Machine Gun Kelly | The Other Urschel

From Airship, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal. In 1933, more was happening than just the kidnapping of Charles Urschel in the hunt for Machine Gun Kelly.

Hell, while all that was going on, the feds were still trying to track down the men behind the horrific Kansas City massacre that had just happened weeks before the Urschel case.

But I'm talking bigger things than even those stories that held the country captivated.

The Great Depression had left plenty of Americans out of work and struggling to feed their families, and the Dust Bowl was just months away from making that worse.

Plus, the rise of mass media consumption in the form of radio broadcasts and wire services brought all of this information directly to people as it was happening. In short, the world was changing, not always for the better it seemed.

News stories that felt monumental one moment were swallowed by bigger events the following week, and hovering above it all was the spectral rise of fascism in Europe.

By the end of the decade, the world would be at war for the second time in a young century. World War II would leave America altered, and it would eclipse just about every detail of the 1930s.

Thankfully, that mass media had created extensive records of every event, every decision, and every opinion that had shaped the country in the years prior.

That meant that when historians, journalists, and even true crime podcasts wanted to revisit those key moments, there was a treasure trove of information waiting to be unearthed. It just needed the right person to come along and find it.

Joe Urschel is the former Executive Director of the National Law Enforcement Museum in Washington, DC. He's a former managing editor of USA Today, and has also worked for the Detroit Free Press.

He's been honored by the National Association of Newspaper Colonists, the National Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, and has an Emmy. He also happens to share a surname with one of the most famous kidnapping victims of the 20th century.

That's how he came to write his book, The Year of Fear, Machine Gun Kelly and the manhunt that changed the nation.

Joe sat down with our producer Joel Callan to talk all things Machine Gun Kelly, the state of crime reporting in the 1930s, and the eternal urge to prove one's father wrong.

Joe, before we start, thank you so much for joining us here on American Criminal.

3:55

A Personal Connection

It's very fun to have you here.

Well, thanks for having me on.

I wanna dive right into it. So it's been about 10 years now since the publication of your book, The Year of Fear.

But in the sort of opening of that book, you write that you first learned about the kidnapping of Charles Urschel more than three decades prior to that. So would you mind telling us how you first came across the story?

Sure. It was in about 1982. I had moved here from Detroit.

And when you first come to Washington, DC, you want to see all the great buildings, the sites, all the monuments and whatnot. So my wife and I were at the Library of Congress in their great reading room.

And they had just converted their cataloging system to an online searchable database. This is very early in the digital revolution.

So you were able to search any subject or search any author, or pretty much as you can do now with kind of a Google search, except this was just about their collection. So on a lark, I just put in my last name.

One reference came up to one book, and it was the story of the kidnapping of a wealthy oil man in 1933. His name was Charles Urschel.

I was kind of struck because I was under the impression that all of the Urschels in the United States were related, but I had never heard of Charles Urschel or this kidnapping, although I had heard a lot, of course, about Machine Gun Kelly, who's

kind of a pop culture figure based on the movie that was made about him, which was wildly inaccurate. So anyway, I thought, well, you know, I should learn more about this guy.

And so I immediately called up my dad and I said, hey, are we related to this guy? This wealthy oil man in the 1930s? My dad says, no, we're not related.

So like any good son, I immediately set out to prove my father wrong. And so I did some research into the name and into Charles, and I checked my ancestry as far back as I could. We are not related.

But anyway, in doing all that, it sort of piqued my interest in not only Charles, but also the oil industry at that time and the criminality at that time. And I just started collecting string on it and continued to be fascinated by what I found.

So that was, what year was that, sorry, in the 1980s?

It was, I believe, in 1982, yeah, would have been 82, maybe 83.

Right, and so you published your book, The Year of Fear, in 2015, I believe. Is that right?

Right, yeah.

So what brought you back to the story all those years later to finally write the book about it?

You mean what took me so long? Well, I didn't really conceive of writing it as a book. I was working as a newspaper man at the time, or I was a reporter and editor for USA Today in 1982 when I came here from Detroit to help launch that newspaper.

