21   THE HOT HOUSE

It was like wandering through the catacombs of memory. As White walked along the cell block tiers, he could see figures from his past, their eyes peering out from behind bars, their bodies gleaming with sweat. He saw Hale and Ramsey. He encountered members of the old Al Spencer Gang and the former head of the Veterans Bureau, who had committed bribery during the scandalous Harding administration. And White came upon the two deserters who had killed his older brother, Dudley, though White never mentioned the connection, not wanting to cause them any distress.

White lived with his family on the prison grounds. His wife was initially unable to sleep, wondering, “How do you raise two young boys in this kind of environment?” The challenges of managing the prison—which was designed to hold twelve hundred inmates but instead had three times that number—were overwhelming. In the summer, the temperatures inside rose as high as 115 degrees, which is why prisoners would later call Leavenworth the Hot House. One August day in 1929, when it was so nightmarishly hot that the milk in the prison’s kitchen soured, a riot erupted in the mess hall. Red Rudensky, an infamous safecracker, recalled that there was “ugly, dangerous, killing hate” and that White rushed in to quell the unrest: “Warden White showed his courage, and came within a few feet of me, although cleavers and broken, jagged bottles were inches from him.”

White tried to improve conditions in the prison. A custodian who later worked under him recalled, “The Warden was strict with the inmates but would never stand for any mistreatment or heckling of them.” White once sent Rudensky a note that said, “It takes a good deal of nerve to change a course that you have been on for years and years—more so, maybe than I realize, but if it is in you, now is the time to show it.” Because of White’s support, Rudensky recalled, “I had a ray of hope.”

Though White encouraged efforts at rehabilitation, he had few illusions about many of the men contained in the Hot House. In 1929, Carl Panzram—a repeat killer who’d confessed to slaying twenty-one people and insisted, “I have no conscience”—beat a member of the prison staff to death. He was sentenced to be hanged inside the penitentiary, and White, though opposed to capital punishment, was given the grim task of overseeing the execution, much as his father had done in Texas. On September 5, 1930, as the sun rose over the prison dome, White went to take Panzram from his cell to the newly built gallows. White made sure that his two boys weren’t present when the noose was looped around the neck of Panzram, who shouted at his executioners to hurry up: “I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around.” At 6:03 a.m., the trap opened and Panzram swung to his death. It was the first time that White had helped to end a human life.

After arriving at Leavenworth, William Hale was assigned to duty on the tuberculosis ward. Later, he toiled on the prison farm, where he tended pigs and other animals the way he had during his early days on the frontier. A prison report said, “He does high grade work caring for stock, and is able to do such operations as opening of abscesses and castrating of animals.”

In November 1926, when a reporter wrote to White fishing for gossip about Hale, White refused to provide any, insisting that Hale would be “treated as other prisoners are treated.” White went out of his way so that Hale’s wife and daughter never felt slighted by prison officials. Hale’s wife once wrote a letter to White, saying, “Would I be imposing to ask your permission to see my husband next Monday? It will be almost three weeks since my last visit and of course I realize your regulations allow us only one visit each month but…if you could please grant me this I would surely appreciate it.” White wrote back that she would be welcome at the prison.

Over the years, Hale never admitted ordering any of the murders: not the killing of Roan, for which he was convicted, or the countless other murders that the evidence showed he had orchestrated but that he wasn’t prosecuted for after he had received a life sentence. Despite his refusal to admit responsibility, he had given, during trial testimony, a rather cold statement about a different attempt that he’d made to swindle a headright—a statement that seemed to reveal his ethos: “It was a business proposition with me.”

Whereas White had once turned to preachers to illuminate this thing of darkness, he now also searched for a scientific explanation. In prison, Hale was given a neurological and psychological examination. The evaluator found that Hale showed no obvious “evidence of repression nor of frank psychosis” but nevertheless had “extremely vicious components in his make-up.” Cloaking his savagery under the banner of civilization, Hale portrayed himself as an American pioneer who had helped forge a nation out of the raw wilderness. The evaluator observed, “His poor judgment is further evidenced by his continued denial of his obvious guilt. His affect is not suitable….He has put behind him any feeling of shame or repentance he may have had.” White read the evaluator’s psychological study of Hale, but there was some evil that seemed beyond the scope of science. Though Hale conformed to prison regulations, he continued to scheme to secure his release. He allegedly arranged for an appeals court to be bribed, and when these efforts failed to win him freedom, he boasted, as the evaluator noted, of “his probable release through influence of friends.”

