Jelly's Gold (7 page)

Much of the information had been gathered by St. Paul historian Paul Maccabee, who donated eleven years’ worth of research to the Minnesota Historical Society after writing his remarkable book
John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crooks’ Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920—1936.
Yet there was so much more as well—books, magazine articles, monographs, diaries, reminiscences, vocal histories, and an untitled, unpublished manuscript penned by some unnamed historian about Richard O’Connor, the man who started it all. Whether or not you consider St. Paul a small town
today—and most of the people living across the river in Minneapolis do—it most certainly was a small town back then. Everyone seemed to know everybody else, and apparently a lot of so-called movers and shakers lived in each other’s pockets.

December 6, 1928

Ryan Hotel, St. Paul, Minnesota

Dick O’Connor was having difficulty focusing. Part of it was a product of age, though he tried to deny it as he slowly crept toward his seventieth birthday. Part of it was his complex personal life. He had married Julia Taylor, and together they had lived happily at the Hotel St. Paul until she discovered that he had been sleeping with Nellie Stone for many years, even fathered a daughter by her. Julie immediately left O’Connor, his legitimate daughter in tow. She offered to divorce him, but he begged her not to; O’Connor even gave her forty thousand in cash and bonds as incentive because he didn’t want to marry Nellie. When Julia died unexpectedly, he was compelled to make Nellie his bride, and together they moved to the Ryan Hotel. Now he was wondering how he could arrange to ship her off to California so he could spend more time with Margaret Condon, the enchantress who ran the hotel’s beauty salon. If that wasn’t trouble enough, he had to spend the afternoon listening to this young man whine about the latest crisis to befall the city.

“They killed Dan Hogan,” the young man said.

“I know,” O’Connor said. How could he not? The event was announced in thick black type on the front page of the
St. Paul Pioneer Press
and supported by photos of his body and the Paige coupe he drove under the headline:
“DAPPER DAN” HOGAN AND HIS BOMB-WRECKED CAR.

“What are you going to do?” the young man asked.

“I’m not going to do anything.”

“But you’re the Cardinal.”

“Not anymore.”

“We need you.”

The “we” the young man referred to was the aristocracy of St. Paul, the rich and powerful who benefited from the system that O’Connor had set in place decades earlier, men who now feared its collapse—Crawford Livingston, president of the gas company; Chester R. Smith, the real estate tycoon; Otto Bremer, who owned the Jacob Schmidt Brewing Company, and his nephew Edward, president of Commercial State Bank; Louis Betz, head of the State Savings Bank; wealthy land man Fred B. Lynch; John J. Dahlin, who owned the construction company that bore his name; William Hamm, who ran his father’s brewery; Thomas Lowry, who owned and operated the city railway; architect Brent Messer; and so many others. Yet, while they might need him,
the Cardinal,
as O’Connor had been labeled, certainly didn’t need them. He was rich, he was old, and he was retired.

Richard O’Connor had been a deputy city clerk before the turn of the century, and nearly every citizen of prominence would come into his office seeking permits for one project or another. O’Connor, who was good with a joke, greeted each with a smile and a sympathetic ear. Over time he accumulated a fund of knowledge about the scandals, secrets, personal habits, characteristics, and weaknesses of these men. He used it to introduce graft into the St. Paul Courthouse.

After a while, O’Connor left city government for the more lucrative job of actually running city government, becoming St. Paul’s undisputed “fixer.” So vast was his influence that the Great Man Himself—James J. Hill—once summoned O’Connor to his Summit Avenue mansion. Hill was supporting Robert Dunn for governor and asked O’Connor for advice on how to get him elected. Hill disagreed with what O’Connor told him and began to explain why. O’Connor said, “Mr. Hill, you asked for my opinion. I gave it to you. I did not
come here to argue.” He walked out, figuring that Hill might know how to run the Great Northern Railroad better than he, but the Cardinal sure as hell knew more about politics and Hill would call again—and so he did. Shortly after, Dunn won the Republican Party’s nomination. Only O’Connor wasn’t finished. He arranged for John A. Johnson to receive the Democratic Party’s nomination and saw to it that he defeated Dunn in the general election to become just the second Democratic governor in the history of Minnesota. When he was later asked why he did it, the Cardinal replied, “Because I could.”

O’Connor smiled at the remembrance of it. He enjoyed the role of kingmaker. Still, he tended to ignore state politics to concentrate on his city—emphasis on
his.
He saw to it that all of the city’s most important positions were filled with his cronies and that his brother John was made chief of police in 1900, a position that “the Big Fellow,” as John was dubbed, would hold for nearly twenty years. O’Connor made every corporation, contractor, or individual doing business with St. Paul pay for the privilege—starting at twenty-five hundred dollars each. Heads of departments paid one hundred to one-fifty for their jobs annually, members of honorary boards paid one hundred, and the breweries were expected to supply free beer and line up their employees and saloon owners behind whatever initiatives O’Connor favored.

For additional income, O’Connor established the Twin Cities Jockey Club and organized horse races at the state fairgrounds, ran a book out of the Fremont Exchange on Robert Street, and operated a numbers game modeled after the Louisiana Lottery. He also skimmed a percentage of every dollar earned by the city’s many saloons, brothels, and gambling establishments, much of which also found its way into the pockets of St. Paul police detectives, aldermen, grand jury members, judges, and prosecutors. In exchange, the city honored a “layover agreement” ensuring that criminals would receive police protection if they followed three simple rules: check in with Chief O’Connor,
donate a small bribe, and promise to commit no crimes within the city limits. The Big Fellow enforced the system with ruthless efficiency. As a result, St. Paul became one of the safest cities in America. A punk snatching a woman’s purse would be tracked down and taught a lesson by other criminals; a man who had the audacity to rob a bank in the Midway District was turned over to the police the very next day by his colleagues in crime. All this two full decades before Prohibition and thirty years before the city would become a home away from home for killers like John Dillinger.

