How the FBI caught the real ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

Flash back to 1924. Prohibition was in full swing.

The FBI, then known simply as the Bureau of Investigation, was struggling to get its footing, with a 29-year-old J. Edgar Hoover appointed acting director.

And in rural Oklahoma, members of the Osage Indian tribe had more money per capita than any other populace in the United States.

The Osage, who had been driven from Kansas to what appeared to be 2,300 square miles of barren central Oklahoma, were sitting on gushers of oil.

Oil wells pumped black gold, Osage men drove the latest Pierce Arrows, women dripped diamonds and families employed white servants.

Now a new Martin Scorsese movie, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” is telling the story of how the tribe’s astonishing wealth was met with jealousy, greed – and a twisted mass murder plot involving shootings and poisoned injections.

The $200m movie, released Friday in cinemas and heading later to AppleTV+, stars Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemens and John Lithgow.

It is based on the book, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” by David Grann, which details how the Osage fell victim to a string of murders.

One was killed with poisoned whiskey (there may have been more), others got shot and Bill and Rita Smith, a white man married to an Osage woman had their home blown up. 

The pure greed of it all was made evident when William King Hale (often referred to, simply, as King), a wealthy rancher who held considerable sway over Native Americans and whites alike, took out a $25,000 life insurance policy on an Osage man named Henry Roan.

A doctor who examined Roan for the policy asked Hale if he planned on killing Roan. “Hell, yes,” Hale responded. 

Few were surprised when, in February 1923, Roan was found riddled with bullets in an automobile. It was the latest killing in a series of Osage people offed by Hale, which would become known as the Reign of Terror.

Wanting to curb the carnage, in 1923, local oilman Barney McBride, sympathetic to the Osage, was dispatched to Washington DC.

“He met with the head of Indian Affairs,” John Fox, an FBI historian, told The Post. “The head of Indian Affairs turned to the Department of Justice and said, ‘We need people to investigate.’”

That led to the Bureau of Investigation, a rag-tag crime fighting organization that was only 15 years old at the time.

“It was a small, weak, ineffectual arm of the Justice Department,” Tim Weiner, author of “Enemies: A History of the FBI,” told The Post. “It was a collection of cheap detectives.”

Raymond Batvinis, author of “The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence,” agrees: “It was a cushy place to be. Your oblivious cousin got a job because a congressman wanted him to be there.”

It is a situation that Hoover was mandated with cleaning up by Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone and, as Weiner put it, “Hoover said, ‘Yes, sir.’”

He had his work cut out for him. Hoover found himself overseeing a crime-fighting organization that was rife with patronage.

Federal crimes were few and far between because of laws that had yet to be put into place, and financial corruption ran rampant.

That showed when investigators were first sent to check out the Osage killings and figure out why the Indians were dying so prolifically.

But the task was far from easy. It was a messy place for an investigation.

“There were a lot of private detectives working the case,” said Fox. “Some were hired by the Osage. Others were hired by William King Hale. Hale’s people muddied the waters and threatened witnesses.”

Hale was a wealthy white cattleman from Texas who presented himself as a friend of the Osage, contributed money to the building of paved roads and communicated in the Osage tongue.

No one suspected that he was a primary person behind the wave of killings and the engineer of a long con that promised to make him wealthy beyond belief.

But the Bureau at the time was so bungling, that they had no shot of outsmarting the likes of Hale. In one outrageous screw-up, according to Grann’s book, investigators convinced the Oklahoma governor to arrange an early release for a bank-robbing outlaw known as “Blackie” Thomas. 

The idea was for Blackie to work as a Bureau spy, toiling in the oilfields among white roughnecks. The goal: obtain details on who was behind the Reign of Terror.

The plan worked for a while, until Blackie disappeared from under the nose of agents charged with watching him, headed to the Black Hills, robbed a bank and killed a cop before getting killed himself. 

Bobbled situations like that one put the heat on Hoover. “He was getting pushback from Indian Affairs to do something,” said Fox. “So he pushed back at his agents.”

Then he set his sights on an agent who would not need a push. That was Tom White, a bureau faithful who cut his teeth as a Texas Ranger.

He proved his worth during a Bureau assignment that had him working as the warden of an Atlanta penitentiary while his real job was to uncover details on the previous warden’s bribe-taking. White succeeded, and the former warden was found guilty of the crimes. 

“Hoover liked the idea of putting Tom White out there among the Osage,” said Fox. “White was born in Texas, had experience working with ranchers and Native Americans, and he was considered a successful leader and investigator. He oversaw a 4-person team at Osage.”

If White failed? “It would have been a black mark on Hoover,” said Fox. “Would it have ended his career? Maybe.”

White did not let Hoover down. He blasted into town and slowly unraveled the crime that centerpieces “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

Doing what Fox characterizes as “old fashioned police work,” White unraveled a hideous plot in which Hale had his malleable nephew, Ernest Burkhart (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) marry Mollie Kyle (portrayed by Lily Gladstone), a full-blooded Osage.

That ranking entitled her to a valuable piece of the tribe’s oil fortune. 

The haul would be worth exponentially more if her mother and siblings died before her, passing the rights onto one another before they all wound up with Mollie.

Then all Hale had to do was see her perish and his nephew would wind up with the fortune — with Hale really in control of it.

The plan would have worked – with Mollie’s mother and sisters having all died under mysterious circumstances, and Ernest administering small, daily doses of poison when he gave his diabetic wife her life-saving injections of a new, miracle medicine called insulin – had White not unraveled it by following money trails.

His investigation led to Hale, Burkhart and others receiving life-sentences in 1929.

Uncle and nephew negotiated early releases. But life on the outside was no picnic. Burkhart’s wife dumped him as soon as he was found guilty.

Paroled in 1937, he wound up back behind bars in 1941 for robbing his former sister-in-law. After getting paroled in 1959, according to Fox, he lived modestly with his brother, in a residence not far from Osage land.

As for Hale, Fox said, “The court declared that Hale could not return to the area. Just before his death, in 1962, Hale was found working at a restaurant in Phoenix and living with a former employee. He may have been earning room and board. But not much more. His money was gone.”

Hoover and his crime-fighting organization, christened the catchier FBI in 1935, fared much better.

“In the early 1930s, the Bureau was approached by a radio company that wanted to do a dramatic broadcast about the crime and investigation of Osage; it was built around Tom White, who was the complete package,” said Fox.

“The show was produced and the Bureau got a first taste of telling its story in an entertaining way. Osage was the right investigation at the right time and other shows followed.

“It was the beginning of them learning to make use of telling the public what they do. Soon after, the G-man became iconic.”