Wrong Side of the Law (10 page)

The search for Sankey and Alcorn reached as far south as the Mexican border and north into Canada. In late May, a Chicago policeman spotted someone he thought was Sankey at a soccer game. He gave chase, but the suspect lost himself in the crowd. It seemed that Sankey was a phantom who could vanish at will.

Then on June 15, 1933, William Hamm, the wealthy president of the Hamm Brewing Company, was kidnapped in St. Paul. The abduction was soon followed by a ransom note demanding $100,000, which had been signed by Hamm. Police investigation would eventually reveal that Hamm had been grabbed by the notorious Barker gang and their Canadian partner Alvin Karpis. But at the time, police were certain that the elusive Verne Sankey had struck again. Sankey was also the number-one suspect in the July 22 kidnapping of wealthy Oklahoma oil man Charles F. Urschel, who had actually been grabbed by George “Machine Gun” Kelly. A search of the South Dakota farmhouse turned up papers that indicated Sankey had been planning to kidnap baseball star Babe Ruth and former world heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey. When the Babe learned of this he quipped, “I don’t want him coming my way unless I can get my hands on a bat.”

In what seemed to be an open season on the rich and the famous, top law-enforcement officials like J. Edgar Hoover were under pressure to catch the criminals quickly. In fact, Hoover said the villains should be “exterminated.” One of the agents he put on the Sankey case was Melvin Purvis, who would soon gain international fame as the cop who killed John Dillinger.

But in the summer of 1933, Claude Boettcher wasn’t satisfied with the efforts of the police to catch Charlie’s kidnappers. He had at least a dozen private detectives chasing down leads all over the United States and in Canada. These investigators were provided with money to hire assistants, drivers, airplane pilots, and to pay informants. Claude also received reports of investigations conducted by Canadian National Railway detectives. Claude accumulated a thick file on Sankey’s and Alcorn’s personal backgrounds and on Sankey’s bootlegging activities, but no clues as to where the fugitives could be hiding.

On January 17, 1934, kidnappers abducted banker Edward G. Bremer of St. Paul and demanded $200,000 ransom. This would turn out to be yet another crime of the Barker-Karpis gang, but Sankey was again the first suspect. Actually, at the time of the Bremer kidnapping, Sankey was on a bus from Chicago to Detroit. Gambling and bad commodity investments were draining his money fast. He was going to Detroit to look into the purchase of a delicatessen. The deal didn’t work out and he returned to Chicago.

Because of Claude’s offer of a hefty reward, police had been swamped with “tips” from people hoping to cash in. Most of the information was useless. But on January 26, Melvin Purvis was contacted by Mrs. Carrie Fischer of Chicago. She had seen Verne Sankey’s picture in the newspaper and she recognized him as a man she’d often seen in her neighbourhood. He was a regular customer of a barber named John Mueller.

Mrs. Fischer’s information was pure gold for Purvis. He had already learned that Sankey was going under the alias of Clark. Purvis questioned John Mueller, who identified a photo of Sankey as “Mr. Clark,” and said that he often came into the barbershop for a haircut and shave.

Purvis soon located Sankey’s Chicago residence, an apartment he shared with a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Helen Mattern. Youngberg had told police that Sankey had resolved never to be taken alive. Purvis therefore decided against a raid on the apartment. That would almost certainly result in a gunfight, putting the lives of officers and Helen Mattern at risk. Instead, he would move against Sankey when he was off-guard and vulnerable — sitting in a barber’s chair.

Purvis placed men in and around Mueller’s barbershop. He knew that J. Edgar Hoover hated sharing glory with other law-enforcement agencies, but he had to bring the Chicago police department in on the stakeout. Federal agents still weren’t permitted to carry guns, and Sankey was likely to be armed.

For two days Purvis and his men waited, but Sankey didn’t show. The police weren’t aware that Sankey had recently had three prominent moles on his face surgically removed. The incisions were too tender for shaving. However, on the third day of the police vigil, Sankey felt that his face had healed well enough for him to endure a shave.

Sankey suspected nothing when he entered the barbershop that afternoon and settled into the chair. Mueller dropped the sheet over him. Suddenly policemen emerged from a back room with guns in their hands. Two of them shoved the muzzles against Sankey’s head. Sergeant Thomas Curtain said, “Don’t move, Verne. We’re police officers. You’re under arrest.”

