Could probably identify which one was urschel by emptying their wallets. So they stopped the car, get the wallet, take all of the money and give him ten bucks to get back to town and they take off. They take him out to a farm owned in west county texas just outside of dallas on by catherine kelleys fatherinlaw my guy known around town is bob. Its sort of a sad, broken down farm with a few animals where he lives with his wife and son and sons wife. So they stick urschel and they blindfold him, they use they keep him blindfolded for the entire ride. And for the next eight days he is basically blind and deaf and chained to a high chair actually or bed frame at various times of the day. But nevertheless, he is the kind of guy who does not part with his money very willingly. So, urschel, who grew up on a farm, in the midwest, realizes of course he is on a farm, begins counting the number of different animals, finds out how many there are, how many milking cows there are, all kinds of information on the farm itself. He walks the room he is held in at various times. He collects information from the people who are holding him about what other buildings are around, how big the farm is, what the postmans name is, who the local prostitute is, and while hes doing all this, over the course of eight days, he realizes at 9 30 the morning and 5 30 at night, plane is passing over head. So he puts all that in the data bank while he is leaving hi fingerprints anywhere he can in the meantime, his wife has collected the money nor ransom for thesome and paid it off. And so at the point theyre about to release urschel, Kathryn Kelly, who is really at the tougher of the two characters, insists they have to kill him. And george, of course, is saying, no, we cant, we cant kill him. I we kill him, theyll come after him with the u. S. Marines and hell never get air and wont be able to kidnap anybody else because our threats will be empty. The plan was to kidnap five more people, rap so many them for 200,000, to the to an of about eight to ten million in contemporary dollars, and retire as millionaires in juarez, mexico. Everybody has their dreams, right . So, that plan is eventually thwarted and they do release urschel, who returns to his home in oklahoma city, which by then, of course, i surrounded by hoarded of press from around the world, and Motion Picture cameras fro the news reels, photographers and various members of the bureau of investigation, j. Edgar hoovers group, as well as some local police. Urschel comes in and immediately debriefed by fbi agent known as gus jones, who listens to the data dump and having started out telling him that finding these kidnappers would be like finding a need until a haystack. After 90 minute he said we just got a really small haystack. So, consequently, urschel borrows a plane from an ol pepperdine. They go up in the air. They fly the route that the airline that they have identified had flown. They look down, using urschels sketch of what he thinks the farm looks like. The identify a farm that looks exactly like the drawing. They put together a Raiding Party. Urschel insists he be in lead car, the Raiding Party with a sawedoff shot gun on his lap and in the middle of the night the burst in, and they arrest the shannons, and a fellow name hari Harvey Bailey who was saying at the farm, hiding out of his escape from state prison in kansas. Harvey bailey is an incredible character in this book that im just so fortunate to stumble into the story. Harvey bailey walling considered the most Successful Bank robber in American History. The inrented she modern form of bankrobbing which involves a lot of careful planning, determining what the best escape routes are, riding the escape routes, having multiple backup plans, figuring out when theres the most money in the bank to be robbed by studying the local economy and the county tax records. What the Police Activity is like. How far away the Police Station is, what kind of cars the police have, if they have any. And basically if harvey was planning your bank robbery, it was going to go well and nobody would know who did it. Part of his m. O. Was the fact he would never, ever admit to having robbed a bank or try to take credit for anything. As a result, he successfully robbed the denver mint, he robbed the Lincoln National bank, of so much money that the bank failed the next day. The did so well in the 20s that by the late 20s he retired from the bankrobbing business and opened a series of gas stations stations and car wn chicago. But lost all his money in the market crash and had to go back to the business that he knew so well. So, he had worked with george kelly on a number of bank jobs, and in fact had lent george 1,000 when george was low on funds. So after the he heard about the kidnapping he went to the farm to collect the money that george owed him, and to nurse a wound he sustained when he was escaping from prison. He just happens to be sleeping in the backyard on a cot when gus jones and urschel arrive with their squadron of Law Enforcement. So, even though george and kathryn had already fled the scene, along with albert bates. Theyd gone off to st. Paul to launder their money. The fbi agents still score an important victory here by pulling in harvey bailee. Who is not only a bank robber but an escaped prisoner. So, the raid is considered a huge success. And it arrives just in time for j. Edgar hoover, who in 1933 was not yet director of the fbi. In fact he was barely holding on to his job. He had been the bureau of investigation, as it was called then, had been given the job of solving the lindbergh kidnapping, and they had bun a fairly miserable job and made almost no progress in the 18 months since it happened. When fdr took office, his first choice for attorney general was a guy named thomas walsh, senator from wyoming. Walsh had a bad history with hoover. During the Harding Administration hoover and the bureau had been instructed to besmirch both walsh and his fellow senator, wheeler, from wyoming. These two were trying to launch