The Year of Fear (3 page)

George fled his home life the way most middle-class kids do, by going off to college. Even though he’d dropped out of high school, he managed to pass the college entrance exam and enrolled at Mississippi A&M (now Mississippi State University) as a probationary student. But he spent most of his time and money on the co-eds he charmed and the parties they attended. By the beginning of his second semester, he’d run up some 55 demerits—which he famously tried to reduce by climbing to the top of the school’s flagpole to fix a broken pulley. Ultimately, he dropped out and returned to Memphis and the business he’d started, which would later expand to great profit when the Volstead Act brought in the Prohibition era in 1919.

Back in the gentleman bootlegging business, he set his sights on the beautiful daughter of a wealthy businessman, Geneva Ramsey. But Ramsey’s father, George, was well aware of the young lothario’s reputation, criminal and otherwise, and he forbade his daughter from seeing him. He sent her away to boarding school when George persisted in his romantic pursuits.

Eventually, they eloped and got married in Mississippi, assisted by none other than the governor’s daughter, whom Geneva had met while at school.

On their return, Ramsey relented and took George into the family with reluctant acceptance that eventually grew into genuine affection. He gave him a job at his construction company and George worked with great enthusiasm, adopting Ramsey as the “father I never had.” The couple had two kids, and Ramsey was naturally taken with his grandchildren, just as he was with his new assistant. But tragedy struck in 1925, when a dynamite charge exploded prematurely and killed Ramsey. His widow, Della, was forced to sell the company, and she generously set George up in various businesses, from selling cars to goat farming, but George was not the businessman that his father-in-law had been and he failed at all of them.

Eventually, George returned to the life of a bootlegger, wearing fashionable suits and snap-brimmed fedoras as he hauled his liquor in fast cars with his golf clubs cohabitating with the contraband in the trunk. Geneva hated the new life with George, gone so frequently, alternately getting chased by police or rivals and ending up in jail in all sorts of places. When she’d had enough, she took the kids and left him.

With Geneva gone, George took off for the wilds of Kansas City, an open city for criminality of all measures and styles. He changed his name to George Ramsey Kelly, using Ramsey as his middle name in deference to his departed father-in-law. He got serious about the business of bootlegging, which was growing increasingly profitable as the Prohibition era dragged on.

He was arrested a number of times in connection with his criminal exploits. In Santa Fe on March 14, 1927, in Tulsa on July 24 and then again in Tulsa in January 1928. But bootlegging in the rural Southwest was a well-tolerated crime, and if the right people were paid off and the right protection acquired, the penalties were light from the local authorities. But he made the foolish mistake of getting caught selling liquor on an Indian reservation, a minor crime, but because it was on federal land, it was a federal offense. On January 13, 1928, he was convicted and sent to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, where he was thrown in with a bunch of hard cases with long rap sheets—the type of men who really did belong there. It was there he would meet the people who would change his life forever, most notably a tight group of professional bank robbers: Francis “Jimmy” Keating, Tommy Holden and the legendary Frank “Jelly” Nash.

Kelly used his math and accounting skills to work his way into a cushy job in the prison’s records office. With access to all of the inmates’ personal statistics and fingerprints, Kelly was able to expertly fabricate fake IDs for Keating and Holden that allowed them to walk out with a work crew of less notorious inmates assigned to farm labor. Once out, they ditched the work crew, changed into civilian clothing and simply walked away. (Nash, the wily veteran, didn’t need any help. He walked out in a similar fashion a short time later.) The three had told Kelly that if he was looking for work once he got on the outside, he should come by the Green Lantern tavern in St. Paul, Minnesota, and look them up. When Kelly was released two years later on good behavior, he was tougher, smarter and had a whole cadre of experienced criminal pals he was looking to reconnect with. And he knew exactly where to find them.

