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And we return to Our American Stories. Up next, the story of how one of America's most notorious criminals was caught. because of one savvy oil man from Oklahoma. Here to tell the story of how Machine Gun Kelly was captured is Joe Urshel, author of The Year of Fear and later, as you'll hear, Dr. T.
Lindsay Baker, author of A Gangster Tour of Texas. and numerous other books. Let's get into the story. Here's Joe Urshel to start us off. The story takes place in 1933.
The unemployment rate was up to 40%. Thousands of banks were closed. Catastrophic dust storms were beginning to kick up across the Southwest and the Midwest. They blow so hard and so strong with so much fine silt that the people who lived in that area would have to do things like drape their child's beds and carriages with wet sheets just to prevent the silt from coming in and choking them to death. It would blow so far that it would turn snow red in New England.
kill livestock in the fields. While all this is going on, of course. FDR takes office. And announces that the only thing we have to fear is. We love it.
At the very same time, an incredible spate of kidnappings began occurring across the country. With the banks drying up, the bank robbing business isn't as good as it used to be. And an estimated 2,000 kidnappings occurred between 1930 and 1933. Mm-hmm. Companies were issuing kidnapping insurance.
People in Hollywood were driving around in armor-plated limousines with armed guards in the passenger seat. They would snatch a wealthy individual, ransom them, and then release them with the caveat that everything would be fine unless they go to the authorities. If they do go to the authorities, we'll return and kill you, not only you, but all the members of your family as well.
So these are tough times in the U.S. with tougher times coming. In the midst of this George Kelly and his glamorous wife decide that they are going to kidnap the richest oil man in the southwest. It's hot summertime. Charles F.
Urshel and his wife. We're playing bridge with friends Walter R. Jarrett and his wife on the screen porch. of the Urshall Home. in Oklahoma City.
And with An almost remarkable lack of planning. Out of the darkness appeared. two armed men. Stick them up. We want our show.
Kelly, armed with a machine gun, and his partner Albert Bates, armed with a Borty 5, burst into the Urshel home. run up to the bridge game and suddenly discover that they don't know which of the two guys is Urshel.
So making all kinds of threats, they demand that Urshel reveal himself, which he doesn't do. He just sits there.
So does Walter.
So Kelly says, We'll take you both. and they speed off into the night. A couple miles out of town. they realized that they could probably identify which one was Urshel by emptying their wallets. Uh So they stop the car, they get the wallets, take all the money, they give them 10 bucks to get a cab back to town, and they take off with Ursham.
Herschel. was no ordinary businessman. Farm kid grew up, enlisted in the Army during the First World War. When he got out, he was bound to determine that the last thing he was going to do any more of was farming.
So he strikes out for Oklahoma and decides to try to make his fortune in the oil business. He hooks up with the aptly named Tom Slick, the King of the Wildcatters. Unfortunately, right at the peak of their oil business. Tom Slick. Age forty-seven.
kind of your classic type A behavior guy, has a massive heart attack and dies. Herschel continued ruining his empire and in time married Slick's widow. Bear in these Urshel's own why. was Berenice's sister.
So he ended up being the husband of two sisters. And of course that generates a lot of headlines in the paper about how rich these folks are. and what their oil holdings entail. All of this was the interesting reading that got Kelly thinking about kidnapping Charles Urshel. The two hoodlumps were no ordinary thugs either.
Kelly started out in Memphis, Tennessee. He was the child of Upper-middle-class parents. He was a caddie at the local country club, pretty smart kid. In fact, he's not known to have killed anybody. He didn't like machine guns.
He was kind of afraid of them. He was one of these charming, hail fellow, well-met Irishmen. but he did not enjoy a very good relationship with his father, whom he hated. and when he caught his father in a tryst with another woman, basically blackmailed him and said, I won't tell mom about this. This is when he's in high school.
If you give me the family car, And increase my allowance by X amount of money. Which Kelly then used his new transportation and his money to hop across the border to Arkansas, which was a wet state, Tennessee was dry. And that's when he started his liquor running business. as a young entrepreneur in high school. And things basically went Downhill from there.
But that wasn't good enough for Catherine. Catherine wanted to be married to the most. Famous criminal in all of America.
So she started working on his reputation. She buys him a machine gun at a pawn shop in Fort Worth, then starts spreading stories about him at speakeasies all over Fort Worth. And she would leave spent shells behind and say that, you know. We've been down to the farm and George has been working on his skills and he can shoot walnuts off a fence post or write his name on the side of a barn with this gun. And then that got into the press and one thing led to another and suddenly we have this psychopathic machine gun Kelly.
