Handsome Harry (35 page)

For the most part I ignored the reporters, and whenever they came with a camera I’d turn my back to the bars. But of course just because I didn’t say anything didn’t stop them from quoting me. According to one guy, I said the first thing I was going to do when I broke out was kill the cops who caught me. Another one said I bragged about paying a thousand dollars a week in protection to the Chicago mob. You’d think they got paid by the lie.

Fortunately, most of them wanted to talk to John—after all, it
was the
Dillinger
Gang. At first he ate up their attention with a spoon and yakked like a magpie, though most of what he told them was bullshit of course. Like the sad information that our partner Jack Hamilton was dead. He gave them the story we’d agreed on to try keeping the heat off Red back in Chicago—that we had dumped Hamilton’s body in the Calumet River after he died of wounds he received during an East Chicago bank robbery the week before last. John was quick to add that none of us had been on that job with Hamilton, but we got the word from friends. When a reporter said that various eyewitnesses had identified John as the man who killed Officer O’Malley during that very same robbery, John got peeved and said most so-called witnesses couldn’t identify shit from brown sugar and the guy could quote him on that.

Even the governor dropped by for a look at us. I said it was the first time I’d seen a governor where he really belonged—although that’s not the way I was quoted in the papers. We also got a visit from the cops who’d rounded us up. John posed for the cameras with them, but I said Sorry boys, no pictures. I did tell them they were the best cops I’d ever run into. The cops in Indiana and Ohio, and especially in Chicago, would’ve bushwhacked us the first chance they got rather than try to take us alive.

We’d been in that cow town jail about three days when Matt Leach showed up. I was sitting at the rear of my cell and heard somebody say Well, Johnny, we meet again—say now, that’s a nice mustache.

I stood up and saw him in front of John’s cage right next to mine, with his hands in his pockets and looking smug. And I couldn’t help it, I saw red. I sprang to the bars and grabbed for him, intending to break his neck or strangle him, whichever came first. He barely managed to jerk away in time. He went white as a sheet and I wouldn’t be surprised if he pissed his pants. I cursed him up and down for a low son of a bitch who bullied women and a lousy coward who jailed my mother. I said the only thing I was sorry about was that I hadn’t
killed him when I had the chance. Which of course only confused him, since he never knew I’d had him in my rifle sights.

J-j-jesus, he said, you’re ins-s-sane.

My rant got the other inmates all worked up and the whole cell block was in a clamor. The jailers hustled Leach out of there, but it still took a while for the joint to settle down.

L
each had come to Tucson with a bunch of other officials who wanted to extradite us to Indiana. They wanted John for killing the O’Malley cop, and the rest of us for busting out of M City and the Greencastle heist. But Ohio wanted us too—John for robbery, and me and Charley and Russell for killing the sheriff in Lima. And then Wisconsin jumped into the fight and said it wanted all of us for the Racine job.

There was no question where we preferred to go to—Wisconsin was the only one of the three states without capital punishment. The Dutchman brought the Wisconsin prosecutor to see us, a man named John Brown. I said he certainly didn’t look as if he had been a-moldering in some grave, and John Brown nodded and gave a tired little smile, like it was the thousandth time he’d heard a joke about his name. We signed the papers Brown put in front of us, and the Dutchman said all we needed now was a something-or-other writ that he’d have ready to put before the judge in the morning. And then we’d be off to Cheeseland. We thought we’d pulled a slick one.

But the Arizona governor made some kind of underhanded deal with Indiana, and that night the Hoosiers came in and grabbed John. He put up a fight but didn’t stand a chance. They pried his fingers off the bars and dragged him out of the cell by force and clapped him in irons. He hollered he was being shanghaied and we were swearing and raising hell as they muscled him out of there. The way we heard it, they had him in an airplane and out of Arizona in less than half an hour.

The Dutchman didn’t find out about John’s abduction until the next morning, and he was outraged, for all the good it did. The rest of us then went before a judge who released Billie and Opal but not Mary, who’d been charged with helping us bust out of M City. He denied the Dutchman’s writ and handed us over to Matt Leach and the state of Indiana.