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The Green Lantern was a major clearinghouse for underworld activities of all sorts run by an Orthodox Jew named Harry “Dutch” Sawyer, who had St. Paul’s notoriously corrupt police department in his pocket. At the Green Lantern, Dutch could put you together with big-time criminal gangs who might be in need of an additional player for a bank heist, burglary, safecracking, shakedown, extortion or whatever other kind of racket you were into. If things didn’t go as planned, he could lead you to a friendly auto body repair shop where they wouldn’t ask questions about the bullet holes in the fender or the shattered back window. If you needed to arm up, he could get you the kind of weapon you desired. Suffer an unfortunate injury on the job? He could get you the best treatment from a skilled, no-questions-asked member of the medical profession. In need of female companionship? He could arrange that, too. And if you needed to unload some marked bills, government bonds or any other hard-to-fence item, he could get you the best rate going.

In 1930, the Green Lantern was a very popular spot. Dutch arranged for employees at the Prohibition-crippled Schmidt Brewery to provide him with beer through a tunnel system. St. Paul Police Chief Tom Brown drank at the bar and worked his various “business deals” with Dutch. In the areas of the country bordered by Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City and the Canadian border, there were few significant criminal activities that didn’t have a connection to the Green Lantern. It was “big time,” but you needed an entrée to get in. And when George got out of prison, he had one.

Dutch was running what was commonly referred to around St. Paul as the “O’Connor System.” From the turn of the century to 1920, Police Chief John O’Connor ran the crime and law enforcement operations of St. Paul. O’Connor was both a law enforcement officer and a criminal enforcer. He was known as the “Smiling Peacemaker,” both for his Irish charm and his ability to keep trouble out of his town by accommodating and protecting those who would ply their trades outside of it. The equation was simple; it didn’t matter what kind of criminal you were, you were protected in St. Paul as long as you didn’t commit any crimes within the city limits. It was a system that worked well for the banks and citizens of the city. The city fathers were happy to live in ignorant bliss and enjoy the crime-free environs of their proud state capital.

On the other side of the river, in Minneapolis, a similar system was run by a tall, affable Irishman named Edward G. “Big Ed” Morgan. It was a perverted form of law enforcement, but it worked particularly well, as long as you lived in the Twin Cities. However, once you got outside the city limits, the countryside was ravaged by the criminals that the O’Connor System protected.

By the early ’30s, fully 20 percent of the bank robberies in the nation occurred within an easy drive of St. Paul. In 1933 alone, forty-three bank robberies had drained $1.4 million from regional coffers (approximately $20 million in contemporary value). The pillaging teams that formed at the Green Lantern hit small community banks in little towns virtually unknown to the rest of the nation: Hugo, Sandstone, Elk River, Cushing, Savage, Shakopee and on and on. They hit the banks in neighboring North and South Dakota, as well. The county sheriffs and amateur guards hired by the local banks were unprepared and ill-equipped for the marauding robbers who would swoop in carrying machine guns, sawed-off shotguns and pistols stuck in their belts. And even if they were lucky enough to have a squad car, they would be left in the dust as gangsters sped away in fast Cadillacs and Packards, back to the safety and comfort of St. Paul.

This was the fraternity Kelly was able to join with Keating and Holden and Nash as his sponsors. He would begin his on-the-job training almost immediately after leaving prison from the guys who were the very best in the business. Nash was the old-timer with a criminal résumé that stretched back more than a decade. Nash was part of the team that robbed the Katy Limited on August 20, 1923—the last successful horseback-mounted train robbery in American history. Nash’s charm and erudition were noted by the Associated Press when reporting on the robbery: “Four men under the leadership of a suave outlaw, who chatted amiably with his victims about the merits of a certain well-known political writer and discussed current questions of the day, held up the Missouri, Kansas & Texas train 123 southbound near Okesa, Okla., early today and robbed the express and mail cars of packages,” the story noted.

Nash had spent so much time in prison libraries that he’d become something of a Shakespeare scholar, quoting liberally from his works for comic effect when the time was right—jokes that went right over the heads of his thuggish compadres. When he walked out of Leavenworth, he’d taken the library’s copy of the Bard’s collected works with him.

Nash worked frequently with another Green Lantern denizen by the name of Harvey Bailey. Bailey was thought to be the most successful bank robber in the country. He had basically invented the modern form of bank robbery—one that emphasized meticulous planning, precise timing and hasty escapes over country roads using the finest and fastest of Detroit’s products. He’d study road maps, often at the county surveyor’s office, and drive them ahead of time for practice, always plotting alternative routes in case things didn’t go according to plan. He knew where the traffic cops were stationed and when the patrolmen walked their beat. There wasn’t a cop in the country that could catch Bailey when he was fleeing a job. He’d be flying down back alleys in speedy escape cars before the local lawmen even knew their town had been hit.

