Public Enemies (11 page)

Suddenly, from in front of the car, someone yelled, “Up! Up! Get your hands up!”

All seven lawmen turned. A split second later there was a gunshot.

“Let ’em have it!” a voice shouted.

A fusillade of machine-gun bullets raked the car. The two police officers, Red Grooms and Frank Hermanson, jerked like marionettes, splashes of blood erupting across their chests and faces; both men were dead before they hit the ground. In the front seat Frank Nash’s head exploded. Behind him Otto Reed’s head burst as well.

In front of the car, Ray Caffrey was blown against the hood and crumpled to the pavement in a heap. A bullet grazed Reed Vetterli’s right arm, and he fell beside the car. An instant later he sprang to his feet and ran back toward the station, a spray of bullets kicking up dust behind him. In the backseat Lackey raised his shotgun, but three bullets hit him and he dropped it; still alive, he fell forward and played dead, as did Frank Smith beside him. Both men had their heads between their knees when the shooting stopped. They heard the sound of footsteps approaching.

“Everyone’s dead in here,” a voice outside the car said.

It would be called the Kansas City Massacre. At the time, it was the second-deadliest murder of law-enforcement officers in American history, and it shocked the nation. Coming less than forty-eight hours after the kidnapping of William Hamm, it generated a shock wave felt all the way to Franklin Roosevelt’s desk in the Oval Office.

The War on Crime had begun.

 

[Whoever did this] must be exterminated, and they must be exterminated by us.

—J . EDGAR HOOVER ON THE KANSAS CITY MASSACRE

We were a bunch of greenhorns who had no idea what we were doing.

—FORMER SPECIAL AGENT KENNETH McINTIRE, 1983

 

“That one’s alive! He’s alive!”

The haze of gunsmoke still hung over the Union Station parking lot as the first bystanders ran up to the FBI car. Ray Caffrey’s fallen body lay sprawled on the pavement next to the front fender, his eyes still open, his jaw working silently; he would be dead within minutes. Six feet away the two Kansas City detectives lay dead in a spreading pool of blood, Red Grooms’s head nestled against Frank Hermanson’s chest. Inside the car, Frank Nash was slumped in the driver’s seat, mouth open, head back, rivulets of blood running down his neck and reddening his chest. In the backseat Otto Reed’s body looked worse.

First to reach the car after the gunmen fled was Mike Fanning, a policeman who had been on duty at the station and had fired shots at the fleeing sedan. He had no idea what was going on. He yanked open a car door, trained his pistol on the men inside, and yelled for them to get out.

“Don’t shoot, I’m a federal officer,” said Frank Smith, raising his hands. There were tears in his eyes as he glanced at his old friend Otto Reed. To his left Joe Lackey moaned in pain. He’d been hit three times in the back. “Steady now, steady,” Smith said, turning to Lackey. “You’ll make it all right.” The Kansas City SAC, Reed Vetterli, ran up, helped pull Lackey from the seat, and laid him on the pavement. Smith cradled the wounded agent’s head in his arms. “I’ll be all right,” Lackey whispered. “Look after the others.”

A crowd was gathering—businessmen in straw boaters, taxi drivers in flat caps, a farmer or two in denim overalls. Several slipped in the spreading pool of blood. A woman screamed. A wire-service reporter tiptoed through the scene, staining her white shoes red. Ambulances were on the scene within minutes, and Lackey was taken to Research Hospital; he would recover and return to duty within weeks. Vetterli, bleeding lightly from his arm wound, rushed to the FBI offices in the Federal Reserve Bank Building. He picked up the phone, called Washington, and was put through to the director.

“It was a massacre, Mr. Hoover,” Vetterli said. “Ray Caffrey is dead. Joe Lackey may not pull through. Two Kansas City detectives and the chief of police from McAlester, Oklahoma, were killed. So was Frank Nash.” Vetterli listened a moment. “Well, I lost a good summer coat and a shirt . . . No, I didn’t go to the hospital . . . Yes, sir, I’ll go to a doctor at once.” An agent was dispatched to Ray Caffrey’s apartment to break the news to his wife.

The remaining agents descended on the Union Station parking lot to interview witnesses. Crowds milled about through the morning, and there was no shortage of people who thought they had seen the assassins. Still, the stories that filled the agents’ notebooks were a jumble. The shooters used one car; no, two. There were two gunmen, or maybe three. Someone else saw five. The assassins were tall and thin, or short and fat, maybe swarthy, maybe not. It was a frustrating beginning to what would quickly become an exasperating investigation.