Sankey tried to jump from the chair, but the officers shoved him back, warning him not to put up a fight. Sankey said he wasn’t trying to fight, he was trying to run so they’d shoot. “You might as well kill me, anyway,” he said.

Sankey wasn’t armed. But in the hem of his coat the police found some pills. He’d been prepared to take poison rather than go to prison.

In Sankey’s apartment police found guns, ammunition, and $3,450 in cash. A weeping Helen Mattern insisted that she had no idea her boyfriend was a wanted criminal. The building manager backed her story. “They were really model tenants, never made any fuss and nobody saw much of them … when the federal agents came, I almost fainted, I was so shocked.”

The capture of Public Enemy Number One was headline news across the country. J. Edgar Hoover played it for all it was worth, even inferring that his agents had prevented Sankey from committing suicide with the lethal pills. But if the news-hungry public that had been following the case expected a sensational trial, they were in for a stunning disappointment.

Melvin Purvis personally took charge of Sankey’s police interrogation. Sankey admitted he had kidnapped Haskell Bohn and Charlie Boettcher. He was bitter about the “dishonourable” way Claude had called in the police after he and Alcorn, in good faith, had released Charlie unharmed. Sankey denied any involvement in the other kidnappings of which he was a suspect. When Purvis asked if he’d been involved in the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, Sankey became angry. “I am a man,” he snapped indignantly. “I would kidnap a man. I would never kidnap a child.”

Sankey was taken under heavy guard to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He was lodged in the state penitentiary where security was stronger than that of the county jail. Aside from a single day he’d spent locked up because of bootlegging, Sankey had never before been behind bars.

Meanwhile, police had tracked down Alcorn. Helen Mattern, who knew him only as Walter Thomas, gave them information about a used car he’d bought in Chicago. Purvis’s agents questioned automobile dealers until they found one who had sold a car to one Walter Thomas. He had the buyer’s address. The day after Sankey’s arrest, police burst into Alcorn’s residence at 11:00 p.m. He was in bed and offered no resistance. The only gun on the premises was a .25-calibre pistol hidden under a sofa cushion. Birdie denied knowing anything about her husband’s criminal activities.

At the time of his arrest, Alcorn had eleven dollars to his name. He confessed to his part in the Boettcher kidnapping. When Charlie was told that both Sankey and Alcorn had been caught, he exclaimed, “That’s great! Now they’ve got ’em all.”

Alcorn actually seemed relieved that his run from the law was over. “I had a swell time with my share of the ransom,” he said. “I bet I made all of the night clubs in Chicago. The money’s all gone now, every cent of it, and I’m ready to take the consequences. I never was cut out for this kidnapping racket anyhow.”

Alcorn was locked in a cell a few doors down from Sankey. It’s unlikely that they so much as had a glimpse of each other. Sankey evidently did feel regret for dragging the young man into his web. “Alcorn is a swell fellow,” he said. “He used to fire for me up in Canada when I was a railroad engineer. He was never in trouble before in his life.”

Ben Laska flew to Sioux Falls to be Sankey’s legal counsel. Sankey was more concerned about his family than he was about himself. He told Laska to look after Fern and the children. Of himself, he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll never do a day for this rap.”

That was the morning of February 7. Sankey made it clear to Laska that he couldn’t stand the humiliation of having his wife and children seeing him in prison. The next day, Sankey stuffed a handkerchief into his mouth, made a noose with a necktie that nobody had the foresight to take away from him, and hanged himself in his cell. Sankey had spoken his last words to Harold Alcorn, who had come from Canada to visit his brother, and had stopped for a moment in front of Sankey’s cell. “Tell my gambling friends up there I have been paid twenty years in advance, and am now working it out.”

The press denounced Sankey as a coward for taking the easy way out. J. Edgar Hoover was disappointed that his justice department would be denied the publicity that would have come with Sankey’s conviction and incarceration in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. He was determined that the rest of the gang would feel the wrath of the law.

Federal prosecutors tried very hard to have Fern and Ruth convicted as Sankey’s accomplices. In one of the longest trials in South Dakota history, the charges against Ruth were eventually dropped due to a lack of evidence. Ben Laska succeeded in winning an acquittal for Fern. Ironically, Laska was prosecuted for accepting ransom money for his legal fees and served a term in prison.

Carl Pearce and Arthur Youngberg were both sentenced to long prison terms. Youngberg was paroled for good behaviour in 1943. Pearce, who suffered from psychoneurosis, was paroled on a medical recommendation for clemency in 1944.

