The Year of Fear Read online

  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.

  The female hostage was doing little to dissuade the townsfolk from returning fire in her direction. Bullets tore past her head until she was finally released as the gang jumped inside the escape car and started returning fire into the crowd.

  Mrs. Emil Johnson was standing on the corner holding her two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, Annette Ruth, in her arms when a bullet tore into her. Her daughter screamed. As she tried to drag her mother and daughter into the safety of a doorway, she, too, was hit. A third round hit the bag the child was holding.

  As the cars sped away back to St. Paul, they were peppered with gunfire from the vigilantes strategically positioned along the way. One round shattered the rear window of one of the getaway cars and hit Steinhardt in the back of the head. He slumped forward and passed out as blood splattered the car’s interior and sent shards of glass shrapnel into the other occupants.

  Still, the gang eluded their pursuers and fled back to the Twin Cities with $142,000 in cash and securities.

  The next edition of the Minneapolis Journal was topped with bold headlines reporting the raid:

  MACHINEGUN BANDITS RAID WILLMAR

  STREETS SPRAYED WITH BULLETS, 3 SHOT

  Citizens Held at Bay Before Machinegun While Gangsters Scoop Up Currency—Townspeople Fire Upon Fleeing Auto

  “The robbery,” said the Journal, “was one of the most daring in the history of the Northwest. The outlaws used a modernized version of the Jesse James practice of half a century ago to shoot up the town after the holdup.”

  “The bandits certainly were thorough in their work,” one eyewitness noted. “They were not amateurs. I just saw one of them. He appeared about 35 or 40 years old and was fairly well dressed.”

  The Journal noted that the Willmar raid was the thirteenth successful holdup on Minnesota banks since the beginning of the year. And at $142,000, it was the biggest theft to date.

  To Bailey it was totally botched. He vowed to only work on jobs he planned himself in the future. He’d taken the job as a favor to Dutch, but it seemed every time he agreed to help someone out, there was trouble. And he hated trouble. Trouble brought notoriety and notoriety brought the law. Bailey liked to keep a low profile, and stay as anonymous as possible. Other people had often been suspected of pulling the jobs he’d executed. But Bailey didn’t care who got the credit as long as he got the money.

  In the Willmar robbery, nobody had cased the place. Nobody had staged it, nobody had mapped out alternative escape routes, so everybody got confused once they got inside. It took eight minutes to get in and get out, and that was way too long. (By contrast, when Bailey and company robbed the Denver Mint, it took all of ninety seconds.) Worse, there was gunplay and people got hurt. That was something the cops could not ignore, no matter how well they were
being paid off.

  Within days of the Willmar job, the Bankers Association of Minnesota and the Dakotas began urging county officials to band their sheriffs’ departments together into a unified police force and join with citizens’ groups to arm up and fight the gangster scourge. The Saint Paul Pioneer Press announced the initiative with a banner headline.

  3 N.W. STATES MAP WAR AGAINST BANDITS

  “Preparing for the greatest crime drive in the history of the northwest, organizations in three states have evolved plans by which they hope bank bandits will be an expression of the past.”

  At a special meeting of county officials, E. F. Riley of the North Dakota School of Science urged the arming of special deputies with machine guns and high-powered rifles in every town, city and farm community in the state.

  “We are going to war on bandits and meet them with the same poison they use in staging their holdups—machine guns, high powered rifles, special automobiles with mounted guns and airplanes,” he declared. “Every garage and filling station along main highways will be equipped to meet the invasion of bank robbers.” He also suggested that machine guns be mounted in second-story offices across the street from local banks.

  Dutch Sawyer did not like the heat that the Willmar job was bringing. Still, in the northern Plains states, crippled by drought and the Depression, he knew there were precious few funds available to supply the states with the kind of armaments they would need for their grand plans.

  Silverman had gone to the Green Lantern to get Dutch to provide him with a team and Dutch had obliged, for his usual cut of the proceeds. He knew Silverman was a trigger-happy hothead who shot a policeman and four bystanders when he robbed a bank during the Republican National Convention in Kansas City in 1928. But that was not something that concerned Dutch. What did concern him, however, was his discovery that Silverman had cheated Dutch’s team out of their fair share of the take from the Willmar job. He sent Verne Miller out to square things up.

  On August 14, a double-deck, seven-column headline in the Saint Paul Dispatch announced the end result of that misguided slight.

  3 GANGSTERS MURDERED

  ON ROAD NEAR WILDWOOD

  Verne Miller tracked down Silverman and two of his hoodlum buddies near a resort at Lake Minnetonka, popular among the gangster crowd for R & R unmolested by local law enforcement. Miller killed all three and hung their bodies from a tree near a desolate road that was popular as a trysting spot for young couples visiting a nearby amusement park.

  George Kelly was getting quite an education in the way banks were robbed and business was conducted in the new Wild West. Although the murderous gunplay terrified him, robbing banks was a lot less work than running booze, and the payout was exponentially better.

  Following the Willmar fiasco, Bailey took Kelly under his wing and taught him how to rob banks without all the drama and fireworks of the Willmar job.

  Two months later, Bailey took Kelly, Miller, Holden and Keating to hit the Ottumwa Savings Bank in Iowa. It went off without a hitch. With one in the getaway car and one on the door, Holden, Keating and Bailey burst through the door and Bailey jumped the counter to grab a clerk who was going for his gun.

  “We won’t hurt anyone, but do as we say,” he explained.

  Holden grabbed the bank’s vice president, H. L. Pollard, and put a gun to his temple.

  “Open the vault door and don’t stall, or it goes through your head.”

  They were out the side door, into the getaway car and on their way before the alarm even sounded.