Yet for the first time in ages life in Osage County went on without his overwhelming presence. Mollie Burkhart began again to socialize and attend church. She eventually fell in love with a man named John Cobb, who was part white and part Creek. According to relatives, their love was genuine, and in 1928 they were married.

There was another dramatic change in Mollie’s life. She and the Osage had fought to end the corrupt system of guardianships, and on April 21, 1931, a court ruled that Mollie was no longer a ward of the state: “IT IS FURTHER ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED BY THE COURT, that the said Mollie Burkhart, Osage Allottee No. 285,…is hereby restored to competency, and the order heretofore made adjudging her to be an incompetent person is hereby vacated.” At forty-four, Mollie could finally spend her money as she pleased, and was recognized as a full-fledged American citizen.

On December 11, 1931, White was in his warden’s office when he heard a noise. He stood and went to the door and found himself staring into the barrel of a gun. Seven of the most dangerous convicts—including two Al Spencer Gang members and a bandit who was nicknamed Boxcar, because of his giant size—were attempting to escape. The group was armed with a Winchester rifle, a sawed-off shotgun, and six sticks of dynamite, which had been smuggled into the prison. The convicts took White and eight members of his staff hostage and used them as shields as they pushed forward. Once outside the front gate, the prisoners released the other hostages and headed out to the main road with White—their insurance policy, as they called him. The inmates commandeered an approaching vehicle, forced White inside, and sped away.

White’s captors reminded him that there’d be nothing left of him to bury if anything went wrong. Everything was going wrong. The car slipped off the muddy road and got stuck, forcing the prisoners to flee on foot. Soldiers from Fort Leavenworth joined the manhunt. Planes were flying overhead. The inmates ran into a farmhouse and seized an eighteen-year-old girl and her younger brother. White pleaded with the prisoners, saying, “I know you’re going to kill me. But don’t kill these two—they aren’t in it at all.”

Boxcar and another inmate went to look for a second car, taking White with them. At one point, White could see that the girl had broken free and was running. The gang seemed ready to start killing, and White grabbed the barrel of the gun being held by one of his captors, who yelled at Boxcar, “Shoot him! He’s got my gun.” As Boxcar leveled his shotgun at White’s chest, only inches away, White lifted his left forearm to shield himself. Then he heard the blast and felt the bullet boring through his arm, through flesh and blood and bone, the buckshot fragmenting, some pieces going through his arm and into his chest. Yet White was standing. It was like a miracle; he had been shot to pieces, and yet he was still breathing in the cold December air, and then he felt the butt of the rifle smashing into his face and he crumbled, all 225 pounds of him, and fell into a ditch, bleeding out and left to die.

Nearly a decade later, in December 1939, the acclaimed newspaper reporter Ernie Pyle stopped at La Tuna prison, near El Paso, Texas. He asked to meet the warden and was led in to see Tom White, who was then nearly sixty years old. “White asked me to stay for lunch,” Pyle later wrote. “So I did, and we sat and talked, and finally he told me the story, as I was hoping all the time he would. The story about his left arm.”

White described how, after being shot by Boxcar, he was found in the ditch and rushed to the hospital. For several days, it was uncertain whether he would live, and doctors contemplated amputating his arm. But he survived, somehow, and he even kept his arm, though it still had bullet fragments lodged inside and dangled uselessly. White didn’t mention one detail to Pyle: the girl who had been taken hostage credited White with protecting her and her brother. “I am sure they intended to kill all of us, and only Warden White’s bravery saved us,” she said.

None of the convicts managed to get away. They believed that if you touched a prison official, especially a warden, it was better, as one of them remarked, never to “come back because if you do you are going to have a hard, hard time.” And so when the authorities caught up with Boxcar and the other escapees, Boxcar shot his two companions, then put a bullet in his own forehead. The other inmates prepared to kill themselves by detonating the dynamite, but before they could light the fuse, they were apprehended. One of them said, “The funny part is that when we got back to the institution they never laid a hand on us. Warden White was a hell of a man. He left strict orders, ‘No hands on these people, leave them alone. Treat them just like the rest of the prisoners.’ ” He added, “Otherwise we’d have got our heads broken in.”

