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

But former New York Governor Alfred E. Smith, who also spoke at the dinner, was less alarmed. The people in power in Berlin were so thuggish as to invite ridicule, he said, and “it is impossible for them to survive any length of time under ridicule.”

Around that time half a world away, events in Japan seemed to portend an era of peace with the United States—or at least that was the opinion expressed in an interview in New York City with Count M. Soyeshima, described as “an outstanding Japanese liberal” who was an insurance executive in private life and was intimately familiar with the workings of his country’s government. He declared that war between the United States and Japan was “unthinkable and impossible” and predicted that the Japanese army’s influence in Tokyo would soon fade.107

Surely Arthur Koehler, the man who loved trees, had reason to feel blessed. On Thanksgiving Eve, as he stood in a lumberyard, he learned that his tireless work over many months had traced the wood used by the Lindbergh kidnapper from a South Carolina sawmill all the way to the Bronx.

And Chicago tough guy Roger Touhy and his lawyers could give thanks, at least for the moment. During a three-week trial, the basic weakness of the government’s case against Touhy for the kidnapping of William Hamm became obvious. The several reliable witnesses that prosecutors had promised to produce turned out not to be so reliable.

Worst of all for the prosecutors, Hamm acknowledged on the witness stand, as he had earlier, that he wasn’t really sure he could identify the men who had abducted him.

On Tuesday, November 28, the jurors deliberated several hours before acquitting the defendants. Afterward, some jurors made it clear that they considered the defendants to be unsavory characters, but that Hamm’s shaky identification of his kidnappers was a fatal flaw in the government’s case. “That, to my mind, was the climax of the case, even though it happened on the first day of the trial, when Mr. Hamm was on the stand,” one juror said.108

“I think most of us would have preferred to have found them guilty,” the jury foreman, T.O. Sundry, told reporters, “but we couldn’t do it on the evidence the government placed before us.”

The chief prosecutor, Joseph B. Keenan, who was in charge of Washington’s war on racketeering in general and kidnapping in particular, was less than gracious in reacting to the federal government’s first defeat in cases tried under the Lindbergh Law. “If a jury of citizens decides to turn these men loose upon the community, there is nothing we can do about it,” he said, asserting that the Justice Department was still convinced the defendants were guilty.109

But perhaps not everyone in the DOJ was convinced. On its website today, the FBI proudly recalls how it eventually solved the Hamm kidnapping. “Using a then state-of-the-art technology now called latent fingerprint identification, the FBI Laboratory raised incriminating fingerprints from surfaces that couldn’t be dusted for prints. Alvin Karpis, ‘Doc’ Barker, Charles Fitzgerald [another gang member], and the other members of the gang had gotten away, but they’d left their fingerprints behind—all over the ransom notes… The silver nitrate method and its application in the Hamm kidnapping was the first time it was used successfully to extract latent prints from forensic evidence,” the bureau declares with pride, explaining how the silver nitrate solution reacted with leftover perspiration to form silver chloride and thus made the prints visible.**110 “There they were: hard evidence that the Karpis gang was behind the kidnapping.”

What a stellar example of the scientific approach to law enforcement that the FBI was pioneering and promoting!

But wait. The FBI says the prints were lifted on September 6, 1933. If so, Hoover and the lab officials knew two months before Touhy and his pals even went on trial that they had nothing to do with the Hamm kidnapping. Yet Keenan, the prosecutor, seems not to have known about the lab’s finding, or why would he have said afterward that the Justice Department was still convinced Touhy and his associates were guilty?

If the FBI website is correct that the fingerprints of William Hamm’s kidnappers were lifted on September 6, 1933, then Hoover and his top aides withheld that all-important information from prosecutors and let a trial proceed, knowing all the while that the defendants were not guilty.

But there was more. On May 6, 1935, more than a year and a half after the fingerprint discovery, the Chicago Tribune carried a brief report noting that $65,000 of the ransom in the Hamm case had been found in the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank, having flowed there from various cities, including Chicago, Cleveland, and Toledo, Ohio. The finding, the Tribune said, was “new evidence pointing to the Barker-Karpis gang as the kidnappers of William Hamm.”111 Remarkably, at least in my opinion, the newspaper did not bother to point out that the finding was further evidence, if any was needed, that Roger Touhy and his bunch had had nothing to do with kidnapping Hamm.

All this suggests that Hoover and a select few in the FBI concealed for many months their knowledge that the Karpis-Barker bunch were the real culprits in the Hamm case. But why the secrecy? If Hoover hid the knowledge so as not to tip off the Karpis-Barker gang that the FBI was on to them, Touhy and his associates still should not have been subjected to a trial. Again, the suspicion arises that Hoover just thought Touhy et al. belonged behind bars for…something.

Would the director have been so ruthless? Knowing what has been revealed about him since the 1930s—how he rewarded sycophants and rooted out critics, how he tried to crush people he perceived as his enemies—we can only conclude that he would have done almost anything to cling to power.

By this time, Hoover had established the FBI as his own fiefdom, answerable only in theory to the heads of the Justice Department. The attorney general