So I was really busy with other things, but I really got re-energized about the story when I had retired from newspaper work and I was the director of a museum in Washington about the history of news. It was called the Newseum.

We had quite a collection of historic newspapers, which I would, being an ex-newspaper man, I spent a lot of time going through them.

And one of our curators came across a series of headlines from the Dallas newspapers, Tulsa newspaper, Oklahoma City. And they were all like screaming headlines about this Urschel kidnapping.

And they were the banner headlines on any number of papers out west back at that time.

So of course I read the stories and I read the coverage and I got to thinking, wow, this involves a lot more than just this one kidnapping from this one gangster, noted gangster.

So I began to learn, as you go through newspaper research, you see unrelated stories to the story that you're looking for. And it suddenly became apparent to me that there was a lot more going on in 1933 than just this kidnapping.

You know, there was the Sarn of the Dust Bowl. There was the Great Depression. There was the election of FDR.

There was the election in Germany of Adolf Hitler. All of these things were kind of happening together.

And I thought, you know, if I could somehow get all those other events woven into the story of this kidnapping and make it understandable why this was of such importance to not only the history of the FBI and the launch of the FBI and the Justice

Department in America, but also of, you know, the launch of the, what we now regard as the mass media was the start of radio news broadcasts, widespread coverage from wire services that took news around the world instantly. And so that's what I

started to do. Yeah, it took me, it took me a little while to get it all finished.

I'm glad you brought up all the different things that were happening in 1933, because that's what I think your book did so well, was it really positions the reader in that moment in time, and sort of gives you an understanding of all the different

pieces of the puzzle that are feeding into this one kidnapping and sort of what makes it so consequential in the series that we've just completed. We've only got so many episodes to work with, and it came down to making a decision of like, okay,

which of these pieces can we sort of do justice to? We included information about, you know, sort of the early sort of formation of the FBI in places, and we sort of decided to take a little bit of a focus on the Lindbergh kidnapping as well, because

from the standpoint of the story of a criminal case, that was a really fascinating aspect that sort of predates the Urschel kidnapping, but sort of sets in motion a lot of things that happen, a year and a half later with the Charles Urschel

kidnapping, which was fascinating, because you hear so much about these two huge kidnappings, and you don't necessarily connect that they are so closely linked in a lot of ways. So in your book, you write a lot about the actions and motivations of J.

10:36

Hooverʼs FBI Rises

kidnapping, which was fascinating, because you hear so much about these two huge kidnappings, and you don't necessarily connect that they are so closely linked in a lot of ways. So in your book, you write a lot about the actions and motivations of J.

Edgar Hoover throughout the Urschel kidnapping case. We hear a lot from his perspective, and what was possibly going through his mind, and sort of what was motivating him throughout this period of the FBI, or as it was known then, the United States

Bureau of Investigation. A lot of the headlines about Hoover's life now will mention instances of blackmail and abuse of power in his later years. But he was also a law enforcement visionary.

Would you mind sort of telling us about his legacy in shaping the FBI as we know it today?

Sure.

I think you have to understand Hoover's influence by understanding a little bit about what kind of a guy he was, and a little bit about what a cauldron of corruption and malfeasance the Justice Department was when he took it over, or when he started

to launch what became the FBI. The Justice Department at that time was referred to as the Department of Easy Virtue.

And when FDR came in and appointed Homer Cummings to be the head of the Justice Department, Cummings was looking around for somebody who could clean the place up. And the only guy who had a possibility of maybe doing that was this guy, J.

Edgar Hoover, who was not at all a classic lawman, or even a classic prosecutor. He had actually worked at the Library of Congress in the cataloging division before going over to the Justice Department. You know, he lived with his mother.

You know, his father had left the family. He had kind of a nervous breakdown. So anyway, in order to save his job, Hoover had to whip this organization into place.

And they had used Hoover to help with the investigation of Lindbergh, but he was really pushed aside and was very ineffectual. But there was such an outroar about the Lindbergh kidnapping and all the other kidnappings that were going on at the time.

In the two years prior to 1933, when this story takes place, there had been over 2,000 kidnappings around the country. And so taking on kidnappers was a pretty tall order.