The FBI did receive one break that morning. Down in Joplin, Dick Galatas had already returned to Hot Springs, but the remaining conspirators—Frances Nash, Deafy Farmer and his wife—panicked when they heard news of the massacre on the radio. Frances was dumbstruck. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it,” she kept saying.

The trio did the only thing they could: they ran. By two o’clock all three had disappeared—but not without being noticed. A local woman heard something suspicious over the telephone line—a party line—and reported it to Joplin police, who raided the Farmer home at noon.
^g
They found only a caretaker but telephoned Kansas City nevertheless. Two FBI men jumped in a car and drove to Joplin the next morning, in case someone returned.

By lunchtime, barely five hours after the last gunshot at Union Station, Hoover was mulling who to place in charge of what was clearly the most important investigation in Bureau history.
^h
Reed Vetterli’s men were fresh-faced College Boys; while eager, none was fit to lead a major investigation. Hoover needed the kind of agent he had so few of, a professional investigator with maturity, diplomacy, and street smarts. Ray Caffrey was the third Bureau man ever killed. Hoover decided to bring in the man who had handled the case of the first. He picked up the phone and dialed San Antonio. He was bringing in Gus Jones.
ⁱ

Jones, the San Antonio SAC since 1921, was the prototype of the dozen or so no-bullshit Cowboys Hoover employed to tutor his College Boys and work major cases. At fifty-one Jones was a creature of the old Texas frontier, stout and moonfaced, with thinning blond hair, wire-frame spectacles, and a fondness for ten-gallon hats. Born in San Angelo in 1882, he came from a family of West Texas lawmen; his father had been killed in a late-nineteenth-century skirmish with Indians. As the El Paso SAC during the World War, Jones spent much of his time trying to head off arms shipments to Pancho Villa and other Mexican revolutionaries. Transferred to San Antonio, he became one of Hoover’s best men.

After talking with Hoover, Jones boarded a flight out of San Antonio and arrived at the Kansas City airport at 2:30 Sunday morning, seventeen hours after the massacre. Downtown, he went into conference with Vetterli and his men, and at 10:00 took two of them to meet with the Kansas City Police Department’s new chief, Eugene Reppert. Reppert, a pawn of the Pendergast machine, was already working to deflect responsibility for the massacre, telling reporters that the Nash arrest had been an FBI operation.

“This is some mess you’ve gotten us into,” Reppert told Jones.
¹
Jones emphasized that the Bureau was willing to aid the police investigation any way it could, but Reppert said he had no intention of investigating the massacre. “This is a government case and not a police matter,” he said. Afterward Jones said it was the most amazing thing he had ever heard a police chief say; two of his men were dead and he wasn’t investigating. The FBI could only wonder why.

The Bureau was on its own. No one said it aloud, but there were some among Hoover’s men who doubted they could carry off the complex investigation they now faced. The FBI had never attempted anything like it before. Gus Jones wondered what weaponless agents would do if confronted by the well-armed massacre assassins. When Hoover sent a wire demanding that he use every resource to apprehend the gunmen, Jones cabled back: “With what? Peashooters?” Suddenly, the FBI’s unofficial ban on guns was lifted. In Washington one of Hoover’s top men, Clyde Tolson, secured two machine guns to send to Kansas City.

Returning to the FBI office, Jones convened a meeting to go over leads. Some agents thought the massacre was a gangland hit directed at Frank Nash. Jones thought it more likely that it was a rescue attempt gone awry. Several suspects had already jumped to the fore. Their two best theories, in fact, were already being debated in the Kansas City newspapers. One posited that Pretty Boy Floyd was behind the killings. After his release, Sheriff Killingsworth had given several interviews, and stories about Floyd’s arrival in Kansas City were everywhere. The problem was, of the dozens of witnesses, only one, the Traveler’s Aid lady, Lottie West, identified Floyd. In fact, Mrs. West said she had seen Floyd sitting at her desk when she arrived for work. Though her story was prominently reported, none of the agents took it seriously.

