Most notorious contains adult themes. It is not suitable for all audiences.

Listener discretion is advised.

Welcome to the Most notorious podcast.

The 1930s are the rise of a new breed of criminal, the machine gun tooting, fast-car driving,

bank robbing version. And machine gun Kelly of course was one of this ilk, a man that made national headlines during the depression and became a legendary figure in the process.

My guest today, Joe Urschel, is the executive director of the National Law Enforcement Museum in Washington, D.C.

He's written a book called The Year of Fear, machine gun Kelly and the manhunt that changed the nation available on Amazon, and he's here today to talk with me about it.

Thank you, Mr. Joe Urschel, for your time. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention right off the bat the elephant in the room. Your last name is Urschel, and the subject of your book, machine gun Kelly, kidnapped an Urschel. Is there a connection there?

Well, I knew you were going to ask that. Everybody does. And there is not a familial connection, at least dating back until the pre-German republic.

So I have no relatives in my line that are related to Charles Urschel's line, although I did, you know, when I discovered the story some 30 or more years ago,

I was in the Library of Congress and I just I punched in my last name into their new digital database, just kind of on a lark, and up popped the name of Charles Urschel.

He was the only one with any reference in the Library of Congress, which of course is supposed to be the greatest collection of knowledge in the world.

And so I see Charles Urschel, comma, kidnapped victim, and there's one book about the story in the Library that was written in 1934 by one of the people who were involved.

So I called that book up and read through it and it's just found it to be a fascinating story, obviously.

So with that finished, I of course asked my dad, I said, you know, hey, are we related to this guy anyway? And he said, no, no, no, we're not. And I said, well, how do you know? He says, we're just we're not.

So like any good son, I set off to prove my dad wrong and did a lot of genealogical research and basically came up dry for as far back as I looked.

So with that, I decided to keep pursuing the story anyway. And the more I dug into it, the better the story got.

The era of the Midwest Bank, Robby Gangster in the early 1930s is a pretty spectacular one. And there are a lot of big names.

John Dillinger, babyface Nelson, pretty boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, and the Barker Carp is gang to name some of the headliners.

And fitting into that marquee would be machine gun Kelly, while most of us have seen movies about Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, we know less about Kelly from popular culture, but his life definitely played out like a movie, didn't it?

Absolutely, he was he was unlike most of those other guys and women that you mentioned in that he was he was not a guy that grew up in poverty or on a farm or anything like that.

He was a middle class kid from Memphis, Tennessee, you know, kind of worked as a caddy to earn money until he got into the business of bootlegging, which he did when he when he was in high school and he discovered his father in a twist with another woman across town.

...