WILD CARD IN KANSAS CITY

I think if the train had been late, things might have turned out differently. Perhaps the waiting men would have attracted attention, or grown bored or been out of position. But the overnight Missouri Pacific train from Fort Smith, Arkansas was unfortunately right on schedule, pulling into Union Station on Track Twelve, at 7:15 A.M. on Saturday 17 June, 1933. And because it was punctual, the train efficiently and smoothly delivered three FBI agents, three local cops and one gangster right on time to their destination. And then there was the wild card in the deck, which turned all the aces into eights.

It all started 24 hours before with the capture of Frank “Jellybean” Nash, “the most successful bank robber in U.S. history”.

Frank was a 20 year career thief who worked with the Barker gang and the Dillinger mob among others, and of whom it was difficult   “…to find anyone who didn't have something nice to say…”, according to Clyde Callahan, co-author of the book “Heritage of an Outlaw”. Even the cops liked "Jellybean"  

While serving a 25 year term in Leavenworth (above),  in October of 1930,  Frank walked right out the front gate, carrying a copy of Shakespeare under his arm.  No one even thought to stop him.

Frank was so often employed as a bank robber after his escape, and so well paid that,  in the summer of 1933,  he could afford to take his wife and daughter on a vacation, to the resort town of Hot Springs (above), southwest of Little Rock, Arkansas.  And it was there, on 16 July, that two FBI agents,  Joe Lackey and Frank Smith, along with an Oklahoma police chief, Otto Reid,  captured "Jellybean"  in a Hot Springs cigar store.

Dick Galatas ran gambling in Hot Springs, and he took the arrest of an underworld tourist in his territory, personally.  The local cops,  who were paid more by Galatas than by the taxpayers,  threw up roadblocks on the highway back to Little Rock  calling Frank a kidnap victim.  But anticipating this,  the FBI took their prisoner northwest,  on the long drive to Fort Smith.  There they planned on catching  the 8:30 P.M. overnight train to Kansas City. They even wired ahead to Special Agent in Charge of the F.B.I..’s Kansas City office, Reed E. Vetterli,  to meet them at Union Station in the morning. 

But the  train was late in arriving at the Fort Smith station (above),  and a stringer for the Associated Press spotted the three men and their shackled prisoner in the waiting room. Before midnight the story broke over the wires, in time to be printed in the early addition of the Kansas City morning newspapers : “Frank Nash…was recaptured today at Hot Springs, by three Department of Justice agents…They revealed the identity of the prisoner for the first time here...”  Meaning in Fort Smith.

Galatas,  in Hot Springs, had already asked for the help of Johnny Lazia (above, coat less), who ran gambling and vice for the Pendegrast machine, which controlled Kansas City.  A newspaper editor at the time described the level of mob activity in that town, “If you want to see some sin, forget about Paris. Go to Kansas City.”

And the man Lazia assigned to this problem was an old buddy of Frank Nash’s, an ex-South Dakota Sheriff turned bank robber named Vernon Miller (above).

Miller called in at least two more gunmen to assist him,  their identities disputed to this day. The FBI claims it was Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd and Adam Richetti,  who just happened to be passing through Kansas City that morning. But there were numerous other gangsters who would have willingly stepped up to help "Jellybean" escape.  And now might be a good time to address the question of why crime in America in 1933 was so well organized but law enforcement was not.

When J. Edgar Hoover (above) took over the Bureau of Investigation in 1924 he commanded just 400 agents.  He spent the next forty years battling small “r” republicans, who were suspicious of a big federal police agency. Hoover eventually overcame their resistance, growing the F.B.I in both numbers and budgets. And yet, until 1963, Hoover still denied the existence of any centralized crime organization in America. But it was there. During the 1920's it was a called the syndicate or the mob,  but after the Great Depression it became the mafia, and was dominated by Italian Americans thanks to their overseas contacts.  Even after the Appalachian Conference of November 1957,  where more than 60 criminal bosses from the U.S., Canada and Italy were detained by local cops in upstate New York,  Hoover still insisted, “The F.B.I has much more important functions to accomplish than arresting gamblers all over the country.”  Whatever his reasoning,  too many people paid with their lives for his denial.

That morning of 17 June the two agents,  Frank Smith and  Joe Lackey and Oklahoma police Chief Otto Reid, left the train heavily armed. According to research done by Pulitzer Prize winner Bob Unger – “The Union Station Massacre: The Original Sin of the FBI” - agent Lackey inadvertently grabbed a pump action Winchester Model 1897 shot gun, which belonged to Chief Reid, who grabbed Lackey’s twelve gauge, also by mistake.