Gordon Alcorn was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was sent first to Leavenworth, and then to the new maximum-security prison in San Francisco Bay — Alcatraz! Although he boasted of making friends with such notorious inmates as Machine Gun Kelly and Al Capone, Alcorn was a model prisoner. He often expressed remorse for his crimes. The prison staff liked him. Nonetheless, he feared for his life among the hard cases in Alcatraz. Alcorn had never been a tough guy.

In 1936, Alcorn’s family in Canada began a campaign to have him released and deported. They even gained the support of the Boettcher family. During the trial of Fern and Ruth, at which Alcorn and Charlie had both testified, Alcorn had personally apologized to Charlie.

The American government was reluctant to grant Alcorn any kind of reprieve, concerned that it might send the wrong message to other would-be kidnappers. But Alcorn’s family persevered, especially after Sankey’s other Canadian henchman, Ray Robinson, was quietly released from Stillwater Penitentiary and deported in 1940. Unfortunately for Alcorn, the authorities seemed determined to make him pay in the absence of the deceased Sankey.

It wasn’t until 1949 that Gordon Alcorn was finally let out of prison and deported to Canada. He wrote to Claude, thanking him for his kindness in recommending his release. For the rest of his life, Alcorn was a hardworking, honest citizen. But he couldn’t shake the guilt from his brief career as a kidnapper. He died alone in a Vancouver rooming house in 1982. As a young railroader, Alcorn had admired smooth-talking Verne Sankey. In the end he was, in a way, the last victim of America’s first Public Enemy Number One.

Sydney Lass and Jack O’Brien:

Mysterious Pat Norton

T
he
two men had been loitering for hours in front of the Durable Waterproof Company at 646 Adelaide Street West in Toronto. It was Friday, September 19, 1930, and the Great Depression that had started less than a year earlier had already cast its grim shadow over the city. The streets were full of unemployed men with nothing to do, and vagrants had become a common sight. These two, however, weren’t victims of the massive layoffs that had followed the stock market crash of October 1929. They were thieves who had chosen to live on the wrong side of the law, and they were waiting in ambush.

Jack O’Brien (left) and Sydney Lass (right) robbed the payroll of the Durable Waterproof Company in Toronto.
Toronto Star.

At 2:45 p.m. a car pulled up. In it was Albert Hattin, age eighteen, an employee of the Durable Waterproof Company. He was returning from a bank where he’d picked up three bundles of cash — the company’s weekly payroll. Riding with him as guard was a bank messenger. The bandits struck before Hattin could even get out of the car; opening the door and grabbing at the money satchel. Several witnesses later gave accounts of the robbery. One was six-year-old Johnnie Brooks, who’d been sitting on a baker’s wagon and saw the whole thing.

“There was a fat guy and a little skinny guy,” said Johnnie. “The fat guy carried the bag out to the sidewalk and dropped it. He stuffed a large package and papers into his pockets. I saw him get into a green car, then he jumped out again … and ran away along Adelaide Street.”

Charles Arrowsmith, the driver of the Canada Bread Company delivery wagon, provided a more detailed account:

I had noticed one rather stout man sitting on the railing. He jumped off and ran toward the door of the factory and then I heard a cry and witnessed three men fighting. One of them apparently had driven up to the factory with the payroll. He was carrying it in a leather satchel.

The stout man had a gun. They struggled for a few seconds and secured hold of the satchel and started to run for the motor car in which I think the employee of the company had driven up to the factory with the money. In running towards the car they dropped the money satchel and three packages fell out. They stopped and picked up a large and small package.

The stout man climbed into the driver’s seat of the car and the other fellow ran around to climb in the other side. He could not get the door open. They both jumped out. The fat man ran east on Macdonnell Square … the other chap ran south around the square … It all happened so sudden. The employee of the company ran into the building after the satchel had been snatched from his hands and he had been knocked down.

The thieves got away with $1,021. Police Chief Dennis Draper confidently predicted an arrest within twenty-four hours. There had been other holdups in the city, which the police believed had all been committed by the same robbers. The chief said his men were about to close in on the bandits. However, none of the suspects the constables hauled in for questioning had been involved in the payroll heist.

It wasn’t until a week later that Toronto police detectives finally got a lead on the two bandits. In Orillia, a man known as Jack O’Brien got drunk and boasted about the robbery. He also said his real name was Pat Norton. That name immediately got the attention of Chief Draper and every cop on his force.

