“Don’t shoot, I’m a federal officer,” said Frank Smith, raising his hands. There were tears in his eyes as he glanced at his old friend Otto Reed. To his left Joe Lackey moaned in pain. He’d been hit three times in the back. “Steady now, steady,” Smith said, turning to Lackey. “You’ll make it all right.” The Kansas City SAC, Reed Vetterli, ran up, helped pull Lackey from the seat, and laid him on the pavement. Smith cradled the wounded agent’s head in his arms. “I’ll be all right,” Lackey whispered. “Look after the others.”

  A crowd was gathering—businessmen in straw boaters, taxi drivers in flat caps, a farmer or two in denim overalls. Several slipped in the spreading pool of blood. A woman screamed. A wire-service reporter tiptoed through the scene, staining her white shoes red. Ambulances were on the scene within minutes, and Lackey was taken to Research Hospital; he would recover and return to duty within weeks. Vetterli, bleeding lightly from his arm wound, rushed to the FBI offices in the Federal Reserve Bank Building. He picked up the phone, called Washington, and was put through to the director.

  “It was a massacre, Mr. Hoover,” Vetterli said. “Ray Caffrey is dead. Joe Lackey may not pull through. Two Kansas City detectives and the chief of police from McAlester, Oklahoma, were killed. So was Frank Nash.” Vetterli listened a moment. “Well, I lost a good summer coat and a shirt . . . No, I didn’t go to the hospital . . . Yes, sir, I’ll go to a doctor at once.” An agent was dispatched to Ray Caffrey’s apartment to break the news to his wife.

  The remaining agents descended on the Union Station parking lot to interview witnesses. Crowds milled about through the morning, and there was no shortage of people who thought they had seen the assassins. Still, the stories that filled the agents’ notebooks were a jumble. The shooters used one car; no, two. There were two gunmen, or maybe three. Someone else saw five. The assassins were tall and thin, or short and fat, maybe swarthy, maybe not. It was a frustrating beginning to what would quickly become an exasperating investigation.

  The FBI did receive one break that morning. Down in Joplin, Dick Galatas had already returned to Hot Springs, but the remaining conspirators—Frances Nash, Deafy Farmer and his wife—panicked when they heard news of the massacre on the radio. Frances was dumbstruck. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it,” she kept saying.

  The trio did the only thing they could: they ran. By two o’clock all three had disappeared—but not without being noticed. A local woman heard something suspicious over the telephone line—a party line—and reported it to Joplin police, who raided the Farmer home at noon.g They found only a caretaker but telephoned Kansas City nevertheless. Two FBI men jumped in a car and drove to Joplin the next morning, in case someone returned.

  By lunchtime, barely five hours after the last gunshot at Union Station, Hoover was mulling who to place in charge of what was clearly the most important investigation in Bureau history.h Reed Vetterli’s men were fresh-faced College Boys; while eager, none was fit to lead a major investigation. Hoover needed the kind of agent he had so few of, a professional investigator with maturity, diplomacy, and street smarts. Ray Caffrey was the third Bureau man ever killed. Hoover decided to bring in the man who had handled the case of the first. He picked up the phone and dialed San Antonio. He was bringing in Gus Jones.i

  Jones, the San Antonio SAC since 1921, was the prototype of the dozen or so no-bullshit Cowboys Hoover employed to tutor his College Boys and work major cases. At fifty-one Jones was a creature of the old Texas frontier, stout and moonfaced, with thinning blond hair, wire-frame spectacles, and a fondness for ten-gallon hats. Born in San Angelo in 1882, he came from a family of West Texas lawmen; his father had been killed in a late-nineteenth-century skirmish with Indians. As the El Paso SAC during the World War, Jones spent much of his time trying to head off arms shipments to Pancho Villa and other Mexican revolutionaries. Transferred to San Antonio, he became one of Hoover’s best men.

  After talking with Hoover, Jones boarded a flight out of San Antonio and arrived at the Kansas City airport at 2:30 Sunday morning, seventeen hours after the massacre. Downtown, he went into conference with Vetterli and his men, and at 10:00 took two of them to meet with the Kansas City Police Department’s new chief, Eugene Reppert. Reppert, a pawn of the Pendergast machine, was already working to deflect responsibility for the massacre, telling reporters that the Nash arrest had been an FBI operation.

