The Kidnap Years: Read online

  James Alexander Reed had just turned seventy, and he was as well connected as a man could be. He was close to Thomas J. Pendergast, the Democratic political boss who ran Kansas City at the time and who had helped Reed become Kansas City mayor from 1900 to 1903 and later a U.S. senator for three terms.

  Handsome, with wavy hair and dark, deep-set eyes, Reed looked like an aristocrat. In fact, he had grown up poor, one of six children born to farm parents in Ohio. The family moved to Iowa when Reed was a young boy, and his father died when Reed was eight. He attended high school irregularly yet managed to become a lawyer by studying law books he bought from the sale of a horse.

  He started a law practice in Kansas City in his late twenties and was appointed Jackson County counselor in 1896. Two years later, he was elected county prosecutor. Reed served in that post for just two years before the Pendergast machine tapped him to run for mayor in 1900. (Perhaps Pendergast thought it safer not to have Reed in the prosecutor’s office, where he had won convictions in all but two of the 287 cases he brought to trial.)

  Reed served a term as mayor and was elected to the Senate in 1910. He was briefly a candidate for president in 1924 and again in 1928, when he decided not to run for a fourth term in the Senate.

  In his years in Washington, Reed never forgot the folks back home. He wrote dozens of letters of recommendation for people seeking patronage jobs in the Pendergast operation. Inevitably, then, he knew people who were frowned upon by good-government purists.

  One of Reed’s acquaintances was a man named John Lazia. With his glasses, receding hairline, and prominent jowls, “Brother John” Lazia, as he was sometimes called, might have passed for a school principal or perhaps an accountant or an insurance salesman.

  The appearance was misleading. Having fled the boredom of school in the eighth grade, Lazia became a street thug. While still a young man, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison for armed robbery. But Tom Pendergast had an eye for talent and helped Lazia obtain parole after less than a year. In return, the authorities wanted Lazia to join the army.

  But Pendergast wanted Lazia in his army. Lazia became a Pendergast loyalist and by his early thirties was a bootlegger, owner of a soft drink company and a bail bond company, and operator of several gambling resorts. (Pendergast also used his influence to get lenient treatment for Lazia on tax-evasion charges.)

  “Brother John” was head of the city’s Northside Democratic Club and acted as a “get out the vote” organizer in Italian neighborhoods for Pendergast-machine candidates. Lazia also had influence over hiring and firing in the Kansas City Police Department.

  After Nell Donnelly was kidnapped, Reed wasted no time phoning John Lazia, with whom he was well acquainted. We can never know exactly what Reed said, but we can be sure of the gist of it: “Nell has been kidnapped, and I need the help of your gangsters to find her and bring her home. And don’t worry about the police.” With the police on the sidelines, Lazia dispatched search parties. Within hours, his men had found a restaurateur they suspected had knowledge of the kidnappers. The Lazia men used their considerable powers of persuasion on the restaurant operator and were soon on their way to the farmhouse where Nell Donnelly and her chauffeur were being held.

  Guns at the ready, Lazia’s men barged into the farmhouse, found Donnelly, and informed her out-of-town captors that they had made a big, big mistake. Perhaps acting on orders, Lazia’s men exercised compassion and did not kill the abductors.

  Donnelly and her chauffeur were driven to Kansas City, where they were dropped off. They had coffee at an all-night café before making their way home. Their ordeal had lasted a day and a half, and they had been freed with no ransom having been paid.

  Before long, several suspects were arrested, likely with tips provided by Lazia’s operatives. Two men were convicted and given life sentences; a third got thirty-five years.

  So the kidnapping of Nell Donnelly had a happy ending (except for the kidnappers). And yet there was an unsettling message. James A. Reed, former U.S. senator, former Kansas City mayor, former prosecutor, hadn’t called the police in the moment of crisis. Instead, he had called on a known mobster.

  Would the relatives of other kidnapping victims be tempted to do the same? The kidnapping and rescue of Nell Donnelly had gotten a lot of press coverage. What kind of message did the episode convey? Nothing very good.