But the thing that made Hoover effective is because of the passage of the Lindbergh law, which made it a federal crime to kidnap somebody for ransom.

And therefore, the penalty would be set by the federal government rather than the state's governments or the county governments or this whole hodgepodge of laws to deal with kidnapping.

And one of the things that that enabled Hoover to do was create a police force that was able to cross state lines and still have jurisdiction. The reason there were so many kidnappings in the early 30s is because they were so easy to pull off.

If you could kidnap somebody in a border town, let's say Texas or Oklahoma, where this took place, and then get them over the state line, the state police, if there even was a state police force in Texas, could not go into Oklahoma and vice versa.

They had no jurisdiction. And so once you got your victim over the state line, you could pretty much set the rules.

And of course, they were very adamant about the fact that if you cooperated with any police force, they would come back and not only kill you, but kill your entire family as well.

The ability for Hoover to go after kidnappers was integral to the development of the FBI. This was the first real law that they had to enforce. Unfortunately, they didn't really have a police force.

They had a lot of guys who were, and they were all guys, basically investigators and lawyers and accountants. They didn't have any real gunslingers.

So Hoover had to put together a force of people who were familiar with police work and willing to work for the federal government.

And he looked around his entire staff of agents, and he found only 12 that actually had any kind of familiarity with weapons and police work. Most of those were out of Texas. They were former Texas Rangers.

So he puts the very best of them onto this case to solve it. So that's a little bit about how they got launched, but in the years following, Hoover doubled down on his interest in police work and instituted a lot of very modern training facilities.

He created a huge network of fingerprints. He developed files on criminals and how they operated.

So he really brought police work, which in the 30s was fairly primitive, brought it up into the modern age by using and inventing a lot of policing techniques.

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I'm back with Joe Urschel, author of The Year of Fear.

Now, you are the former executive director of the National Law Enforcement Museum in DC. So you, I guess, would have a lot of background in sort of familiarity with these subjects.

And I was wondering if you could tell us about the changes or improvements in procedures that happened between the Lindbergh kidnapping in 1932 and the Urschel kidnapping just over a year later in July of 33.

Well, for the Bureau, the major development was that ability to cross state lines to prosecute people who were breaking federal laws. At the time, there were only 11 state police organizations in the country.

Most law enforcement was practiced by county sheriffs and local city police forces. So by giving a police force this national reach, that changed a lot.

And the other thing that would happen very quickly with Hoover is that he developed a system for gathering evidence that up until then would have been kind of happenstance.

So with this case in particular, he had agents all over the country looking for the Kellys when they escaped after they had pulled off the kidnapping.

And each of these agents had to call Hoover himself every night and tell him what had happened during the day, what they discovered, what they didn't discover. And he would build these files, this big collection of evidence.

And he would, by orchestrating everything from Washington, DC, he would get information back to his agents who were literally all over the country.

And so by bringing that sense of professional investigative work into the FBI, that also helped them in their ability to prosecute these criminals. He also trained them how to use weapons and how to fight. He had a gym built in the FBI offices.

He had training programs in martial arts. So he really took it from a kind of a backwater, catch-as-catch-can kind of a profession and brought it up to a much higher professional level, I would say.

Yeah. Bringing it back to the Lindbergh law, which was passed just a couple of months after Charles Lindbergh Jr. was kidnapped.

I'm interested to know how you think the Urschel case might have played out differently if that law had never been passed.

They never would have caught Kelly. Easy as that. Up until the Lindbergh law, very few kidnappers were caught and prosecuted.

And after the Lindbergh law, and after this successful prosecution of Kelly and his wife and others that were involved in the kidnapping and several who weren't, kidnapping as a major crime in America virtually disappeared.

Yeah. It was wild reading about how much kidnapping was sort of the crime du jour in like the early 1930s, as prohibition was waning and, you know, gangsters were looking for new ways to make money.

It was fascinating to read just how many kidnappings were taking place, and sort of the number of wealthy people who had bodyguards in their house, and celebrities who were riding around with, you know, people riding shotgun with shotguns to protect

them. It's this fascinating little time that was like a little flash in the pan crime-wise, I guess. Okay, so in your book, you had a lot of great excerpts from reporting on the Urschel kidnapping as it was happening.