On the platform they were met by Agent in Charge Reed Vetterli (above)...

and agent Ray Caffrey (above),  ...

along with two K.C. police detectives, William "Red" Grooms (above)...

 and Frank Hermanson (above).

 As the seven men moved through the cavernous station they formed a "V", with their handcuffed prisoner, "Jellybean" Nash,  protected in the center.   A four door Chevrolet was parked in front of the station, head in, and K.C. policemen Grooms and Hermanson screened the car from the front. Nash was first placed in the front bench seat, behind the steering wheel. Agents Lackey and Smith and Chief Reed sat in the back. 

As Agent Caffey was about to enter in the driver’s side door, Joe Lackey noticed three men appear from behind a green Plymouth parked in the space in front of them  At least two carried machine guns. One of the gunmen called out, "Hands up! Up, up, up!"  Instead, the F.B.I. says, the gunmen opened fire. In that first burst of machine gun fire, KC police detectives Bill Grooms and Frank Hermansom were killed, and Agent-in-Charge R.E. Vetterli was wounded in the shoulder, crawling toward cover.

But according to Bob Unger's research,  it was right at the beginning that Joe Lackey (above) found himself holding the wild card.

The Winchester 1897 was a WWI army surplus shotgun and lacked a safety feature most shotguns have – a trigger disconnect, or a safety.  In the slam mode this “trench sweeper” would automatically fire if the trigger was compressed at the same time the action was pumped, forcing a round into the chamber. Unfamiliar with this feature, and without even waiting to get his weapon up,  Lackey pumped a first round into the chamber. As he did so the weapon went off and blasted a load of ball bearings into the back of Frank Nash’s head (below), just 12 inches away.  A stray pellet also went “…right into the side of the head of agent Caffrey” who just getting into the car.

As proof Unger offers an image of the Chevrolet's windshield,  taken shortly after the shooting stopped and the wounded had been removed (above) .  Shattered glass is scattered over the car's hood, indicating the shot gun pellets came from inside the car, where the FBI agents sat,  and not from outside,  where the attacking mobsters were. Also, witness Harry Orr, just feet away in his cab, testified, "I saw one man with a shotgun, and he was trying to fire it." And this was just before the shooting started. 

Panicked at the unexpected explosion, Lackey pumped the action on the shotgun a second time, and again the weapon immediately discharged.  Bill Unger described what he thinks happened next. “Hermanson is in a direct line between Lackey and the machine gun wielders. Joe Lackey gets off a second shot, which takes of the left side of Frank Hermansons’ head…. 

"So here we are in the first two seconds of shooting, and already Frank Nash – the top of his head is gone and he is dead, and Ray Caffrey is dying of a fatal wound….And Hermanson is dead. So far no one has fired a shot except Joe Lackey…

"At this point everyone begins to shoot, and there’s massive firings by machine guns...and by the time all of this is over, Bill Grooms, the other Kansas City policeman, is also dead. (above, lying between the cars). And Reed in back seat….when they finally get to him, he has a fatal wound…”.    When one of the gunmen finally got close to the Chevy,  he glanced inside and shouted, “They’re all dead. Let’s get out of here.”

They weren’t all dead. Agent Lackey was wounded three times and barely survived. Agent Smith, having ducked behind an adjacent car when the shooting started, was uninjured. Agent-in-Charge Reed Vetterli had made it inside the train station, bleeding from a wound in his shoulder.   The entire shootout took less than 60 seconds. And that quickly the Kansas City Massacre was over.

Five months and two weeks later, Vern Miller (above), one of the few men who could be proved to be responsible to the shootout, was found mutilated and murdered outside of Detroit, Michigan.   Rumor at the time said the syndicate running organized crime in America had issued orders that Nash was not to be helped because of the publicity surrounding him.  One week short of the first anniversary of the massacre, John Lazia was gunned down out side of his hotel in Kansas City.  And ballistics tests run decades later indicated the gun which fired the bullets that cut down Lazia, had also been used in the massacre. So perhaps it was mob justice for not following orders.  As he lay dying in a hospital, John Lazia asked his doctor, “Doc, what I can't understand is why anybody would do this to me? Why to me, to Johnny Lazia,  who has been the friend of everybody?”

It was a question that Frank "Jellybean" Nash would probably have asked,  if it hadn't been for that wild card.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Seventy – Six

A minie' ball shattered Andre's left arm. The stinging numbness shocked his entire being and dropped him to the ground. The 37 year old knew instantly that his career as a boxer was over. Still, the handsome captain struggled to his feet. He held his sword aloft in his still strong right arm and with horse shouts rallied his company for yet another charge. Then, as the men rushed forward for the 6^th time against the fortifications of Port Hudson, Captain Andre Cailloux (pronounced Cah-you) relinquished command of company K, of the 1^st Louisiana Native Guards and dropped back.

