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

given by gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond just before Diamond was shot to death on December 18, 1931. Diamond had been staying in an Albany rooming house while on trial in Troy, New York, for kidnapping a driver for a rival bootlegger. The party on December 18 was to celebrate Diamond’s acquittal, but the joy lasted only until he was shot to death in the rooming house. Hess was one of those questioned in connection with the hit, though he was never charged. As for who actually killed Diamond, speculation focused on gangster Dutch Schultz, the brothers John and Francis Oley, well-known Albany area thugs (about whom more later), and even members of the Albany police department.**

Another name on the third list was Manning “Manny” Strewl, described in press accounts as a former bootlegger “whose occupation is hard to classify.”89 Strewl soon established himself as the chief negotiator between the O’Connell family and whoever was holding Butch.

As the days went by, the collective fear increased. Those who knew Butch personally worried that he might endanger himself by getting combative with his captors. He was, after all, a six-footer and weighed well over two hundred pounds, and he had played football in high school. He was not used to being pushed around.

Until the night he was taken, that is. As would be revealed later, he had been knocked into semiconsciousness, possibly drugged to further immobilize him, then put into a crate before he was transported to New York City.

On Friday, July 28, things began to move. The kidnappers had sent word that they would accept $40,000, a relative pittance compared to the original demand. Louis Snyder, a lawyer for Manny Strewl, picked up the money at the O’Connells’ home in the Catskills and drove to New York City, where he had been told that Butch would be found safe.

On Sunday, July 30, after he had been held captive for twenty-three days, Butch was set free in the Bronx. Snyder and Strewl went to New York where Strewl made several telephone calls and took various taxi rides, as instructed by the kidnappers. He was blindfolded much of the time. After he handed over the money, he was dropped off at his own car, which by prearrangement had been parked at Broadway and 220th Street in the Bronx.

And there, in Strewl’s car, sat Butch, blindfolded and gagged. Strewl freed the young man from his inconveniences and drove to pick up Snyder, who had been waiting a short distance away. Then it was on to Albany for a joyous family reunion.

Strewl quickly came under suspicion. He had seemed to wiggle his way all too easily onto the list of intermediaries who might be acceptable to the kidnappers, and then he had been chosen. Also, known samples of his handwriting resembled that in the notes sent to the family by the kidnappers.

On August 1, District Attorney John T. Delaney made a statement that seems astounding, at least by today’s standards of conduct by prosecutors. Reporters, who knew that Strewl was being interrogated, asked Delaney if Strewl would be charged. “Oh, eventually, I suppose so,” the prosecutor replied. “You can’t act as a go-between in cases like this without being charged with something. But just now he is helping and has been helping… No one has been offered any protection. If they’re in, they’re in.”90

With his seemingly casual remarks, the prosecutor had made it clear that the border between good citizens and criminals in Albany was easily crossed, if there was in fact a border.

No one who had followed the case and knew the nature of Albany was surprised when Strewl was indicted on charges of kidnapping. Others who were indicted included the thug brothers John and Francis Oley, an ex-con named Percy “Angel Face” Geary, and several others who were nowhere to be found at first. All were well known to local lawmen.

Strewl was convicted in a New York State court in March 1934 and sentenced to fifty years in prison. The Oleys and Geary remained at large, but they were not idle.

On the morning of August 21, 1934, the Oley brothers and Geary were part of a gang that held up an armored car at a Brooklyn ice house, then commandeered a boat to effect their getaway with more than $400,000. Unfortunately, a shotgun was accidentally discharged on the boat, mangling the leg of one robber so badly that he soon died despite the efforts of a shady surgeon who had been summoned to try to save him.

Francis Oley was eventually tracked to Denver, where he was arrested in 1937. He soon hanged himself in his cell. John Oley and Geary were also captured in 1937. On November 15, 1937, John Oley, Geary, and another prisoner escaped from the Onondaga County Penitentiary in Jamesville, New York, where they had been housed to await transfer to federal prison. They were soon recaptured and sent to that most dreaded of federal prisons, Alcatraz.

Oley and Strewl served some time on the island in San Francisco Bay and were probably grateful to be transferred to an easier federal prison in Atlanta. Strewl was released in 1958 and Oley the following year. But Geary adjusted so well to prison that he feared a return to the “real world,” whatever that term meant to him. He begged prison officials to let him stay, but they declined. Three days before he was to be turned loose after serving twenty years, Geary ended his life by throwing himself under a moving truck in the Atlanta prison in 1959.

John J. O’Connell Jr. lived up to the expectations of the clan’s elders, becoming Albany County Democratic chairman in 1940 at the age of thirty. He served until 1946, when he relinquished the post to his uncle, Dan O’Connell, who until his death in 1977 was the real party chieftain in the county, whether he held the formal title or not.

Butch also became vice president and general manager of the family-owned brewing company, which profited