As we were leaving the courthouse a mob of reporters swarmed around us, yelling questions and taking pictures. I ducked my head to hide my face under my hat brim, but some of the cops pinned me between them and one snatched my hat off and two others forced my head up and all I could do to defend myself against the cameras was close my eyes. I heard the shutters snapping like jaws and the bulbs popping. One of the hounds yelled Make him open his eyes, willya? A cop said The hell with these leeches, and they shoved my hat back on my head and hustled me out of there.

An hour later, we were in a special car on a train bound for Chicago, each of us sitting in a different row, all of us in cuffs and leg irons and surrounded by armed guards.

For some reason—and without me asking for the favor, since I wouldn’t have asked the son of a bitch for the time of day—Leach told the policewoman in charge of Mary to let her sit beside me for the whole trip. I don’t think she and I exchanged a dozen words during those two days. There was nothing to say we didn’t already know. We simply held hands and gave each other a look now and then. I could see she was scared about what might happen to her. The way it went, she’d do almost a month in the Indytown jail before they dropped all charges against her—but that little stretch would have its effect.

The only kiss we had on that train ride was when the policewoman came to take her to another car a few minutes before we pulled into Chicago. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that I might never see her again.

T
here were a hundred cops waiting at the station, and God knows how many gawkers. They put each of us in a separate car and we drove off in a motorcade a block long. We crossed the state line into Indiana and sped through East Chicago. I caught a glimpse of the Indiago Industries building over by the lakeshore and I wondered if Sonny Sheetz was in there at that moment, maybe counting money. It was a cold gray morning and the windblown lake looked like crumpled tin. Nobody talked as we rolled along, drawing curious looks from everyone we passed.

We knew where we were headed, but still, it’s hard to describe how I felt when we came in sight of the M City walls. Like for a minute I forgot how to breathe.

As they marched us toward the gate, Charley said if anybody would care to shoot him in the head before we passed through those portals, they would be doing him a colossal kindness. Better a quick death than what awaits us within those walls, he said. A cop told him to shut up.

You can imagine how the warden and his hacks were slavering over having us back in their power. We had humiliated the bunch of them, and they meant to make us pay for it. Half an hour after getting to M City, we were stripped and in the hole.

I sat with my back against the wall and hugged my knees to my chest, shivering in the freezing darkness. I pretty much succeeded in not thinking about anything except that as long as you’re alive there’s hope for escape. I had no doubt whatever that the M City goons intended to kill us, one way or another, and they probably wouldn’t take long to get to it.

After a few days, though, they came for me and gave me a set of grays to put on, then chained me up and took me to the warden’s office.

The room was crowded, what with the guards plus the warden and some guy in a pinstriped suit, plus Russ and Charley, who were in chains too. Charley grinned at me and Russ gave me a nod. Charley
had never done time in the hole before, but he looked all right. A little less corpulent than I’d ever seen him, since the whole time we were in solitary we got nothing to eat but a few slices of bread. Russell still had the bandage on his head but it was now filthy brown with black patches of dried blood. None of us had shaved or washed since we’d been on the train, and it was amusing to see all those faces pinched up at the smell of us.

We were in the warden’s office because Indiana and Ohio had made a deal—the Hoosiers got John and Ohio got the three of us. Mr. Pinstripes had papers that would send us to Lima to stand trial for shooting the sheriff. The odds in Ohio didn’t look good, but they were better than our chances of staying alive in M City.

None of us hesitated to sign the waivers. The warden looked like a kid who’s just been told there’s no such thing as Santa Claus.

A
s you’d expect, defense measures at the Allen County jail were a whole lot beefier than they’d been the last time we were there.

They had round-the-clock guards, a pair of them with Thompsons at the entrance to the building, two more with twelve-gauge pumps in the corridor between the office and the cell block, and two guys armed with clubs in the cell block runaround. We were the only prisoners in there—all the local miscreants had been transferred to other jails. The cells were partitioned from each other by bars, not solid walls, and we were kept in separate cells with an empty one between us. It was impossible to talk without the guards overhearing, so we mostly kept our mouths shut. They can take away your privacy but they can’t get in your head. During our first weeks in Lima I constantly racked my brain for some way to escape. Every morning I’d look at Russell and Charley in hope of seeing some sign that maybe one of them had come up with an idea. But none of us came up with anything, not in that tight little lockup and under constant watch.

