Chapter 1
The Snatch Racket
The opening salvo in the FBI's War on Crime took place in the shadow of the billowing smokestacks of a sprawling beer brewery complex in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Just after noon on June 15, 1933, William Hamm Jr., the thirty-
nine-year-old president of the Hamm Brewing Company, left his office for a short walk home to have lunch at his family's hilltop mansion, as was his custom. He was unaware he was being watched by a group of men who'd been stalking him for days, observing his every move, learning his habits and walking routes. Maskless so as not to arouse any suspicion, they loitered about the street where the labyrinthine brewery was located.
Hamm didn't get far before a tall, distinguished-looking man with a graying mustache and a business suit strode up, shook his hand on the street, and grabbed his elbow.
"You are Mr. Hamm, are you not?" the man asked.
"Yes," Hamm responded. "What is it you want?" Suddenly the man tightened his grip on Hamm's right hand, and another, much shorter man stepped up, grabbed Hamm's left hand and arm, and pushed him to the curb.
Immediately, a black Hudson sedan, driven by a man in a chauffeur's hat and uniform, drew up next to them and screeched to a stop. The rear door was opened, and the two captors shoved the tall, handsome Hamm into the back seat next to yet another man.
The older man climbed in the front seat next to the driver while the shorter man who had grabbed Hamm jumped in alongside him, slipped a pillowcase over his head, and yanked him to the floor. "I don't like to do this," the older gentleman apologized to their captive. "But I'm going to have to ask you to get down on the floor because I don't want you to see where you're going. I hope you don't mind."
The car drove off over a paved thoroughfare for about a half hour, then onto a gravel road, where it stopped. Hamm heard the voices of additional new men, who'd driven to meet them at the stopping point.
After lifting Hamm's hood slightly, one of the new captors gave him a pen and four pieces of paper and ordered him to sign them. Each was a typed ransom note authorizing the payment of $100,000 and requesting that all instructions be carried out as specified. Hamm barely glanced at the papers before signing them.
The kidnappers talked casually about muskellunge (pike) fishing for a few minutes; then the Hudson resumed its journey. Hamm's pillow hood was exchanged for dark goggles taped over cotton balls pressed against his eyelids.
Another of the abductors asked Hamm to name a trusted intermediary they could use to negotiate with the divorced businessman's family. He suggested William W. Dunn, the brewery's sales manager and a close friend.
The kidnappers couldn't have been more pleased. Billy Dunn, a former billiards hall operator, was himself an underworld figure who could be counted on to follow directions. In a town known for beer and bribery, the short, bespectacled Dunn had served as a bagman for the St. Paul police, collecting extortion money paid by hoodlums and gamblers for protection. Hamm's brewery, like its crosstown rival, Schmidt's, was cozy with gangsters and bootleggers and corrupt cops during Prohibition, relying on them to grease the skids for the delivery of real beer to the Twin Cities' many speakeasies.
Around 2:45 p.m. on June 15, a couple of hours after Hamm was abducted, Dunn received an anonymous phone call in his office. "I want to talk to you, and I don't want you to say anything until I get all through," the voice said. "We have Mr. Hamm." He said the kidnappers wanted $100,000 in unmarked bills placed in a Hamm's beer truck with further delivery instructions to follow. The caller continued, "If you tell a soul about this, it will be just too bad for Hamm and you."
Dunn, disregarding the warning, contacted St. Paul's recently appointed police chief, Tom Dahill. An unusually honest cop for the city, Dahill brought the FBI's local office into the case.
Heading the FBI's investigation was St. Paul's veteran SAC (special agent in charge), Werner Hanni, a balding, thirty-eight-year-old native of Switzerland who had joined the Bureau in 1919. He had an intermittently contentious relationship with Hoover, who was forever castigating him for this or that minor transgression, such as forwarding a report a bit late or not telephoning headquarters with updates quickly enough.
As Hanni's granddaughter, Lisa Hanni, pointed out in 2021, her grandfather wasn't Hoover's type. He was European, dressed like one, spoke with an accent that he made no attempt to soften, was older than Hoover's young and grateful special agents, and was neither a lawyer nor an accountant. (He'd been a Swiss army colonel and a carpenter in Nebraska.) But his years of experience made him a valuable SAC in a tough town.
