dillinger, and if all the people whose relatives claim they were there had been there, they would have filled the old Lexington Park baseball stadium.
Yet while a great many people know about St. Paul’s “gangster era”—meaning the mid-1930s, when much of Jelly’s Gold takes place—precious few seem to appreciate just how widespread the corruption was and how long it lasted. Our collective memories suggest that it sprang up during Prohibition and disappeared soon after Repeal. In reality, it lasted over thirty-five years and reached the highest echelons of society. St. Paul was so laughably corrupt that what I learned during my research reminded me of Gotham City of Batman comic book fame.
As I attempted to explain early in the novel, the corruption began at the turn of the century when a nondescript deputy court clerk named Richard O’Connor rose to become St. Paul’s most notorious fixer. It was “the Cardinal” who installed John “the Big Fellow” O’Connor as chief of police and organized an alliance with “Dapper Dan” Hogan (everyone had a nickname in those days) to control the city’s criminal activities. Called the O’Connor System, it allowed even the most villainous killers and cutthroats to live comfortably among us as long as they committed no crime within the city limits. Most St. Paulites not only knew about it, they approved. When he died in 1924, four thousand people attended the Big Fellow’s funeral; the St. Paul Pioneer Press praised him, noting that while his “methods were those of a bygone day, the fact remains that they generally accomplished results.”
At least the results were favorable for citizens of St. Paul; not so much for our neighbors. St. Paul might have been one of the safest cities in America, but in 1916, Minneapolis mayor Wallace Nye complained publicly that there was little he could do to stem the rising crime rate in his town because the perpetrators so easily escaped across the Mississippi River into St. Paul, where they were protected.
On and on the system went, lasting ten years after the Big Fellow died, Dapper Dan was blown up, and the Cardinal retired.
Which brings me to the characters of Kathryn and Brent Messer and the Dahlins. They are figments of my imagination, meant to serve as a reminder of just how involved St. Paul society was with the criminals—and they were involved. To this day, a portrait of Nina Clifford, the city’s most notorious madam, hangs in a place of honor in St. Paul’s Minnesota Club, only a stone’s throw—or, some believe, a tunnel’s length—from the house where she plied her trade.
Of course, all good things—if you want to call it that—must come to an end and the O’Connor System collapsed with almost astonishing speed. There were three reasons for this; I list all of them in the book.
The first was the Kansas City Massacre. The killing of three police officers and an agent of the FBI in broad daylight in a public place not only outraged the nation, it mortified the citizens of St. Paul. Jelly Nash and Verne Miller were “local boys,” after all. Nash was married to an Aurora girl; Miller was involved with a woman from Brainerd, Minnesota; they were practically fixtures in the community. The second, of course, was the kidnappings of William Hamm and Edward Bremer. This proved that the citizens of St. Paul were no longer safe from the criminals they had welcomed for over three decades.
I believe a newspaper landed the most telling blow in June 1935. The St. Paul Daily News hired Wallace Ness Jamie, a criminologist from Chicago—who just happened to be the nephew of Eliot Ness of Untouchables fame—to prove police corruption in St. Paul. Jamie was a pioneer in the use of surveillance equipment, and with the permission of Public Safety Commissioner H. E. Warren, he bugged the phones and offices of the St. Paul Police Department. Over three thousand pages of transcripts were generated, proving without a doubt just how low the cops had sunk, confirming just how corrupt St. Paulites had allowed their city to become—and the Daily News printed them!
It was a watershed moment, not unlike the printing of the Watergate Tapes forty years later. There was no hiding from the truth, now. Like Captain Renault of Casablanca, St. Paulites were outraged—outraged!—to discover that there was gambling and a whole lot of other criminal activities on the premises, and they moved to rid themselves of it. Cops were imprisoned, politicians were ruined, and many of our wealthiest citizens were embarrassed. In fact, the cleansing of St. Paul took place so quickly that by April 1937 prominent citizens sought “a clean bill of health” from D.C. bigwigs who had disparaged their city for so long. They didn’t get it, but they felt “honest” enough to try.
Meanwhile, bad things were happening to bad people. I noted in the novel what fates greeted Nash, Miller, Karpis, the Barkers, and a lot of the other miscreants who lived here at one time or another. As for Nash’s pals Jimmy Keating and Tommy Holden—both ended up breaking rocks in the hot sun at Alcatraz. After he was released in the late forties, Holden got into a drunken quarrel with his wife and shot her and two others. He died of heart failure in Stateville Prison in Illinois in 1953. Keating, on the other hand, went straight. He became first a florist at the Calhoun Beach Club in Minneapolis and later an organizer for a St. Paul machinists union. One of his best friends was a former member of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension—go figure. He died in July 1978 at age seventy-nine.
I wish I had met him. I wish I had met Frank Nash, too. This isn’t to suggest that I wish St. Paul were still an open city (although people who read my book and who have heard the stories that my research has given me might believe otherwise). Far from it. I like the city just the way it is. Honestly, though, wouldn’t you love to have taken a short vacation here when St. Paul roared?
David Housewright
St. Paul, Minnesota
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