  By this time, in Kansas City and other big cities, gangsters were becoming a second arm of government—helping the political parties select candidates, helping the police hire, fire, and promote. They acted as unofficial chambers of commerce in some places, welcoming gangsters visiting from other cities as long as the visitors paid deference and sometimes tribute.

  How had all this come about? Machine politics had sprouted and thrived in many cities, in part because clubhouse politicians offered jobs and services to immigrants. Then came Prohibition. Millions of law-abiding Americans still wanted to drink and not always in speakeasies. If an honest American wanted a steady supply of top-shelf liquor and wine to sip in the living room or serve to dinner guests, he couldn’t rely only on the neighborhood druggist. He needed a reliably civilized distributor or salesman, preferably someone who was friendly and nonthreatening.

  And if an honest American wanted to gamble in an area where gambling was officially illegal, that was another recreation provided by gangsters—another “service,” as it were. Inevitably, with so much cash sloshing around, some of it flowed to city hall and the precinct house. The pols and the police, after all, felt entitled to their “licensing fees.” And where was the harm, really, as long as everyone got along, especially if more violent and vulgar out-of-town criminal elements were kept a safe distance away?

  Honest Americans wanted goods and services that only criminals provided—that was the basic, contradictory fact of life in America at the time. The gangsters were not only corrupt. They were corrupting.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BELOVED INNOCENT

  Hopewell, New Jersey

  Tuesday, March 1, 1932

  Charles and Anne Lindbergh had finished dinner and were relaxing in the living room of their new home. They could hear gusts rattling the tree branches on this cold and rainy night.

  Here, in a wooded and hilly region of western New Jersey, Lindbergh had the privacy he so needed. He had found something close to happiness. “Colonel Lindbergh,” as he was formally known, had become quite well-to-do, his celebrity having opened various boardroom doors for him. Yet though he was acquainted with titans of business and industry, he had few close relationships outside his family.

  Adorable Charles Jr., not quite two years old, was asleep in his upstairs room as nurse Betty Gow peeked in on him around 8:30. She was relieved to see the baby blissfully somnolent in his night robe. He had a cold, for which he had been given medicine.

  Around 9:10 or 9:15, Lindbergh heard a noise that sounded to him (as he would testify later) like pieces of wood clattering.

  “What is that?” he said to his wife, who answered with a shrug.*

  The Lindberghs were not concerned enough to get up and check. They had a playful little terrier that was known to get into things. There was a crate of oranges in the kitchen; perhaps it had fallen off a counter. Or maybe it was the wind.

  Around 10:00 p.m., Gow went to look in on the baby once more—and got the shock of her life. The crib was empty. There were muddy footprints on the floor, leading from the crib to a nearby window, which appeared to have been pried open. On the window sill was an envelope containing a note demanding $50,000 in twenty-, ten-, and five-dollar bills. It was signed with a symbol of two overlapping rings in blue ink and a smaller center circle in red.

  The nurse raced downstairs. “The baby’s been kidnapped!” she shouted.

  Lindbergh and his wife rushed up to see for themselves. Then Lindbergh called the Hopewell police chief, Charles Williamson, who called state police headquarters in Trenton, then drove to the Lindbergh home with anoth
er officer.

  Philadelphia police were notified, as were New York City police. Special guards were posted at the Holland Tunnel, ferry terminals, and the George Washington Bridge, which had opened just the previous summer.

  Meanwhile, Lindbergh and a bevy of police officers searched the grounds of his property. Two sets of footprints and marks from a ladder were found under the nursery window. A chisel lay nearby. Soon, a makeshift wooden ladder was found about seventy feet from the house. It was broken in the middle. Later, Lindbergh would speculate that the wood-clatter sound he thought had come from the kitchen was really the sound of a ladder falling outside the house.

  The ransom note contained the word were when obviously where was meant. It said the child was “in gute care.” And it warned Lindbergh “for making anyding public or for notify the police.”19 It seemed clear that the author was either a foreigner or pretending to be one. Or if he was an American, he was not an educated person.

