Forgotten chapter from Kansas City’s past tells story of convent girl turned gangster

Detectives and attorneys described Mattie Howard as “the most dangerous criminal ever in Kansas City,” and The Kansas City Times called her murder trial in 1919 “one of the most spectacular in Kansas City’s court history.”

Yet Mattie Howard has been a forgotten figure in the city’s gangster past. Virtually nothing was written about her locally in the past 70 years.

Kansas City Star journalist Dan Kelly has changed that with “The Girl With the Agate Eyes: The Untold Story of Mattie Howard, Kansas City’s Queen of the Underworld” (Jacomo Publishing. $16.99, agateeyes.com).

The book recounts the colorful life of a woman who, after spending most of her childhood in a convent, gained national notoriety for her involvement in the beating death of a Kansas City pawnbroker and jewelry dealer, Diamond Joe Morino.

Her saga spilled across multiple states, entailing manhunts, shootouts, killings and love affairs, and was highlighted by that murder trial in which Jesse James Jr., son of the infamous outlaw, defended her.

The nonfiction book’s narrator is William Moorhead, who was an institution at The Star as a police reporter for more than 50 years. He produced much of the newspaper’s coverage of Mattie Howard.

This excerpt describes her days shortly after leaving her husband in 1917 to join gangster Albert Pagel, recently released from the Leavenworth federal penitentiary, in Kansas City.

Chapter 4

Albert Pagel was a Secret Service man in Kansas City. At least that’s what he told people, and that’s what Mattie Howard said she believed him to be.

She knew better, however.

She probably also knew better than to accept thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts from an ex-con who ventured away from Kansas City on extended “business trips” and returned with stacks of cash. But accept them she did.

Mattie didn’t dive headfirst into the world of crime after joining Pagel in Kansas City in 1917. In fact, soon after settling into a room in a private home at 5222 St. John Avenue in northeast Kansas City, she held down two jobs, sorting mail orders in the office of the Montgomery Ward department store during the day and working the switchboard at the Bell Telephone Company in the evening.

“I was really making good in the big city,” she said later. “My letters back home, sending money and a lot of news about my success, gave me the feeling that my mother now would feel I was right in leaving home.”

But it wasn’t long before she succumbed to the allure of the criminal underworld.

Albert treated Mattie to a lifestyle she had seen only in the silent movies, showering her with jewelry, perfume, and expensive handkerchiefs, and escorting her to restaurants, night clubs, and late-night parties. She developed a particular fondness for Chinese noodles.

Mattie, at her new lover’s urging, also drank liquor for the first time. It started with one sip one evening, and before long she imbibed with the best of Kansas City’s partying crowd.

The excitement of it all thrilled her. But the good times also took a toll, coming as they did after long days and nights working two jobs. Her letters home stopped. She arrived at Montgomery Ward’s sleep-deprived and no doubt sometimes hungover, then dozed off on the job. Her concentration waned.

Mattie’s boss at Montgomery Ward’s told her she was no longer needed, and Bell Telephone soon fired her as well.

“With both my jobs gone, I did wonder what to do next,” she said.

Then Albert called.

“Noting the strained tone in which I was talking, he soon found out I had lost both jobs. ‘Don’t worry, kid, I’ll be right out.’”

Taking Mattie for a drive in his fancy car, Albert said she should find a new apartment and he would pay for it.

“When I protested about money, he laughed and took out a roll of money which my two hands could hardly span. He told me to shoot the wad; there was more where that came from. I stared in unbelief at the huge roll, and stammered I couldn’t take it, only to have him tell me not to be a little silly.”

Upon returning to her room, Mattie counted the bills in the roll. One thousand dollars.

She proceeded to rent a classy place in the new Ardmore Apartments at Eleventh and Forest. With Albert out of town — perhaps robbing a bank or stealing a car to be used in bootlegging — Mattie partied there with her friends from the telephone company.

She then went about spending her windfall, buying her first car — a used Maxwell — as well as new clothes, a dog, and a parrot. The entire thousand dollars was gone in eight days, and Mattie became the envy of her telephone company friends.

When Albert returned, Mattie expected him to be angry that she had spent all the money. Instead, he made her get rid of the car and the dog and replaced both with more expensive models.

“He laughed and called the car a pile of junk, sold it and bought me a Duesenberg, all upholstered in red leather and more gadgets on it than I ever learned what to do with.”

