Wrong Side of the Law Page 7

  Prohibition had made the United States into a legally “dry” country, but it had done nothing to dry up the American thirst for alcoholic beverages. If anything, many people were drinking more simply because it was forbidden. Canadian beer and liquor flowed across the border, smuggled by anyone willing to take the risk of arrest. The potential profits were too great for a man like Sankey to ignore.

  Sankey established an extensive bootlegging enterprise. He ran whiskey into Michigan, Minnestoa, Colorado, Wyoming, and North and South Dakota. Sometimes the booze was hidden in the boxcars of the trains he drove. Other times Sankey drove across the border in an old Tin Lizzie with cases of whiskey stowed in a secret compartment. He would pose as a railroad man visiting his home in the United States. He often took Echo along his rum-running trips. Sankey enjoyed the little girl’s company and he thought that the border guards wouldn’t suspect a man travelling with his young daughter of smuggling liquor.

  As a bootlegger, Sankey was a sharp businessman. He dealt only in top-quality Canadian spirits. He undercut the prices of rival bootleggers, many of whom were peddling watered-down whiskey and home-brewed moonshine. Wherever Sankey went, he made a point of making friends with people in influential positions. Mayors, police chiefs, bank presidents, and the members of the social elite of communities like Denver were all listed in Sankey’s book of contacts. He even sent them Christmas cards.

  Sankey was also a careful operator. On one occasion he was in a diner in a North Dakota town, with a carload of booze parked out front. He spotted two men he thought were Prohibition agents watching him from across the street. Sankey finished his lunch and then went out the back door. He took a train out of town, abandoning the car and the liquor.

  Bootlegging was so profitable for Sankey that he began to lose interest in railroading. He took long leaves of absence from his job with the CPR. He moved his family to Regina in 1930. From there he ran liquor over the border in two big Nash cars that were equipped with truck springs to carry the heavy loads. Amazingly, Sankey’s criminal record for that period was almost spotless. He was arrested for bootlegging once, in Fergus Falls, Minnesota. He posted bail and then skipped.

  Sankey’s bootlegging was no secret. He often told friends colourful stories about close calls with the cops. Officials on both sides of the border turned a blind eye because they’d been bribed or because they disagreed with the whole idea of Prohibition. However, when the wild decade of the Roaring Twenties went out with a whimper and the crushing Dirty Thirties began, Sankey’s bootlegging business faltered.

  The slide began with powerful crime syndicates that didn’t like competition from freelancers. The syndicates were run by ruthless criminals who operated on a corporate scale. One crossed them at one’s own peril. In one American city after another, Sankey was literally run out of town.

  The Great Depression made things even worse. Many people no longer had money to spend on illegal booze. Prohibition would be in effect until 1933, but most of the criminals who profited from it could see in advance that their cash cow wasn’t going to last and they’d have to find other ways of making a dishonest living. Verne Sankey decided to gamble on bank robbery.

  Sankey was an avid reader of true crime magazines. He concluded that most criminals got caught because they were stupid. He believed that a smart man, like himself, could commit a felony and get away with it simply by planning carefully.

  On February 28, 1931, Sankey was the engineer on a train that took the Melville Millionaires to Regina for a hockey game. That morning Sankey and another man, masked and armed, robbed the Royal Bank of Canada at the corner of Albert Street and Thirteenth Avenue. They forced manager Douglas Melklejohn to open the vault at gunpoint, and then tied up him and teller David Slinn, covering their eyes and mouths with tape. The bandits looted the vault of $12,000 and made their getaway in a car. According to one story, the bag containing the stolen money was among the bags of hockey gear loaded onto the train for the team’s trip home.

  A month after the Regina holdup, Sankey took his last leave of absence from the CPR. He never returned. The lure of easy money taken at the point of a gun overwhelmed his love of railroading.

  By this time the Sankey family included a son, Orville, born in 1929. Sankey bought 320 acres of farmland in Buffalo County, South Dakota, eleven miles from the village of Gann Valley. He put the title to the land in Fern’s name. Sankey built a three-room clapboard house with an unusually elaborate basement. Then he set himself up as a farmer, raising corn, cattle, and turkeys.

