Summary: In the first three chapters of this series we reviewed the rise of the James brothers to the top of Kansas City’s underworld in the early years of Prohibition; their war with Al Capone at the height of their power in the late ‘20s; the James-Younger syndicate’s gradual decline in the early 1930s as the Great Depression disrupted the U.S. economy; and the notorious 1932 Northfield, Minnesota shootout which left many of the James brothers’ chief associates dead and made Frank and Jesse themselves fugitives. In this segment we’ll look back at the final collapse of the James brothers’ original syndicate and the 1935 assassination of Jesse James by a rival gangster.

Cole Younger didn’t survive long once he left Minneapolis; he’d made a laundry list of enemies on both sides of the law, and they all had guns or connections(or both) with which to take him down. His own growing panic at the thought of going to prison made him a much easier target than he’d been before for those people wanting to inflict more damage on an already badly mauled James syndicate. He started to get sloppy, making mistakes which would have been inconceivable to those who knew him in the old days-- and on a hot afternoon three months to day after the Northfield shootout, one such mistake would cost him his life.

On July 7th, 1932 Younger, low on cash and desperate to cross the Canadian border before the FBI got hold of him, walked into a diner in northern Montana intending to rob it and use the proceeds to finance his entry into Canada. Unfortunately for him, the diner he planned to hold up was a favorite hangout with cops and sheriff’s deputies; three police officers happened to be sitting by the door when Younger walked in, and two of them immediately recognized him from FBI WANTED posters of the James-Younger gang. The officers drew .38 revolvers from their holsters and fired on Younger at point-blank range; two shots hit him in the chest and a third slammed straight into his brain. He was dead before he hit the floor.

The picture of Younger’s corpse sprawled out in front of the three policemen made the front pages of newspapers all over America the next morning, and within a week “true crime” magazines were using that same photo to accompany feature stories giving blow-by-blow accounts of the James-Younger syndicate chief enforcer’s last moments on Earth. Today a privately owned and operated museum dedicated to the Prohibition era stands on the spot which was once the diner’s home; not surprisingly, one of the museum’s most popular exhibits is a display case containing the clothes Younger was wearing at the time of his death.

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While Younger was being buried, law enforcement agents in Kansas City and St. Louis were moving swiftly to confiscate what was left of the James syndicate’s underworld empire. With the James brothers now on the run, dismantling the bootleg liquor cartel they had built was a much easier task than anybody would have dared to hope in the past. Speakeasies, nightclubs, gambling dens, financial assets, all of these and more were confiscated by the police as well as by the U.S. Justice Department, who were preparing to bring charges of tax evasion against Frank and Jesse in addition to the myriad other criminal counts which were already facing the brothers. By New Year’s Day 1934, the last of the James Brothers’ old establishments were up for sale on police and FBI auction blocks.

Ironically one of the James brothers returned to Kansas City at this time right under the noses of the very law enforcement personnel trying to capture him. After growing a mustache and getting some minor plastic surgery to disguise his famous features, Jesse James had come back to town under the alias “Frank Howard” and reinvented himself as a respectable businessman so he could covertly establish a new crime syndicate. Unfortunately for Jesse, there was one person in town who managed to recognize him even through his carefully crafted disguise: Bob Ford, one-time leader of a gang that had tried to muscle in on the James brothers’ liquor operation back in the late ‘20s and been wiped out almost to the last man for their troubles. For years Ford had been promising himself that he would get even with Jesse James, and once he discovered his old enemy was back in town he didn’t hesitate too long before making good on his promise.

On April 3rd, 1935 Ford and the lone other survivor of his old gang drove to the house where Jesse had been living as “Frank Howard” since returning to Kansas City and waited to ambush him; both Ford and his associate were carrying .45 automatic pistols. When Jesse stepped out from behind the front door, the two gunmen opened fire with lethal accuracy. Two shots hit Jesse square in the chest, a third ripped into his brain, and the fourth sliced through his throat. Within seconds he was dead, choking out his last breath even as Bob Ford’s getaway car barreled out of sight. A coroner’s autopsy the next day determined it was the third bullet that actually killed Jesse.

The grisly photos of Jesse’s bullet-riddled corpse were splashed across the front pages of many of America’s major newspapers the next day. Radio commentator Walter Winchell called the bootlegger’s demise “the inevitable final act of a life dedicated to lawbreaking and sin”. Active and retired Kansas City police officers who’d lost colleagues to the James syndicate threw a party to celebrate his death. J. Edgar Hoover, in a press conference at FBI headquarters in Washington, was somewhat more restrained in his reaction to the news of Jesse James’ demise but made it clear he wasn’t sorry to see the Kansas City crime boss gone.

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Frank James was considerably more fortunate than his younger bother; he was able to remain at large until August of 1939, when a lack of money and a series of long-standing medical issues combined to compel him to surrender to federal marshals in Tucson, Arizona. He was promptly extradited back to Missouri to stand trial for his role as one of the major ringleaders in the James-Younger syndicate during the Prohibition era, but in spite of the rather substantial amount of evidence prosecutors had assembled against him the jury at his trial acquitted him of most of the charges he had been facing in connection with his bootlegging activities. He was found guilty on racketeering and tax evasion charges and sentenced to ten years in prison, serving just over half of that sentence before being paroled in 1945. Fearful of being sent back to prison if he resumed his old ways, and finding out he had a talent for voice acting, he found honest work as a radio drama performer and became a much-sought after guest star on the era’s most popular crime shows. When television began to supersede radio as America’s chief entertainment medium in the 1950s, Frank James would move on to a career as a consultant to police dramas like Dragnet and Naked City; he also had a three-year run as host of his own true crime TV series, American Rogues.

Frank James spent much of the final years of his life visiting the few surviving members of his brother’s old syndicate in rest homes and prison hospitals; in between visits he compiled material for the second volume of his autobiography (the first volume, printed in 1958, had made the New York Times bestseller list).Shortly after the second volume of his autobiography was published he got a letter from movie director Arthur Penn asking if he would be interested in doing a bit part in Penn’s latest project, Bonnie & Clyde. He would never get the chance to participate in the film, however: on August 10th, 1966 Frank suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died at the age of seventy.

Frank’s death marked the end of an era in American history. At the time he passed away he had been the last living member of the old James-Younger syndicate; when he was gone, the notorious gang was once and for all extinct. But one rather important part of the James boys’ past would survive-- shortly before his death, Frank had sold the home he and Jesse grew up in to the Missouri state historical society, who after his death turned it into a museum recounting the James brothers’ careers as bootleggers. In Northfield, Minnesota, site of the shootout which had triggered the original James syndicate’s collapse, a cottage industry sprang up capitalizing on the town’s role in those events.

And Hollywood certainly wasn’t going to shy away from telling the James brothers’ salacious story. Fictionalized accounts of their underworld exploits had been playing to packed theaters since at least the early ‘20s, and a 1936 short subject about the Northfield shootout had been nominated for an Oscar in the Best Documentary category. Now the silver screen was about to see an explosion of projects dedicated to the infamous bootleggers....

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