The Year of Fear (11 page)

On June 27, 1930, he checked himself into Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Two weeks later, he began writing his will. A month later, after twenty-seven years in the frenetic oil business, he suffered a massive stroke and cerebral hemorrhage and died. He was forty-seven.

His obituary ran in newspapers from New York to Kansas City. Just as notable, though, were the letters from readers that flooded into newspapers after Slick’s death. Readers praised him for his honesty and success at helping them survive the drought and the Depression by finding oil on their land and sharing in the profits, allowing them to not only stay on their land, but pay off their mortgages and survive the repossession efforts of the banks. Slick managed to be the most inexplicable combination of characteristics: a rich oilman and populist hero.

Urschel had lost his best friend and business partner.

Slick had shunned publicity all his life, in part because it was part and parcel of his business, but also because he hated the attention and scrutiny it brought. Slick knew how hard it was to amass a fortune and how quickly that fortune would attract schemers, con men and thieves bent on taking it away by any means necessary. So he lived his life without ostentation and as far out of the spotlight as possible.

Urschel understood that sense of secrecy as well, perhaps even better. But he was about to inherit a third of Slick’s fortune and the lion’s share of the nightmare of publicity that the news of that wealth would bring.

On August 27, the Associated Press moved a story on their national wire stating that “The will of a former teamster was revealed today as leaving a fortune of between $75,000,000 and $100,000,000 … The will was that of Thomas B. Slick, whose independent operation in Illinois and the Southwest led to his being known as the wealthiest independent oil operator in the world.”

Within weeks, Oklahoma newspapers began speculating that the inheritance taxes on the Slick estate would bring enough cash into the state’s coffers that its burgeoning debt would be erased and budget cuts in response to the lingering Depression eliminated.

All of the publicity about the Slick-Urschel fortune was making Charles extremely uncomfortable. Slick, a bit paranoid by nature, lived in fear that someone would kidnap him or a member of his family to extort the money he’d worked so hard to earn. He had passed that fear along to Charles, who now had the onus of protecting his family and Tom’s, as well. Charles, a widower, had become legal guardian of Tom’s children since his death. Two years later, he married Tom’s widow, Berenice, and set off a new round of publicity about the marriage of the two fortunes. All of this did not escape the attention of Kathryn Kelly, who found it to be most interesting reading. Urschel’s worst fears about the dangers of his family’s high-profile fortune were about to be realized.

*   *   *

On Saturday, July 22, 1933, Charles and Berenice were preparing for a night of socializing and a few rounds of bridge with some neighborhood friends. Charles, though, was finding it hard to relax. His son, Charles Jr., and his two stepsons were off on a fishing trip and that concerned him. His stepdaughter was out at a party, and he worried most about her. Recently, she’d mentioned that she thought some strangers were following her.

Ever since the Lindbergh kidnapping the year before, it seemed like the crime was proliferating daily. The local papers carried constant reports and updates on the William Hamm kidnapping in Minnesota, the John Factor kidnapping in Chicago, the Charles Boettcher kidnapping in Denver, the kidnapping of twenty-four-year-old John O’Connell, nephew of two of New York’s most powerful Democratic Party leaders in Albany and August Luer, an Illinois banker, plucked from his home in Alton.

The New York Times
had begun running a regular feature that listed the nation’s ongoing kidnapping cases and where they stood in the process of being solved.

On July 14,
The
Daily Oklahoman
carried two stories of particular interest to Urschel. The first, datelined out of Chicago, was headlined:

SECRET POLICE FOR KIDNAPPING WAR IS URGED

Warfare on kidnappers through a nationwide secret police body with branches in every city was suggested Thursday by Frank J. Loesch, head of the Illinois Crime Commission.

“Kidnapping has become the greatest menace to the public in modern times,” Loesch said, “and the only way we can defeat kidnappers is with their own weapons, secrecy and armed force.

“Kidnappings cannot be solved or kidnappers arrested under the existing police systems,” he said, “because they have the advantage of knowing the identity of the police. In some of the epidemic of recent cases it appears that police officers may have been implicated in the actual crime.”