an investigation of the Harding Administration, and uncover some of the scandals that later evolved are but j. Edgar hoovers job was to well you know, he tapped his phone and read his mail and tried to entrap him in a hotel room with a woman to get incriminating evidence on him. None of which succeeded but did succeed in making a lifelong enemy or mr. Walsh, who was announced by fdr as his first choice for attorney general, and after that announcement, walsh vowed to get rid of that miserable son of a bitch, j. Edgar hoover, as soon as he got to town. Unfortunately walsh was 72 years old and before he got to up to, he wont to miami and married a cuban deb pew tenant, and debutant, and on the train ride from washington, when train stopped in north carolina, walshs wife woke up but he did not. So subsequently, the next attorney general, a guy named homer cummings, who was one of fdrs brain trust, who was originally slated to be ambassador to the philippines, but cummings takes over the justice department, and hi is one of fdrs real gogetters and figures the way he can raise the profile of the justice department, which was held in fairly low repute at the time, referred to the department of easy virtue. He decided he is going to ship this place up and go and prosecute a war on crime. Fdr was prosecuting a war on this, war on this, war on everything and really like the militaristic sound of that and wanted to use the fbi to break up basically this criminal alley and anything else he could do. So, j. Edgar is nature lot of pressure at this time to bring in some big score, and it looks like the Machine Gun Kelly case could be the one. Theres charles, the other leading character to in the story. Charles was a farm kid, grew up, enlisted in the army during the first world war, and when he got out, was bound and determined that the last thing he was going to do any more of was farming. Just too hard work and didnt really pay off as well as he was hoping so he strikes out for oklahoma, and decides to try to make his fortune in the oil business. He has real head for numbers, and a great memory as you well know, and he hooks up with tom slick, the aptly named tom slick, who rapidly becomes the king of the wildcatters and they make fortunes together. Unfortunately, right at the peak of their oil business, tom slick, at age 47, kind of your classic type are a behavior guy, has a massive heart attack and dies. Charles then marries his widow, forming the urschelslick oil company, which is even bigger than the tom slick company, and of course that generates a lot of headlines in the paper about how rich these folks are, and what their oil holdings entail. All of this was the interesting reading that got Kathryn Kelly thinking about kidnapping charles urschel. So,undershell and slick, who urschel and slick, who had no great love of the press before the kidnapping because they were always talking about their Business Affairs and their oil finds, suddenly has even more reason to despise them. So, charles goes into an alliance with j. Edgar hoover. Theres the home where the kidnapping occurs. And hoover then prosecutes a nationwide search for kathryn and george. The fbi had just been given the sole responsibility for chasing kidnappers across state lines. And so they were really the only organization that could bring this to fruition, but the were two problems they still had. One was the fact they were not an armed police force. They were not trained in weapons. Most of them were lawyers and accountants who would help local municipalities prosecutor criminal investigations. So hoover looked around his agencies across the country to try to find people who would be skilled enough to go up against machine gunners and shotgun wielders, bank robberrers and murders and discovers he has fewer than 12 out of the force of 33 of 336. So he puts the investigation in order and its run by gus jones, who worked in texas, kind of a legendary lawman, and this is a document produced by the bureau after the successful prosecution of the case, which they used to further demonstrate their need for expanded powers. You can see all of the cities where they suspected the kellies might be and where they tracked them. In fact they had been in most of those places other than the ones on the west coast. One of the things they did was try to closed to the borders bought they thought they would leave one way or another. Not a bad assumption. This is another document produced by the fbi which just sort of mapped out the most prominent members of society who had been kidnapped. This is the famous Melvin Purvis, the special agent in charge of the chicago office, purvis is the agent who captured and killed john dill Len Jerry Dylan jerry, bringing the but he let kelly slip through his fingers in chicago. The fbi discovered deli wassing would a place called the michigan tank as his address and a place where would would go and hang out and enjoy special protection from the police, and he assigned purvis to stake out the michigan tavern and try to snatch him. But literally purvis just forgot to do it. By the time he remembered, he sent two agent outside but they never went inside, and on that very day, kelly was inside arranging to get a new automobile to escape to memphis, tennessee in, this disnot make the director happy, and you may be aware that Melvin Purvis left the agency a few years after all of these great events were occurring. So, ultimately, they chase after about six to seven weeks on the road, they found kelly in memphis, tennessee, and successfully arrest him. There he is walking out of the courthouse in chains. Guarded by machine gunners. The fbi now acquired quite an arsenal, and they deployed them prominently during the trial and afterwards. The interesting thing about memphis is that kelly started out in memphis, tennessee. He was a child of upper middle class parents, a cady at the local country club, a pretty smart kid. But he did not enjoy very Good Relationship with his father, whom he hated. And when he caught his father in a