  “This is some mess you’ve gotten us into,” Reppert told Jones.1 Jones emphasized that the Bureau was willing to aid the police investigation any way it could, but Reppert said he had no intention of investigating the massacre. “This is a government case and not a police matter,” he said. Afterward Jones said it was the most amazing thing he had ever heard a police chief say; two of his men were dead and he wasn’t investigating. The FBI could only wonder why.

  The Bureau was on its own. No one said it aloud, but there were some among Hoover’s men who doubted they could carry off the complex investigation they now faced. The FBI had never attempted anything like it before. Gus Jones wondered what weaponless agents would do if confronted by the well-armed massacre assassins. When Hoover sent a wire demanding that he use every resource to apprehend the gunmen, Jones cabled back: “With what? Peashooters?” Suddenly, the FBI’s unofficial ban on guns was lifted. In Washington one of Hoover’s top men, Clyde Tolson, secured two machine guns to send to Kansas City.

  Returning to the FBI office, Jones convened a meeting to go over leads. Some agents thought the massacre was a gangland hit directed at Frank Nash. Jones thought it more likely that it was a rescue attempt gone awry. Several suspects had already jumped to the fore. Their two best theories, in fact, were already being debated in the Kansas City newspapers. One posited that Pretty Boy Floyd was behind the killings. After his release, Sheriff Killingsworth had given several interviews, and stories about Floyd’s arrival in Kansas City were everywhere. The problem was, of the dozens of witnesses, only one, the Traveler’s Aid lady, Lottie West, identified Floyd. In fact, Mrs. West said she had seen Floyd sitting at her desk when she arrived for work. Though her story was prominently reported, none of the agents took it seriously.

  The stronger theory rested on rumors that Nash had arranged the escape of Harvey Bailey and ten other convicts from the Kansas State Penitentiary on May 31. Jones theorized that Bailey’s group had attempted to rescue Nash and for some reason ended up killing him. This theory gained momentum when several eyewitnesses identified photographs of Bailey as one of the assassins. The best was a businessman named Samuel Link. Link said he had stepped out of his car that morning next to a Reo sedan just as a man he recognized as Bailey emerged from the Reo, knocking off Link’s hat. Link said he watched as Bailey and another man fired on the FBI car. Best of all, Link said he had been a deputy sheriff in Kansas City in 1926 and had once seen Bailey on the street. He pointed to a photo of one of Bailey’s co-escapees, a murderous Oklahoma yegg named Wilbur Underhill—the papers called him “The Tri-State Terror”—and identified him as the other assassin.

  The best witnesses should have been the three agents who survived the shooting: Vetterli, Lackey, and Frank Smith. Their stories were disappointing. From his hospital bed, Lackey said he had seen two of the shooters but couldn’t identify them; the car windows were too dirty for a clear view. Smith had seen one man he couldn’t identify, then ducked his head when the shooting began. Only Vetterli made a concrete identification of a man he said he saw wielding a submachine gun: “Big” Bob Brady, an Oklahoma bank robber who had escaped with Bailey. By Sunday night Jones had focused the Bureau’s efforts on finding Bailey and the other escapees. Wanted posters were drawn up.

  By Sunday night, thirty-six hours after the shootings, their best lead was a series of suspicious phone calls the Oklahoma City office traced from Hot Springs to Deafy Farmer’s house south of Joplin. This suggested that someone from Hot Springs had called on Farmer to rescue Nash; now agents needed to learn who Farmer had telephoned in Kansas City. Phone records were in St. Louis. Amazingly, Reed Vetterli decided to write the phone company a letter instead of just telephoning. It would take four days for the records to arrive, during which time Verne Miller and everyone else involved in the massacre conspiracy got away.

  That Saturday night, fifteen hours after the Kansas City Massacre, William Hamm’s intermediary, Billy Dunn, left St. Paul in a Ford coupe whose doors had been removed. It had been Shotgun George Ziegler’s idea to order the doors taken off; this way, no one could be hiding inside to ambush them. On the floorboard beside Dunn was a satchel containing $100,000 in cash.