In a second story on the very same page, under the headline
Laws being drawn to combat kidnapping,
Attorney General Homer Cummings was mapping out just such a plan, and he hoped that Congress would approve it in its very next session. In the meantime, though, he took the extraordinary step of outlining to the nation how they should behave if indeed they were kidnapped in a three-point program designed to put his agency front and center in the high-profile cases:

1. Communicate immediately the fact of the kidnapping to the nearest official of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation so that among other things its vast collection of fingerprints may be put into use at the first opportunity.

2. Take prompt steps to keep out of the picture other than the properly constituted officers so that all available clues will be preserved.

3. Make full disclosure of every fact to the federal officers so that they will not be needlessly handicapped.

Life in Oklahoma and Texas among the scattered burgs where Urschel and his companies did business had always been rough-and-tumble, but since the market crashed and the Depression spread, people were growing increasingly desperate and violent. He was well aware that a group of gangsters had just shot up the parking lot of Kansas City’s Union Station, killing cops and a federal agent, and
The
Daily Oklahoman
was making the claim that they’d fled to Oklahoma to hide out and that local killer/kidnapper Pretty Boy Floyd was among the suspects. He worried about the safety of his family.

Today, though, there was news of another sort on the radio, and it was one in which Urschel had a great deal of interest.

Fifty thousand New Yorkers had gathered at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn to watch daredevil aviator Wiley Post land after flying around the world. If he landed successfully, he would become the first pilot to fly it solo. And, unless something went terribly wrong, he was also expected to do it in record time, breaking the previous record he had set flying with a navigator.

The Wiley Post adventure was exactly the kind of feel-good story the weary nation craved, and the press was hyping it at every opportunity. Now, as the conclusion of the flight neared, the story was the province of the newly formed national radio networks, and they had listeners glued to their sets.

Urschel knew all about Post and his exploits. Though he was born in Texas, Post spent most of his life in Oklahoma, and the state was proud to claim him.

Post was a poor farm boy, part Cherokee, who had dropped out of school after the sixth grade. He hated farmwork and was hardly built for it at 5′4″ and weighing 130 pounds. He left his parents’ farm in Texas to find work in the oil fields of Oklahoma, but he was equally ill-suited to that work. He found it tedious and boring and impossibly hard. He tried to find success as a highway robber, but was arrested on one of his first attempts.

Within months of his incarceration, a sympathetic prison doctor took pity on the despondent prisoner and arranged for his release on parole. Eventually, Post returned to work in the oil fields, but lost his left eye in an accident when a flying chip of steel hit him.

The state compensation board ordered the company to pay him a settlement of $1,698.25. Post would use it to pay for flying lessons and buy a recently crash-landed plane for $240. He rebuilt it, learned to fly it and launched his aviation career without the benefit of a pilot’s license, which was denied him because of his disability.

He later went to work for one of Urschel’s competitors, oilman F. C. Hall. Hall was looking for ways to gain a competitive edge in the business and needed a pilot to shuttle him to distant fields, where he might lay a claim before others could get there. Post, always the thrill seeker, was willing to brave any kind of weather and take off at a moment’s notice. Hall found him to be the perfect fit, and lent him his plane to fly at off-times in races around the country. From there, he built his legend.

The Daily Oklahoman
had been following his exploits since his takeoff on July 15 from New York bound for Berlin, where he landed 25 hours and 45 minutes later. He was greeted on the ground by Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s newly appointed Reichsminister Hermann Goring. Two hours later, he took off for Novosibirsk in Siberian Russia, but equipment trouble forced him down in East Prussia. The rest of the flight had been a doozy of a story full of unscheduled stops, equipment failures, crash landings, bad weather and assorted unexpected emergencies. But Post continually pressed on and, with good weather ahead of him, it looked as if he would break his own round-the-globe flying record—but this time flying alone.