  But the farm was really a well-planned robber’s lair. It was remote. The only way in from the road was by a mile-long grassy path. No one could approach the house unnoticed. The door was at the back, which meant the occupants could slip out into a ravine, unseen by anyone coming in from the road.

  As always, Sankey made friends with his neighbours, the nearest of whom were three miles away. He pitched in when they needed help with farm work. His winning ways made him popular in Gann Valley and the nearby town of Kimball. Nonetheless, there were oddities about Verne Sankey that raised some of his new neighbours’ suspicions.

  Where, in the middle of the Depression, did he get the money to buy the farm? Why was he always flush with cash when everyone else was broke? Where did he go on his frequent trips away from home? How could he afford a brand-new 1932 Ford Model 18 V8 sedan?

  Other things made some of the South Dakota farmers uneasy about the newcomer. He associated with men whom the police knew to be shady characters. Planes occasionally landed on his land in the dead of night. There was an incident in which Sankey shot and wounded an alleged intruder. He said the man was a turkey thief, but then, strangely, didn’t press charges. Meanwhile, Sankey was still bootlegging, though not on as big a scale as he had done previously.

  On October 4, 1932, three men robbed a bank in Vayland, a town near Gann Valley. They escaped in a car after grabbing a paltry $900. One day later, a bank in the nearby community of Winner was robbed, possibly by the same gang. Suspicion eventually fell on Verne Sankey as the leader of the robbers, but nothing was ever proven. However, if Sankey was involved in the South Dakota robberies, it’s possible that one of his accomplices — who might also have been the other man in the Regina stickup — was a Canadian named Gordon Alcorn.

  Born in Welwyn, Saskatchewan, in 1905, Alcorn came from a railroading family. He knew Verne Sankey from boyhood and grew up admiring the colourful engineer who told such wonderful stories and always had a wallet full of money. Alcorn even worked for the CPR as Sankey’s fireman.

  A tall, gangly youth, Alcorn was easygoing and shy. The only time he was ever in trouble with police in Canada was when he was fined two dollars for using abusive language. But Alcorn was easily led and Sankey took advantage of that. Whether or not Alcorn was in fact involved in armed robbery, he would be a key participant in the events that made Verne Sankey notorious.

  One of the most highly publicized crimes in twentieth-century America was the kidnapping on March 1, 1932, of aviation hero Charles Lindbergh’s baby son. The snatching of an innocent child for ransom outraged the nation. Even convicted gangster Al Capone, from his prison cell, offered his services in getting the little boy home safely. The child was eventually found dead. More than two years later, a man named Bruno Richard Hauptmann was arrested and charged. He was tried, convicted, and executed. But before the Lindbergh kidnapping case was finally stamped CLOSED, it created a logistical nightmare for American law-enforcement agencies. It also opened a new door to fast money for criminals.

  At the time, American legal jurisdiction was divided among federal, state, and municipal authorities. The various law enforcement agencies jealously guarded their own turf. Communication among them was poor and co-operation sometimes non-existent. The Bureau of Investigation, a branch of the Department of Justice, and the forerunner of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), was a small, almost insignificant agency with extremely limited authority. Its new direct
or, J. Edgar Hoover, was an ambitious, publicity-hungry autocrat who would use any means, fair or foul, to extend his department’s power. He was delighted when the American government passed the Lindbergh Law, which made kidnapping a federal crime. During the early 1930s, Hoover would capitalize on other sensational crimes in his quest for power and glory.

  The Lindbergh kidnapping touched off a rash of abductions in the United States. The victims were nearly all very wealthy men. The whole nation sympathized with the Lindberghs, especially after the discovery of the decomposed little body. But many people in Depression-stricken America felt little empathy for rich adult males. They and their families, living in opulence while others lost their homes and went hungry, were hardly touched by the Depression. Some of the wheelers and dealers among them had even profited from the misfortunes of others. Criminals saw them as fair game. Holding a rich man for ransom could be much more lucrative than armed robbery, and not nearly as dangerous.

