1930s gangsters rule in ‘The Year of Fear’
In an America where the exploits of legendary gangsters such as Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly have almost entirely faded from living memory, it’s the task of earnest historians to cut through the pulp fiction and tell it like it was. The brazen bootleggers and racketeers of the 1920s and ’ 30s were colorful, but they were mainly products of their time — nasty, brutish, short-lived avatars of Prohibition, the Depression and crude capitalism.
They also were the perfect bogeymen — and women — for an under-ripe federal lawman named J. Edgar Hoover to chase down in his quest for glory. He may have been a creepy obsessive, but Hoover had vision. He built a potent Federal Bureau of Investigation to transcend the corrupt network of local and state police who often were in cahoots with the gangsters.
But once Prohibition ended, and as the Depression and the Dust Bowl were instead wringing America dry, the criminal element kicked up a reign of terror, robbing banks and kidnapping rich folk for ransom. And that’s where The Year of
Fear, Joe Urschel’s entertaining history of 1933, takes off, in a wheel-spinning flurry of detail that brings the era to life.
The book chronicles the kidnapping of an Oklahoma oil magnate, Charles Urschel (no relation to the author), and the manhunt that ensued. The FBI trapped the dapper kidnapper, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, his fortune hunter wife, Kathryn, and assorted accomplices. A lively trial was the public payoff.
This is Joe Urschel’s first book. He’s a former editor at USA TODAY and is now executive director of the National Law Enforcement Museum. He carefully
cites the source material that bolsters the fly-on-the-wall reportage of The
Year of Fear.
If anything, there are too many heroes, villains and bit players to keep track of. But Urschel builds suspense with a swift narrative and a strong sense of place and delineates characters well.
Urschel draws a humorous portrait of Kelly, who wasn’t a poor boy gone bad so much as a middle-class lout who preferred the easy money of rum running and bank robbing to an honest living.
In releasing an unnecessary hostage from his Cadillac, Kelly made a point of leaving the man with $10 to catch a cab home. Desperate times they were, but a certain civility still ruled, and Urschel draws a subtle bead on it.