Five days after Grant threw his “forlorn hope” against the defenses at Vicksburg, Major General Nathaniel Banks repeated the tactic against the defenses of Port Hudson. And with the same results.

The Dutch origin of the phrase - “Verloren Hoop”, meaning lost heap - reflects the influence of Marquis de Vauban's competitor, Baron van Coehorn - who designed forts for the Republic of Holland. In German these units were called “Verloren Haufen” - forlorn heap. In France they were the Lost Children - “Les Enfants Perdus” - and in Norman English, they were the “avant-garde” or “vanguard”.

The troops chosen were either the best the army had to offer, or the most expendable. But from the Greeks who hid inside a wooden horse to defeat the walls of Troy, through the German Storm Troops who overwhelmed French trenches in 1918, they always represented a desperation when technology favored the defense. With a tactical advantage, such as a siege tower at Troy, such forlorn hopes were occasionally successful. But usually, as at Vicksburg on 22 May, 1863, and Port Hudson on 27 May, 1863, they failed. And in failing at Port Hudson, they failed a nation which desperately needed the very men who were being sacrificed, men like Andre Cailloux.

He was born into slavery on 25 August, 1825, on a plantation less than 20 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi. When he was five his owner, Joseph Duvernay, died, and eventually the child became the property of Duvernay's daughter Aimee and her husband, William Bailey. 

Then in June, the Bailey's sold Andre's mother, and took the child with them to New Orleans. As soon as he came of age, he was sold into apprenticeship to a cigar maker.

Andre thus arrived in the fastest growing city in the United States, with a population of 46,000 souls. In 1830 a thousand steamboats burdened with corn, cotton and tobacco from Ohio, Kentucky and Missouri, tied up along the New Orleans levee. 

Then in 1831, six miles of rails were laid to Lake Pontchartrain. Five more years and the new lake port saw 169 ocean going steamships, almost 300 sail driven packets, sloops and brigs, all transferring cargoes bound for or coming from American Atlantic ports, Europe and South America. Within ten years the number of riverboats docking at the Crescent City had doubled, and residents had topped 100,000. The number of river boats doubled again by 1850, and the city added 40,000 more residents.

Andre was also lucky in that he was African in his genes and Cajun culturally, meaning French in his language and Catholic in his religion. His new home had been founded by the French in 1718, and then occupied by the Spanish for 40 years - between 1762 and 1802. That history left slavery more plastic here than anywhere else in the America. 

Laws still forbade mixed race marriages, but were often ignored because of a shortage of socially acceptable white females. This necessitated the “Quadroon Placage –. educated black women - or quadroons - who “married” white men. These woman and their mulatto children became a middle third race. They could not vote, but they had property rights, which also meant the right to read and write, sign contracts, and for their mixed race children to inherit. By 1850 the city contained 144,000 white residents, 14,000 slaves and 11,000 “gens de couleur libres”, or free blacks.

At the age of 21, Andre Cailloux filed a petition for his manumission with a police court. Supported by his owner, the all white jury granted his petition in 1846. The very next year Andre married Felicie Coulon, a free Creole woman of color, and adopted her son. He then established his own tobacconist shop. By 1852 he had moved his business to the corner of Prieur and Perdido streets, and moved his growing family – 2 more sons - into a cottage on Baronne Street.

In late 1852, the New Orleans, Opelousas and Great Western railroad began laying tracks out of

Algiers , Louisiana – on the west bank of the river from New Orleans. By 1857 the line had reached 83 miles south west to Brashier City, where construction stopped. But still, the line into the rich delta lands proved profitable. In addition, the New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern Railroad headed north from the Crescent City as far as Canton, Mississippi, before the start of the war ended construction on that line.

By 1861 Andre Cailloux was a community leader, handsome and athletic, a boxer and a horseman, equipped with hard earned social graces and sophisticated language. Andre began calling himself with pride, “The Blackest Man in New Orleans.” In January of 1860 he opened a second tobacco shop, the same month in which Governor Thomas Overton Moore had taken Louisiana into succession.  

Moore's  Secretary of State, George Williamson, was explicit concerning the future of race relations. “ Louisiana”, Williams told his audience, “looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery...” Governor Moore asked the loyal citizens of Louisiana to show their support with a lantern in their front parlors. And in that light, and the more threatening flames of pine torch processions through the New Orleans' streets, the black residents, free and slave, saw the shadow of the noose tightening about their necks.