The stronger theory rested on rumors that Nash had arranged the escape of Harvey Bailey and ten other convicts from the Kansas State Penitentiary on May 31. Jones theorized that Bailey’s group had attempted to rescue Nash and for some reason ended up killing him. This theory gained momentum when several eyewitnesses identified photographs of Bailey as one of the assassins. The best was a businessman named Samuel Link. Link said he had stepped out of his car that morning next to a Reo sedan just as a man he recognized as Bailey emerged from the Reo, knocking off Link’s hat. Link said he watched as Bailey and another man fired on the FBI car. Best of all, Link said he had been a deputy sheriff in Kansas City in 1926 and had once seen Bailey on the street. He pointed to a photo of one of Bailey’s co-escapees, a murderous Oklahoma yegg named Wilbur Underhill—the papers called him “The Tri-State Terror”—and identified him as the other assassin.

The best witnesses should have been the three agents who survived the shooting: Vetterli, Lackey, and Frank Smith. Their stories were disappointing. From his hospital bed, Lackey said he had seen two of the shooters but couldn’t identify them; the car windows were too dirty for a clear view. Smith had seen one man he couldn’t identify, then ducked his head when the shooting began. Only Vetterli made a concrete identification of a man he said he saw wielding a submachine gun: “Big” Bob Brady, an Oklahoma bank robber who had escaped with Bailey. By Sunday night Jones had focused the Bureau’s efforts on finding Bailey and the other escapees. Wanted posters were drawn up.

By Sunday night, thirty-six hours after the shootings, their best lead was a series of suspicious phone calls the Oklahoma City office traced from Hot Springs to Deafy Farmer’s house south of Joplin. This suggested that someone from Hot Springs had called on Farmer to rescue Nash; now agents needed to learn who Farmer had telephoned in Kansas City. Phone records were in St. Louis. Amazingly, Reed Vetterli decided to write the phone company a letter instead of just telephoning. It would take four days for the records to arrive, during which time Verne Miller and everyone else involved in the massacre conspiracy got away.

 

 

That Saturday night, fifteen hours after the Kansas City Massacre, William Hamm’s intermediary, Billy Dunn, left St. Paul in a Ford coupe whose doors had been removed. It had been Shotgun George Ziegler’s idea to order the doors taken off; this way, no one could be hiding inside to ambush them. On the floorboard beside Dunn was a satchel containing $100,000 in cash.

Dunn’s late-night drive followed three notes from Hamm’s kidnappers. The first had been delivered to a pharmacy near Dunn’s home:
You’re so god damed
[
sic
]
smart that you’ll wind up getting both of you guys killed. Furthermore we demand that you personally deliver the money so that if there is any doble
[
sic
]
crossing we will have the pleasure of hitting you in the head.

Saturday morning a second note was left in the car of a brewery worker. It gave instructions on how to deliver the ransom and warned Dunn to come alone:
You brought the coppers into this, now you get rid of the ass-holes.
The St. Paul SAC, Werner Hanni, debated whether to set a trap for the kidnappers when the ransom was delivered. The corrupt detective Tom Brown alerted the Barkers. A third ransom note was delivered to Dunn that afternoon:
If you are through with the bullshit and balyhoo
[
sic
]
, we’ll give you your chance. First of all,
get away from the coppers.

Just after ten o’clock that night, Dunn drove north on Highway 61. He passed the town of White Bear Lake and continued north in the darkness. Just before Pine City, about halfway to Duluth, a car roared past at a speed of over seventy miles per hour. A second car followed. Dunn slowed and watched as the two cars pulled to the side of the road. They let him pass, then pulled out and passed him again. After a few minutes, Dunn saw headlights ahead of him in the darkness. They flashed five times. It was the signal. He stopped the car and threw out the money.

Dunn drove on to Duluth, where he had been told Hamm would be waiting at the New Duluth Hotel. He wasn’t there. Soon Dunn was joined by the kidnappers’ secret liaison, Tom Brown, and another detective. They sat all night, waiting. Hamm never showed.

Fred Barker and George Ziegler returned to the Bensonville safe house the next morning and threw the satchel on the kitchen table. “You better round up some Hamm’s beer,” Ziegler announced. “I got a feeling that it’ll be my favorite for a long time to come.”

The next morning at dawn, after an all-night drive back to Minnesota, Karpis left William Hamm blindfolded in a field outside the town of Wyoming. After a few minutes, Hamm took off his blindfold and trudged to a farmhouse, where he telephoned his mother in Minneapolis. By noon he was back at his mansion, standing dazed before a crowd of reporters.