rescue his best friend, Frank Nash.
In the suburb of Maywood, Dock Barker’s friend Volney Davis paced his second-floor apartment all that morning. “That shooting is sure going to turn the heat on,” he told his girlfriend, Edna “Rabbits” Murray. Davis and Murray were still debating what to do around noon when they heard a car horn blaring. Murray stepped to the window. To her horror, she looked down on the blond head of Verne Miller.
“Is Curly there?” Miller asked.
“Yes,” Murray said.
Davis stepped to the window. “Come downstairs for a minute,” Miller hollered.
Murray watched as Davis walked downstairs, drove Miller’s car into a garage across the street, then handed Miller the keys to his own car. Afterward Miller came upstairs, plopping down on a divan. “I’m all in,” he said. “Had a tough time getting out of Kansas City. Got any iodine?” He had a small wound on one finger. As Murray swabbed it with iodine, Miller’s discourse grew fatalistic. “I’m the hottest man in the country,” he said. “I know I’ll hang for this. I talked to Nash’s wife the night before it happened and told her I would do all I could for Jelly. She’ll put the finger on me.” 2
The next day, Miller returned with his girlfriend, Vi Mathias. They stayed in the Davis apartment for three days, then vanished.
With ten seconds of machine-gun fire and the deaths of five men, the Kansas City Massacre forever changed the American legal landscape. It put the FBI on a wartime footing that in coming months would transform it into the country’s first federal police force. It probably saved Hoover’s job; six weeks later, he was formally reappointed as the Bureau’s director. Most important, it led to the public declaration of an ambitious federal War on Crime that in time would thrust Hoover’s men into their first confrontations with real criminals.
None of this happened overnight. Contrary to myth, there was no morning-after press conference in which Hoover declared war on gangsters. He took calls from reporters in his office, but his answers were limited to the massacre itself. “We will never stop until we get our men,” he told the Kansas City Star hours after the shootings, “if it takes ages to accomplish it. There will be no letup in this case.”
In fact, the driving force behind the broader War on Crime was not Hoover but his new boss, the attorney general Homer Cummings, who had spent the spring studying the feasibility of some kind of federal drive on organized crime. The massacre gave the administration the pretext it needed to sell this idea to the public. On June 29, twelve days after the massacre, Cummings announced a series of measures that composed the new War on Crime: the hiring of a special prosecutor, Joseph Keenan; a legislative package that would, among other things, make it a federal crime to kill a federal agent; and the formation of “special squads” inside the Bureau to tackle major cases. Cummings suggested he would study the formation of a federal police force, built around the Bureau, augmented by agents from the soon-to-be disbanded Prohibition Bureau. The New York Times carried the story on Page 1.
“Racketeering has got to a point when the government as such must take a hand and try to stamp out this underworld army,” Cummings told reporters, in the first of a series of interviews and speeches he was to give that summer. “We are now engaged in a war,” he told the Daughters of the American Revolution in August, “that threatens the safety of our country—a war with the organized forces of crime.”
Public reaction to this new “war” was by turns encouraging and doubtful. “Defiance of law,” the Washington Post editorialized the same day, “has seldom been more flagrantly manifested than it was at Kansas City Saturday.” But government officials had called for wars against gangsters before, and many doubted whether the FBI or any other agency could
In the suburb of Maywood, Dock Barker’s friend Volney Davis paced his second-floor apartment all that morning. “That shooting is sure going to turn the heat on,” he told his girlfriend, Edna “Rabbits” Murray. Davis and Murray were still debating what to do around noon when they heard a car horn blaring. Murray stepped to the window. To her horror, she looked down on the blond head of Verne Miller.
“Is Curly there?” Miller asked.
“Yes,” Murray said.
Davis stepped to the window. “Come downstairs for a minute,” Miller hollered.
Murray watched as Davis walked downstairs, drove Miller’s car into a garage across the street, then handed Miller the keys to his own car. Afterward Miller came upstairs, plopping down on a divan. “I’m all in,” he said. “Had a tough time getting out of Kansas City. Got any iodine?” He had a small wound on one finger. As Murray swabbed it with iodine, Miller’s discourse grew fatalistic. “I’m the hottest man in the country,” he said. “I know I’ll hang for this. I talked to Nash’s wife the night before it happened and told her I would do all I could for Jelly. She’ll put the finger on me.” 2
The next day, Miller returned with his girlfriend, Vi Mathias. They stayed in the Davis apartment for three days, then vanished.
With ten seconds of machine-gun fire and the deaths of five men, the Kansas City Massacre forever changed the American legal landscape. It put the FBI on a wartime footing that in coming months would transform it into the country’s first federal police force. It probably saved Hoover’s job; six weeks later, he was formally reappointed as the Bureau’s director. Most important, it led to the public declaration of an ambitious federal War on Crime that in time would thrust Hoover’s men into their first confrontations with real criminals.
None of this happened overnight. Contrary to myth, there was no morning-after press conference in which Hoover declared war on gangsters. He took calls from reporters in his office, but his answers were limited to the massacre itself. “We will never stop until we get our men,” he told the Kansas City Star hours after the shootings, “if it takes ages to accomplish it. There will be no letup in this case.”
In fact, the driving force behind the broader War on Crime was not Hoover but his new boss, the attorney general Homer Cummings, who had spent the spring studying the feasibility of some kind of federal drive on organized crime. The massacre gave the administration the pretext it needed to sell this idea to the public. On June 29, twelve days after the massacre, Cummings announced a series of measures that composed the new War on Crime: the hiring of a special prosecutor, Joseph Keenan; a legislative package that would, among other things, make it a federal crime to kill a federal agent; and the formation of “special squads” inside the Bureau to tackle major cases. Cummings suggested he would study the formation of a federal police force, built around the Bureau, augmented by agents from the soon-to-be disbanded Prohibition Bureau. The New York Times carried the story on Page 1.
“Racketeering has got to a point when the government as such must take a hand and try to stamp out this underworld army,” Cummings told reporters, in the first of a series of interviews and speeches he was to give that summer. “We are now engaged in a war,” he told the Daughters of the American Revolution in August, “that threatens the safety of our country—a war with the organized forces of crime.”
Public reaction to this new “war” was by turns encouraging and doubtful. “Defiance of law,” the Washington Post editorialized the same day, “has seldom been more flagrantly manifested than it was at Kansas City Saturday.” But government officials had called for wars against gangsters before, and many doubted whether the FBI or any other agency could
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