Jelly's Gold (5 page)

“I’d go a long way to catch you, Frank,” Reed said.

“I’m sorry to have put you to so much trouble.”

“No trouble,” Reed said.

“May I ask how you knew I was here?”

“The gunmen you busted out of Leavenworth, Keating and Holden, we grabbed them up a while back in K.C.,” Lackey said. “They ratted you out. Told us you had contacts here, told us that you received protection here. We’ve been waiting for you to show ever since.”

“It’s true what they say, then.”

“What’s that?” Lackey said.

“No good deed goes unpunished.”

Smith cuffed Frank’s hands in front of him. “Now I know how you got your nickname,” he said.

Frank flashed on the spare tire around his belly. “Nickname?”

“The Gentleman Bandit.”

“Well, there’s no reason to be uncivil, is there? We’re all professionals.”

Lackey took Frank by the arm and directed him toward the entrance to the store. “Nice toupee,” he said.

“I paid a hundred dollars for it in Chicago. You do what you can.”

“I notice that you also had some plastic work done on your nose.”

“Makes me look thinner, don’t you think?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

Out on the street, Dick Galatas was watching intently. Frank Nash had sat in on many of Galatas’s high-stakes poker games over the years, had been a welcomed guest at his pool hall. When he saw Frank crossing the street earlier, he had moved to say hello, but held back when he spied the three men following him. Now he watched the agents escorting Frank from the cigar store to a waiting sedan. Frank saw his old friend and smiled, gestured at him with his chin. Galatas watched the Feds put Frank into the backseat and drive out of town—they weren’t even thinking about contacting the Hot Springs Police Department. Good for the FBI, not so much for Frank.

A few minutes later, Galatas explained the situation to Frances. Frances was frightened and she was angry, but she did not panic; she and Frank had discussed this possibility often. She went to the phone and called Louis Stacci. She didn’t know who Stacci was or what he did; she only knew that this was the number she was told to dial. After he was made to understand the situation, “Doc” Stacci told Frances not to worry and hung up. A few minutes later, word went out to all of Stacci’s underworld contacts—Frank “Jelly” Nash had been taken by the Feds.

June 17, 1933

Kansas City, Missouri

From her perch behind the desk of the Travelers Aid Society at Kansas City’s Union Station, Lottie West could easily observe the four men who had come to meet the Missouri Pacific Flyer. They
stood in a loose circle on the platform, nervously surveying the area around them, studying the train passengers that came and went with intense curiosity. Even so, Lottie probably would not have noticed them at all—it was Saturday and the station was busy—if it hadn’t been for the shotguns.

Agent Lackey appeared and spoke briefly with the leader of the four men. He was R. E. Vetterli, special agent in charge of the Kansas City office of the FBI. With him were Special Agent Raymond Caffrey and two of the few members of the Kansas City Police Department that Vetterli could trust—Detectives William “Red” Grooms and Frank Hermanson. Lottie didn’t know their names, of course. She wouldn’t learn their identities until she read about them in the paper the next morning.

Lackey disappeared into the train. A few minutes later, he returned with three other men: Chief Reed, Frank Smith, and a man who was sporting a set of handcuffs. The seven men surrounded the prisoner and slowly walked him past Lottie’s desk toward the entrance to the train depot. She would remember later that the prisoner was the only one who was smiling.

The smile annoyed Frank’s captors. He had been so damn pleasant as they spirited him out of Hot Springs and drove at breakneck speed along U.S. 64 to Fort Smith, Arkansas. He had been positively cheerful when they transferred him from the car to a stateroom on the Flyer en route to Kansas City. Frank had asked politely where he was being taken, and they answered Leavenworth Penitentiary, to serve out the sentence he had escaped three years earlier. His many other crimes, they said, would catch up to him there. Frank replied that he had been to Leavenworth before and didn’t expect to stay long.

The lawmen and their prisoner paused briefly when they emerged from the depot into bright sunshine; Frank brought his manacled hands up to shade his eyes. Seeing nothing that aroused their suspicions, they moved gingerly toward a new 1933 Chevrolet and a 1932’s
Dodge sedan that were parked directly in front of the east entrance of Union Station. The Chevy was owned by Agent Caffrey. He opened the right front passenger door and shoved Frank inside. Lackey, Reed, and Smith settled into the backseat while Vetterli, Grooms, and Hermanson waited between the Chevy and the Dodge—it was their intention to use the Dodge to escort the Chevy to the prison. Caffrey circled the car and had set his hand on the driver’s door latch when a booming voice shouted, “Up! Up! Get ’em up!”

Two men carrying machine guns were sprinting toward the Chevy from behind. Three others, similarly armed, appeared in front. The one who had shouted, a heavyset man, was standing on the running board of a green Plymouth. He was aiming his chopper at the lawmen standing between the Chevy and the Dodge. The identities of most of the gunmen would be debated for decades—especially that of the heavyset man standing on the running board—but the identity of at least one remains indisputable: Verne Miller.

Frank grinned and shook his head with wonder at the sight of him. The last time he had seen him, Miller bawled Frank out for his excessive drinking. Miller was like that, a teetotaling, nonsmoking nongambler who simply would not abide profanity in his presence. He and Frank had become fast friends largely because of the sensibilities they shared. Both were unfailingly polite even during the course of a robbery, both respected women, both were notoriously meticulous when planning and executing their spectacular crimes, and neither tolerated gratuitous violence. If there was a difference, it was this: Verne Miller was one of the most proficient and sought-after hit men of his era, working with the Purple Gang in Detroit, Capone’s syndicate in Chicago, and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter’s Murder Incorporated on the East Coast.