24:54

The Media Spectacle

And as a former newspaper man, how do you think reporting on crime has changed in the nearly century since this story? Or do you think it's mostly stayed the same?

Well, I think in terms of newspaper coverage of crime, it has significantly diminished. When this story occurred, most cities had two or three daily newspapers. There were three or four wire services.

And there was such street level coverage of what was going on in a city or a county from all of these reporters that were out there in the field that as you can see in this case, the reporting actually led a lot of the investigation because the

reporters knew what was going on ahead of when a lot of the agents did. There was a case when Kelly fled to Memphis. And the first thing he saw was a headline in the local newspaper saying that he was believed to be in Memphis.

So he very quickly had to get out of Memphis. That was before the FBI even got there. So the blanket coverage of crime was very heavy in newspapers at the time.

As now, crime sells, and newspapers were obviously trying to sell themselves. That was about the only place you could get any real information about it.

And most of the local crime news that you get now is probably off of local television stations, who generally do a better job somehow covering crime news than the major newspapers that are left. It's also covered in a different way.

The way it would go in the 30s in the gangster area, it would go one of two ways. Either criminals would be romanticized, and people would pull for them, or they would be depicted as just despicable individuals who needed to be rounded up and jailed.

And now I think there's a lot more nuance in the coverage of what actually defines a crime, and also the element of mental illness is played into it, and there's a lot less romanticizing of criminals.

Something that I found fascinating while reading about this case was just how heavily George and Catherine Kelly and the others involved in the Urschel kidnapping, they were guarded by very, very heavily armed law enforcement officers during their

trials. trials.

27:22

Complicated Characters

Considering that the kidnapping hadn't resulted in any injuries that I'm aware of, why do you think the authorities were being so cautious?

Or was this sort of all for show for the benefit of the media and for the general public to sort of show how successful the Bureau had been?

Well, I think it's probably a little of both, but I think primarily the Kelly's were not caught until significantly later than Catherine's mother and father.

And so while they were on the run, they were constantly sending in threats to the courts and to the prosecutors and the judges that were handling the case of the people that were captured at the farm when it was raided.

So I think there was somewhat an element of fear. And there was also the fact that, you know, jails couldn't really hold these criminals.

They had this great record of breaking out of jail, usually with the assistance of one or more people in the police force or in the parole office, or, you know, you name it.

Because these criminals had money, and when they wanted to get out of something, all they really had to do was bribe somebody to help them. So I think there was a fear that they could escape.

I think there was a fear that other members of their so-called gang might come to try to rescue them in some kind of violent fashion.

You know, you have to remember the Kansas City massacre where two bureau agents and a criminal were gunned down in their car in the parking lot of the Kansas City train station.

And one of the people that was involved in that incident was believed to be a partner of Kelly. And this guy, Vern Miller, was just a psychopathic killer. I mean, and so there was this fear that maybe he was involved.

And there was also the fear that they also tried to pin that massacre on Kelly, but he had nothing to do with it, of course. So I think primarily that's why they were so heavily guarded.

And also, you know, there was this element of showmanship, which J. Edgar Hoover was very good at. I mean, he was one of the earliest examples of extreme media manipulation that the country had ever hatched.

He understood the power of the media, whether it was movies, radio, photographic images, stories, magazines, you know, he had his finger in them all.

It's interesting, you know, early on, you mentioned the letters that these criminals were sending in to the authorities after the initial round of arrests were made after the kidnapping.

One of my favorites that I read, I think I read parts of it in your book, was one that Catherine wrote. I forget who she wrote it to, but she basically was saying, I'm innocent, I've had nothing to do with this.

But if you don't let these people go, terrible things are going to happen to you. There's going to be an awful massacre. That said, I'm innocent.

I have nothing to do with this. She was threatening this great violence, but then at the same time, also saying, oh no, but I'm innocent. I've got nothing to do with it.

It was funny watching her try and twist herself into knots to get everything done.

I know. She even wrote to the Bureau and said, look, I'll give you George if you release my mother. Because she had nothing to do with it.

