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

a few weeks, then hook up again to plan another job. Kathryn became an enthusiastic participant, taking part in the planning and helping to switch cars to stymie pursuers.

Surely, Kelly and his wife were shocked by the Union Station bloodbath on June 17, 1933. Just as surely, they had followed the exploits, real and imagined, of Verne Sankey, who had graduated from bank robbery to kidnapping.

Kathryn studied the society pages of several newspapers in the region, convinced that any of the “swells” who appeared in them must have money to spare. The oil baron Charles Urschel of Oklahoma City, about 185 miles due north of Paradise, was mentioned now and then.

So the stage was set for the events that began on the night of Saturday, July 22, 1933, as Urschel and his wife and their friends the Jarretts were playing bridge.

After Urschel was released and lawmen zeroed in on Paradise, Texas, and the surrounding area, they reasoned that an isolated ranch of several hundred acres just might have been the place where Urschel was held captive. Surveillance of the spread revealed that a conspicuous number of high-powered cars entered and left the ranch with some frequency.

Early on Saturday, August 12, 1933, a dozen lawmen from the FBI and the Dallas and Fort Worth police forces raided the ranch. They had expected to nab George Kelly, but he wasn’t there. But to the lawmen’s delight, they found Harvey Bailey asleep on a cot in the backyard, a machine gun and pistol by his side, other guns on the porch, and a powerful car poised for a getaway.

The man who had escaped so boldly from the Kansas State Penitentiary was prodded awake by the muzzle of a submachine gun and surrendered meekly. Perhaps he had lost some of his fighting spirit after being shot in the leg while robbing a bank in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, not long before. On his person was part of the Urschel ransom money, in marked twenty-dollar bills. Robert Shannon was arrested, as were several members of his extended family.

Urschel accompanied the lawmen on the raid. “Yes,” he said after looking around the premises. “This is the room where I was held. There’s the tin cup I drank from.”

Urschel’s fingerprints, which he had taken care to leave on as many surfaces as possible, confirmed his recollection.

Around the time of the raid, Albert Bates, a career criminal soon to be established as Kelly’s partner in the Urschel kidnapping, was arrested in Denver. He, too, had some of the ransom money on him. Various other racketeers were swept up in St. Paul, Minnesota.

But where was Kelly? Had the roads been better in that era, he might have been just about anywhere, from Alaska to Miami or Boston to San Diego, considering that he drove a Cadillac with sixteen cylinders.

Weeks later, the Kellys were tracked to Memphis, where they had been put up by the brother of George’s first wife. They were arrested early on the morning of September 26. Machine Gun Kelly never got to show his supposed expertise with the weapon that had given him his sobriquet. Instead, he surrendered his pistol as a tough Memphis police sergeant thrust the muzzle of a shotgun against his stomach.

And how disheartened Kelly must have been when his wife immediately pronounced herself relieved to be rid of the man who had lured her into wrongdoing: her husband!

Within months, more than a dozen people were convicted of taking part in the Urschel kidnapping, including several in St. Paul, Minnesota, where some of the ransom money had appeared. Besides the main players, George Kelly and Albert Bates, they included Kelly’s newly unhappy wife and various people accused of secondary or even peripheral roles in the Urschel kidnapping.

One unfortunate soul was the brother of Kelly’s first wife, the man who sheltered the Kellys in Memphis and who had run errands for them. There have been questions in the ensuing years as to whether the young man was even aware that his long-lost, one-time brother-in-law, whom he had known as George Barnes, was the wanted desperado Machine Gun Kelly. The young man had recently passed the Tennessee bar exam, but his aspirations for practicing law were dashed. He lost his law license and served time in prison for his marginal role, intentional or not, in helping the fugitive Kellys.

But Hoover was not overly concerned with legal niceties or collateral damage in his pursuit of bank robbers and kidnappers, or “sewer rats,” as he described them. Nor did many reporters seem much interested in digging into possible miscarriages of injustice. On the contrary; newspapers were full of praise for the FBI, after Hoover boasted that his agents had secured the convictions or guilty pleas of twenty-one men and women in the Urschel case, with six of those people getting life sentences and others being sent away for years.

A movie newsreel was also unctuous. “Uncle Sam rolled up his sleeves and dealt gangland a swift, decisive blow,” the newsreel narrator declared. “They are going for rides, and with the federal government at the wheel,” the narrator said as the defendants were herded into a police van.102

In fairness, there was a lot of crime for editors and reporters to keep up with. On the weekend that Harvey Bailey was arrested at the Shannon ranch, a white mob in Alabama seized three young black men who were charged with murdering a young white woman. The prisoners were being transported by sheriff’s deputies, their supposed protectors, from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham for safekeeping when they were ambushed on a dark country road.

Not long after they were spirited away, two of the men were found shot to death. The third was also shot but survived. Governor Benjamin Miller ordered an inquiry into how such a thing could have happened. Tuscaloosa County Sheriff R. L. Shamblin said he already knew: the International Labor Defense, a far-left group with communist links, had stirred up local feelings by assigning three lawyers to represent the defendants.

No inquiry