  Kelly continued to team up with members of the group throughout the year and into the next until his education was complete. Then he started branching out on his own, and turning his criminal pursuits into a family affair. In doing so, he would be breaking one of the cardinal rules of the Bailey bank-robbing system. “Don’t ever work with women,” Bailey had told him. “They can’t keep their mouths shut.”

  * * *

  At Leavenworth, Kelly had been introduced to a comely young Texan who’d come to the prison to visit her incarcerated uncle. She’d caught his eye and he bulldozed an introduction. She responded in the way that women had always responded to the rakish George Kelly. From prison, they struck up a pen pal relationship, and once he got out and established himself with his new bank-robbing buddies, Kelly decided to take it to the next level.

  At that time, Kathryn was shacking up with a bootlegger named “Little Steve” Anderson in Oklahoma City, sharing in both his affections and his business. Kelly, who’d managed a successful multi-state liquor-running business before his little misstep on the Indian reservation, offered his expertise and assistance to the duo, and in no time he was sharing in their profits and Kathryn’s affections, as well.

  She was smitten with the smooth-talking ex-con. In almost every way, Kit was the classic gangster moll. The hardscrabble Texan was a schemer who’d spent her life getting by on good looks and bad attitude.

  Kathryn was born in Saltillo, Mississippi, as Cleo Brooks in 1904. At age 15, she married a field hand named Lonnie Frye and gave birth to a daughter, Pauline. Soon after, she divorced Frye and took off with Pauline.

  She then changed her name to Kathryn because it had more of a movie-star sound to it than the frumpish Cleo. She married again, but left her new husband right about the time her mother, Ora, extricated herself from Kathryn’s father, J. E. Brooks. With no love lost between Kathryn and her father, she was thrilled when her beloved mother finally left him.

  Ora remarried a connected Texas county politico named Robert Shannon, who preferred to go by his nickname “Boss.” Boss owned a farm in Paradise, Texas, where Kathryn soon relocated, set up a little bootlegging business and started renting out space at the farm to criminal associates who were on the run or needed to lie low. She continued trading up husbands, and the next rung on her ladder was a bootlegger and small-time crook named Charlie Thorne.

  For a woman with so many husbands and the occasional foray into the “escort” business, Kathryn was an insanely jealous wife.

  While she was away on business, she discovered that Charlie was cheating on her. She headed back home, telling one of her associates, “I’m bound for Coleman, Texas, to kill that god-damned Charlie Thorne.”

  When she confronted Charlie with accusations of his philandering, an enormous row ensued and Charlie ended up dead on the floor with a bullet through his head.

  Kathryn called the police, and when they arrived there was a neatly typed suicide note next to the illiterate bootlegger. If the police were suspicious, they didn’t bother to investigate. Why investigate the murder of a man most people wouldn’t miss and wanted dead anyway?

  Kathryn, who’d seen her share of tough, charmless gangsters, had never met a man like George Kelly. He was classy, smart and he dressed like a million bucks. Better yet, he had money in his pocket and connections with a lot of big shots up north.

  One September afternoon when Steve was out of town, George invited Kit out to dinner. Over drinks, he interrupted the small talk with a startling proposal.

  “Let’s get married!” he blurted.

  Kit didn’t miss a beat. “All right, big guy. When?”

  George grabbed his fiancé and hustled her out of the restaurant in a delirious rush. They sped back to Anderson’s house, where Kit picked up her belongings—along with Anderson’s prized bulldog, whom she loved—and headed up to St. Paul, where Kelly’s connections could arrange the hasty nuptials without all the bothersome paperwork, legal documents and irksome questions about all those outstanding warrants for his arrest.

  After the nuptials, they drove down to Dallas for a short honeymoon and some long days of shopping. George wanted his bride wearing a brand-new wardrobe of the latest fashions. Kit was an absolute clotheshorse, and she was never happier than when she was acquiring new baubles and adornments. And when Kit was happy, George was happy.

  George often told people he was in the banking business when they asked what
he did for a living. So on their honeymoon Kit and George played the roles of a banker and his wife on a shopping spree. They’d spend their way through the finest stores in town and dine at the best eateries while pounding down shots in gulps from George’s flask and the bottles in their room.

  They were madly in love—with each other, with money, with booze, with cars and with the kind of lifestyle that could be yours if you were a successful criminal in Depression-era America.

  2

  A MASSACRE IN KANSAS CITY

  On the evening of June 16, 1933, an enterprising reporter walking through the train station in sleepy Fort Smith, Arkansas, noticed something curious—two neatly dressed men in suits, ties and snap-brimmed hats standing beside a disheveled, older, mustachioed man in casual clothes wearing shackles and a cheap wig.

  He identified himself to the dapper men and inquired about the man in their custody. He feigned nonchalance as the two suits boasted about their prisoner.

  After gleaning enough details, he wished them luck, excused himself and hustled to the nearest pay phone to dictate the elements of a story that would be racing across the regional Associated Press wires within minutes.

  FT. SMITH, ARK. June 16 (AP) Frank Nash, one of the last surviving members of the notorious Al Spencer gang of bank and train robbers that operated a decade ago, was recaptured today at Hot Springs, Ark., by three Department of Justice agents—who “kidnapped” him on the streets of the resort city.

  Nash had been at liberty since his escape from the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, in October 1930. He was serving a 25-year term for robbing a mail train at Okesa, Okla., with Spencer and five others of the gang.

  The Department of Justice men moved with utmost secrecy after rushing Nash out of Hot Springs in their automobile. They revealed the identity of the prisoner for the first time here, although they were stopped by officers at Little Rock following a report from Hot Springs that three men had kidnapped a man known there as “Doc.”