She really didn't. And I had nothing to do with it. But in fact, Catherine really planned the whole thing.

It's fascinating just sort of looking at her role and sort of trying to sort of unpack which of George's crimes Catherine was actually involved in.

And it was fun trying to sort of work out what I felt about her and her role in this story.

I find her to be the most fascinating character, you know, with her fashion sense and her sense of promotion of her husband and her grand vision for what they could accomplish together.

I mean, this is a woman who is up from poverty, but was robbing banks and Chanel suits. And when she was on the run, was trying to get people to go back to her house to bring her her better clothes and her fur coats.

And she was a very good looking woman. And I think there would be a lot of actresses out there who would just love to play that role, because it is so rich with detail and irony and glamour.

And a touch less violence than the sort of more famous Bonnie and Clyde story, I guess.

Right, right. You know, Bonnie and Clyde, somehow they get the romantic attachment story. But in fact, George and Catherine were much more interested and much more in love, and much better criminals, actually, than Bonnie and Clyde, you know.

They were just violent.

Right.

You know, they weren't very good at robbing banks or running liquor or setting up illegal operations. But Catherine and George, I mean, they were both fashion plates and they were both pretty smart.

I mean, besides the fact that she was going to turn George in to get her mother loose, I think they were, you know, they were pretty much in love. They were spent with each other.

Hi, I'm Jim Clemente, retired FBI profiler.

And I'm Cathy Canning-Mello, retired FBI profiler.

And we are the co-hosts of Real Crime Profile.

33:18

Apple Podcasts

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/real-crime-profile/id1081244497

artwork representing URL
Cathy and I work together profiling cases for the FBI for more than a decade.

Yes, and if you're looking for insightful and informed deep analysis of open and closed crimes, you've come to the right place.

Yeah, we don't just do the skim over like they do on the news. So please listen to Real Crime Profile anywhere you listen to podcasts. And on IDENTIFY, the app.

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34:38

Lingering Questions

And once again, I'm here with Joe Urschel, author of The Year of Fear.

I wanna turn briefly to a couple of questions I had about the story itself, and to see if you had some answers for me. These were things that I couldn't quite work out in my research. The first was about the ransom money.

So we know that the Kelly's share of the ransom was eventually recovered from where it was buried on the Coleman farm. But what seemed a bit more of a mystery to me was the money that Albert Bates took with him.

Right.

Do you know what happened to that?

I do not, and nobody does. I mean, they recovered a portion of...

His girlfriend had taken a portion of that money up to the Pacific Northwest, and they tracked her down, and she gave them what she claimed she had, which was, you know, $15,000 or something like that.

But the bulk of his share of the ransom was never recovered. And despite efforts by the FBI and Charles Urschel to recover it, I mean, he wanted his money back. And, you know, they kept sending FBI agents...

Bates and Kelly end up in Alcatraz, as you know. And the FBI kept sending agents, you know, routinely to Alcatraz to interview Bates, to get him to tell where the rest of the money was. And he never would.

And he took it to his deathbed with him. So the money was never recovered, and there isn't really even a good theory about where it would be.

I suppose if you recovered it now, it wouldn't be worth quite as much, but I don't know if you could keep it anyway.

Something that really interested me was that Charles ended up anonymously funding the education of Katherine Kelly's daughter, Pauline. And that was something that I think didn't come out until fairly recently.

And I never came across any explanation of what compelled him to do this. Did you find any information about that when you were researching the book?

Yes. I mean, Urschel believed, or he knew that Katherine's mother and Katherine's father had nothing to do with the kidnapping. They just used his farm to hold Urschel.

And after they were all convicted, along with Harvey Bailey, who had nothing to do with it either, they were all sent to prison for life. And so Urschel realized that Pauline had nobody to raise her.

She was being raised by her grandparents because Katherine had kind of abandoned her there, and no one to take care of her, no one to fund various things.

So he literally set up like a trust fund for her, and he had it administered through a judge that he knew. In fact, it was the judge who presided over the trial of the Kellys.

And so this judge would go to her, and when she needed to go to school, he would tell her how to do it. When she needed to apply to college, he helped her with the financing, got her a place to live. It's just the kind of guy he was.

