Public Enemies (22 page)

The next morning Luther Arnold succeeded in reaching Sam Sayers, who drove out to meet him with Kathryn’s Chevrolet. Arnold took the car, loading his two lady friends into the rumble seat, and drove to Enid, where he hired the lawyer for Kathryn’s mother. Arnold and the girls drove on to Oklahoma City and registered at the city’s nicest hotel, the Skirvin, where they began a loud party.
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By the next morning several attorneys Kathryn had hired also arrived at the Skirvin.

It was then, on Saturday, September 9, that Gus Jones received a tip that the attorneys were meeting with an emissary of Kathryn Kelly’s at the Skirvin. Luther Arnold was placed under surveillance. Apparently there was some debate whether the hard-drinking Arnold was really mixed up in the Kellys’ affairs. The quality of surveillance that weekend reflected this ambivalence. On Monday morning, September 11, agents noticed something that made their stomachs drop: Luther Arnold was gone. Arnold’s two lady friends remained, but Jones realized the FBI’s best chance at finding the Kellys had simply walked out the door.

 

 

While Hoover’s men closed in on Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger received the disappointing news that a set of guns he had thrown over the wall at Michigan City had been found and turned over to the warden. He realized he would need to try again, and for that he needed more money. At noon on Wednesday, September 6, Dillinger and his partner Harry Copeland strolled into the lobby of the State Bank of Massachusetts Avenue in downtown Indianapolis. Without a word, Dillinger, his trademark straw boater tilted jauntily to one side, scrambled atop a seven-foot-high teller cage and trained a pistol on the bank’s assistant manager, Lloyd Reinhart. “This is a stickup,” he said.

Reinhart, deep in conversation on a telephone, kept his head down and ignored the comment, thinking someone was joking.

“Get away from that damn telephone!” Dillinger snapped.

Reinhart looked up into the barrel of Dillinger’s gun and realized this was no joke. Reinhart and another cashier raised their hands, and Dillinger hopped down and began shoving cash from the counters into a white sack. Behind him, Copeland, fidgeting with the handkerchief across his face, kept glancing outside.

“Hurry up!” Copeland urged more than once. Within minutes Dillinger and Copeland scurried from the bank into a waiting getaway car. Later, when they counted the take, it came to more than $24,000—at the time the second costliest bank robbery in state history.

To this day, no one is sure how Dillinger slipped the second batch of guns into the Michigan City prison. One of the inmate plotters later told authorities that the guns were smuggled in a box of thread sent to the prison’s shirt factory. According to another version, Dillinger once again tossed the guns over a prison wall. Whatever happened, the guns finally made it into the hands of Dillinger’s friends.

His mission accomplished, Dillinger was ready for a few days off. He hopped into his new car, a fast Essex Terraplane, and headed to Dayton, to see the girl he had been courting all summer, Mary Longnaker, whose apartment was still being watched by two police officers.

 

 

After parting with Luther Arnold, Kathryn Kelly drove Arnold’s wife, Flossie Mae, and their daughter, Geralene, back to her uncle’s ranch in West Texas. It was a risky move: FBI agents had been canvassing the area for weeks. But it was the only place Kathryn knew to look for her wayward husband. When she drove up, Cass Coleman told her he hadn’t seen Kelly in two weeks. Kathryn lingered barely thirty minutes, just long enough to load some cots into the pickup and scribble out a note for Kelly. She told Coleman to write her care of General Delivery, San Antonio, the moment Kelly appeared.

Four nights later, on Saturday, September 9, Kelly finally arrived, having spent ten days lying around Memphis, draining bottles of gin. Worried that Cass Coleman’s ranch was under surveillance, he walked unannounced into a neighbor’s kitchen, startling the neighbor’s wife. His hair alone would have frightened most people. Kelly had dyed it a bright yellow; with the additional ten pounds or so he had gained while a fugitive, he looked like a bloated canary. The neighbor woman, who had heard rumors of Kelly’s real identity, drove straight to Cass Coleman’s and angrily demanded that he take Kelly away. Instead, Coleman sent a telegram to Kathryn: MOTHER BETTER.

Kathryn received the telegram two days later. She took Flossie Mae Arnold to the San Antonio post office and sent her in to get it. “Mother started to open the telegram at first,” Geralene Arnold said later, “but she waited till she got back to the car where Kathryn was, and Kathryn just jerked it right out of her hand and told her it wasn’t hers.” After reading the telegram, Kathryn took Geralene and drove to Coleman’s ranch. She left Flossie Mae behind.

After three weeks apart, the Kellys’ reunion that evening was hardly a warm, fuzzy moment. As Geralene recalled, “[Kathryn] went up to [Kelly] and said, ‘I don’t know whether to kill you or kiss you.’”
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Cass Coleman later told the FBI: “As soon as she got there Kathryn told George he was a damned fool, and should have had better sense than to go off to Mississippi where she couldn’t get in touch with him, as he knew she needed money, and that he had just gone down there chasing after [some] woman. He said he was just trying to take care of himself until he could get in touch with her. Kathryn called him a damned liar, and he called her another damned liar.”