For the time being, free blacks in New Orleans still held the right to serve in the militia, and Andre formed a company of them, presumably to defend their city. They were called the Native Guards, but in contrast to white militias, they were never issued uniforms or weapons. As one Louisiana artilleryman explained, "I never want to see the day when a negro is put on an equality with a white person. There is too many free niggers . . . now, to suit me...”. 

But Andre continued to drill his little black band along with the white recruits on the grounds of the Metairie race track until February of 1862. As soon as a federal fleet under Admiral David Farragut approached the head of the pass at the mouth of Mississippi River (above),  the governor informed the men of color that their help was not wanted, and they were ordered disbanded.

The governor's prudence did nothing to save the largest and richest city in the Confederacy. Farragut captured New Orleans in April of 1862. And in May, 44 year old Massachusetts political general Benjamin Franklin Butler (above) arrived with 5,000 soldiers. Butler saw slaves as property to be seized – contraband. But free blacks were an unknown quantity, unlike Jews, whom Butler hated with a passion. 

Being painfully short of men, and listening to the treaties from Andre Cailloux and others, in September Butler authorized the formation of the Native Guards in the Federal army. 

Butler's orders were that only free blacks could enlist. But with the Native Guards officered by blacks, the induction of escaped slaves began almost immediately, allowing the Guards to expand to 3 full regiments, all with blue uniforms and muskets. 

Then Major General Nathaniel Banks arrived to replace Butler, bringing with him 30,000 fresh troops. No longer in desperate need of soldiers, Banks felt less need for the Native Guards, and began replace their black officers with whites.

As the Army of the Gulf marched up Bayou Techee the guards found themselves chopping wood and moving dirt behind the lines. The lack of respect and Bank's attitude drove many to walk away until there were only about 1,500 left all three regiments. 

Then in May of 1863 Banks was forced to bend to General Hallack's orders and return to Port Hudson. He divided his army at Alexandria in Mid May. Some , 10,000 men retreating back down Bayou Techee, to Bashear. They dug in there to guard the approaches to New Orleans. That freed Banks, at the head of 20,000 men, to move by boat down the Red River to the Mississippi. Stripping a division each from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Banks now had some 30,000 men for an assault on Port Hudson, in addition to the 3 regiments of The Louisiana Guards.

Thirty Federal guns began blasting the rebel defenses from the land and the river at about 9:00 am, and about 9:30 General Sherman's division struck out from Slaughter's Plantation. By 10:00 am when that attack became bogged down, Bank's ordered the 1^st and 3^rd Native Guards to rush the northern flank of the fortifications, where the land met the muddy Mississippi. The assumption was that with the proper elan, the rebel line was certain to break somewhere.

At 200 yards, the rebel troops opened fire, in such volume that the attack dissolved into confusion, and the black Yankees too cover among willow trees. The officers – black and white – rallied the men to continue – only to have them driven back again. Again the men were rallied, and again they were driven to ground. Then finally, with the wounded Captain Cailloux (above)  in the lead, some 1,000 black men in blue uniforms reached the edge of the the ditch. Following Cailloux's sword, the men stood for an instant and then let fly a volley at the murderous fire from the rebel forts and trenches. Heads down, as if charging into a hurricane wind, the guards surged forward into the ditch and up the slope.

It was then the rebel artillery let lose a coordinated volley of grape and canister, shredding the battle flags of the 1^st Louisiana Native Guards, and the assault troops. And a few yards behind the attacking line a jagged piece of shrapnel, tumbling and spinning at high speed struck the wounded Captain Cailloux in the head, blowing off a chunk of his skull, and spewing what had once been the brave ambitious man across the Mississippi River mud.

Out of the 1,000 Native Guards selected as the Forlorn Hope, 36 were killed and 133 were wounded, a casualty rate of almost 20%. The rebels did not lose a single man. General Banks told his wife, “They fought splendidly!”. Said one of the defenders, “We mowed them down, and made them disperse, leaving their dead and wounded on the field to stink."

Across the entire front, Banks lost 2,000 men on Wednesday 27 May, 1863. The following morning, Thursday, 28 May, 1863, the rebels accepted a truce and the bodies of some 2,000 white Yankees were retrieved from the field to be identified and buried with honor. But the Confederate gunners, who had suffered only 500 dead and wounded, would not allow the removal of a single black skinned corpse from the Native Guard's battlefield. Those dead would lay in the Mississippi river mud for another 47 days.

They would not be the last black men to die in the fight against white supremacy.

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