At the time, Pat Norton was an elusive phantom to Ontario police. A man who went by that name had been with Bill and Sid Murrell on April 11, 1921, when they killed a man while robbing a bank in Melbourne, Ontario. Sid had been hanged, Bill was sentenced to life in the Kingston Penitentiary, but Norton had vanished. Canadian police had no records of a Pat Norton, but believed the man they were looking for was an escaped murderer from the Michigan State Penitentiary, who used a string of aliases, including John Price, “Honest” John Morten, Ernest George Norton, “Two Gun” Jack O’Brien, and Babe O’Brien. In 1928, during the much-publicized hunt for Orval Shaw, the eccentric small-time criminal known as “The Mystery Man of Skunk’s Misery,” there had been false rumours that the trickster Shaw had hooked up with the much more dangerous Norton.

Depending on which story he told, O’Brien was born in either Detroit or Scotland. He would have been about thirty years old at the time of the Toronto robbery. Of average height and build, he could have been the “skinny guy” Johnny Brooks had seen.

O’Brien had been living in Orillia for about a year and a half and was friends with a local man named John Ainsworth. He worked as a painter, and occasionally made trips to Toronto. At about the time of the Durable robbery, Ainsworth was arrested in Toronto for car theft. The Toronto police learned that he was wanted in Orillia as the principal suspect in the burglary of the town’s Central Hardware Store. Thieves had made off with rifles, shotguns, and ammunition, which police believed were to be used for holdups. Then came O’Brien’s drunken claim that he was Pat Norton.

Toronto detectives also learned that O’Brien had been keeping company with Sydney “Sunny” Lass, who sometimes went by the alias Sam Levy. They’d been seen together in Orillia and in the Lido Restaurant on Temperance Street, a known hangout for Toronto hoodlums. With his short, stocky frame, Lass could have been the “stout man” with a gun who Charles Arrowsmith had seen.

Although the Toronto
Star
referred to Lass as a “well-known Torontonian” (that is, well-known to the police), he was originally from Greenwood, British Columbia. Lass was twenty-seven years old at the time of the Durable holdup. He first got in trouble with the law in 1910 when, at the age of seven, he was arrested for theft. The case was remanded and then apparently dropped. In 1913, ten-year-old Lass was again charged with theft and this time put on probation. The next year he was in court again, facing three charges of theft, and was once more put on probation. Young Sydney’s incorrigible ways finally caught up to him in 1915, when the twelve-year-old was found guilty on three more charges of theft and sent to the Victoria Industrial School for an indefinite period.

Five years later, Lass was arrested in Detroit for robbing a pawn shop. He was sentenced to ten-to-twenty-five years in the Michigan State Penitentiary, with the judge recommending that he serve at least fifteen years. It was 1920, and Sunny Lass was still a teenager.

The purpose of prisons at that time was simply to administer harsh punishment. The concept of educating and rehabilitating inmates was still in its infancy. Wayward, impressionable youths were tossed into a brutal environment with hardened criminals. Prisons were little more than schools for crime. Lass no doubt considered himself lucky when he was paroled after ten years, and sent back to Canada. But he hadn’t changed much from the seven-year-old boy who’d been caught stealing.

An escort of six detectives and constables took Ainsworth to Orillia for a preliminary inquest into the hardware store burglary. The senior officer carried warrants for the arrest of O’Brien and Lass. He took along the extra manpower because there had been reports that O’Brien and Lass might try to rescue Ainsworth or kill him to shut him up. A large crowd of Orillians hung around the courthouse “to see what would happen.” However, the suspected bandits were nowhere to be seen, and the police were told they’d fled to Montreal. The police doubted the truth of that information. After Ainsworth had been committed for trial, they took him back to Toronto over a secret route that involved criss-crossing secondary roads to hide the movements of the police cars in order to foil anyone who might be following or lying in wait.

On October 1, while Toronto police staked out the haunts frequented by the likes of O’Brien and Lass, The OPP began a province-wide search. They thought they had a lead when the manager of the liquor store in Lindsay reported to local police that a woman had tried to purchase more alcohol than was allowed by the strict regulations of the time. She’d presented a permit for purchasing liquor made out to John Ainsworth. After being refused, she’d left in a car with two men. It took the police a day or so to locate the woman’s residence. The house was empty. Neighbours said there had been two men staying there, but they’d gone to Detroit. The police didn’t know if the strangers were O’Brien and Lass.