White learned that Rudensky had been recruited to assist with the escape but had refused. “He had begun to develop a sense of responsibility,” White told another writer. “He realized that I had been fair with him and was sincerely trying to help him establish himself as a member of ‘legitimate’ society.” In 1944, Rudensky was released on parole and had a successful career as an author and a businessman.

When White had sufficiently recovered, he took over as warden of La Tuna, a job that was less strenuous. Pyle wrote of the shooting, “The experience affected Warden White, as it would anyone. It didn’t make him afraid, but it made him jumpy, and kind of haunted.” Pyle continued, “I don’t see how, after an experience like that, you could look upon any convict with anything but hatred. But Warden White isn’t that way. He is thoroughly professional about his job. He is a serious, pleasant man, and he has trained himself to control his emotions.”

If J. Edgar Hoover used the Osage murder probe as a showcase for the bureau, a series of sensational crimes in the 1930s stoked public fears and enabled Hoover to turn the organization into the powerful force recognized today. These crimes included the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby and the Kansas City Massacre, where several lawmen were killed in a shootout while transporting the Al Spencer Gang member Frank “Jelly” Nash. White’s old colleague, Agent Frank Smith, was among the convoy but survived. (The journalist Robert Unger later documented how Smith and another agent who originally claimed that they hadn’t been able to identify the shooters, suddenly vividly recalled them after pressure from Hoover to resolve the cases.) In the wake of these incidents, Congress passed a series of New Deal reforms that gave the federal government its first comprehensive criminal code and the bureau a sweeping mission. Agents were now empowered to make arrests and carry firearms, and the department was soon renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “The days of the small Bureau were over,” Hoover’s biographer Curt Gentry observed. “Gone, too, were the days when special agents were merely investigators.” White’s brother Doc was involved in many of the bureau’s biggest cases during this period—from hunting public enemies like John Dillinger to killing Ma Barker and her son Fred. Tom White’s son had also joined the bureau, making three generations of White lawmen.

Hoover ensured that the identity of the bureau was indistinguishable from his own. And while presidents came and went, this bureaucrat, now thick around the waist and with jowls like a bulldog, remained. “I looked up and there was J. Edgar Hoover on his balcony, high and distant and quiet, watching with his misty kingdom behind him, going on from President to President and decade to decade,” a reporter for Life magazine wrote. The many details of Hoover’s abuses of power would not be made public until after his death, in 1972, and despite White’s perceptiveness he was blind to the boss man’s megalomania, his politicization of the bureau, and his paranoid plots against an ever-growing list of perceived enemies, among them American Indian activists.

Over the years, White wrote periodically to Hoover. Once, White invited him to a relative’s ranch: “We do not have to rough it on his ranch, for he has every convenience except air cooling and you don’t need that.” But Hoover politely declined. He was too busy now and had to be prodded to take note of his former star agent. When White, at the age of seventy, stepped down as warden of La Tuna in 1951, Hoover sent him a card only after another agent reminded him how much White would “appreciate a personal note from the director on his retirement.”

In the late 1950s, White learned that Hollywood was about to shoot a movie, The FBI Story, starring James Stewart as a crime-busting agent, that would feature a segment on the murders of the Osage. White sent Hoover a letter, asking if the filmmakers might want to talk to him about the case. “I would be glad to afford the information as I know it from start to finish,” White said. Hoover replied that he would “certainly bear you in mind,” but he never followed up. Hoover made a cameo appearance in the 1959 movie, which further enshrined him in the popular imagination.

But, even though the movie was popular, the Osage case was fading from memory, eclipsed by more recent celebrated cases. Soon, most Americans had forgotten it. In the late 1950s, White contemplated writing a story to document the case. He wanted to record the crimes against the Osage and wanted to make sure that the agents who had worked with him were not erased from history. They had all since died in obscurity and often in poverty. When one of the undercover operatives was dying, his wife wrote that she wished he had a retirement fund, and an agent who knew him advised Hoover that the family was “confronted with a very gloomy situation.”