  By April 1932, Gordon Alcorn had joined the ranks of the unemployed, having been laid off by the CPR. He was in Winnipeg, living hand-to-mouth while he looked for work. Alcorn had made friends with a man named Arthur Youngberg, a Minnesota native of Swedish background. He was over six feet tall and powerfully built, but, like Alcorn, naive in the ways of the world. Youngberg had worked for the CPR for thirteen years and had even known Verne Sankey. He, too, had been laid off.

  Sankey looked up Alcorn while he was in Winnipeg on bootlegging business. Inspired by the Lindberg case, he wanted Alcorn to help him kidnap some wealthy Winnipeg citizen and hold him for ransom. Sankey had even made inquiries about renting a house where the victim could be held. Alcorn would have none of it. But he was still unemployed and broke a few weeks later when he received a letter from Sankey inviting him and Youngberg to go to South Dakota and work for him on the farm. Both young men liked that idea. Sankey went to Winnipeg to pick them up and they arrived at his farm on November 11, 1932. Alcorn and Youngberg happily began their work as farmhands, not suspecting that Sankey had other plans for them.

  Shortly after Christmas, Sankey told his two workers that he was taking his family to Denver for the winter because Fern couldn’t stand the prairie cold. Alcorn and Youngberg were to look after things while he was away. In fact, Sankey was going to Denver to lay plans and recruit yet another member for the “gang” he was clandestinely assembling.

  Carl Pearce of Colorado had served with the American army in the First World War. He had suffered shell shock and had never recovered. Pearce had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals. He had a nervous twitch and his hands often shook. He couldn’t hold down a job. When his wife left him, he began to drink heavily. He associated with bad characters and once spent ninety days in jail for passing bogus cheques. It was through his descent into the underworld that Pearce met Sankey, and then Fern’s sister Ruth Kohler, who had been recently widowed. Carl and Ruth were both lonely, lost souls, and they fell for each other.

  Sankey rented a house in Denver and invited Carl and Ruth to stay with him, Fern, and the kids. The house was also home to some of Sankey’s bootlegging friends. It was ideal for Pearce. He had a woman who was willing to look after him and easy access to the booze he needed.

  When Sankey visited the farm, he found Alcorn suffering because of a vicious fight he’d had with Youngberg. The big Swede had knocked most of Alcorn’s teeth out. A legitimate farmer might have dismissed both of them, but Sankey wasn’t about to let a little fracas get in the way of his grand plan. Leaving Youngberg to look after the farm, he took Alcorn to Denver for medical attention.

  At the house in Denver, Sankey once again brought up the subject of kidnapping. This time Alcorn was receptive. Sankey had made a detailed study of the best prospects. He had finally decided on Charlie Boettcher. They would demand $100,000. Alcorn thought that was too much and suggested $25, 000. They compromised on $60,000. Carl Pearce typed out the ransom letter.

  Charles Boettcher II, age thirty-two, belonged to one of the wealthiest families in Colorado. His paternal grandfather, also named Charles, had become rich in the hardware, sugar beet, and cement industries. His father, Claude, had enhanced the Boettcher fortune through shrewd investments. They were an influential and politically powerful family.

  Charlie was a good-natured man who liked to party, gamble, tell jokes, and sometimes drink too much. He was also a dedicated baseball fan. He and his beautiful wife, Anna Lou, and little daughter, Ann, lived in Denver’s exclusive Capitol Hill district in an elegant twenty-one-room chateau Claude had built as a wedding present. Charlie had named the house Les Trois Tours for its three towers. Charles Lindbergh was one of the many celebrities who visited there. To the Boettchers, the Great Depression was just a passing storm to be weathered. It didn’t interfere with their opulent lifestyle. Then one night the Sankey gang came calling.

  On the evening of February 12, 1933, Charlie and Anna Lou’s car pulled into the driveway of Les Trois Tours and stopped in front of the garage. When Charlie got out, Verne Sankey’s voice came from the darkness. “Come here, Charlie, and stick up your hands.”

  Charlie, who was slightly intoxicated, was startled. Anna Lou, eight months pregnant, told him, “This is a holdup. Don’t resist.”

  Then Sankey said, “Do what you’re told, and everything will be all right.”

  He handed an envelope to Anna Lou, who was still in the car, and politely said, “Mrs. Boettcher, open that envelope, please.”

