Public Enemies (16 page)

“I wish I knew,” Kirkpatrick said.

Finally, whistles blew, and the train chugged out of the station, heading northeast toward the Kansas border. As it picked up speed, the dwindling dust-bowl towns of northern Oklahoma slid by in the night. Witcher. Arcadia. Luther. Fallis. Tryon. Kirkpatrick was nervous, but Catlett seemed without a care, discussing fishing lures and turkey hunting. At each town Kirkpatrick stepped out into the night air, lighting a cigarette beneath the platform light. Both men agreed the most likely place for the drop was the wild Osage Hills. Kirkpatrick allowed himself to ruminate on all the outlaws who had crisscrossed these train tracks in years past—the Daltons, the James Brothers, the Doolins, Al Spencer, Frank Nash. Some things never changed.

Hours ticked by. The train passed Bartlesville, then Dewey, then crossed into Kansas. No fires were seen. As they approached Kansas City, dawn broke. Kirkpatrick was distraught. Either they had bungled the drop or the whole thing had been a hoax. In Kansas City the two men trudged off the train and checked into the Muehlebach Hotel, as the kidnappers had ordered. Not long after, a bellboy brought Fitzpatrick a telegram. It read: UNAVOIDABLE INCIDENT KEPT ME FROM SEEING YOU LAST NIGHT. WILL COMMUNICATE ABOUT 6:00 O’CLOCK. E.W. MOORE.
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Exactly why Kelly missed the drop was never explained. According to one story, he flooded the engine of his car.
¹¹

 

 

All that Sunday, Kirkpatrick and Catlett waited in their hotel room and listened to the dulcet tones of a lobby pianist playing Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song,” Rubenstein’s “Melody in F,” and Schubert’s “Serenade.” Finally, at 5:40, the phone rang. “This is Moore,” a man’s voice said. “Did you get my wire?” When Kirkpatrick said he had, the voice told him to proceed to the LaSalle Hotel on Linwood Boulevard—alone. He would be met outside. They agreed to meet at 6:20.

Kirkpatrick had a Colt automatic jammed in his belt when the taxi let him out at the LaSalle. The Gladstone bag in hand, he walked a few yards and lit a cigarette. After a moment he saw a barrel-chested figure striding toward him on the sidewalk. The man wore a pressed summer suit, a panama hat, and a cinched knot in his tie.

It was Kelly. “I’ll take that grip,” Kelly said.

Kirkpatrick studied the man, trying to memorize every detail.

“Hurry up,” Kelly said.

“How do I know you’re the right party?”

“Hell, you know damned well I am.”

“Two hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money,” Kirkpatrick said. “What assurance have we that you’ll do what you promise?”

“Don’t argue with me,” Kelly said. “The boys are waiting.”

“Wait. Tell me definitely what I can tell Mrs. Urschel.”

“Urschel will be home within twelve hours.” Then the man stepped forward, grabbed the Gladstone bag, and walked off into traffic.

Back at the hotel, Kirkpatrick telephoned Mrs. Urschel. “I closed the deal for that farm,” he said. “It will require about twelve hours for the lawyers to examine the abstracts, then title will pass.”

“Thanks,” Berenice said and hung up.
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It rained hard all that Monday in Oklahoma City. Berenice spent the day pacing the drawing room, waiting. When Kirkpatrick returned from Kansas City, Gus Jones drove him to the FBI office to review mug shots. Weatherford saw no one he recognized.

“What do you think? Will they release him?” Kirkpatrick asked as they returned to the mansion.

Jones shook his head. “It’s a poor bet,” he said. “If they feel he can identify the hideout, he doesn’t stand a chance. They told you he’d be home within twelve hours. He isn’t. Their letter said they were gonna hold him until all the money had been examined and exchanged. Now that’s something that could take weeks. The longer they hold him the more dangerous it becomes.”

“Then you don’t think he’ll make it back?” Kirkpatrick asked.

“I won’t say that,” said Jones. “But I will say that if he’s not back by sunup tomorrow, he won’t be back.”

When night fell, tensions rose in the Urschel mansion. The only moment of levity came after one of the lawyers saw a mouse. He retrieved a mousetrap from the kitchen and slipped it under a divan, then forgot about it. Later that night, as the rain drummed outside, a loud pop sounded. Mrs. Urschel jumped to her feet, frightened.

“What was that?” she asked. The lawyer smiled. “Just the mouse being caught, Berenice,” he said.