The Urschels had invited their good friends and neighbors, the Jarretts, over that evening for a game of bridge on the sunporch behind the house, where the air stirred and the temperature dipped below that inside the mansion, which had baked in the sun all day. Charles was an excellent player. He had a card-counters memory and, with his wife’s mental tenacity, they were daunting competitors. The Jarretts enjoyed the rivalry, but after a long, hot night of losing hands, they were itching to leave.

“It’s almost 11:30. Time we were going home, Walter,” said Mr. Jarrett’s wife.

“I suppose so,” he responded.

But Berenice was liking her luck and asked for another game. Walter Jarrett shuffled the cards and dealt.

As they sorted their cards, a car pulled up to the house and killed its lights. Inside the powerful new Chevrolet, George Kelly looked at Al Bates, his agitated partner, and told him to relax. Kelly felt good. Excited. He saw lights on the back porch. The doors were open and the screens were the only barrier.

“OK, Al. Calm down. It is going to be a piece of cake.”

Berenice’s luck held. Staring at her hand and hoping to run a grand slam, she stoically bid: “Two hearts.” Then she froze.

“What is it?” asked Charles.

“I heard something,” she said. “Someone moved outside.”

Charles turned toward the screen door just as two men rushed inside, both armed. One carried a submachine gun, the other a revolver.

Berenice screamed.

Flipping the machine gun in her direction, Kelly told her to “shut up.”

Then, calmly: “Everyone keep your seat, and no one will get hurt.”

As he stared at the startled foursome, he realized he had no idea which man was to be his victim. Which man was the richest oilman in the whole damn country and which man was the unlucky chump he was playing cards with?

“Which one of you is Charles Urschel?” he asked politely.

Urschel stared back in stoic silence trying to catalog details of the machine-gun-wielding thug who had no idea who he was trying to kidnap. That the gunman couldn’t tell Urschel apart from his pudgy, balding neighbor, who just so happened to be a wealthy oilman as well, was almost laughable.

The trim, muscular machine gunner was awfully well-dressed for a night of marauding. Snap-brimmed Panama hat, pressed short-sleeved shirt, pleated slacks, fancy leather belt, shined shoes. The hat threw heavy shadows over his face, and it was hard to make out any features. His complexion looked dark. Mexican, maybe. But his speech was smooth and unaccented. Probably some thug from up north.

Urschel would kill them both in a heartbeat if he could get to his shotgun. He thought worriedly about his sixteen-year-old stepdaughter upstairs. Would she have it cocked and ready if the intruders had other intentions? He kicked himself mentally for firing his bodyguard, whom he’d caught sleeping on the job.

In any negotiation, time and delay are the weapons of last resort for the side dealing from a weaker position. So Urschel sat, unmoving, as Kelly repeated his demand.

“Once again I’ll ask you. Which one is Urschel? If you still refuse to answer, we’ll take you both.”

Jarrett, playing the hero, began to rise. As he did, Urschel followed.

“All right, if that’s the way you want it,” said Kelly turning to Bates. “Take ’em both.”

As Kelly backed out of the room, machine gun still trained on the frightened women, he instructed them not to call the police or he wouldn’t hesitate to kill the two men.

Berenice, who’d grown up with hard-bitten cowboys and ranchers and had raised her children in the gritty oil fields of West Texas and Oklahoma among the roustabouts and drunks, was no stranger to adversity. And she did not scare easily.

As soon as Kelly was out the door, she ran upstairs, locked herself in a room and called Chief Watts of the Oklahoma City Police Department. Then she grabbed a copy of
Time
magazine and flipped to a page that had caught her interest. She had been discussing it with Charles just that afternoon and had left it on her dressing table. The
Time
article was analyzing the recent spate of kidnappings of wealthy individuals. It included the telephone number the Justice Department had set up to expedite action on any kidnapping that should occur. The department was eager to put the new Lindbergh Law into practice and bring kidnappers to justice as quickly as possible.

She dialed the number immediately.

Nine miles outside of town, Kelly told Bates to stop the car. He turned to Urschel and Jarrett and demanded their wallets. Pulling sixty dollars in cash and a driver’s license from Jarrett’s wallet, he looked at Urschel and told him he could have saved his buddy all this grief if he’d just spoken up earlier.