'Nappers at the Bar

In a crowded Federal courtroom in Oklahoma City one day last week, middle- aged Charles Frederick Urschel climbed down from the witness stand, strode over to a row of prisoners. He stopped in front of a strapping, humped-nosed fellow named Albert Bates. "That's one of the men who kidnapped me," said he.

"They told me I was not to hear or see anything and that if I did, I'd never go home, they'd kill me," he continued. "They had some chains in the car and mentioned giving me a hypodermic. The tape over my eyes was very effective. I lost all sense of direction. . . .

"Finally we drove into a garage. . . . They said we had arrived. They took me into the house. . . . My ears were stuffed with cotton and I still was blindfolded but I was not handcuffed. ... I slept on the bed, chained to it. I was released every morning. During the day I lay on the floor guarded and blindfolded."

"Was the blindfold ever changed?" asked the prosecutor.

"Yes, daily until Friday, but from then until Monday after Bates and Kelly left it was not changed."

"After Friday who guarded you?"

"Boss Shannon."

The courtroom stirred with tense excitement as Witness Urschel identified the chain and battered tin cup which definitely established his hideout as the gangster-ridden Texas farm of R. G. ("Boss") Shannon. In the most graphic and sensational trial Oklahoma had seen in years, twelve defendants were charged with conspiracy to kidnap the wealthy oil man. whose family had paid about $200,000 for his release last July. Besides Bates there were seven alleged money-passers from St. Paul and Minneapolis, Farmer Shannon, his wife and son, and most notorious of all, Harvey J. Bailey. The law was taking no chances with this desperado. The courtroom bristled with armed men. Every spectator, every lawyer was searched before entering. Even the judge had a bodyguard. It was Harvey J. Bailey who had engineered the Memorial Day break from the Kansas State Penitentiary. It was allegedly Harvey J. Bailey who poured a volley of machine gun bullets into four peace officers and their prisoner in front of Kansas City's Union Station last June. It was Harvey J. Bailey who was captured in his sleep, pistols and machine guns by his side, at the Shannon farm shortly after Urschel's release. It was Harvey J. Bailey who escaped from the Dallas jail last Labor Day after forcing his way out with a mysteriously acquired pistol and kidnapping one of his guards. Only by the sheerest luck had the police been able to recapture him the same day at Ardmore, Okla. And it was Bailey's fugitive partner, George ("Machine Gun") Kelly who last week threatened the life of Urschel and other witnesses if they testified at the trial. It was doubtless Kelly who threatened also to kidnap Peggy Ann, daughter of Governor Alf M. Landon of Kansas unless he pardoned some Bailey gangsters now in Kansas Penitentiary. And Kelly was even linked to last week's robbery of the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank which resulted in the murder of a policeman.

Bailey sat almost motionless in the courtroom as witness after witness identified the kidnappers and pointed to him as an associate. Notable in the evidence against him were statements of the Shannons declaring that while it was Bates and Kelly who had brought Urschel to their farm, Bailey had been there too.

Near him sat Special Assistant Attorney General Joseph Berry Keenan, a familiar figure at recent kidnapping trials. Spear head of the Federal Government's antikidnapping drive, he was on hand to press this first test of the "Lindbergh law," which makes it a Federal offense to conduct kidnapping operations across State lines. Stocky, hooknosed, hard-boiled Attorney Keenan used to prosecute crooks and gangsters in Cleveland, knows their tricks. Before the Urschel trial began he announced that it would be a good idea to put Bailey in a portable iron cage. "That's my idea of the only way to keep that boy safe," he declared. "I would bring him into the courtroom in the cage and set it down at the counsel table. If he wanted to take the stand the cage could be moved to the witness platform."

The Bailey defense lawyers would be arrested, he said, if they were found accepting part of the unrecovered Urschel ransom money in payment for their services. Unimpressed by the grandstand tactics of U. S. desperados, Attorney Keenan declared early in the trial: "Some call Harvey Bailey our 'public enemy No. 1.' I don't. In my opinion Bailey is just a rat--typically cowardly--a man who has never hesitated to use a machine gun against an unarmed opponent. And Kelly? There is nothing romantic about him-- just another rat who has had a lot of luck." Nonetheless Attorney Keenan took the precaution of keeping "rats" out of his Washington home last week by throwing a guard around it. While Prosecutor Herbert K. Hyde was building his chain of evidence around the prisoners, a grey-haired old lady sat in her cottage parlor at Green City, Mo. She was Mrs. Amanda E. Bailey, widow of a Civil War Federal infantry captain, mother of Harvey Bailey. "He never planned the Urschel kidnapping," she told newshawks. "He couldn't have done the things they charge him with. A better boy was never born. . . ." Two other notorious kidnapping cases were well on their way toward solution last week: In an Edwardsville, Ill. courtroom five men and one woman were identified by aged Banker August Luer as the ones who kidnapped him from his Alton home last July, held him captive in a dank cellar. After a heated legal skirmish with the jury excluded from the room, the prosecutor secured permission to introduce as evidence the confessions of the accused.

In New York City, and Mt. Kisco, N. Y. police rounded up five gunmen and two women as suspects in the kidnapping of John J. ("Butch") O'Connell, seized at his Albany home three months ago and held for $40,000 ransom. In the flat where three of them were caught was a pair of handcuffs, some adhesive tape and gauze, two pairs of goggles--all of which O'Connell thought he recognized. He could not identify the prisoners but thought that two of them were the ones who had pushed him into a car on the night of the abduction. Meanwhile police were gathering evidence which linked the gang with four bank robberies, five murders.

An amateurish plot to kidnap Mrs. John K. Dougherty, 22, niece of Morgan Partner Russell Cornell Leffingwell, was foiled last week in Yonkers, N. Y. by Federal and local police. They arrested a trained nurse who allegedly confessed that she and her partner, a former gasoline station manager, had mailed five crudely-written letters threatening to abduct Mrs. Dougherty and blow up her father's home unless they received $10,000. The money was to have been left behind a billboard. When the police surrounded the spot they found the nurse clutching a loaf of bread which was split down the middle to form a pocket for the folded bills. Apparently the kidnappers had not known that Mrs. Dougherty, quietly married fortnight ago, was away on her honeymoon.

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