Meanwhile, the kidnap caravan rolled along. After a five-hour ride, Hamm was brought to a hideout: a two-story frame house where he was taken upstairs to a sparely furnished bedroom with an iron bed, boarded-up windows, and a single unshaded electric light dangling from the ceiling. He later recalled a couple of distinguishing features: pictures of flamingos on one of the walls and the word mother inscribed on the bed's baseboard.
Hamm was usually guarded by a man in a rocking chair and was forced to face the wall whenever his goggles were off. Nearby church bells, children playing, busy thoroughfare traffic, and a train whistle were among the sounds he heard.
With Hamm in captivity, the kidnappers continued sending messages to Dunn. At 1:30 a.m. on June 16, he received a call at home from the same anonymous person who'd phoned the previous afternoon. "Well, Dunn, you are following instructions very well so far," the man said. "You must realize by now that the call was not a joke."
Late that evening, a drugstore delivery boy named Art Kleifgen brought Dunn a note at his residence. As Kleifgen would tell the FBI, a curly-haired man had entered the Rosedale Pharmacy on the west side of town earlier that evening to buy some cigarettes. After leaving, he phoned the drugstore, claiming to be Dunn. He told young Kleifgen that he'd left a letter in a soda booth there and asked the boy to bring it to his home.
Kleifgen had known the voice wasn't that of Dunn, who was a regular customer, but he carried the message anyway. In the note, the kidnappers demanded that Dunn deliver the $100,000 in ransom money personally because they'd learned he was cooperating with law enforcement. "You brought the coppers to this, now you get rid of the assholes," the note read.
The FBI men suspected a leak in the St. Paul Police Department based on another note Dunn soon received. It warned him not to go through with a plan that St. Paul detective Charles Tierney had hatched for the delivery of the ransom money. Tierney wanted to conceal himself under a tarpaulin in the back of the Hamm's beer truck that Dunn was supposed to drive, then pop up and spray the kidnappers with machine-gun fire when they tried to collect. The latest missive to Dunn read, "If you are through with the bullshit and ballyhoo we will give you your chance." He was to "get away from the coppers" and find a standard Ford or Chevy instead of the beer truck they'd previously instructed him to use.
The note told Dunn to remove the side doors and trunk lid and put a red lantern in the back of the car so that no one could hide inside. Clearly, the kidnappers had been tipped off to Tierney's plan.
Dunn also received delivery instructions: drive alone out of St. Paul on Highway 61 with the money in a bag until he saw an approaching car flash its headlights five times. Then drop the bag at the side of the road and continue to Duluth. This time Dunn did as instructed, and on the night of June 17, he made the drop-off.
The $100,000 Dunn turned over that night (more than $2 million in 2024 dollars) was the largest ransom amount paid for an American to date. Two months later, Lloyd's of London underwriters began writing kidnap insurance for up to a maximum of $100,000 for an adult.
Most high-ransom kidnappings of adults in the Depression era had been mobster on mobster: one criminal outfit would abduct an enemy gang's leader or a high-ranking union racketeering official out of revenge. But by 1933, all manner of criminals, including some previously known only as bank robbers, were seeing the "snatch racket" as easy money. Their targets were wealthy businessmen who could afford to pay. Arguably, it beat robbing banks, which usually involved at least some shooting and often killing.
One disadvantage to ransom kidnapping: it brought the feds into the case, at least if state lines were crossed. The Hamm kidnappers weren't too worried, though, about the FBI, which was inexperienced in handling kidnapping cases. Previously, the Bureau had taken a back seat to state law enforcement authorities, who asserted primary jurisdiction over a kidnapping. But Hoover was itching to get into the game, and even though there was no proof yet that Hamm's abductors had taken him across state lines, there was no proof that they hadn't. Hoover decided to assume Lindbergh Law jurisdiction provisionally, and if it later turned out that federal jurisdiction was lacking, the FBI could always turn over the fruits of its investigation to state authorities.
The Hamm snatch was the first high-profile kidnapping case the FBI would lead. And how well Hoover's men performed would go a long way toward establishing whether the lightly regarded agency was up to the task of bringing dangerous criminals to justice.
Copyright © 2024 by John Oller. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
