The Kidnap Years: by David Stout (popular books of all time TXT) 📗

an Orthodox Jewish butcher and his wife. Before landing in St. Paul and becoming Hogan’s protégé, Sawyer lived in Nebraska, where he acquired the nickname “Omaha Harry” and compiled a record that included larceny, robbery, and auto theft. But he was never known to possess bomb-making skills, so people who believe that Sawyer was behind Hogan’s assassination, which remains unsolved officially, are fairly certain that he hired outside talent to install the explosives beneath Hogan’s car seat.

At the Green Lantern, Sawyer was a networker extraordinaire. If a visiting mobster confided that his gang needed a specialist—a burglar, say, or safecracker or getaway driver—Sawyer could find a candidate in no time. It might take a bit longer to find a reliable hit man, but he could do that too.

One can imagine a law-abiding citizen with a Walter Mitty complex, dropping in to the Green Lantern to quench his thirst after a routine day at his humdrum job, hoping to catch a glimpse of John Dillinger or Al Capone or the city’s own Leon Gleckman, a bootlegger so successful he was known as the “Al Capone of St. Paul.”

After a drink or two, a law-abiding citizen could go home and brag to his wife about standing at the bar near a lowlife mobster who might even be a cold-blooded killer but looked good in a double-breasted suit.

Gleckman had been kidnapped in September 1931 and held for a week in a cabin in northern Wisconsin. The price for his freedom was originally $75,000, but the kidnappers settled for just over $5,000. The main negotiator with the kidnappers was Jack Peifer, owner of the Hollyhocks, another St. Paul nightclub where crooks were more than welcome.***

We don’t know for sure if the FBI agents stationed in St. Paul ever dropped by the Green Lantern or the Hollyhocks, but they probably didn’t. They wouldn’t have gleaned much of value anyhow. The shady imbibers along the bar would have picked them out too easily.

For whatever reasons, intelligence gathering was not the FBI’s strongest suit at the time. Had Hoover and his men been better at it, they might have realized that clues to the kidnapping of William Hamm were available amid the bar chatter and the clinking of cocktail glasses at the Green Lantern and Hollyhocks.

Hamm’s sales manager, William Dunn, was reputed to be a middleman who delivered bribes to the police. Harry Sawyer knew Dunn, and Sawyer knew that Hamm (himself no stranger to mob people) followed the same routine every weekday, walking home from the brewery to have lunch at 12:45.

Regulars at the Green Lantern and Hollyhocks included members of the Barker-Karpis gang, along with other Midwestern lowlifes.

In the spring of 1933, Sawyer is believed to have approached Karpis and suggested that Hamm was an ideal kidnapping target.

The FBI ought to have learned all this earlier, but again, intelligence gathering wasn’t their strong point. And in fairness, a lot more was going on in 1933.

*The least gregarious of the brothers, Lloyd Barker was released in 1947 and married. He spent two years in the straight life as an assistant manager of a bar and grill in Denver before being shot dead by his wife in 1949.

**The Green Lantern still exists in St. Paul and boasts of its colorful past, as do many long-time restaurants and watering holes in cities where organized crime flourished.

***Five men were eventually arrested and imprisoned for the Gleckman kidnapping.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

A SHERIFF TAKEN PRISONER

Bolivar, Missouri

Friday, June 16, 1933

Sheriff Jack Killingsworth and his wife, Bernice, were early risers. It was hard for them not to be, since their living quarters were in the same building as the Polk County jail. Nor did they mind getting up at sunrise; Jack liked to make his rounds in the cool part of the day.

The weather was promising on Friday, June 16. The temperature was in the mid-sixties at dawn, so it probably wouldn’t go much above eighty during the afternoon. As they finished breakfast, Jack had a thought: maybe the couple’s two-year-old son would like to come along.

“No,” Bernice said. “Don’t wake him. Let’s just let him sleep.”59

So the sheriff, who was thirty-six, set off alone on his daily tour. It was more about socializing than looking for trouble, since few bad things happened in Bolivar, about 120 miles southeast of Kansas City and at the time a community of just over two thousand. Jack Killingsworth knew a lot of people in town. Before being elected sheriff the previous year, he had been a salesman at Bitzer Chevrolet on the corner of Broadway and Missouri Avenue.

Of course, Jack Killingsworth liked cars, and he liked the people at Bitzer Chevy, so he usually started his patrol, if it could be called that, by hanging out there.

Just after 7:00 a.m., Killingsworth parked his car next to the Chevy dealership and walked into the garage section. Right away, he saw proprietor Ernest Bitzer sitting on a bench, talking to another man and looking very nervous. Several mechanics in coveralls were standing against a wall, also looking ill at ease.

Before Killingsworth could say hello, a man shouted, “There’s the law!”

The sheriff recognized the man. He was Adam Richetti, a Bolivar native in his midtwenties who had moved away to embark on a career as a gunman and bank robber.

When the sheriff saw the face of the man sitting next to Ernest Bitzer, he was stunned. It was Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, whose image had been on wanted posters all over the Midwest. The cherubic, apple-cheeked features were misleading, for the twenty-nine-year-old Floyd was one of the most notorious killers and bandits in the country. Born in Georgia, raised in poverty on a farm in Oklahoma, he had turned early to crime. By the early 1930s, he was a celebrated bank robber, even seen as a hero by some Americans. There were stories, likely apocryphal, that he sometimes burned the mortgage documents in banks that he robbed, thus offering relief to debt-strained homeowners.

It took only a couple of