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A film premiering next week looks back on the Union Station Massacre.
And then, a few minutes before 8 a.m., all hell broke lose.
Law enforcement officers transporting Leavenworth escapee Frank “Jelly” Nash back to the prison were ambushed as they got into a car for the drive north. Two men armed with machine guns opened fire.
It was an attempt by Nash’s criminal pals to free him, but it resulted in the death of Nash and four of his guards. The gunmen fled. Within hours the incident was being called the Kansas City Massacre.
The event is the subject of “Shooting Back in Time: The Kansas City Union Station Massacre,” a 40-minute film commissioned by Union Station to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the shootout.
The picture will debut Tuesday on the station’s Extreme Screen. It has been written, directed, edited and narrated by Terence O’Malley, a local insurance executive who a couple of years back wowed audiences here and at film festivals with “Nelly Don: A Stitch in Time,” his documentary about the KC-based fashion magnate.
He got the job, he said, because station officials knew he already was working on a feature documentary about crime in Kansas City. Called “Black Hand Strawman: The History of Organized Crime in Kansas City,” it will debut in November. Because of that project O’Malley already had done much research on the massacre.
“The Black Hand, of course, refers to organized crime with roots in Sicily,” O’Malley said. Strawman was the name of two secret FBI investigations that two decades ago put the Kansas City mob on trial for skimming profits from Las Vegas casinos.
O’Malley said he found more information than he could use in a short film. “It was supposed to be a 20-minute film, but I told them I couldn’t possibly do this story justice in 20 minutes. We agreed on 40 minutes. But it easily could have been a two-hour film.”
Some of the biggest names in crime had a hand (or were suspected of being involved) in the shootout: Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Vern Miller and KC crime boss John Lazia.
So outraged was the public by this act of violence against law enforcement officers that it gave a young man named J. Edgar Hoover the push he needed to turn a loosely organized group of federal agents into the FBI.
The complicity of Kansas City police officers — many of whom had criminal records and got their jobs through Lazia’s connections at City Hall — built public support against the political machine of Boss Tom Pendergast, whose empire crumbled over the next decade.
By far the hardest part of his job, O’Malley said, was amassing thousands of photographs and drawings and what little film footage exists of the incident and its aftermath.
“This is probably the largest assemblage of images related to the massacre in any one presentation. I feel comfortable that I’ve collected more images than anybody else had.”
O’Malley says he got photos through the Lazia family that had never been published. Other images came from scouring newspapers of the time.
“The pencil drawings of Frank Nash were from an obscure 20-year-old book. Probably not more than 200 copies of that book exist — I had to pay $100 for mine.”
Kansas City will observe the 75th anniversary of the Union Station Massacre on Tuesday.
Among the events are a 6:15 p.m. screening on the Extreme Screen of Terence O’Malley’s new film “Shooting Back in Time: The Union Station Massacre.”
It will be followed at 7 p.m. by a panel discussion on the massacre and Kansas City during the criminal era. Participating are FBI agent Kevin Steck, filmmaker O’Malley, UMKC history professor Bill Worley and moderator Pat O’Neill.
Tickets cost $10 at www.unionstation.org.