The Year of Fear (28 page)

When he was asked if Kelly had said anything about Urschel’s family, he said Kelly “told me that he knew all about our family; knew all about the children; knew about the cars they drove; that he had been by the house and had seen a trailer set up in our backyard which the boys used in going on a camping trip the week before.

“I made the statement or asked him whether he didn’t consider they were lucky that they found that door unlocked, and he said they probably were, that it would not have made any difference; they were coming for me that night and would have taken me even if I had been in bed. He also said he knew what room in the house I slept in. He talked a good deal about automobiles. He seemed to know a lot about cars, especially the mechanics of cars. He preferred Chevrolets and Cadillacs.”

The federal agents let Bailey know that despite the flimsy evidence holding him to the kidnapping, he would indeed be going down for the crime and it would be unwise to fight it too vigorously, since he was wanted in Kansas for kidnapping the warden in the Memorial Day prison escape that had gotten him shot in the knee. He could fry for that.

He was also wanted in Kansas in connection with the massacre at Union Station. Bailey knew well the benefits of a conviction for a lesser crime, and his lawyer did not dissuade him from that view.

So he sat bemusedly in the courtroom, chewing tobacco and preening for the society ladies who were photographing him constantly. “Be sure you get a good one, ma’am,” he would quip politely.

Hyde put Geraldine Arnold on the stand and she recounted her enslavement with the Kellys in expert detail.

“We left San Antonio to go to Cass Coleman’s but did not go there. A man told us that the law had been to Cass Coleman’s place. George said we would go to Chicago and see Joe Bergl.”

Bergl ran a garage in Chicago on Twenty-second Street, next to the Chicago branch of the Cotton Club, which was run by Al Capone’s older brother, Ralph. (Although he was the lesser brother, Ralph, aka “Bottles,” was quite successful in his own right. He ran a large bottling company that not only made the containers for his younger brother’s illegal liquor operation, but also for his legitimate business selling soda water, ginger ale and other mixers that would dilute the rotgut gin sold during Prohibition. During the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933, he had cornered so much of the concession business that his company was second only to Coca-Cola.)

Bergl’s garage specialized in obtaining and customizing cars for gangsters and bootleggers. Bergl had figured out ways to alter the suspension on cars and trucks so they could carry heavy loads of liquor and still maneuver nimbly without looking suspiciously loaded down. He could soup them up so they would run faster than their Detroit designers could imagine. For Capone and his lieutenants, he would add bulletproof windows and armor plating. He also experimented with police-evading features, such as oil-dumping tanks in the undercarriage that could be released to create slicks behind the vehicle to cause pursuers to spin out of control and smoke-producing exhaust pipes that would create a noxious screen to frustrate shooters chasing those vehicles.

For liquor and gun runners, he would add larger gas tanks so they could speed through the back hills and roads without having to stop for gas.

“We went to Chicago,” Geraldine continued. “Kathryn wrote a letter to Mother on the way. Before we left Texas we changed cars and had to have our battery changed too.”

“Where did you stay in Chicago and what was done there?” asked Hyde.

“We stayed in an apartment and they tried to phone Joe Bergl, but they could not get him for two or three days.”

At that point, Bergl didn’t want anything to do with Kelly. He knew Kelly was being tracked by the feds, and he didn’t want to become collateral damage. Eventually, though, Bergl provided Kelly with a new car, a Chevy coupe, $200 and a quart of whiskey and told him to get out of town. The Kellys then headed to Memphis.

In Memphis, Geraldine told the prosecutors, the Kellys started plotting to get the ransom money from Cass Coleman’s farm.

“Langford Ramsey and I were to take a car and go to Texas and get the money and some furs that Kathryn had left … get Kathryn’s clothes and necklace. Then they wanted me to come back … They said I was a good shield.

“When I got to Oklahoma City, I did not want to go back [to Memphis] and Mother did not want me to go back either.”

Hyde asked if Geraldine had seen the Kellys writing any letters.

“Lots of them,” she answered. “George and Kathryn both wrote letters and George put his fingerprints on them. I seen him put his fingerprints on them. I bought the stamps for the letters at the post office substation.”

