The Kidnap Years: by David Stout (if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud TXT) 📕

Two bandits held four bank employees hostage in a vault for six days, threatening them with nooses and sticks of dynamite to keep them submissive. The siege ended when the police used gas, capturing the bandits and freeing the captives. The authorities were startled when the four hostages expressed concern, even sympathy, for the pair who had brutalized them.

Psychologists who have studied the Stockholm syndrome believe a bond is created when a captor threatens to kill or harm a captive, then relents—creating a feeling in the captive not only of relief but of gratitude. Little acts of kindness in awful circumstances are interpreted as good treatment—which is what Mary insisted she had been given, despite being chased from her bath, taken from her home, and handcuffed to a wall in a basement room that smelled of chicken droppings.

The years after the kidnapping were unkind to Mary. The power of the Pendergast machine, which had enabled her father to live large despite a modest official salary, was ebbing. The 1933 train station bloodshed had outraged good-government idealists. Tom Pendergast sensed that his muscleman, John Lazia, who was rumored to have helped plan the ambush, was becoming a liability, so Pendergast began to distance himself.

Lazia, facing vicious new competition from other gangsters and without Pendergast’s support, was assassinated by men with submachine guns and shotguns on July 10, 1934, after a night inspecting his nightclubs and gambling dens with his wife. He was thirty-seven.

In 1934, a reform-minded federal prosecutor, Maurice Milligan, became the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri and set his sights on Pendergast and his cronies. President Roosevelt’s treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., marshalled his bureaucracy against the Kansas City machine.

In April 1939, Tom Pendergast was indicted for tax evasion.* Days later, Henry McElroy resigned as city manager. On May 5, the body of Edward L. Schneider, a bookkeeper for the Pendergast organization, was found in the Missouri River. Suicide notes were found in his car.

An investigation revealed that millions of dollars in city money had evaporated while Henry McElroy was city manager. On June 29, 1939, he was indicted by a county grand jury on embezzlement and fraud charges. Meanwhile, federal agents were picking over his tax returns. Knowing that he would soon face federal tax-evasion charges, McElroy sank into despondency. He died of a heart attack on September 15, 1939, at the age of seventy-four.

Mary was devastated by the disgrace and death of her beloved father. She was occasionally pestered by reporters who wanted her to tell the “real story” about the kidnapping.

On the morning of January 21, 1940, she wrote a note that said: “My four kidnappers are probably the only people on earth who don’t consider me an utter fool. You have your death penalty now so—please—give them a chance.” Perhaps not even she knew just what she meant.

After writing the note, she went into a sunroom, held a pistol near her right ear, and pulled the trigger. Mary McElroy was dead at thirty-two.

When notified of her death, the McGee brothers seemed heartbroken. “I wouldn’t have felt the loss of my own sister more,” Walter said.77 He died in prison in 1949, two years before he would have been eligible for parole. His brother, George, was paroled in 1947. Clarence Click completed his sentence in 1938.

*Pendergast was convicted on tax charges and served fifteen months in prison. He died on January 26, 1945, at seventy-two.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“JAKE THE BARBER”

Chicago

Saturday, July 1, 1933

John “Jake the Barber” Factor was described in the New York Times as a “suave, curly haired speculator” and “a bizarre figure in the world of international finance.” He was also a man with “friends in all strata of society on both sides of the Atlantic,” the newspaper noted.78 He had plenty of enemies too.

Calling him “a bizarre figure” hardly did justice to Factor. He was a man who might have become wealthy by legitimate means, if only he had devoted his agile mind and considerable talents to honest endeavors.* But he preferred to separate gullible people from their money.

Born Iakov Faktorowicz in London on October 8, 1892, the son of a rabbi, he was raised in Poland. He moved to the United States with his parents in 1904. He had little schooling and perhaps little need for it. He knew what he wanted: to climb out of immigrant poverty any way he could.

In 1926, he persuaded Al Capone and Arnold Rothstein, the New York City gambler most infamous for rigging the 1919 World Series, to stake him in a swindling adventure in Britain, where Factor published a tip sheet that touted stocks of dubious value in Rhodesian gold mines among other offerings. The promised returns seemed too good to be true (which, of course, they were), but hordes of investors, reportedly including members of the royal family, entrusted their money to the fast-talking American.

Pursued by British regulators, Factor fled to France, where he made another bundle by forming a syndicate that rigged the gaming tables at Monte Carlo. Then he sailed back to the United States, where he counted on the Capone outfit to protect him.

But Al Capone’s influence did not extend to British diplomats and courts, which demanded that Factor be extradited to Britain to face trial on swindling charges. Factor fought extradition as long as he could, taking his case all the way to the Supreme Court, which seemed likely to find against him, given the strength of the evidence from London.

The Factor family seemed to be especially unlucky when it came to kidnapping. The previous April, John Factor’s nineteen-year-old son, Jerome, a student at Northwestern University, had apparently been abducted and held for eight days.

The elder Factor had taken a suite in Chicago’s Morrison Hotel, supposedly to negotiate for his son’s release, ignoring the police and reaching out to his well-connected friends on the nightclub circuit and to Murray Humphreys, a labor racketeer and friend of the Capone organization. A ransom of $50,000 had reportedly been demanded