  Dunn’s late-night drive followed three notes from Hamm’s kidnappers. The first had been delivered to a pharmacy near Dunn’s home: You’re so god damed [sic] smart that you’ll wind up getting both of you guys killed. Furthermore we demand that you personally deliver the money so that if there is any doble [sic] crossing we will have the pleasure of hitting you in the head.

  Saturday morning a second note was left in the car of a brewery worker. It gave instructions on how to deliver the ransom and warned Dunn to come alone: You brought the coppers into this, now you get rid of the ass-holes. The St. Paul SAC, Werner Hanni, debated whether to set a trap for the kidnappers when the ransom was delivered. The corrupt detective Tom Brown alerted the Barkers. A third ransom note was delivered to Dunn that afternoon: If you are through with the bullshit and balyhoo [sic], we’ll give you your chance. First of all, get away from the coppers.

  Just after ten o’clock that night, Dunn drove north on Highway 61. He passed the town of White Bear Lake and continued north in the darkness. Just before Pine City, about halfway to Duluth, a car roared past at a speed of over seventy miles per hour. A second car followed. Dunn slowed and watched as the two cars pulled to the side of the road. They let him pass, then pulled out and passed him again. After a few minutes, Dunn saw headlights ahead of him in the darkness. They flashed five times. It was the signal. He stopped the car and threw out the money.

  Dunn drove on to Duluth, where he had been told Hamm would be waiting at the New Duluth Hotel. He wasn’t there. Soon Dunn was joined by the kidnappers’ secret liaison, Tom Brown, and another detective. They sat all night, waiting. Hamm never showed.

  Fred Barker and George Ziegler returned to the Bensonville safe house the next morning and threw the satchel on the kitchen table. “You better round up some Hamm’s beer,” Ziegler announced. “I got a feeling that it’ll be my favorite for a long time to come.”

  The next morning at dawn, after an all-night drive back to Minnesota, Karpis left William Hamm blindfolded in a field outside the town of Wyoming. After a few minutes, Hamm took off his blindfold and trudged to a farmhouse, where he telephoned his mother in Minneapolis. By noon he was back at his mansion, standing dazed before a crowd of reporters.

  Several members of the gang also returned to the Twin Cities that morning, and if not for the intervention of Tom Brown, the Barkers’ careers would have ended that day. At the house Fred Barker was renting on Vernon Street, neighbors had noticed his strange habits and the arrival and departures of all sorts of large cars at all hours, and had taken to joking that the home’s occupants were gangsters, maybe even the Hamm kidnappers. As the gang piled out of its Buick that morning, one neighbor joked, “There goes the ransom money.”

  Not everyone was joking. One young man was suspicious enough to phone in a tip to an editor at the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The editor phoned the police who, to the Barkers’ good fortune, turned the matter over to Tom Brown. Brown slipped out of his office and phoned a friend, who alerted the Barkers. All that evening neighbors watched as the gang scurried through the house, slamming doors and tossing suitcases into their cars. When two officers arrived to check out the house the next morning, they found it empty.

  By that Monday, as the Barkers scrambled to escape St. Paul, the rest of the gang had already decamped to apartments in Chicago. There they read in amazement newspaper stories of the Kansas City Massacre. Everyone affiliated with the gang realized Verne Miller must have done it to rescue his best friend, Frank Nash.

  In the suburb of Maywood, Dock Barker’s friend Volney Davis paced his second-floor apartment all that morning. “That shooting is sure going to turn the heat on,” he told his girlfriend, Edna “Rabbits” Murray. Davis and Murray were still debating what to do around noon when they heard a car horn blaring. Murray stepped to the window. To her horror, she looked down on the blond head of Verne Miller.

  “Is Curly there?” Miller asked.

  “Yes,” Murray said.

  Davis stepped to the window. “Come downstairs for a minute,” Miller hollered.

  Murray watched as Davis walked downstairs, drove Miller’s car into a garage across the street, then handed Miller the keys to his own car. Afterward Miller came upstairs, plopping down on a divan. “I’m all in,” he said. “Had a tough time getting out of Kansas City. Got any iodine?” He had a small wound on one finger. As Murray swabbed it with iodine, Miller’s discourse grew fatalistic. “I’m the hottest man in the country,” he said. “I know I’ll hang for this. I talked to Nash’s wife the night before it happened and told her I would do all I could for Jelly. She’ll put the finger on me.”2

  The next day, Miller returned with his girlfriend, Vi Mathias. They stayed in the Davis apartment for three days, then vanished.