Bailey would study a bank for weeks or months before he would pull a job. He could judge the health of a bank by the commercial activity of its city and county. He knew when payroll deposits were made and the cash on hand would be greatest. There was no point in risking your life to rob a bank that was low on money.

Bailey robbed his first bank in 1920, and by the end of the decade his successful plunders included the Denver Mint and Lincoln National Bank, which netted him and his crew a cool million in cash and bonds, which he then laundered through Sawyer at the Green Lantern. The losses suffered by the Lincoln Bank were so severe that it closed its doors a short time later. Bailey had stolen so much money in fact, that in the late ’20s he quit the business and went straight, investing in real estate and opening a group of gas stations and car washes in Chicago. But when the market crashed in 1929 and his bank failed, Bailey’s legitimate businesses were wiped out and he had to return to the kind of work he did best.

Keating and Holden had been incarcerated so long they needed a couple of jobs to retrain for the modern era. So Dutch assigned them and Bailey, along with their rookie friend Kelly, to assist Sammy Silverman and Robert Steinhardt from Chicago on a job planned to knock over the bank of Willmar, Minnesotta. For George, the amiable bootlegger who’d never been in on a bank robbery, it was baptism by fire.

Bailey brought in his longtime partner and legendary gunman, Verne Miller. Miller was a former county sheriff from South Dakota and a combat-hardened army marksman who’d served in World War I. He’d taken his talents over to the criminal side after the county fathers had sent him to prison on an embezzlement charge. If there was the risk of gunplay on a job, Verne Miller was the kind of man you would want on your team. Bailey was uneasy about the Willmar raid because he had not participated in the planning and in his view it was poorly planned—in fact, not really planned at all. Steinhardt and Silverman were going to take the place by force and surprise. This was not the way Bailey liked to work, but, not wanting to disappoint Dutch, he agreed to go along.

On the day of the job, the group assembled, each grabbing a tommy gun or sawed-off shotgun and a sidearm out of the trunk of the assault cars. Kelly was assigned to guard the bank’s front door while the others went inside to empty the vaults and cover the customers.

The group sped into Willmar, jumped from the cars with guns drawn and burst into the lobby. There were sixteen employees and nine customers milling about.

“Lay down or we’ll blow the hell out of you!”

The crowd dove for the floor. Steinhardt covered them as Bailey went to work on the tellers and the vault, filling satchels with cash and bonds. When the bank’s vice president was slow to comply with the order to hit the floor, Steinhardt clubbed him with his gun and kicked him into compliance.

But the bank had done some planning. A silent alarm switch had been installed under the counter to alert the police and a group of unofficially deputized neighbors. As Bailey leapt the counter, he noticed a teller lift his leg, tripping the silent alarm.

“I’ll kill you for that,” snarled Bailey as he pushed the teller to the floor. Steinhardt and Silverman were having trouble getting the vaults opened and valuable time was wasting away as a small crowd, alerted by the alarm, began to assemble outside as Kelly tried to keep them at bay waving his weapon from side to side and threatening to shoot.

Inside, Bailey and Steinhardt grabbed the bank’s vice president and threatened to kill him if he didn’t give them the safe’s combination.

“Then shoot,” he replied stoically. “I don’t know it.”

Another teller was not so defiant and finally got the door open after a sizeable delay. With their satchels full, they headed for the door. Bailey put his gun on the cowering teller who had tripped the alarm.

“Stand up, I’ll need you,” he said, grabbing him by the collar and forcing him to the door as a shield. Bailey’s compatriot grabbed a woman off the floor and did the same. When they burst outside, Kelly let loose a volley of machine-gun fire to scatter the crowd as the escape car approached. But the crowd was returning fire and a bullet whizzed past the head of Bailey’s shield. As it did, the teller ducked violently, getting free of Bailey’s grip. Bailey clubbed him to the ground with a swift blow from his rifle’s butt and the kid crawled along the ground back into the bank and reached up to lock the door as the frightened employees were jumping out the rear window to flee the scene.