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I start today with an unusual story that caught my attention the other day and left me scratching my head in disbelief. It describes a kind of micro-Mutiny on the Bounty which took place in 2004 on dry land in Long Island City. The victim was a businessman named Bruce Levy, 52, the owner of a cleaning plant. One of his employees, Jerome Fletcher, -- no, nothing to Fletcher Christian -- recruited another man to kill Levy and seize a $10,000 payroll arriving at the plant the same day. A woman employee kept Fletcher informed of the arrival of the payroll. A girl friend lent Fletcher her car on the date of the murder and he used it for the killer’s getaway. Later he used it for his own getaway south where he was later arrested. A fifth accomplice also participated, but no details were given. It seems that at least three of the five conspirators have pleaded guilty to one charge or another because there’s no mention of a trial in the story. Maybe there will be trials for two whose cases are still pending, one of them the actual killer.
I intend to dig into this case a little to find out how it’s possible to collect five characters together to gang up on one man for an amount of no more than $2,000 apiece if shared out equally. How did it all start? Did Levy ever suspect anything? Could it have been stopped? How was the case cracked? Finally, is it really right that society should be burdened with the support of these lubbers in idleness for the rest of their lives? I hope to write more about this subject.
My police years may be over but they’ve left their mark. Crime interests me. Not just what pops up all around us today, but also crime as it exists in history, some of its manifestations forgotten for unknown reasons while others remain vivid in memory. For instance, I give you Bonnie and Clyde. They are more famous today than they were in 1934 when the posse caught up to them. This last glorious shootout was a failure on their part since the law did all the shooting, but before this in a space of two years they had murdered an estimated thirteen people, six of whom were policemen.
So they weren’t gentle souls. They were pathological killers in fact. But they weren’t alone. Right in the heart of the southwest territory they ruled with machine guns they had rivals who were just as destructive as themselves even though their names have not come down to us in the same way. Two of these were the Young boys of Springfield, Missouri, who achieved fame on New Year’s Eve in 1931 in the following way:
They started of course with the murder of a policeman. This was the kind of thing that always brought out the remaining police in force. Tipped off that the boys were at the family farm ten miles outside of Springfield, the county and city police set off in two cars for the encounter. They surrounded the house and summoned it. Receiving no answer they opened the ball with a tear gas bomb through a window. Then the sheriff and a deputy crashed through the back door and were immediately mowed down with shotguns. A detective escaped and sent two men back to Springfield for help. An infuriated patrolman charged the front of the house and got a shotgun blast in his face. Another detective fired at the house from a storm cellar in the rear, but the cellar was flanked by a wing of the house, which exposed him to another shotgun blast fired from a window.
Another detective was then hit by a rifle slug in the forehead, making a total of five men dead, one wounded, two still standing and two gone for help. At this point they arrived with the same or the slaughter might have continued.
The help consisted of seventy-five men from a Coast Artillery unit in Springfield , bringing ambulances and machine guns.# They riddled the house with bullets until firing from inside stopped and they rushed the place. Inside they found no one at home. The Youngs had escaped through a tunnel to an orchard far from the house..
The two, Harry and Jennings, were at large for two days until they were found holed up in a rooming house in Houston, Texas. When the Houston police broke in on them, they shot each other rather than be taken alive. That was the epilogue to New Year’s Eve in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri.
Missouri has quieted down quite a bit since the days of battles like these, but it didn’t happen overnight. In between there were incidents, well like the famous Kansas City Massacre. Eighteen months after the Young affair, in June 1933 shoot first was again the order of the day in Missouri. A desperado named Frank Nash, who had escaped from a 25-year sentence at Leavenworth Penitentiary had been recaptured and was being returned by train to K. C. in the custody of the two FBI agents and the Arkansas sheriff who had found him. They were to be met at the Union Station by two more FBI agents and two Kansas City detectives.
What they didn’t know is that they would also be met by seven of Nash’s associates, armed to the teeth and planning a rescue. They disposed themselves around the station and managed to conceal themselves from the police by mingling with the railroad patrons. Nash and his escort came out through the front entrance of the station and started to get into a waiting FBI car. At this point they were attacked by two men jumping from behind a parked car. One had a machine gun. But the first blood was taken by another shooter firing from behind a second car, who shot both the K.C. detectives dead on the spot. After that the gangsters rushed the FBI car firing away and killing Chief Reed, the Arkansas escort, but also killing Nash, while two agents managed to duck their fire in the back seat. Another agent, named Caffrey, was killed by a shot to the head.
At the end five men were dead, Nash and four police. One attacker, Pretty Boy Floyd, had been wounded, but escaped with the others. In October 1934 police caught up to him in Ohio and shot him to death. His accomplice, Adam Richetti, was captured and eventually executed in 1938. Another well-known gangster Verne Miller, was apparently killed in a gang feud in November 1933, judging by the condition of his body when found in a ditch in Michigan. The four other co-conspirators got off in 1935 with two-year sentences and fines of $10,000 each. I’ll return to all this sometime in the near future. | |