It must have seemed to Frank at that moment that he would escape this disaster just as he had so many others in the past. Then the fragile peace that existed for an instant when the gunmen first
faced the officers was broken when Red Grooms jerked his pistol out and squeezed off two rounds at the heavyset man, hitting him in the arm. “Let ’em have it!” the man shouted even as he opened up on the lawmen. His companions did the same.

Grooms and Hermanson were killed instantly.

Vetterli was shot in the arm. He dropped to the pavement and slid under a car for cover.

Caffrey was shot in the head; he was dead before he fell.

Inside the car, Chief Reed took a chest full of slugs and died while reaching for his gun.

Lackey was shot three times in the spine—but did not die. He slumped on top of Smith. Only Smith would escape the massacre unscathed.

Frank was appalled by the slaughter around him. “Verne, have you gone crazy?” he shouted. The shooting continued. Machine-gun rounds splattered the Chevy. Frank began frantically waving his cuffed hands at the gunmen. “For God’s sake, don’t shoot me.”

A moment later, much of his head was blown away.

Watching it all, Lottie West began screaming, “They’re killing everyone.”

Officer Mike Fanning, who patrolled Union Station for the Kansas City Police Department, came running. He saw the gunfight but didn’t know who was shooting at whom or why.

“Shoot the fat man, Mike,” Lottie shouted. “Shoot the fat man. It’s Pretty Boy Floyd.”

Fanning aimed at the heavyset man and fired. The man whirled and fell to the ground, but he got up and continued firing, and Fanning didn’t know if he hit him or if the fat man merely dove to avoid being shot.

One of the gunmen ran to the Chevy and peered inside. “They’re all dead,” he announced. The killers began running, all except Verne Miller, who stood in front of the Chevy, apparently transfixed by the
shattered windshield his friend had been sitting behind. One of the gunmen grabbed his arm and pulled him away. “Let’s get out of here,” he cried. The gunmen piled into the Plymouth and a light-colored Oldsmobile and raced out of the parking lot, heading west on Broadway.

It would astonish Lottie West later when she learned that the entire Kansas City Massacre, as the shooting would soon be infamously dubbed, had taken less than thirty seconds. To her it seemed to last forever.

My research took me well past the death of Jelly Nash. Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd was killed following a shootout with federal agents on a farm in Clarkson, Ohio. His partner, Adam Richetti, was arrested and executed for his part in the massacre, even though he vehemently denied that he and Floyd had had anything to do with it. Dick Galatas, Louis Stacci, and two others were found guilty of conspiracy to cause the escape of a federal prisoner and were themselves sentenced to two years in Leavenworth. Frances returned to her home in Aurora, Minnesota, with her daughter, Danella, and tried as best she could to live down her life with Frank. However, for years afterward, every time one of Frank’s former associates was suspected of a crime, the Feds would knock on her door and ask questions. Following testimony in a conspiracy trial three years later, she would scream in open court, “I’m tired of talking about gangsters.”

After the massacre, Verne Miller drove to St. Paul, where he picked up his longtime girlfriend, Vivian Mathis, the daughter of a Bemidji, Minnesota, farmer. They quickly made their way to New York. Vivian would say later that Verne had planned to escape with her to Europe; he seemed to have plenty of cash, although she didn’t know where he got it. Only New York was closed to him. He was being hunted now with a vengeance, not only by the FBI but by the underworld as well. Public
outrage over the massacre had made life difficult for every gangster in the country, and even his closest associates were gunning for him. It became a race to see who would get him first, organized crime or the Feds.

Before the Kansas City Massacre, most people treated gangsters like latter-day Robin Hoods, mostly because their targets were banks. This was the middle of the Great Depression, and bank failures had wiped out the savings of hundreds of thousands of depositors even while other, more prosperous banks were busily foreclosing on the homes, farms, and small businesses of thousands of others who had been forced out of work. Still, killing four peace officers and severely wounding two others in broad daylight in a public place—that was something else again. Many historians credit the massacre with finally turning public sentiment against the gangsters. Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover used it as evidence that the FBI required broader police powers to deal with the gangster threat, including the ability to chase criminals from one jurisdiction to another without impediment, and Congress gave it to him with a series of nine major crime bills.

Finally, Miller’s nude and mutilated body was found in a ditch along a highway near Detroit. He had been strangled with a garrote, his skull had been crushed, and he was tied into a cheap Saxton auto robe with a fifty-foot cord. He had been so severely beaten that the FBI could identify him only through his fingerprints.

That was the end of that. Except in all the documents I read, in all the research materials I studied, there hadn’t been a single mention of Jelly’s gold.

“You’re wasting your time,” I said aloud.

Just the same, early the next morning I drove to the St. Paul Police Department to waste some more.

4

There was an ancient plaque just inside the front door of the James S. Griffin Building. It used to be called simply the Public Safety Building, except the St. Paul Police Department took possession a couple of years ago, remodeled it into its new headquarters, and renamed it after a deputy chief. I read the plaque while I was waiting for my turn with the desk sergeant. It stated that the original building was built in 1930 by the John J. Dahlin Construction Company and listed the names of the mayor and aldermen who were in office back then, including Chief of Police Thomas A. Brown. Brown was a crook in uniform that had helped the Barker-Karpis gang kidnap William Hamm; he was paid twenty-five thousand of the one-hundred-thousand-dollar ransom for his efforts, three times more than what was earned by each of the rats who actually pulled the job. Yet that wasn’t what held my interest. It was the name of the chief architect—Brent Messer.
Wasn’t that the name of the man Jelly Nash partied with after he stole all that gold?
my inner
voice asked. I made note of it with the intention of asking Berglund later.

The woman behind the thick glass partition in the records unit wore a loose-fitting polyester dress with a pattern that made her look like a pudgy leopard. Reading glasses were perched on top of her short orange hair like a tiara; I was amazed they didn’t fly off when she shook her head, which she did repeatedly.