And then, around eleven, the backdoor opened and Charles Urschel walked in. He was unshaven. His eyes blinked. Mrs. Urschel ran to him and fell into his arms. He had been dropped off in the suburb of Norman an hour earlier and had taken a taxi home.

Gus Jones was called and arrived at 11:00. Urschel said he was too tired to talk. Jones insisted. Urschel said he couldn’t identify the kidnappers and didn’t know where he had been taken. Jones took him by the arm and told him it was okay. Then he led him into the study, closed the door, and began to ask questions.

 

 

With Gus Jones transferred to the Urschel case, the Kansas City Massacre investigation began to drift. No one in custody had shed any light on Verne Miller’s whereabouts or who his partners were. The Hot Springs bookie Dick Galatas had vanished, as had Pretty Boy Floyd, though most agents discounted his involvement. Harvey Bailey and the other Kansas escapees were loose in Oklahoma, robbing banks at will, but the Bureau had mounted no credible efforts to apprehend them.

Then on July 31, the day Urschel was released, came a rocket from New York: agents there had found Verne Miller’s girlfriend, Vi Mathias. She was living under the alias “Vivian Allen” in a luxurious apartment on Central Park West. The initial report of the New York SAC, Frank X. Fay, identified her host as thirty-six-year-old “Louis or Philip Buckwalt (also known as Bucholtz, Buchouse or Buchalter)” and added: “Preliminary investigation with respect to him has disclosed that even though he resides in luxury, he is somewhat of a notorious character.”
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It is a measure of the FBI’s meager knowledge of the American underworld in 1933 that Fay had little sense of who this man was.

Vi Mathias’s host is better known to history as Louis “Lepke” Buchalter. A founding member of the New York syndicate along with Meyer Lansky and Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Buchalter had just been named head of its syndicate’s enforcement arm, Murder, Inc., which he ran alongside his traditional narcotics and labor-union rackets. How Buchalter came to meet Verne Miller will never be known for certain, but the FBI later picked up reports that Buchalter had hired Miller on several occasions to murder rival mobsters. However they met, Buchalter knew Miller well enough to hide his girlfriend.

New York agents had been closing in on Vi Mathias since July 19, when the St. Paul office, which was intercepting her parents’ mail, called to say her daughter Betty had received a box of saltwater taffy sent from Atlantic City. A New York agent tracked down the store where the taffy was bought and retrieved a sales receipt. Handwriting on the receipt was confirmed as Mathias’s, but the trail ended there.

Then on July 22, the day Charles Urschel was kidnapped, came word that Betty had received a second package, this one a pen-and-pencil set, mailed from a novelty store in Lake Placid, New York. New York agents were at the store within hours. They discovered that two well-dressed women had purchased the gift a week earlier. One of the women was described as thirty-eight years old, “very stout, very broad shoulders and heavy chest, very dark throughout, dark hair, dark complexion, looked Jewish and wore a yellow sweater ensemble and a very large green pin.” This was Buchalter’s wife, Betty. The second woman, a slim “straw blonde” wearing heavy makeup, was decked out in a blue silk ensemble and a white tam. A salesman identified her from a photo as Vi Mathias.

Agents spread across the Lake Placid area, checking every hotel, resort, and Western Union office. They found nothing concrete, but on a tip that a woman who resembled Mathias had told a salesperson she was heading to Montreal, agents expanded their search into Canada. Finally, on the night of July 27, a hotel detective in Montreal told agents a woman who resembled Mathias had checked out of the Mt. Royal Hotel hours before. Identifying the photos of Mathias and Betty Buchalter, he said the two women had been driving with two men, one a Columbia Pictures executive, the other the owner of an Adirondack tourist camp. The next day, agents located the camp owner, who described how the two couples had toured Montreal nightclubs and upstate New York hotels for a week, drinking heavily and having a wild time. Mathias had fallen hard for the Columbia executive. Neither of the women seemed bothered by the absence of their respective life partners.

The camp owner volunteered that the women were now at the New Sherwood Hotel in Burlington, Vermont. Two agents were dispatched from Manhattan, and at 11:00 the next morning, Sunday, July 30, they watched as Mathias, wearing a low-cut green dress, drove a black Lincoln away from the hotel. Beside her sat the buxom Betty Buchalter. The two agents followed the Lincoln across the New York line, where it turned south. All went smoothly until the two cars passed through the town of Troy, New York, where the FBI car got a flat tire. Mathias and Buchalter continued south, disappearing into a warm Sunday afternoon.