  Just after 11:00 p.m. on March 1, the night supervisor at the FBI called J. Edgar Hoover at home to tell him that a police teletype had just reported the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. Hoover knew that the FBI had no jurisdiction in the case, since kidnapping was not a federal offense. Still, he ordered that he be kept informed of any developments. He was called again about two hours later with the information that a ransom note had been found at the crime scene.

  At once, Hoover summoned his driver and went to bureau headquarters. Most of his aides were already there. It was quickly decided that the bureau would offer “unofficial” assistance to Charles and Anne Lindbergh. A special squad of about twenty men was set up for that purpose.

  No doubt, Hoover felt sympathy for the parents. Nor could he have failed to realize that if the FBI could help recover the child, the prestige of the agency would increase enormously.20

  The New York Times devoted four front-page stories to the kidnapping the next day. The main story noted that a woman was believed to be involved, since some footprints below the window were considerably smaller than others. The police in New Jersey and nearby states were told to be on the alert for suspicious-looking couples, especially any who may have asked for directions to the Lindbergh home.

  The police theorized early on that the kidnapper or kidnappers would have used a stolen car. The license plate numbers of sixteen cars stolen in New Jersey between noon and midnight were transmitted to police in several states.

  A front-page story in the Times reported the reaction of Senator Patterson of Missouri, cosponsor of the federal kidnapping law pending on Capitol Hill. “It is a shock to me to hear of this outrage,” he said. “I hope the child will soon be returned… This filthy act will aid us in passing the needed legislation.”21

  That prediction turned out to be right, of course. But some initial “facts” were quickly shot down. The smaller footprints beneath the window were indeed those of a woman—Anne Lindbergh. So perhaps there was only one kidnapper.

  On the very back page of the New York Times of March 2, 1932, was a seemingly routine article. It told of a dinner the night before at the Waldorf-Astoria where more than sixteen hundred alumni of New York University had celebrated their alma mater’s centennial. Thirty-four alumni received the newly created meritorious service award from Chancellor Elmer Ellsworth Brown, the Times reported. The article listed several people who spoke at the dinner.

  But the most important fact about the dinner concerned someone who was expected to be there but did not appear: Charles A. Lindbergh. Curiously, the article did not note the famous aviator’s absence. Perhaps the reporter simply did not know Lindbergh was supposed to be there, even though his anticipated appearance had been well publicized. Perhaps a cub reporter was assigned to the event and didn’t think Lindbergh’s absence was such a big deal.

  It’s certain that with the news of the kidnapping breaking on the same night, the editors weren’t much concerned with the NYU dinner. Soon, it would be reported that Chancellor Brown was to blame for Lindbergh’s failure to attend. In a note to Lindbergh before the dinner, the chancellor had apparently said the event was to be on the fourth of March, not the first. So Lindbergh innocently dined at home on March 1, the night his son was taken from his crib.

  For conspiracy theorists, the seeds of suspicion had been planted.

  Three days after the kidnapping, Hoover went to Hopewell, New Jersey, to offer his assistance to Charles and Anne Lindbergh. They declined to see him. Hoover then conferred with Colonel Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf, head of the New Jersey State Police, who told the FBI boss that his people could manage things by themselves. Schwarzkopf was leery of federal men parachuting into his cases (although the Treasury Department would play a vital role as it recorded the serial numbers on the ransom currency), and he would soon have plenty of turf battles without having to worry about Hoover.

  But Hoover craved a role in the case, even hoping he might be put in charge overall despite the absence of an officially defined role for the FBI. U.S. attorney general Homer Cummings even wrote to Governor A. Harry Moore of New Jersey that “a coordinator of tested ability was available in the person of J. Edgar Hoover.”22

  The governor ignored the suggestion, which had undoubtedly been inspired by Hoover himself. As the investigation lurched on, it became clear that Hoover, glory hound that he was, had precisely the organizational skills that were sorely needed.