Several years after the Osage murder investigation, Wren, the Ute agent, was forced out of the bureau again, this time for good. As he left, he cursed and threw items from his desk. His treatment, he later wrote to Hoover, had been “unjust, unfair and unwarranted.” Wren’s anger eventually dissipated, and before he died, in 1939, he sent Hoover a letter that said, “Often when I read of you and your men I swell up with much pleasure and pride, then I begin to think again of the long time ago. I am very proud of you and still call you my old chief.” He continued, “Many of my old friends have gone to the happy hunting grounds. Many of the tall beautiful trees have been destroyed, many have been cut down by the white man. The wild turkey, the deer, the wild horses, and the wild cattle have gone, and do not live anymore among the beautiful hills.”

Along with documenting the roles of other agents, White no doubt hoped to secure himself a small place in history, though he’d never say so himself. He wrote a few stilted pages, which read, in part,

After the Director Mr. J. Edgar Hoover briefed me on the importance of the case, he instructed me to return to Houston, arrange my affairs there, and go as soon as possible to take charge of the Oklahoma City office. He told me I was to select my investigators necessary in this case from men I knew best fitted in this line of work….We realized the importance of men working under cover more than ever when we arrived on the ground and found the frightened state of mind the Indians were living under.

White recognized that he wasn’t much of a writer, and by 1958 he had teamed up with Fred Grove, an author of Western novels who was part Osage and who, as a boy, had been staying in Fairfax at the time of the Smith explosion, an event that haunted him. As Grove worked on the book, White asked him, in a letter, if the narrative could be told in the third person. “I would like to keep the big ‘I’ out of it all I can, because I don’t want it conveyed that I am the whole story,” White explained. “If it had not been for the good agents I had on the job we could never have made it. Then too our boss man J. Edgar Hoover, the directing head of the F.B.I., is to be reckoned with.”

In a letter to Hoover, White asked if the bureau would release to him some of the old case files to help him prepare the book. He also inquired whether Hoover would write a brief introduction. “I hope this will not be asking too much of you,” White said. “I feel that this would be invaluable to us all who were then and are now vitally interested in our great organization, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You and I are about the only ones of the originals left now.” In an internal memo, Clyde Tolson, the associate director of the bureau, who had become Hoover’s longtime companion, spawning rumors that they were romantically involved, said, “We should furnish only limited, routine material, if any.”

White’s body was beginning to fail him. He had arthritis. He tripped walking (walking!) and injured himself. In September 1959, White’s wife told Grove, “Sickness of any kind is really very terrible to him and puts him out considerably. We still hope he will improve so that he can go to Dallas the last of October to attend the National Convention of Ex-FBI Agents.” Even in his ailing state White assisted Grove with the book, as if he were consumed by an unsolved case, until the manuscript was completed. In a letter to Grove, White wrote, “I am hoping that all the good luck in the world will come our way from a good publisher,” adding that he would be keeping his fingers crossed. But publishers found the account less than captivating. And though Grove would eventually release a fictionalized version called The Years of Fear, the original historical account was never published. “I am sincerely sorry this letter couldn’t bring better news,” an editor said.

On February 11, 1969, Doc, who was staying on the ranch where he and Tom had grown up, died at the age of eighty-four. In a letter, White shared the news with Hoover, noting that he and his four siblings had been “born on this land.” He added wistfully, “And now I am the only one left.”

In October 1971, White collapsed from an apparent stroke. He was ninety and had no more miraculous escapes. On December 21, in the early morning hours, he stopped breathing. A friend said, “He died as he had lived, quietly and with a calm dignity.” An agent urged Hoover to send condolences to White’s widow, emphasizing that there was nothing in White’s files to “militate against such action.” And so Hoover sent a bouquet of flowers, which was laid upon the casket as it disappeared into the ground.

For a moment, before he receded from history, too, White was eulogized as a good man who had solved the murders of the Osage. Years later, the bureau would release several of its files on the Osage investigation in order to preserve the case in the nation’s memory. But there was something essential that wasn’t included in these and other historical records, something that White himself had missed. There was another layer to the case—a deeper, darker, even more terrifying conspiracy, which the bureau had never exposed.