Their destination? The farm owned by the stepfather of George Kelly's wife. It's a sad broken down farm with a few animals. They cover his ears with cotton and tape them shut. There, they held Ursul captive for nine days.
The motive? Lots of money. $200,000 in used $20 bills. $200,000 was a huge sum of money. You could buy a brand new Ford V8 automobile for $500.
But nevertheless, he's the kind of guy who does not part with his money very willingly. He is blind and deaf and found and determined that if he ever gets out, he's going to come back and find these guys and get his money back. Urshel's friend made the money delivery in Kansas City on Sunday, July 30th, 1933. eight days after the abduction. The next evening, a disheveled man approached the back door of the Urshall Mansion.
It was the missing Charles F. Ursul. who had been carried to the outskirts of Norman, just south of Oklahoma City. and was a left at the side of the road. Can I Bates and their accomplices.
congratulated themselves. on what they believed had been a perfect Crane. What Kenny and the others did not realize was Was that Charles F. Ursul? was not just a financial Machine, yes.
He had what today might be called a photographic Memory. And you've been listening to Dr. T. Lindsey Baker and Joe Urshel. Tell the story.
of the kidnapping of one of the richest oilmen in the country. and by virtue of that tell the story of Machine Gun Kelly. The story of Machine Gun Kelly and the Southwest Oil Man. continues here on Our American Stories. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously.
On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high-free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the SP 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks.
Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com/slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com/slash podcast. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC.
Advisory Services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. Craving bold, authentic taste without kitchen chaos?
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In our instant world, we've made Jesus a life coach, a therapist, a political ally. The Missing Messiah, a new book by Kyle Eidelman and Mark Moore, helps us understand how Western culture has gradually reshaped Jesus into our image and recognize the difference between a personalized savior and revolutionary king. If you believe there's a more dangerous, more majestic Messiah than the one you've inherited, visit missingmessiah.com to learn more today. Hi, everyone. This is Mariah Rose, co-host of Full Circle and the creator behind Hoops for Audis.
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Let's return to this story. Here to start us off is Dr. T. Lindsey Baker. Urshel was not just A financial genius.
He had what today might be called a photographic Memory. He knows how long the car ride took. He also realizes that they were going in a circuitous route designed to confuse him. But this is a guy who's been working his whole career for the King of the Wildcatters. He and Ursul have been finding oil all over Oklahoma and Texas, and they know just about every inch of that territory, backward and forward.
And realizes, of course, that he's on a farm. He begins counting the number of different animals. A bull, four milk cows, a flock of guineas. What the postman's name is, who the local prostitute is. Most importantly, he noted hearing the regular drone of an airplane.
He realizes that at 9:30 in the morning and at 5:30 at night, a plane is passing overhead.
So he puts all that in the data bank while he's leaving his fingerprints all over anywhere he possibly can. The very evening that the fatigued and careworn Charles Urshel stumbled to his own back door, Special Agent Gus Jones plied him. with questions. The federal lawman must have smiled to himself when he discovered the remarkable recall. that the oil man offered.
Just Urshall's observation that he heard the kidnapper's car rattle across the bumpy Canadian River Bridge, plus his estimate of the eight-hour driving time during his release. pointed southward. toward Texas. Gus Jones just listens to this data dump, and having started out telling him that finding these kidnappers would be like finding a needle in a haystack. After 90 minutes of talking to Charles, he said, well, we just got a really small haystack.
Jones assigned investigators to find out what localities to the south. experienced the same sequence of rain and wind that Ursul remembered. and to check commercial airline schedules. They quickly concluded that the airplane sound likely came from a daily American Airlines flight between Meacham Field and Fort Worth. Enamarino.
Urshel borrows a plane from one of his oil friends. They go up in the air, fly the route. They look down using Urshel's sketch of what he thinks the farm looks like. identify a farm that looks exactly like the drawing. Jones dispatched agent Edward Dowd.
The investigator arrived there only three days after Urshel's release. visiting in the guise of a mortgage salesman. Dowd confirmed what the oil man remembered. The house had a broken window pane. patched with cardboard.
The fourboards ran the right directions. He saw the correct number of cattle, mules, and even guineas. When the agent asked for a drink of water on the hot summer day, the pummy at the well made the right squeak. and the water had the same mineralized taste that Ursula. described.