  With ten seconds of machine-gun fire and the deaths of five men, the Kansas City Massacre forever changed the American legal landscape. It put the FBI on a wartime footing that in coming months would transform it into the country’s first federal police force. It probably saved Hoover’s job; six weeks later, he was formally reappointed as the Bureau’s director. Most important, it led to the public declaration of an ambitious federal War on Crime that in time would thrust Hoover’s men into their first confrontations with real criminals.

  None of this happened overnight. Contrary to myth, there was no morning-after press conference in which Hoover declared war on gangsters. He took calls from reporters in his office, but his answers were limited to the massacre itself. “We will never stop until we get our men,” he told the Kansas City Star hours after the shootings, “if it takes ages to accomplish it. There will be no letup in this case.”

  In fact, the driving force behind the broader War on Crime was not Hoover but his new boss, the attorney general Homer Cummings, who had spent the spring studying the feasibility of some kind of federal drive on organized crime. The massacre gave the administration the pretext it needed to sell this idea to the public. On June 29, twelve days after the massacre, Cummings announced a series of measures that composed the new War on Crime: the hiring of a special prosecutor, Joseph Keenan; a legislative package that would, among other things, make it a federal crime to kill a federal agent; and the formation of “special squads” inside the Bureau to tackle major cases. Cummings suggested he would study the formation of a federal police force, built around the Bureau, augmented by agents from the soon-to-be disbanded Prohibition Bureau. The New York Times carried the story on Page 1.

  “Racketeering has got to a point when the government as such must take a hand and try to stamp out this underworld army,” Cummings told reporters, in the first of a series of interviews and speeches he was to give that summer. “We are now engaged in a war,” he told the Daughters of the American Revolution in August, “that threatens the safety of our country—a war with the organized forces of crime.”

  Public reaction to this new “war” was by turns encouraging and doubtful. “Defiance of law,” the Washington Post editorialized the same day, “has seldom been more flagrantly manifested than it was at Kansas City Saturday.” But government officials had called for wars against gangsters before, and many doubted whether the FBI or any other agency could make a difference. “Department of Justice officials are marvelous at finding and arresting counterfeiters,” one columnist wrote. “Perhaps they will do as well with highway murderers.”

  The call for a War on Crime wasn’t without self-interest; Cummings badly wanted a way to focus and grow his shrinking Justice Department. Nor did it create any immediate groundswell of support for federal policing; that was yet to come. In fact, national interest surrounding the FBI’s new headline cases—the Kansas City Massacre and the Hamm kidnapping—paled before that of, say, the Lindbergh kidnapping; intensive coverage was limited to Midwestern newspapers.

  But Cummings’s call dovetailed with the desires of New Dealers in Roosevelt’s cabinet, who picked up the attorney general’s cries and placed them in the context of the government’s fight to overcome the Depression. By that autumn the War on Crime would become a centerpiece of Roosevelt’s push to centralize many facets of American government. It would be a focal point of his State of the Union Address in January. Thus a little-known bureau of the Justice Department became a cutting edge of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. If Hoover and his neophyte agents could defeat “name brand” gangsters, it would be immediate and tangible evidence of the New Deal’s worth.

  It was with these issues in mind that resources were shoveled toward Hoover in the days after the massacre. Dozens of new agents were hired and hustled into training classes. Guns were purchased and for the first time the men were shown how to use them—sort of. The FBI’s firearms-training program was initially a hit-and-miss affair. Agents in New York trained at one agent’s farm, shooting at pumpkins and soda bottles, while the Cincinnati office prevailed on local police to teach its men. In Chicago the SAC simply handed out pistols and said, “Here they are, boys. Learn how to shoot ’em.”3 “We had one .32 caliber pistol in the Kansas City office,” one agent remembered. “That was it. I was told one time to get the gun and some bullets and come to a particular office. When I got there, I found out the bullets wouldn’t even fit the gun.”4