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

was promised nor any comment offered on another fatal shooting that weekend, that of a black man killed by the police near Tuscaloosa while swinging a club as he was resisting arrest for stealing chickens.

Harvey Bailey, who had escaped from the Kansas State Penitentiary the previous Memorial Day, the traditional start of the summer season, chose the official end of the season, Labor Day, to escape again, this time from the Dallas jail where he was being held while awaiting trial. On the morning of September 4, 1933, he sawed three bars from his tenth-floor jail cell and fled, armed with a revolver.

A reasonable person might have asked how one of the most wanted bandits in the country, a man who had already escaped from prison once, could break out again. Simple. A crooked deputy had smuggled hacksaw blades and the revolver into the jail and given them to Bailey. The fugitive was recaptured Labor Day afternoon in Norman, Oklahoma.

The deputy and an accomplice who had bought the blades were soon found out. The deputy was sentenced to two years in prison and his accomplice to fourteen months. The deputy’s perfidy was a reminder, if any were needed, of the corruption that infected many police forces and sheriff’s offices in that era.

The happy outcome of the Urschel kidnapping was a gift for Hoover, for even though he enjoyed wide support among the American people and seemed to be a master at shaping his own image, there were a few brave critics in the press corps. One was Ray Tucker, the Washington bureau chief of Collier’s magazine, who wrote in the issue of August 19, 1933, that Hoover’s agents were less competent than the director portrayed them to be, that Hoover kept them in “fear and awe by firing and shifting them at whim,” and that Hoover was a publicity hound who walked with a “mincing step.”103

That last was a veiled but hard-to-miss allusion to the fact that Hoover, then thirty-eight, was single and was never seen in the company of a woman except his mother, with whom he still lived. That attack on his masculinity had to smart.

Bailey was convicted just weeks later in federal court and sentenced to life for kidnapping. He was briefly confined to Leavenworth, but federal prison officials were not inclined to let him escape a third time. In September 1934, he was sent to a newly opened federal institution that was deemed to be escape-proof, perched as it was on a rocky island in San Francisco Bay: Alcatraz.

Machine Gun Kelly was also sent to Alcatraz in September 1934, presumably to live out his days there. Albert Bates had been sent to the dismal island months earlier.

Kelly’s by now estranged wife was sentenced to life in the Women’s Federal Prison at Alderson, West Virginia. Ranch owner Robert Shannon and his wife drew shorter but still substantial sentences.

The quick solution to the Urschel case, Hoover’s well-publicized obsession with stamping out kidnapping, and the draconian sentences imposed on the defendants—would all those factors be enough to end kidnapping for ransom so that wealthy Americans could feel safe in their homes again? Hardly. At least not yet.

But a former deputy police commissioner of New York City was sure that he knew a way to stamp out kidnapping: make it a crime to pay ransom.

“After all, payment of ransom is accessory after the fact,” Dr. Carleton Simon told the convention of the International Association of Police Chiefs on August 1, 1933. “Kidnapping and all crimes would cease to be active when not lucrative and when the incentive is not there.”104

Dr. Simon had become a criminologist for the New York Association of Chiefs of Police when he spoke those words, which showed no sympathy for someone who would pay money to get a kidnapped relative back.

“To my mind, the man who pays a ransom is a selfish individual endangering the lives of untold numbers,” he went on boldly, if heartlessly. “He perpetuates and continues this nefarious traffic… This is a war against all crimes, and anyone who gives solace or information or contributes to the well-being of the criminal is as guilty as a traitor in actual warfare.”

So, then, any parents whose child was kidnapped and who begged kidnappers to return the child unharmed and promised to pay money to see the child alive again—these people were traitors and selfish accomplices to crime. Far better, Dr. Simon seemed to say, for the parents to stand fast and refuse to pay a nickel. And if the child’s corpse was found by a roadside, well, it was for the greater good.

Not surprisingly, Dr. Simon’s coldhearted proposal went nowhere.

CHAPTER THIRTY

A MOMENTOUS MONTH

November 1933

As Thanksgiving Day* drew near, President Roosevelt expressed a hope: “May we on that day in our churches and in our homes give humble thanks for the blessings bestowed upon us during the year past by Almighty God… May we be grateful for the passing of dark days; for the new spirit of dependence one on another; for the closer unity of all parts of our wide land.”105

But the “dark days” were far from over. For many Americans, a Thanksgiving Day feast with a golden turkey as the centerpiece was a vision hopelessly beyond reach. They would have to scrape to put any decent food on the table.

And events oceans away were casting ominous shadows. Although most Americans wanted to avoid getting swept up in another war, it was getting harder to ignore what was happening in Germany. The assault on the American businessman Philip Zuckerman, who had been badly beaten by Nazi storm troopers in Leipzig in July, was looking less like an isolated occurrence and more like an ugly pattern.

So warned Samuel Untermyer, president of the World Jewish Economic Federation, at a September dinner in his honor in New York City. “A once proud and cultivated nation has been converted into a den of savage beasts of prey,” he lamented, saying that the new regime was “bent upon