Geraldine told Hyde that when they weren’t writing letters they were drinking and talking about killing people.

“George said he was going to kill Judge Vaught, Keenan, Urschel and [you].”

“What did he say about Urschel?” Hyde asked.

“George said they should have taken Urschel to Arizona and buried him. Kathryn said, ‘That’s what we ought to have done.’”

During cross-examination, Kathryn’s attorney, James Mathers, who looked every bit the legal scholar with his shock of tussled white hair, round owlish wire rims, three-piece suit and fine cigar wedged in his fingers, asked Geraldine if Kathryn had treated her well. She smiled, and answered, “Yes.”

“She bought me this dress and a coat in Chicago,” she said, brightening.

“Are you sure it was not in Cicero?” asked Mathers.

“No, we went to Cicero but it was in one of Bergl’s saloons in Chicago where we saw him,” she said definitively.

“Kathryn thanked him for what he had done for us and said something about the car and the money,” she added, to Mathers’s chagrin.

Once he got on the stand, the nervous Armon broke down and confessed to everything. When the prosecutor asked why he agreed to guard Urschel, he replied, “Kelly said if I didn’t, he would shoot me with a machine gun.”

After Armon caved, Ora and Boss did so, as well. They told the jury that they feared for their lives if they didn’t cooperate with Kelly and Bates. Ora wept on the stand, saying she was “forced into this thing with machine guns, the same as Mr. Urschel … I was afraid of George Kelly.”

Boss expressed similar fears, saying that if he didn’t help out Bates and Kelly they would have come back and killed him and his family. Boss claimed that if he hadn’t cooperated, “I would not be alive, my boy would not be alive, and maybe Mr. Urschel would not be alive today.

“The reason I didn’t phone no officers or the sheriff was for the simple reason I had a boy over there at this place, and if I phoned the officers, or if they had come over there, there would have been a battle and perhaps my boy would have been killed or perhaps Mr. Urschel would have been killed.”

Later, in his comments at the trial’s conclusion, Judge Vaught would scoff at this reasoning. “The threat of future injury is not enough. The evidence shows that the Shannons knew there was a kidnapped man at their home. If they knew he was kidnapped and they guarded him, then they would be just as guilty as if they had kidnapped him, transported him, and collected the ransom. Fear of individual punishment is no excuse for a violation of the law.”

Vaught wanted to put teeth in the new Lindbergh Law, and if he could do it with the gang that had abducted and ransomed his good friend Urschel, so much the better. He’d earlier let his feelings be known, when he described the new law as “absolutely revolutionary.”

“Congress passed it for one reason only—to try to stop kidnapping,” he said. “A kidnapper is more than a murderer and is so recognized over the country. No more vicious character in this country exists than one who kidnaps a man and holds him for ransom.”

In his concluding argument, prosecutor Keenan took a similar tack. “If this government cannot protect its citizens, then we had better, frankly, turn it over to the Kellys and the Bateses, the Baileys and the others of the underworld and pay tribute to them through taxes.

“Kidnapping has become a modern art. The plotters lay their vicious plans, bold strong-armed men carry out the abduction, hirelings stand guard and later when the ransom has been paid, the money changers arrange for its dissemination through underworld channels. In this case, the government has shown you the whole picture of how this heinous scheme was conceived and carried out.”

In their closing arguments, Keenan and Hyde lowered the hammer, Keenan telling the jury they would decide whether “we are to have a government of law and order, or abdicate in favor of machine-gun gangsters.”

Neatly through his statements, he detailed the need for a strong national government and a federal police force to protect its citizens when the states, and their local forces, could not:

“Through four states of the Union these criminals plied their trade and defied the government. A single state could not control such swift operations. The federal government was forced to step in and take a hand. Now that government has been defied by these gangsters and we have caught them red-handed. We are convinced that they are all guilty of this conspiracy and demand that a verdict of guilty be returned.”

Hyde reminded the jury that the kidnappers had put Urschel through “the tortures of hell.”

