Public Enemies (101 page)

Nelson never learned how close he had come to being discovered at Wally Hot Springs. On three separate occasions during his stay there, a sheriff from nearby Gardnerville had visited the camp, each time asking about a Hudson. They escaped notice only because the camp cook, Ethel Tyler, thought Nelson’s car was a Plymouth.

William C. “Bill” Ryan was the first of three brothers who served as FBI agents. His son was also an agent. A member of the Bureau basketball team that won the 1931-32 government-league championship, Bill Ryan had been at Little Bohemia and the Biograph. He served in the Bureau from 1932 to 1958. He died in 1967 at the age of sixty.

At the moment Hollis died, his wife, Genevieve, and their young son were waiting in the lobby of the Bankers Building, taking a moment from a downtown shopping trip to surprise him at the end of his workday. An agent saw her and called her upstairs, where Doris Rogers watched one of the agents break the news to her.

The caller’s identity was never confirmed. It may have been Nelson’s sister; his wife, Helen; John Chase; or another family member.

Born in 1894, Loyde E. Kingman served in the FBI from 1927 to 1953. A popular mentor to many agents, known as “King” inside the Bureau, Kingman died in 1978.

Burdette, Gladys Sawyer, and Paula Harmon had all been released after giving detailed statements. The Bureau inexplicably failed to keep them under regular surveillance, allowing Burdette and Sawyer to reunite with their men. Never the most stable of the Barker women, Paula Harmon had returned to Texas, where her family had her committed to an asylum.

John R. Welles was the scion of a wealthy family who owned a mill in the northeast Pennsylvania village of Wyalusing. He was a George Washington Law graduate who resigned from the FBI in 1939 to join the family business. In later years Welles was active in the FBI agents’ alumni association. He died in May 1981 at the age of eighty-three.

Rudolph A. “Rudy” Alt served in the Bureau from 1926 to 1952. He died in 1977 at the age of ninety-four.

Some argued against it, saying it unnecessarily glorified the Bureau. “I do not believe it would be wise for Bureau officials to attempt to protest against the appellation ‘G-men,’” Pop Nathan wrote Hoover on May 21, 1935. “Neither do I think it would be wise for the Bureau to approve it. I believe it would be futile to attempt any campaign against this term. As a matter of fact, I can think of much worse terms that might be applied to us. In other words, if, as would appear probable, that is to be the verdict of destiny, I do not think we should struggle against it.” As usual, Nathan carried the day.

The arrest of Volney Davis was Melvin Purvis’s last.

Richetti was formally charged only with the killing of one of the two murdered Kansas City policemen, Frank Hermanson.

Kansas City journalism professor Robert Unger investigated the case for a decade; it was only after his prodding that the FBI released massacre case files. In his 1997 book,
The Union Station Massacre,
Unger reaches no conclusion about who was with Miller that morning but says it probably wasn’t Floyd.

This made Campbell a bigamist, among other things. He had an estranged wife and daughter living in Texas. The FBI was watching them closely.

Sam Coker was born in Nowata, Oklahoma, in 1895. Convicted of bank robbery in 1924, he drew a sentence in the McAlester penitentiary, where he became friends with Dock Barker and Volney Davis. Paroled in the spring of 1931, he took a message from Dock to his brother Fred in Tulsa and thereupon joined Fred and Karpis in their first burglaries after their release from prison. Coker was arrested with Barker and Karpis that June, and his parole was revoked. He was released a second time in September 1935, joining Karpis in Hot Springs; some sources suggest Karpis paid a bribe to secure his release.

Grayson, whose real name was Bensen Groves, was born in 1880 in West Virginia. He had served two concurrent five-year sentences in Atlanta for post-office robberies.

The bartender, John Brock, was another McAlester alumnus, a prison pal of Volney Davis and Dock Barker. He had come to Ohio that spring for a time, intending to be the third man in the Warren payroll robbery. But he had second thoughts and returned to Tulsa.

The same band of inspectors had investigated the Warren robbery that April and had picked up rumors that Karpis had been involved.

Connelley discounted rumors of Milton Lett’s involvement because the FBI had already interviewed Lett and considered him a confidential informant.

On March 13, FBI agents arrested Ed Bentz in Brooklyn. The last of the great Jazz Age yeggmen, the were getting nowhere, and he knew it. The only ones making any progress were the inspectors. As irksome as he found the task, Connelley needed to know what they knew. He couldn’t simply ask; the two sides were now openly hostile to each other. Somehow Connelley had to force their hand. Thumbing through his papers, he came upon the Cleveland office’s report of its visit to Clayton Hall’s house. There were rumors the inspectors had been seen with Hall.

man who had mentored Machine Gun Kelly and Baby Face Nelson, Bentz had cannily relocated to New England when the Bureau mounted its great hunts for Dillinger and other Midwestern outlaws. He had robbed several banks in Vermont and New Hampshire; agents tracked him down after finding one of his girlfriends. In time the bookish Eddie Bentz became Hoover’s favorite bank robber. Devoting an entire chapter to Bentz in his 1938 book
Persons in Hiding,
Hoover termed him “a superman . . . known to thousands of honest persons as one of the most gracious men, generous attributes, enviable education, and impeccable morals.”

Connelley spent hours debriefing the talkative old yegg. Bentz told a strange tale of meeting Karpis in Chicago in 1935 and of following him to an Indiana hideout at what he described as a yeggmen’s “burial ground,” where various bank robbers buried stolen bonds. Connelley spent a week trying to find the place before giving up.

In Cleveland a wire-service reporter got wind of the flight and issued a dispatch saying a group of FBI agents were en route to Arkansas. The leak enraged Hoover, who ordered an investigation. In the meantime, reporters were told the agents were gathering in Arkansas for a conference.

Not for several weeks would FBI agents learn who had been in the house the night before. It was Grace Goldstein, removing her things in anticipation of a raid. With her was the Hot Springs police chief, Joe Wakelin. According to FBI files, while Connelley was watching the house that night, Wakelin and Goldstein were having sex inside.

FBI files do back up Hoover’s assertion about the rifle in the backseat. An inventory of items seized from Karpis’s car lists two .45 caliber pistols, two shoulder holsters, a hunting knife, a tackle box, and a .22 caliber Remington rifle.

The key role played by postal inspectors in Karpis’s capture was never revealed.

Harry Campbell and Sam Coker were arrested the following week in Toledo. Checking Coker’s records for his hospitalization the previous fall, agents learned he had dated a Toledo nurse. The nurse, who was unaware of his identity, led agents to both Coker and Campbell. Hoover went on that raid as well.