The search suddenly shifted back to Orillia with the report of a missing girl. Anna Bryson, age seventeen, had been an “admirer” of O’Brien, and police had questioned her. Anna quit her job without notice and then disappeared.

Meanwhile, O’Brien and Lass had been seen in a restaurant between Orillia and Barrie. A waitress recognized them from photographs in the newspapers. Anna had given those pictures to the police. The waitress phoned the OPP detachment in Barrie. She said that when the men left, they drove toward Orillia.

Police feared that O’Brien and Lass were after Anna because of the pictures. The girl might have been thinking the same thing and had gone into hiding. She no doubt would have been terrified to learn that the man she knew as Jack O’Brien might really be Pat Norton, a convicted killer.

Police raided Anna’s home, but it was deserted. A squad of officers searched the swampland near Orillia, but found nothing. Then on October 2, officers tracked Anna down as she was attempting to get some extra clothing before fleeing Orillia. They wouldn’t say where they found her or where they had taken her for safekeeping. A police spokesman would say only that Anna lived in fear of O’Brien.

Certain that O’Brien and Lass were in the Orillia area, police threw out a wide net, expecting to snare them as they drew it tighter. But if the two were indeed in the district, they managed to slip through the cordon. On the night of October 3, Toronto police responded to a report that O’Brien and Lass had been spotted in the city’s west end. Police cars and motorcycles sped to the location and prowled the surrounding streets. After a few hours of fruitless searching, they gave up. “Just another rumour,” an officer told a reporter.

Police still had no real evidence to support O’Brien’s drunken boast that he was Pat Norton. Even though Norton had been known to use the alias Jack O’Brien, it was almost as common a name as John Smith. Police had very little concrete information on the Pat Norton who’d been a member of the Murrell gang. But now, thanks to Anna Bryson, they had a photograph.

Chief Draper personally went to the Kingston Penitentiary to talk to Bill Murrell. Bill had been in prison for over nine years and hadn’t set eyes on Pat Norton since the day of the Melbourne bank robbery. Nonetheless, he identified the man in Anna’s photograph as Pat Norton.

Toronto police and the OPP searched for O’Brien and Lass for several weeks without finding a trace. Then they received information that the fugitives were in New York City, and two Toronto police detectives, Walter McConnell and Archie McCathie, were sent there. On Saturday, November 1, the Canadian officers accompanied by a squad of New York police caught O’Brien and Lass in Pennsylvania Station as they were about to board a train. McConnell said, “We want you O’Brien, and you too, Lass.”

Lass had a revolver in his pocket, but with four police guns pointed at him, he didn’t try to draw it. The pair had arranged passage on a ship to Europe, and were on their way to the harbour when they were arrested. In a West 34th Street apartment where O’Brien and Lass had been staying, police found guns and burglar tools.

According to American police records, Jack O’Brien couldn’t have been the Pat Norton who’d been in on the Melbourne bank robbery, because he was in jail at the time. His real name, the Americans said, was Elmer J. Giller. He was indeed an escapee from the Michigan State Penitentiary, but he’d been doing time for armed robbery, not murder. Even so, the New York police said that O’Brien was one of the most “hard boiled” gunmen they had ever encountered.

“The only thing I would go back to Toronto for would be to shoot up a bunch of their dicks and people there,” O’Brien snarled to New York police. “Youse’ll never get me to Toronto or anywhere else in Canada.”

The New York police sent photographs of O’Brien and Lass to Toronto and witnesses there identified them as the Durable bandits. A New York magistrate dismissed the local charges against the pair to smooth the extradition process. Evidently, Michigan authorities hadn’t requested that O’Brien be extradited to that state to complete his prison term.

O’Brien and Lass were held without bail in a New York City jail. Both initially decided that they would fight extradition. Lass’s mother, Ethel “Fanny” Lass, went to New York and was in the courtroom for the bail hearing. She broke down in tears when federal marshals wouldn’t allow her to approach her son. Later, she obtained a pass to visit him in the detention cell for half an hour.

O’Brien attempted to escape when he was being taken from the court building back to jail. He tripped one of the officers escorting him and ran from the building. Three police officers fired at him as he ran down the street. None of the shots hit O’Brien, but two officers caught up with him before he got very far. They beat him into submission with blackjacks.