We hired a team of lawyers to represent all three of us, the main one being a woman named Jessie Levy, as good as any mouthpiece I ever met—and by far the best-looking. I had the feeling that if she ever took off those glasses and let down her hair she’d be a ball of fire.

She told us John was in jail at Crown Point, Indiana, and the joint was being guarded by cops, posse men, and the National Guard.

I said maybe they better put a net over the place too, to make sure he didn’t fly out of there.

We were arraigned in the middle of February. Each of us would be tried separately for the murder of Allen County sheriff Jess Sarber, me first. My trial was set for the sixth of March.

Sad to say, but by the time of our arraignment Russell was showing clear signs of defeat. It sounds harsh, but the truth’s the truth. Charley saw it too. No question in my mind it had to do with the daily letters he was getting from Opal. I don’t know what she was writing to him, but each letter seemed to diminish his spirit a little bit more. I finally asked him one day how she was doing. But he only shrugged and lay on his bunk and stared at the ceiling.

I got letters from my mother and Mary. My mother said for me to have hope, I would beat this thing yet. That was Mom, the eternal optimist. Mary was staying put at the Indianapolis apartment she shared with her mother and Margo. She hadn’t come to see me because she was afraid. The month she’d spent in the Indy lockup had spooked her bad, and she was terrified of going back to jail. She said she loved me and was praying for me. I wrote back that I loved her too and she was doing the right thing by staying away.

I’ll confess that my own spirits weren’t exactly sky-high while we were waiting to go to court. I kept as active as I could—I did pushups, sit-ups, I ran in place till I was exhausted. I was hanging tight to the hope of breaking out even though I had no idea how it might happen. Still, when you feel like you’re about to drown, you hold on to anything that might keep you afloat.

And then, three days before my trial began, John escaped from Crown Point.

W
e got the news from Jessie Levy. It explained why the guards had been glowering at us even more than usual all day. Charley said he’d have to stop calling him Johnny Fairbanks and start referring to him as Johnny Houdini. One of the guards said it wouldn’t be long before everybody would be calling him Johnny Dead.

Everybody knows the Crown Point story. Christ, they’ll still be telling it years from now. They had him behind bars and under the heaviest guard in the world, and still he got away. And the kicker is that he did it with a fake gun. They say he whittled it out of a chunk of washboard frame and painted it with black shoe polish and then used it to force a guard to unlock his cell. He rounded up more than a dozen guards and jail employees and locked them all up, taking his sweet time about it, singing and making jokes. He took up a collection from them so he’d have a little traveling money, then rattled the wooden gun along the bars and laughed at them for being suckered by a toy. He snuck down to the jail garage and got in the sheriff’s car—the
sheriff’s
car, I love it!—and drove out of there as casually as you please. Drove right past all those cops and soldiers standing guard outside the joint and armed to the teeth. He was long gone before they knew he’d made the break.

It’s a great story, and all of it true—except for the wooden gun. I knew that part was bullshit the minute I heard it, and one of our lawyers said I was right. Never mind which one—Mr. X, let’s call him, though maybe it wasn’t a
mister
—and never mind how he got the story.

Oh, there was a wooden gun, all right, but John wasn’t the one who made it, and it’s not what got him out of there. The toy was a cover for the real piece that was smuggled in along with it. A lot of money changed hands to arrange the break. Some of it went to cer
tain jail guards and officials, some of it to a judicial authority, as Mr. X phrased it, who made sure John wasn’t moved to another jail. Where the dough came from, Mr. X didn’t know, but my guess was Sonny Sheetz. John had been doing business with him since before I got out of M City, and he trusted Sheetz more than I ever did. The wooden gun—which he’d made sure to show to the guards after he locked them up—was what kept the inside guys off the hook, no matter how much suspicion fell their way, and no matter that several guards insisted it was a real gun John stuck in their face before locking them up. The plan was smart and worked smooth as Vaseline, but I hated to think of the price John must’ve paid for it. I had a feeling that anytime Sonny wanted to find John from then on, all he’d have to do was reach in his hip pocket.