Of course, the O’Connor System didn’t apply to surrounding communities. Gangsters sworn to keep their noses clean in St. Paul thought nothing of raiding neighboring cities. The Minnesota Bankers’ Association would later report that 21 percent of all the bank holdups in the United States in 1932—an amazing forty-three daylight robberies—occurred in Minnesota. As long as they didn’t occur in St. Paul, O’Connor didn’t care.

The original liaison between the criminals and the O’Connors was a red-haired Irishman named Billy Griffin who held court at the old Hotel Savoy on Minnesota Street. When he died of apoplexy in 1913, Dapper Dan Hogan replaced him. Now, with Hogan’s murder, a vacuum existed. Not only had he been a mob peacekeeper who helped make sure the O’Connor System operated smoothly, Hogan was the city’s most accomplished fence. He could launder any amount of cash stolen with either gun or pen; he offered criminals thirty-five to forty cents on the dollar for stolen railroad bonds and security bonds and eighty-five to ninety cents for Liberty Bonds.

What, though, did they expect the Cardinal to do about Hogan’s departure from this earth? The Big Fellow usually dealt with that end of the O’Connor System, and he had died four years earlier.

“If you don’t step in to help us fill the void that now exists, we believe that Leon Gleckman will,” said the young man.

“Gleckman,” said O’Connor. “The bootlegger?”

“He is indiscreet, not a man of good judgment, not a man we can trust.” There was that
“we”
again, O’Connor thought. “He has actually announced publicly his intention of running for the office of mayor of St. Paul.”

O’Connor laughed at the suggestion. Well, why not, he asked himself. O’Connor had known seventeen mayors in his time and felt that Gleckman would easily fit in.

“Mr. O’Connor,” the young man said. “We believe if something isn’t done immediately, the system by which we have all lived and profited these many years will collapse, the reformers will take over, and who knows who might be compromised as a result.”

The Cardinal smiled. He knew a threat when he heard one.

“I’m retired,” he said.

I wondered—with Dapper Dan Hogan gone, would Nash have entrusted his gold to Gleckman? Nash was a meticulous planner, and somehow I couldn’t see him working with a fence that had a reputation for recklessness. I dug deeper. Other names surfaced: Harry “Dutch” Sawyer, Hogan’s protégé, who took over the Green Lantern nightclub when Hogan was killed; Jack Peifer, owner of the Hollyhocks Casino, a popular gangster and high society hangout (the FBI reported that there had been an unusual amount of telephone traffic in and out of the Hollyhocks just before and after the Kansas City Massacre); Robert Hamilton, the gambling impresario who directed the casino operations at the Boulevards of Paris, where Nash was seen the evening of the gold heist. I didn’t like any of them, but that didn’t mean Nash agreed. He had been bosom pals with Verne Miller, and he was a stone killer. He associated with Ma Barker’s brood, and they were maniacs.

On the other hand, I knew that Nash got wind of the gold shipment only a few days before he hit the bank in Huron, South Dakota—that’s when he ordered his specially modified car. Maybe he didn’t have time
to arrange for a fence that could handle such a big job. Maybe he did hide it in his backyard, like Berglund suggested. Question was, where was his backyard?

It was while I was attempting to answer that question that the Nordic princess I noticed earlier abruptly pulled out the chair on the opposite side of the table from me and sat down. Up close she looked like a romance novel cliché—perfect teeth in a perfect mouth formed into a perfect smile, eyes sparkling like liquid azurite, hair as lustrous as spun gold. She was wearing a black pencil skirt with a pleated hem and a long-sleeve scoop-neck T-shirt made from some stretch fabric that clung to her athletic body like damp cloth. I would have dropped a pencil so I’d have an excuse to duck under the table and examine her legs except that it was too juvenile even for me.

She extended her hand. “Good morning, Mr. McKenzie. I’m Heavenly.”

“Of course you are,” I said.

“Heavenly Petryk.”

I shook her hand. There was strength in it.

“Your parents named you Heavenly?” I said.

“Some might argue it’s a couple of steps above Rushmore.”

“You know my name. Should I be impressed?”

“Considering how quickly you learned the names of my friends yesterday, I wouldn’t think so.”

“Ted and Wally are your friends?”

Heavenly held her right hand out for me to see and gave it a waggle.

“More like acquaintances,” she said.

I had to admit to myself, beautiful young women didn’t often accost me in libraries. In fact, the last time it happened was never. So I had to ask, “What do you want from me, Heavenly?”

“My friends call me Hep.”

“Hep?”

“My initials—Heavenly Elizabeth Petryk.”

“If we get to be friends, I’ll call you that, too.”

“Oh, I know we’ll be friends. In the meantime, I would like you to stop researching Jelly Nash. That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? I recognize some of the boxes.” I don’t know why, but I closed the file in front of me. “Stop your research, return the materials to the desk, and meet me in the café downstairs for a coffee.”

“Why would I do that?”

Heavenly spoke loudly—“Because it’ll be more comfortable”—causing heads to turn and someone to go “Shhhhhh.” She smiled.