Albert also provided Mattie with a new supply of cash, which went the way of the first batch.

“Furs, diamonds, lingerie, hats, everything I could think of. The apartment was furnished to the queen’s taste, and if at times I had qualms of conscience, they were soon drowned in the whirl of good times with Al. Several times he left town, returning with huge sums of money which we threw to the winds like millionaires.”

While Albert was on his out-of-town adventures, Mattie led a life of leisure. She spent much of her time with the girlfriends of Albert’s cohorts. She had charge accounts at Kansas City’s finest stores. According to The Pathway of Mattie Howard, she owned a $2,700 fur coat and a $500 mink cape and kept “as much as $20,000 pinned in her bosom.”

Several months later, after Mattie’s arrest, police detective Harry Arthur gave me the inside scoop on her relationship with Pagel. He said Mattie had opened a checking account at the Midwest National Bank on February 14, 1918, depositing $600. At that point, she still lived in a room on St. John Avenue. “While there she was frequented by a man named Albert Pagel, who, she said, was a ‘Secret Service man,’” I wrote.

Arthur told me he had interviewed a woman who lived in the house on St. John Avenue and who knew Mattie.

“Miss Howard would often be away from home several days and nights,” she said, according to Arthur. “I would ask where she had been. The girl would say she had been out on cabaret parties. She often would show me twenty-dollar and fifty-dollar bills. She said she had good friends who lent her money. No, Mattie was not working then. I remember once she told me she had a rich jeweler and pawnbroker downtown who loved her and wanted to marry her. No, she wouldn’t tell me his name.”

Mattie apparently wasn’t yet directly involved in crimes. She lurked on the peripheries of the underworld, riding with Albert to meetings where the gangsters planned jobs while she waited in the car. She accompanied him on some out-of-town trips, but he insisted she not be seen with him at the hotels where they stayed, so they departed separately and met up later.

Meanwhile, Mattie spent every illicit dollar Albert gave her.

She also no doubt met the gangsters he associated with, including the notorious Dale Jones.

Before the first flowers bloomed in April 1918, everything changed for Mattie Howard.

As the Great War raged in Europe and the first sign of the devastating Spanish Flu epidemic appeared at Camp Funston, Kansas, about 125 miles west of Kansas City, she completed her metamorphosis from Catholic convent girl to outright gangster.

Her world began to turn one evening when Albert Pagel hastened back to Kansas City from a misadventure in the southwest part of the state, where Missouri borders both Kansas and Oklahoma. The area had been a haven for scofflaws for decades, dating to when what would become Oklahoma was Indian Territory. Oklahoma had earned statehood barely ten years earlier, in 1907.

Members of the Jones-Lewis gang were known to operate in that region, mostly stealing cars and robbing banks but also holding up fellow gangsters, taking bootleggers’ cars and their illegal liquor. They were suspected of a unique ruse: Posing as agents for the Secret Service — which at that time performed much more far-reaching duties than merely protecting the president — they “arrested” bootleggers and then promised not to prosecute them if the bootleggers paid a fee.

Albert Pagel, remember, was known to impersonate a Secret Service man.

On an early spring evening in 1918, he burst into Mattie’s apartment in a state of panic upon returning from southwest Missouri.

“Get your traps together and blow,” he exclaimed. “Go to your mother’s or anywhere till the heat is off.”

Mattie asked if she had done something wrong, but Albert merely repeated his order to get packing and get going. When she refused, he grabbed her clothes, stuffed them into suitcases, and rushed her out the door.

Obviously, somebody was after Pagel. But why did he insist that Mattie get out of town?

Perhaps she knew too much about his illegal operations for him to risk her falling into the hands of the police. Or perhaps one or more of the bootleggers his crew had ripped off was on his trail and he feared for Mattie’s safety.

In either case, as Albert put Mattie on a westbound train at Union Station, he told her to stay at her mother’s house in Raton, New Mexico, until she heard from him. He would write in a few days when the coast was clear and tell her she could return to Kansas City

That was the plan, anyway.

Dan Kelly

The Kansas City Star

Dan Kelly has been covering entertainment and arts news at The Star since 2009. He previously worked at the Columbia Daily Tribune, The Miami Herald and The Louisville Courier-Journal. He also was on the University of Missouri School of Journalism faculty for six years, and he has written two books, most recently “The Girl with the Agate Eyes: The Untold Story of Mattie Howard, Kansas City’s Queen of the Underworld.”