Back to the Public Enemy Chronology

On June 16, 1933, FBI agents Joe Lackey and Frank Smith, and Otto Reed, an Oklahoma police chief, arrested Frank Nash, a veteran bank robber, in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Since it was an underworld resort center under the protection of the state government, getting out of Arkansas would prove to be harder than capturing the outlaw. Nash’s friends used their influence with the corrupt police department to arrange two separate road blocks but the agents’ ID enabled them to pass through each time. They told the police they were going to Joplin but decided to take the train from Fort Smith to Kansas City, which was another center of corruption, controlled by the Pendergast machine. Unfortunately, an Associated Press (AP) reporter was at the station and although the agents deny revealing who they were guarding, later that morning dozens of AP offices knew that FBI agents were taking Frank Nash by train to Kansas City’s Union Station. Nash’s wife then contacted his best friend, Verne Miller, an experienced bank robber who was living in Kansas City. Aware that the city was not safe, the local FBI office had sent two more agents and two Kansas City policemen to escort them to Leavenworth, thirty miles away. The agents were waiting when the train pulled in at 7AM on June 17 and the seven lawmen surrounded Nash as they headed to the parking lot. Unfortunately, just as they entered the car, machineguns opened up. Reed, FBI agent Ray Caffrey, and Kansas City policemen Red Grooms and Frank Hermanson, and Nash died, while agents Lackey and Smith survived by playing dead.

Outlaws like the Clyde Barrow gang were already operating and William Hamm, chairman of the Hamm Brewery in Minneapolis, had been kidnapped a few days earlier, but the Kansas City Massacre would be a call to arms for the FBI. The bureau took over the investigation even though it had no jurisdiction since killing a federal agent was not yet a federal crime. However, the Kansas City police chief wanted to avoid shining a spotlight on the entrenched corruption and said that it was a federal case. Actually, he refused to launch an investigation, which naturally raised the bureau men’s suspicions.

Unfortunately, it had happened so fast that no one knew who had fired the shots. The agents had been too busy ducking bullets to see anything and witnesses could not agree on the number of shooters or how many cars were used, never mind the identities of the gunmen. Pretty Boy Floyd was an obvious suspect since he was known to have arrived in Kansas City the night before but since Nash had helped arrange the escape of Harvey Bailey and ten other prisoners from the Kansa State Penitentiary on May 31, it seemed likely that Bailey had attempted to return the favor but the raid had backfired. Several witnesses identified Bailey and one of them, a former Kansas City deputy sheriff, had also recognized Wilbur Underhill, a bank robber who had escaped with Bailey.

Verne Miller had organized the ambush and he quickly realized that he would be hunted until he died.

The massacre focused attention on the need for a real federal police force and ensured that J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, would keep his job. However, the War on Crime was not declared the day after the massacre but twelve days later. Furthermore, it was not Hoover who declared war on crime but his boss, attorney general Homer Cummings, who wanted to build up his department. The end of Prohibition meant that all of the agents from the Prohibition Bureau were suddenly purposeless and could be assigned to the new national police force. Neither the massacre nor the Hamm kidnapping achieved national fame but Roosevelt used the War on Crime as a justification to centralize the government as part of his fight against the Depression and to win support for the New Deal.

The Bureau swung into action and quickly hired new agents to increase its manpower but it was not organized. The previously unarmed agents were issued guns and while the training was haphazard, the agents were clearly filled with energy. Nash’s fingerprints were found on a beer bottle in the house used to hold Hamm, which made agents wonder if he was involved. He wasn’t, he had just visited some old friends for a drink. Bailey actually sent the agent in charge of the investigation a letter denying that he had organized the massacre and had been robbing a bank at the time. It later turned out that the witness who had positively identified Bailey and Underhill was prone to exaggeration. By late June, Verne Miller was the key suspect and Frances Nash had been arrested but Miller’s accomplices were still unknown. The FBI had tracked down Miller’s girlfriend, Vi Mathias, who was staying with Lepke Buchalter, the head of Murder, Inc, but a lack of manpower and amateurish surveillance techniques meant that they eventually lost her in New York City.

By mid-September, the FBI had still not found the planners of the massacre and was not even sure who had actually planned the hit. Rounds fired by Bonnie and Clyde and Baby Face Nelson were checked in the lab but there were no positive matches. In the end, they found Miller’s girlfriend in late October when she began living in the same building as her best friend in Chicago. Even though the building was staked out by agents and police, when Miller arrived to see Mathias bad management allowed him to slip through the net. The failure showed that the FBI still had a lot to learn. Part of the problem was that there were no pictures of Miller, therefore they had to rely on a single agent and a secretary who had met Miller before to make the identification before the trap was sprung, so there were only a few seconds to confirm that it was him and signal the other agents who were waiting in a nearby apartment. Even then, he would have been captured but the agent in charge forgot to signal the agents watching outside the apartment building, so Miller was able to make it to his car and drive away in a hail of gunfire. Matthias was caught in the building and her friend surrendered the next day but neither of them said a word to the agents.