  She did so, and a smaller envelope fell out. Sankey took back the first envelope and said, “Now open that one.”

  As Anna Lou tore open the second envelope and unfolded the note inside, Sankey withdrew. He forced Charlie into a car driven by Alcorn and they sped away. The typed message in Anna Lou’s shaking hands said:

  Do not notify the police. If you do, and they start making it hot for us, you will never see ___ alive again. We are holding ___ for Sixty Thousand Dollars. We are asking you to get this money in Ten and Twenty dollar bills and they must be old bills only. When you get the money ready and are willing to pay as above for the safe return of ___, then insert the following add in the Denver Post, personal items …

  (Please write, I am ready to return) SIGN (Mabel) …

  We will not stand for any stalling thru advise [sic] that police may give you. You are smart enough to know what the results will be if you try that. You know what happened to little Charles Lindbergh through his father calling the police. He would be alive today if his father had followed instructions given him. You are to choose one of these to [sic] courses. Either insert add and be prepared to pay ransome [sic], Or forget it all.

  Anna Lou’s first phone call was to Charlie’s father. In spite of the threat in the note, Claude immediately called the police. A patrol car arrived at the scene of the crime within three minutes and was quickly followed by more. Five minutes after Claude’s call, police were swarming through Denver with orders to stop and search any small black sedan — a description that fit thousands of cars. Anna Lou hadn’t seen the licence-plate number.

  In fact, Anna Lou could give the police few clues. Sankey had been masked. She could only report that the kidnapper was white, short, and stocky, and had unusually round eyes.

  Denver police Chief Albert T. Clark was certain that Charlie had been abducted by professional criminals and announced that he would be safely returned to the bosom of his family within forty-eight hours. Clark’s dragnet scooped up plenty of suspects, including several well-known gangsters. There was no evidence connecting any of them to the kidnapping. The mention of the name “Lindbergh” in the ransom note had investigators wondering if Charlie had been taken by the still-at-large kidnappers of the Lindbergh baby.

  The Denver police put Les Trois Tours and Claude’s gated mansion under armed guard. Some of the officers even toted machine guns. But their biggest problem was keeping the hordes of newspaper reporters, photographers, and curious gawkers at bay.

  Meanwhile, by the eveni
ng after his abduction, Charlie was sitting blindfolded and miserable in the basement of the Sankey farmhouse. When the masked men had him in their car, they’d tied his hands and taped his eyes closed, and then put sunglasses on him. He’d endured a ride of over 570 miles of back roads in complete darkness. When the kidnappers had to stop for gas, they told him he’d be okay as long as he behaved himself.

  Arthur Youngberg was taken completely by surprise when Sankey and Alcorn arrived at the farm with a man who was obviously a prisoner. When Sankey told him to take care of the “new boarder,” Youngberg replied that they’d better take Charlie back where they found him or they’d all wind up in jail. However, after the smooth-talking Sankey assured Youngberg that they wouldn’t get caught and he’d have a “nice fat share of the proceeds,” Youngberg agreed to go along with the plan. His job was to be Charlie’s keeper.

  Charlie’s basement prison was a damp room with a cot, a coal-oil lamp, a table, and a couple of chairs. Youngberg brought his meals, coffee, and cigarettes, but was always careful not to let Charlie see his face. He occasionally gave Charlie a shave. Sometimes Youngberg stood behind the prisoner and took off the blindfold so he could read a magazine. He warned Charlie not to look around if he didn’t want to be “bumped off.” Charlie would talk to his captor about his wife and family, whom he said were surely concerned about his safety.

  On February 15, Claude placed the ad in the Denver Post, as the ransom note had instructed. The days since his son’s abductions had been confusing. He and Anna Lou had been swamped with phone calls, most of them from cranks looking for money. Sankey himself had added to the confusion when he made Charlie write letters to Claude and Anna Lou, and then delivered them via the Boettchers’ pastor, the Reverend B.D. Dagwell. The letter to Claude admonished him for not following directions, and told him, “Charles is very nerves [sic] and frightened. He often asks if we will release him if you pay and I keep telling him we will, but he lives in fear of being bumped off.”