“I beg of you, in the name of my government, to return a verdict of guilty against these defendants. This is one of the most important cases ever tried. Precedents are being set that will guide the courts and the bar in all future trials that grow out of this determined effort of your government to stamp out this most damnable of crimes—kidnapping!”

Even Bates was impressed with Hyde’s summation. When Hyde, dripping with sweat, walked by to return to his seat, Bates congratulated him. “That’s the best I’ve heard,” said the veteran bank robber mockingly.

Hyde grinned and shook Bates’s hand.

The trial ended and the jurors, who had been sequestered for the trial, broke for dinner and began their deliberations. Within an hour, and with just one round of voting, they had reached their verdict. But it would have to wait until the morning.

*   *   *

George and Kathryn Kelly were taken to the courthouse the next morning. Judge Vaught was expecting pleas of guilty from both, which would have buttoned things up nicely with the conclusion of the trial of the other defendants and the sentencing ready to be handed down.

However, the Kellys ruined everybody’s morning when they both pleaded not guilty. The headstrong Kathryn remained convinced she could use her charms and acting skills to persuade the jury that she had been dragged against her will into the kidnapping by her threatening husband. George had no such illusions, and he knew if he took the stand that Hyde and Keenan would grill him about Bates, Bailey and others, and there was no way he would testify against or about his compatriots. So he told Mathers he would sit it out and watch the proceedings from his box seat. He would not take the stand and be bullied and insulted by the federal stooges who were running this three-ring circus, he said.

Vaught was not happy. Now there would need to be another trial for the Kellys, the marquee players in this courtroom battle. He shunted them aside and made them wait as he read the verdicts and sentences for the other defendants.

With Bailey, Bates and the Shannons standing shoulder to shoulder in the courtroom (the statuesque Bailey towering above the rest in his handsome double-breasted suit, slicked-back, wavy hair and chiseled features), Vaught read the verdict.

“The jury has returned a verdict of guilty. The court is of the opinion that this verdict is fully sustained by the evidence.”

But before launching into the sentencing, he teased the audience with an assessment of the enormity of the case.

“Something more is at stake than the mere punishment for the crime that has been committed in this case. The question before the American people today is whether or not crime will be recognized as an occupation or a profession. Or whether the people will enforce the laws of the nation as they are written. So far as this court is concerned, it is its purpose to try to enforce the laws as they are written.”

He then sentenced Bates, Bailey and Boss and Ora Shannon to life in prison. Armon got a ten-year sentence.

The hammer had fallen, and Kathryn was crestfallen and shocked. Her mother had just been sentenced to life in prison for a crime she had no part in. Bailey also had taken the fall for something he didn’t do.

Hyde and Keenan gloated to the press that the government now had the upper hand in the fight against kidnapping and was ready to “shoot the works.”

So now they would have to have another trial with another jury for the two principals in the case, George and Kathryn Kelly. But this was going to be a pummeling. The same evidence that had just been presented to incarcerate the hangers-on in the case was simply going to be resurrected to convict the principals. It was the ultimate anticlimax, and the only one who thought the outcome might be different was the delusional Kathryn.

At this point, Kelly knew he was cooked and didn’t care. He could have a trial and a conviction, or he could plead guilty. If Kathryn thought she had a shot, there was no loss in playing along. He was going to prison either way, and he’d been there before. He knew the prison system and how it worked. He could live comfortably on the inside, and when the time was right, he could get out.

*   *   *

On October 9, the second trial began. Two days earlier, Judge Vaught had received another threat in a letter that read, “If you do not dismiss these people, you and your family will be killed and your house will be blown up.”

From his jail cell in Oklahoma City, Kelly tried to get a message out to the rest of his gang, pleading with them to kidnap Hyde’s four-year-old son. “Snatch the child of this prosecutor to calm him down,” wrote Kelly.

The message, of course, was intercepted, and Hyde’s wife and son were placed under protective custody for the duration of the trial.

George fully intended to take the rap for everything and let Kathryn try to plead and lie her way out of it by sticking to her story alleging that he had forced her to cooperate.