The FBI managed to track Miller to Al Silvers, a member of Longy Zwillman’s gang in New Jersey but before they could arrest Silvers, he was found dead, presumably because he had ignored Zwillman’s order to not help Miller, since it would attract police attention. In fact, an increasing number of FBI informants were saying that the syndicate wanted to kill Miller since he was a magnet for police attention. FBI agents interviewed Lepke Buchalter on November 28, but he refused to say whether he knew if Miller would be killed. However, Miller was found dead the next day, and he had been killed in the same manner as Silvers. Miller’s death was a huge embarrassment to the FBI and it meant that they had lost their primary lead.

Worse, when they finally captured their secondary suspect, bank robber Wilbur Underhill, in Oklahoma on December 30, he swore on his deathbed that neither he nor Harvey Bailey had been involved in the massacre, so the trail was now cold.

However, the Bureau refused to give up and continued to pursue Pretty Boy Floyd, although without any success. In fact, not a single informant was able to provide evidence that confirmed that Floyd had worked with Miller. This would change in August when a Kansas City gangster named Johnny Lazia was killed and one of the bullets turned out to have been fired by the same gun that was used in the massacre. The FBI knew that Jack Griffin had been one of Lazia’s killers but Griffin had disappeared and would most likely be killed by Lazia’s men in revenge. Fortunately, one of Griffin’s partners, Michael LaCapra, turned himself into the Kansas City Police after he barely survived an assassination attempt. Seeking protection, he told FBI agents the entire story of the massacre. Miller had asked Lazia for men to free Nash but Lazia had refused since it would attract too much attention. However, he had introduced Miller to Pretty Boy Floyd, who needed money. When Floyd was wounded in the shootout he was treated and hidden by Lazia’s men.

Unfortunately, a secondhand tale spun by a junkie in fear of his life was not exactly cast-iron evidence. Miller’s girlfriend was the only person who could support the story but almost a year in prison had not loosened her lips. Since she was to be paroled on September 18, it was arranged for her to be released at a time when there were no buses or taxis around, the guards would be pulled in and she would not be permitted to contact anyone beforehand to meet her. This would enable the FBI to basically kidnap her and put her in an apartment where she would be questioned until she broke. Even so, it took longer than expected.

Around the same time, a man claimed the reward for the arrest of Dick Galatas, who was believed to have organized the Kansas City Massacre, and he was captured on September 22. Like Mathias, he and his wife were never officially processed in the legal system, instead they were kept locked up in the apartment of the head agent in New Orleans. Living on the run had worn down Galatas and he quickly told everything he knew.

Galatas had arranged to have Nash arrested because he thought that Nash was working with Chicago gangsters to strong arm him into working for them. When Nash was arrested he helped Nash’s wife to avoid suspicion. Believing that his lack of knowledge of Floyd’s whereabouts was a lie, he was interrogated, threatened with being thrown out of a window and finally beaten but he still did not know anything. Fortunately, Mathias gave in and confirmed LaCapra’s story, so on October 10 Hoover announced that Miller, Floyd and Richette had committed the massacre.

Back to the Public Enemy Chronology

Further Reading:

Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34. Bryan Burrough, New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.

The author grew up listening to stories about Bonnie and Clyde, and decided to write the book because there was no single history of that period, partially because the FBI files had only been released in the late 1980s. His access to previously sealed FBI files means that the story is as much about the evolution of the FBI as it is about the gangsters themselves. It is a superb, one-stop look at that brief period where outlaws seemed to roam free. Ignoring the easy approach of dividing the book into several sections that focus on individual gangs, the story is told in chronological order, which might appear confusing to some readers but serves to show how interrelated the events were. Most of the gangs knew each other and their paths crossed more frequently than I would have thought, which may help to explain why the FBI was so confused in the beginning. Burrough’s attention to detail is impressive, he shows what happened to the main FBI agents, the surviving outlaws who ended up in prison, and their various girlfriends and accomplices. What is odd is that once the War on Crime was over, no one really talked about it. The agents rarely told their families, while the families of the outlaws often preferred to move forward and leave their tainted past behind them.

Share this page with others: