DOW JONES, A NEWS CORP COMPANY About WSJ

DJIA 30932.37 1.50% ▼ S&P 500 3811.15 0.48% ▼ Nasdaq 13192.35 0.56% ▲ U.S. 10 Yr 32/32 Yield 1.415% ▲ Crude Oil 61.66 2.94% ▼ Euro 1.2076 0.02% ▲ John Kosner

COVID-19 DAILY BRIEFING

English Edition Print Edition Video Podcasts Latest Headlines

Home World U.S. Politics Economy Business Tech Markets Opinion Life & Arts Real Estate WSJ. Magazine Search

BEST OF BEST BOOKS OF FEBRUARY LATEST TV REVIEWS LATEST MOVIE REVIEWS FICTION BOOK REVIEWS MUSIC REVIEWS VIRTUAL VATICAN REVIEW BEST SPY NOVELS Arts & Review BEST BOOKS OF 2020

BOOKS | BOOKSHELF SHARE ‘The Snatch Racket’ Review: Coppers & Kidnappers The Lindbergh baby was only the most high-profile victim of an ‘epidemic’ of abductions in 1930s America.

Bruno Richard Hauptmann, convicted for the murder of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., in his jail cell in 1935. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

By Edward Kosner Feb. 25, 2021 6:26 pm ET

SAVE PRINT TEXT 5

Listen to this article 6 minutes

Decades before actor Kevin McCarthy had his big-screen encounter with the pod people of Santa Mira, Calif., America suffered from an invasion of real-life body snatchers.

Through the Jazz Age and the Depression, mobsters and copycat amateurs captured rich and prominent people or their children and held them for ransom. Most of the victims were freed unharmed, often for a million dollars or more in today’s money. But in the most notorious case—the kidnapping of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s 20-month-old Charlie from their home in New Jersey—the baby was long dead during the endless negotiations for his release.

That case prompted the passage of the “Lindbergh Law”—the Federal Kidnapping Act of MOST POPULAR NEWS 1932—enabling the U.S. government to get involved and giving J. Edgar Hoover, the head of 1. What We Know About the FBI, a boost in his insatiable quest for fame. Even so, the epidemic of kidnapping, as the Tiger Woods's Injury and Car Accident papers called it, stubbornly persisted through the 1930s and into our times. Frank Sinatra’s 19-year-old son Frank Jr. was grabbed at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe in 1963 and, a decade later, J&J Single-Dose 2. Covid-19 Vaccine the radical Symbionese Liberation Army snatched the publishing heiress Patty Hearst. Gains Backing From FDA Advisory Panel The kidnappings of the ’30s seem almost quaint compared to the school massacres, drive- In Hunt for Covid-19 by shootings, cyberhacks, radical rioting, pressure-cooker bombings and other grim crimes 3. Origin, Patient Zero of today. But they were terrifying in their era. began publishing a Points to Second Wuhan Market kidnapping log. Behind the gates of their mansions, rich people quaked for their lives. They hired armed chauffeurs and slept with shotguns and pistols at their bedsides. J.P. Morgan The New Covid 4. Vacation? Moving enlisted 250 armed guards for its partners and their families. Abroad In “The Snatch Racket,” Carolyn Cox, a veteran 5. Russian Diplomats Washington lawyer and law professor, Flee North Korea by Hand-Powered Rail reanimates this intriguing slice of American life. Crisp, zesty and free of the clichés of most Cart true-crime writing, Ms. Cox’s book interweaves her case narratives with the inside story of how Hoover exploited the crisis to launch a “crusade” against organized crime, even MOST POPULAR OPINION coining the term “G-men” to glamorize his agents. Opinion: The Old New 1. York Won’t Come Back In one of the first headlined cases, in April 1931, Dr. Dee Kelley, a leading St. Louis ear specialist, was lured out in the middle of the night on a Opinion: What Altered 2. the Public’s Taste for house call, captured and stashed away. Within Lies? two days, Kelley’s family forked over more than Opinion: Joe Biden’s $4.2 million in today’s money and he was 3. Mixed Iran Messages released, shaken but unharmed. Eight months later, kidnappers in Kansas City, Mo., grabbed Opinion: The Nell Donnelly, the largest women’s clothing 4. Censorship Party manufacturer in the country. They demanded

today’s equivalent of $1.2 million and Opinion: California’s threatened to blind her and kill her husband if 5. Climate Contradictions the police were called. Instead, a U.S. senator who was a pal of the victim blackmailed local Mafia boss Johnny Lazia into arranging her RECOMMENDED VIDEOS

release—with an apology. Tiger Woods Injured 1. in Car Accident Crooked cops and mobsters kept popping up in PHOTO: WSJ these kidnappings. Frank Costello and Al NASA Releases New Capone volunteered to try to break the 2. Color Images of THE SNATCH RACKET Lindbergh case. After mad dog Alvin Karpis and Perseverance Rover Landing on Mars confederates kidnapped Minnesota brewer By Carolyn Cox William Hamm Jr., “the most eligible bachelor How Public Potomac, 341 pages, $34.95 3. Universities Became in the Midwest,” in November 1933 —the fifth So Expensive such case in St. Paul in three years—officials set Behind the Price Tag up a kidnap squad headed by a former police 4. of the Most Expensive chief. He turned out to be a “finger man,” identifying victims for future snatches. Watches in the World