  *The scene and dialogue are derived from the testimony in the trial of the suspected kidnapper, which began on January 2, 1935, and was exhaustively covered by the New York Times (www.nytimes.com).

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE BOY IN THE WALL

  Niles, Ohio

  Wednesday, March 2, 1932

  As Americans were waking up to the horrible news about the Lindbergh baby being kidnapped the night before, they worried about their own children: Were they really safe playing in the streets or in the fields? Were they safe in their own homes?

  James DeJute Jr., the eleven-year-old son of a contractor in Niles, a small city in northeastern Ohio, had been fighting a cold, but he was well enough to go to Lincoln School. Jimmy, as he was called by just about everyone, happened to be wearing his Lindbergh-style pilot’s cap.

  It was no secret that Jimmy’s father, James Sr., prospered as a contractor. But the DeJute family was hardly famous, and it was the opposite of high society. An outsider might have assumed that the DeJutes were descended from French aristocracy. In fact, the name “DeJute” was invented, shortened from the Italian “DeGuido.”

  This morning, Jimmy was accompanied by his cousin, Anna. As they took a shortcut through the grounds of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, they saw a brown coupe parked by the curb. The hood was up, and two men seemed to be looking at the engine.

  “Hey, little boy, come here!” one of the men called out, as Anna would recall later.

  Jimmy approached the men. When he got close, they grabbed him. He yelled and struggled and broke away for a moment, but the men caught him and put him in the car in front of his screaming cousin. Then the car sped away.

  Other schoolboys noted the license plate number. But the license number was useless: the plate was soon found behind a church, where it had been tossed. It had been on a black coupe stolen in Niles in early January.

  Jimmy had a brother, Anthony, who was several years younger—just a toddler, really. Anthony was too young to comprehend what was happening in his parents’ house. All he knew was that his mother and father were afraid. They went from room to room, whispering to each other, and his mother’s eyes were red from crying. Now and then, the phone rang. His father whispered into it.

  My brother is gone, Anthony thought. And maybe they think it’s my fault.

  For Anthony had wished that his older brother would go away. From the time he first had feelings, Anthony sensed that his parents liked Jimmy better. Now, Anthony’s wish had come true. His brother was gone. Anthony wished that Jimmy would come back. He prayed as hard as he could before f
alling asleep.*

  The agonizing wait went on until Saturday, March 5, when a veteran Trumbull County detective, W. J. Harrison, who had sources on both sides of the law, got a cryptic phone call. “Go to Scotty’s place, and you will find that DeJute kid from Niles,” the caller said.

  Lawmen in the region were familiar with “Scotty’s place,” a recently abandoned gambling den that stood behind a barbecue joint and a filling station on a road on the outskirts of Youngstown, Ohio. The previous year, a woman who ran a house of pleasure had been kidnapped and held at Scotty’s until she arranged for a ransom to be paid.

  Deputies from Trumbull and Mahoning Counties staked out Scotty’s place, which was supposedly vacant. So why was smoke coming from a chimney? The lawmen rushed the building and kicked in the door.

  There was no one there. The interior was devoid of furniture, though there were rugs on the floor along with an old mattress and a couple of pillows. A fire was burning in the kitchen stove, and a partially eaten loaf of bread lay in a corner.

  Then Detective Harrison spotted a math textbook on the floor. On the flyleaf was written “James DeJute, 327 Robbins Avenue, Niles, Ohio, grade 5A, Lincoln School.”

  For a moment, a sickening silence enveloped the investigators. The kidnappers must have found out, somehow, that the law was coming. They had fled with their captive.

  But a rifle and pistol were visible in one corner. The kidnappers wouldn’t have left their weapons behind, would they?

  “Jimmy!” an officer shouted in desperation.

  “Yes, sir! Yes, sir, here I am!” came a boy’s voice from behind a wall.23

  A couple of lawmen kicked at the wall, which was only plasterboard covered with wallpaper. And there stood James DeJute Jr., shivering and pale, between two young men. One of the men held a revolver, but he surrendered it at once.