tryst with another woman, he basically blackmailed him and said, i wont tell mom about this this is when he is in high school if you give me the family car and increase my allowance by x amount of money, which kelly then used his new transportation and his money to hop across the border to arkansas, which was a wet state, tennessee was try, and he started his liquorrunning business as a young entrepreneur in high school. And things basically went downhill from there. Here is kathryn and george in federal court. Look a little bloated from seven weeks on the road, when they were going through three or four gin bottles a day, and kelly has already been pistolwhipped by the fbi, right in the courtroom in view of all of the spectators. When he attempted to defend cath r. I. P. From what he thought was an advance by an fbi agent. You can maybe see the knot on his forehead there. From one of the wound he sustained. And this is alcatraz where he ended up. Homer cummings and j. Edgar hoover had a special contempt for the federal prison system, which they thought was too fluid, to easy to escape from. Two corrupted, too coddling of prisoners, whatever. And so they wanted to create a prison that nobody could escape from, that only the worst of the worst would be sent to, and there would be no attempt at rehabilitation, that would be solely for confinement. Be cut off from the outside world, wouldnt be allowed to talk to one another. The result was it was just a new special kind of hell for these 103 prisoners they deemed to be the worst in the nation, people like al capone, various midwestern murderers and thieves. So george kelly ends up in the introductory class going to alcatraz prison, where he lives out most of the rest of his life. Kathryn kelly was sent to a womens prison, got out in the late 50s, Harvey Bailey ended up with george on alcatraz. He is later released into state prison, and charles by that point had sort of softened on the whole affair, and he went to fdr and hoover and said, look, Harvey Bailey had nothing to do with this kidnapping. We august to let him out. So he afros to probation for harvey and sets him up in joplin, missouri, with a job as a cabinetmaker and gets him a room at the ymca where he lived out the rest of his life without committing another crime. The urschels end up intact, fairly rattled. They spent the rest of their lives as running their oil business. Set up a number of foundations, Biochemical Research foundation in texas, which is quite famous. But they didnt really feel all that comfortable in texas in the wild west anymore, spent a lot of time travel through europe, collecting art, and lived happily ever after, but part of what charles experienced made him detest publicity of any kind, and so he instructed the rest of his family, and anybody that would listen to him, that you should never get any publicity whatsoever, no matter what you have done no matter how proud you are of it. You should remain as concealed as possible. Otherwise bad things will happen to you. And that attitude was not only passed on to his children, but to his grandchildren as well, and to the grandchildren of everybody involved in this case, even to the point where when i got around to finding them and trying to talk to them, they were very circumspect, and the only way i think that i got any kind of cooperation whatsoever from them was because of the same last name and the fact that at in point we were probably related, and charles granddaughter lives in texas probably shouldnt tell you that was especially helpful ultimately, and we enjoyed some good chats and emails together, and she shared with me most of the things she collected about the case. The other interesting thing about this particular case and j. Edgar hoover, was that while hoover was maybe not the best lawman, in the country at the time, he tide did understand Public Relations and publicity. And he was just beside himself with hollywood because hollywood at the time was glamorizing gangsters. In 1930 the number one movie in the 1933 was scar face. Starring james cagney about a character based on al al capone. Almost said al pacino. So hoover knew if he was going to be successful with his agents as a Law Enforcement agency, the was going to have to create them as heroes. He didnt want the gangsters to be the heroes anymore. The wanted his agents to be the heroes and went to james cagney and complained and said, you ought to star in something that makes a hero out of the Law Enforcement officers. And basically at the time there was a big kind of public revulsion at these gangster movies that were growing increasingly violent, if you can believe that, and so the hollywood fearing that there would be some kind of censorship imposed by the government, creates their own kind of rating system, and one of the things that they outlaw is gangster movies. They try to get the entire industry not to produce them. But hoover manages to get one caveat put into the code, and that is that if youre going to make a gangster movie, you have to have an fbi agent in it. And if youre going have to an fbi nath your move, j. Edgar hoover has to approve the script. So in 1935, gmen comes out with james cagney as a fbi agent who solves a kidnapping, and there are tree there are three or four movies roo after that willing the them sea narrow and the same fbi hero in it. Nevertheless, this hoover did many more things, of course. He had his on publicist inhouse, guys writing magazine stories about famous cases. He was just a master at manipulating the message. Unfortunately, george kelly didnt have such a Publicity Department on his behalf, and the stories that hoover put out about kelly took hold. Base which basically, hooverd to make Machine Gun Kelly that his achievement in casting him and prosecuting him would seem all the greater. And so he spread and part of it is still in the fbi lore, on the web site. You can read about it. One of the stories he spread was that when they finally coronerred Machine Gun Kelly in memphis, he dropped his weapon and c