There was no question in the lawman's mind. Herschel insists that he be in the lead car, the raiding party, with a saw-off shotgun on his lap. And in the middle of the night, they burst in. They arrest the Shannons. and a fellow named Harvey Bailey, who was staying at the farm, kind of hiding out after his escape from state prison in Kansas.
Harvey Bailey An incredible character, Bailey was considered the most successful bank robber in American history. He was a guy who basically invented the modern form of bank robbing, which involves determining what the best escape routes are, riding the escape routes, figuring out when there's the most money in the bank to be robbed by studying the local economy and the county tax records. What the police activity is like, how far away the police station is, what kind of cars the police have, if they have any. Basically, if Harvey was planning your bank robbery, it was going to go well and nobody was going to know who did it. He robbed the Lincoln National Bank of so much money that the bank failed the next day.
He did so well in the 20s that by the late 20s, he retired from the bank robbing business and opened a series of gas stations and car washes in Chicago. but lost all his money in the market crash and had to go back to the business that he knew so well.
So he had worked with George and in fact had lent George $1,000 when George was low on funds.
So after he heard about the kidnapping, he went down to the farm in Wise County to collect the money that George owed him and to nurse a wound that he sustained when he was escaping from prison. He just happens to be sleeping in the backyard on a cot. In the semi-darkness just before dawn, Gus Jones awakened Harvey Bailey with the muzzle of a machine gun.
Meanwhile, George Kelly and Albert Bates absconded with the ransom money.
So even though George and Catherine had already fled the scene along with Albert Bates to launder their money, The FBI agents still score an important victory here by pulling in Harvey Bailey. And it arrives just in time for J. Edgar Hoover, who was not yet director of the FBI. In fact, he was barely holding on to his job. Mm When FDR took office, his first choice for Attorney General was a guy named Thomas Walsh, senator from Wyoming.
Walsh had a long and bad history with J. Edgar Hoover during the Harding administration. J. Edgar Hoover's job was to, well, you know, he tapped his phone and he read his mail and he tried to entrap him in a hotel room with a woman to get incriminating evidence on him. None of which succeeded, but it did succeed in making a lifelong enemy of Mr.
Walsh. Walsh vowed to get rid of that miserable son of the b ⁇ . As soon as he got to town.
Now, unfortunately, Walsh was 72 years old, and before he got to town, he went down to Miami and married a Cuban debutante. And on the train ride back to Washington, when the train stopped in North Carolina, Walsh's wife Woke up, but he did not. Subsequently, the FDR was prosecuting a war on this, a war on that, a war on everything, and war on crime.
So Jay Edgar is under a lot of pressure at this time to bring in some big score. And it looks like the machine gun Kelly case could be the one. The FBI had just been given the sole responsibility for chasing kidnappers. Across state lines. They were really the only organization that could bring this to fruition, but there were two problems that they still had.
One was the fact that they were not an armed police force. They were not trained in weapons. Most of them were lawyers and accountants who would help local municipalities prosecute criminal investigations.
So Hoover looked around his agencies to try to find people who would be skilled enough to go up against machine gunners and shotgun wielders and whatnot. And he discovers that he's got fewer than 12.
So he puts those guys together. They find Kelly in Memphis, Tennessee, successfully arrest him. George Kelly, R.G. Shannon, Albert Bates, and Harvey Bailey all went to the Federal Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. while Catherine Kelly and her mother, Aura Shannon, went to a penal institution for women.
All of them with life sentences. When the U.S. Department of Justice Opened a new maximum security prison on Alcatraz Island in California. It transferred Kelly. beats and be made fam.
The Urshels lived happily ever after, but Charles, by that point, have softened on the on the whole affair and He went to FDR and Hoover, and said, Look, Harvey Bailey had nothing to do with this. You know, we ought to let him out. He agrees to probation for Harvey and sets him up in Joplin, Missouri with a job as a cabinet maker. He lived out the rest of his life without committing another crime. Two decades later, George Kenny died in federal prison.
His body went unclaimed.
So a released R.G. Boss Shannon agreed to bury him in a plot that he owned in Wise County. There, beneath a homemade concrete marker, lie the remains of the man who coined the term still used. For the FBI. when he declared at his Memphis arrest.
I knew you G-Men would get me. Thank you. And a special thanks to Dr. T. Lindsay Baker.
and to Joe Ursul. Sharing this story. A special thanks also to the Fort Worth Public Library and the Library of Congress for allowing us to access this audio. The story of the oil man who brought Machine Gun Kelly to justice. Here on on our American stories.