Losing Vi Mathias was the kind of blunder the FBI made often in 1933 as Hoover’s men learned the ins and outs of professional law enforcement. Still, they recovered nicely. By then, thanks to an inspection of hotel registries, the New York office knew where Mrs. Buchalter lived, in Apartment 17J at the Majestic Apartments on Central Park West.
^r
A team of agents was put on twenty-four-hour surveillance, and the next night, July 31, Mrs. Buchalter was spotted leaving the building alone. The agents followed her for a few blocks but let her go. They had already placed a tap on the Buchalters’ phone and secured an informant inside the building, apparently a bellman. If Mathias was still in New York, the agents bet she would return.
¹⁴

Three days later, the informant at the Majestic alerted the New York office that the Buchalters were preparing to leave for a vacation and had sent a grouping of trunks to Pennsylvania Station. A pair of agents reached the station just as a party of seven, including people identified as Mr. and Mrs. L. Buchalter and Miss V. Allen, boarded a train for Vermont. The agents scrambled onto the train, which reached Vermont that night. But inexplicably, by the time the two agents disembarked, they found the Buchalters’ party had already driven off.

This time Hoover’s men caught a break. Agents from the New York office had been canvassing hotels in Atlantic City for weeks, chasing unconfirmed reports that Verne Miller was hiding in the area. The next evening, Friday, August 4, the assistant manager of the Ritz Carlton in Atlantic City telephoned to say the Buchalters and their son, accompanied by a Miss Vivian Allen, had just checked in to the hotel.

By midnight five agents had gathered at the Ritz Carlton. The Buchalters and “Miss Allen” were staying in Rooms 1519 and 1520, overlooking the ocean. When questioned, the hotel’s assistant manager told agents the party had reserved beach chairs for the weekend. The next morning several agents donned bathing suits and took seats on the beach behind the Buchalter party, which consisted of Buchalter and his wife, a young boy, and three other men “of Jewish extraction.” There was a second woman with them, but she wasn’t a blonde; in their report the agents described her as having “henna colored hair which she wore in a Greta Garbo fashion.” It was Mathias, her hair newly dyed.

Monday morning around eleven, after an uneventful weekend, the Buchalters checked out. Along with Mathias they stepped into a black Lincoln sedan outside the hotel. As the Lincoln pulled away, the New York agents were behind it, two agents driving in a Packard, another agent following in a chauffeur-driven limousine. They trailed the Buchalters north, toward Manhattan. When the FBI car overheated, only the chauffeured limo remained behind the Buchalters’ Lincoln as it headed into downtown Newark and stopped at the Robert Trent Hotel. A bellman unloaded several bags. The Buchalter family, Mathias, and an unidentified man stepped out of the car and walked inside.

After a few minutes the Buchalters emerged from the hotel and stepped into the Lincoln. There was no sign of Mathias. The agent inside the limousine had to make a split-second decision: follow the Lincoln, or follow Mathias. Assuming Mathias had checked in to the hotel, he chose the Lincoln, trailing it just far enough to be certain it was heading for the Holland Tunnel into Manhattan. At that point, the agent told his chauffeur to return to the Robert Trent. Reaching the hotel, he hurried inside to make sure Mathias had checked in. To his horror, she hadn’t. According to the assistant manager, she had loitered inside the lobby for twenty minutes, then left.

A half-dozen agents descended on the hotel and questioned bellmen, taxi drivers, and anyone else they could find. It was no use. Vi Mathias had vanished, and this time the FBI couldn’t find her.

 

 

Behind closed doors at the Urschel mansion, Gus Jones slowly drew from Charles Urschel every memory he could retrieve of his captors. Jones’s manner was soothing. Though Urschel insisted he had nothing to offer—he had been blindfolded—Jones asked him to proceed on the premise that when one sense is removed, remaining senses grow more acute. As the hours wore on, Urschel realized that Jones was right.

He remembered passing through an intense rainstorm about an hour after leaving Oklahoma City. He recalled stopping at a filling station where an attendant had made a remark about “broom corn,” a crop grown mostly in southern Oklahoma. He remembered the car crossing a long wooden bridge. Jones thought he knew the bridge. It crossed the Red River near Ardmore. It meant Urschel had been taken to Texas.