Remote Workers 5. Wanted: Small Cities Local and state police had a mixed record in kidnapping cases, and some of the perps were Offer Cash to Those never tried. The men who snatched handsome young Brooke Hart, whose father owned the Who Relocate biggest department store in San Jose, Calif., faced a different fate. After Hart’s body was found floating in San Francisco Bay, Ms. Cox writes, thousands of angry citizens WSJ MEMBER MESSAGE: NEWSLETTER surrounded the county jail, seized the two suspects and lynched them. The governor of California applauded. Let's Talk Politics From campaigns to the Capitol, never miss Given the ineptitude of the locals, Hoover had the latest major political news with Politics little trouble insinuating his G-men deeper into Alert. the cases—although the Feds sometimes came SIGN UP NOW off more like Keystone Kops than crack sleuths. During his three-year campaign against the kidnappers, Hoover was also at war with the marquee mobsters of the age, among them Capone, John Dillinger (whose family pronounced it with a hard “g”), “Machine Gun” BEST OF THE FEBRUARY BOOKSHELF: OUR Kelly, Karpis and his mentor Ma Barker. These REVIEWERS’ PICKS » hoods were sometimes involved in the snatches ‘No One Is Talking About This,’ ‘Think and sometimes spuriously linked to them by Again,’ ‘Dostoevsky in Love’—and more of Hoover. The Feds were trigger-happy, too, the best reads from this month. massacring mobsters, including Ma Barker and Dillinger, while supposedly trying to capture them.

Appropriately, Ms. Cox devotes a good deal of the book to the authentically sensational Lindbergh case. From the beginning, Hoover and the FBI were kept at the margins of the investigation run by H. Norman Schwarzkopf—head of the New Jersey state police (and father of the Gulf War hero general)—and the cops. But, using the vast resources of the Treasury Department and his nationwide network of agents, Hoover pioneered tracing the serial numbers of the ransom bills as the kidnapper began to spend the money. By pinpointing where each bill was passed, the FBI located Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a 36-year-old immigrant carpenter in the Bronx, and captured him when a service-station operator happened to write the license number of Hauptmann’s car on the $10 gold certificate he’d used to buy gas. Lindbergh had overheard Hauptmann when the ransom was passed. At the trial, he dramatically identified Hauptmann by his German accent, and he was convicted and sent to the electric chair.

“Once the professional kidnappers—the instigators of the kidnap epidemic—realized they could no longer be confident they could exchange or spend ransom money without getting caught,” Ms. Cox writes, “they gave up on kidnapping as a business, and the magnitude of the threat rapidly diminished.” And J. Edgar Hoover got his wish, becoming Public Hero No. 1 to millions of Americans.

Mr. Kosner is the former editor of , New York, Esquire and the .

Appeared in the February 26, 2021, print edition as 'Coppers & Kidnappers.'

Would you like more stories like this?

YES NO

SHOW CONVERSATION (5)

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

What’s Missing in the SPONSORED OFFERS Electric-Vehicle Revolution: Enough Places to Plug In TURBOTAX: TARGET: MACY'S: TurboTax service code: 50% off 20% off entire order - Target Macy's coupon - Sign up to get WSJ News Exclusive | BTS for Deluxe version promo code 25% off next order and K-Pop Took Over the World. These Companies Say J-Pop Will Be Even SAKS FIFTH AVENUE: OLD NAVY: SHEIN: Bigger. 20% off first order - Saks Fifth Save 25% on Quilted Puffer 30% off any order - SHEIN Avenue coupon Vest with Old Navy coupon coupon Declutter the Filing Cabinet: What to Save, Move to the Cloud or Shred

In Covid-19 Vaccine Surveys, the Wording Affects the Results

Roblox’s ‘Builderman’ CEO Heads to Wall Street With an Army of Young Game Creators

Covid-19 Picture Brightens in U.S., but Virus Isn’t Done Yet

Covid-19 Vaccine ‘Passports’ Raise Ethics Concerns, Logistical Hurdles

$15 Minimum-Wage Setback Tests Biden’s Ability to Unite Democrats

Stocks Cap Losing Week as Bond Yields Jump

In Hunt for Covid-19 Origin, Patient Zero Points to Second Wuhan Market

BACK TO TOP «

The WallEnglish Street Edition Journal Sign Out

WSJ Membership Customer Service Tools & Features Ads More

WSJ+ Membership Benefits Customer Center Emails & Alerts Advertise About Us

Subscription Options Contact Us Guides Commercial Real Estate Ads Commercial Partnerships

Why Subscribe? Topics Place a Classified Ad Content Partnerships

Corporate Subscriptions My News Sell Your Business Corrections

Professor Journal RSS Feeds Sell Your Home Jobs at WSJ

Student Journal Video Center Recruitment & Career Ads News Archive

WSJ High School Program Watchlist Coupons Register for Free

WSJ Amenity Program Podcasts Reprints

WSJ Live Buy Issues

Dow Jones Products Barron's BigCharts Dow Jones Newswires Factiva Financial News Mansion Global MarketWatch Private Markets Risk & Compliance WSJ Pro WSJ Video WSJ Wine

Privacy Notice Cookie Notice Copyright Policy Data Policy Subscriber Agreement & Terms of Use Your Ad Choices

Copyright ©2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.