I mean, he was vindictive about the people who were actually involved in the crime, but he was very sympathetic to the people who got caught up in it, including Harvey Bailey, who was a notorious bank robber.

He was just visiting this farm at the wrong time when he got arrested, and he got sent to prison for life.

Urschel, every time he came up for bond, Urschel would, up for parole, Urschel would go in and testify on his behalf and say that you should release this guy. It had nothing to do with my case.

Eventually, they did, and Urschel set him up with a job as a cabinet maker and got him set up in some low-income housing at a YMCA or something. So, I mean, it's just, I just think it's a measure of the kind of guy he was.

He was a complicated character, just like everybody involved, but he certainly was, by the book, generous and fair-minded.

Along those lines, that was something that sort of took me by surprise when I found out about Urschel helping out Pauline and sort of campaigning quite hard for Bailey's release.

I was wondering if during your research for your book, was there anything you learned that really shocked or surprised you that you weren't expecting?

I wasn't expecting most of this. I was fascinated and surprised by the level of criminal control of major cities out west, particularly St. Paul, which I always thought of as not a crime capital at all.

That was Chicago. But just the sheer level of how criminal gangs or criminal families would control a city, its government, its courts. That was the one thing that surprised me, just the extent of it.

I'm curious to know, are there any other historic true crime cases that fascinate you or figures who you would want to write a book about?

You know, there are a couple of guys in this story that I thought could be fleshed out into a longer story, but I'm probably not the man to do it.

Let me mention one other thing about Urschel, though. As much as Hoover loved publicity, Urschel hated it. The whole reason he got into the headlines that people knew he had so much money was when Tom Slick died, Urschel married his widow.

And so the two oil companies that they were running, or they were in several, they're all melded into one company.

And it created a lot of coverage, particularly from the governor of Oklahoma, who said, if I can tax these companies, I can eliminate our state debt. And so there was a lot of coverage of Urschel.

So it made him publicity shy for the rest of his life, because that's how Catherine found out that he should be their first victim, because of all this news about him in the newspapers and how much money he did have.

So for the rest of his life, he was extremely publicity shy, which was one of the things that made it hard to write this book, because there's just nothing about him.

In the 1950s, when Fortune Magazine did a story on the five richest men in Texas, you know, it was the Hunt Brothers and a couple of others, and they had Charles Urschel, but they had pictures of the other four.

But where his photo was supposed to be, they said no known picture. He not only was adverse to publicity, but he passed down that aversion to his children and even to their grandchildren.

None of them really wanted to talk, but the one thing that did help me with my name is when I did contact some of his living descendants, they were a little more open with me, I think because of the name connection, and of course because the case has

gotten so old, and there's really no reason for them to fear anymore. Yeah, so that was lucky for me, and I ran into Ken Freydis, who's also a crime writer, who gave me a lot of information about Charles that I wouldn't have been able to get

For anyone who enjoyed our series on George Machine Gun Kelly and the Urschel kidnapping, I'm going to remind them once again, with the name of your book, it's The Year of Fear, Machine Gun Kelly, and The Manhunt that Changed the Nation.

I highly, highly recommend it. It's a really, really fun ride. It's really well-researched.

It's really beautifully written. Joe, it was a pleasure to read your book, and it was a pleasure to talk with you today. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

I enjoyed it as well.

That was our producer, Joel Cowan's conversation with Joe Urschel, the author of The Year of Fear, Machine Gun Kelly and the Manhunt that Changed the Nation.

Okay, before you go, don't forget to make sure you're subscribed to American Criminal and leave us a five-star rating. You probably heard it from other podcasts, but those two little things really help us out a lot.

You can also visit americancriminal.com to get in touch with us and let us know what criminals you'd like to hear about next. American Criminal is a co-production of Airship and Evergreen podcasts.

It's hosted, edited, and produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz. Audio editing and sound design by Sean Ruhl Hoffman. Music by Thrum.

This episode is written and researched by Joel Callan, managing producer Emily Burke. Executive producers are Joel Callan and Lindsey Graham.