The squabbling Kellys climbed into Kathryn’s pickup and drove back to San Antonio, where Kathryn had rented a five-room furnished bungalow. Flossie Mae and little Geralene listened as the Kellys debated their next move. Kelly wanted to head east, to Chicago or New York, where he felt they could hide for months. But Kathryn insisted on doing something to free her mother. She told Kelly he should surrender to the FBI in return for a deal that would enable her mother to go free. To Kathryn’s surprise, Kelly agreed.

“Go ahead and make your dicker and when you get it made, let me know,” Kelly said. “I’m willing to go, but you know I can’t go to them and do any dickering [myself ].”
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The next day, Tuesday, September 12, Luther Arnold arrived in San Antonio, brimming with details of his trip to Oklahoma City and completely oblivious to how close he had come to being arrested. Kathryn gave him more money to pay her mother’s attorneys. The next day Arnold returned north, stopping en route in Fort Worth, where he tarried for a night of barhopping. When he finished he was so drunk he hired a young man to drive him on to Oklahoma City. Arnold had barely stepped into the Skirvin hotel the following afternoon, Wednesday, September 14, when Gus Jones’s men arrested him.

By now the FBI men were losing patience. According to one internal report, agents employed “vigorous but appropriate” methods to persuade Arnold to talk (this term would later emerge as Bureau shorthand for roughing up a subject). Arnold broke quickly.
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Gus Jones telephoned San Antonio. Within hours agents there led a squad of San Antonio police to the Kellys’ bungalow. Bursting through the front door, they found only a flustered Flossie Mae Arnold. The Kellys had left the day before, she said, heading back to Cass Coleman’s ranch. Flossie Mae was frightened. The Kellys had taken her daughter, Geralene, with them.

The Dallas office had several agents in West Texas that night, and all converged on Coleman in search of the Kellys. One agent was already in town when the Kellys, with Geralene in tow, arrived just hours before the San Antonio raid. For the moment, the couple’s luck held. One of Cass Coleman’s neighbors, Clarence Durham, returned home from work that day to find the Kellys lying on a bed on his front porch. Durham demanded that they leave immediately.

The moment the Kellys drove off, Durham headed to the sheriff’s office and told him everything.
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By the next day, every sheriff’s office in West Texas was on high alert. Sightings of the Kellys came in from Abilene, San Angelo, and a series of towns leading toward Wichita Falls, which suggested they were making for Oklahoma. Highway Patrol officers were placed on the Red River bridges, but they were too late. The Kellys crossed into Oklahoma early that day, speeding north.

Hungry and tired, they reached Chicago on Sunday, September 17. In search of a new and untraceable car, Kelly stopped at a pay phone and tried in vain to reach a Cicero garage owner; at that very moment, the man was completing a special armor-plated car for the Federal Reserve raid Alvin Karpis and the Barkers planned. The Kellys drove downtown, rented an apartment, and, after unpacking their luggage, trudged out to a diner to eat.

Over dinner, Kelly grew nervous when a pair of diners seemed to stare at him. Afterward, fearing they had been spotted, he and Kathryn took Geralene and drove downtown streets for an hour before returning to the apartment. Kathryn sent Geralene inside to pack and retrieve their luggage, then let Kelly out at the Piccadilly Theatre, where he disappeared inside to watch a movie and wait. If they had been spotted, it wasn’t by the FBI. By evening’s end, they had successfully rented a new furnished apartment on Chicago’s North Side.
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They told the landlady they were in town to visit the World’s Fair.

The next day, Monday, September 18, the kidnapping trial of Albert Bates, Harvey Bailey, and the Shannons began in Oklahoma City. The trial was front-page news in Chicago. Kathryn read the newspapers in a fury, stomping around the apartment, swearing revenge on Urschel and the government prosecutor, Joseph Keenan. At some point, she wrote a letter to Keenan. Post-marked Chicago, it arrived in Oklahoma City the next day.
The entire Urschel family and friends, and all of you will be exterminated soon,
Kathryn wrote.
There is no way I can prevent it. I will gladly put George Kelly on the spot for you if you will save my mother, who is innocent of any wrong doing
[sic].

The next day, a second letter, this time signed by Kelly, arrived at the Urschel mansion. “Ignorant Charles,” it began.

The Kellys’ letters dropped like bombs in the Oklahoma City courtroom, which was packed with the nation’s press. The Bureau’s number two man, Harold “Pop” Nathan, who had arrived to oversee the trial, sent agents to trace the letters, but to no avail. But not all the Kellys’ letters proved untraceable. Before leaving Texas, Kathryn had mailed a note to Flossie Mae Arnold, directing her to check into an Oklahoma City boardinghouse to wait for further instructions. This letter was intercepted by FBI agents in San Antonio and forwarded to Pop Nathan in Oklahoma City.

Nathan had Flossie Mae brought to Oklahoma, reunited with her husband, Luther, and installed in the boardinghouse to await word from Kathryn. On Thursday, September 21, it finally came, a letter, saying the Kellys could be reached via Special Delivery mail at a bar on Chicago’s South Side, the Michigan Tavern, at 1150 South Michigan Avenue.
I am taking care of the baby honey,
Kathryn wrote, alluding to Geralene.
She’s never out of my Sight
[sic]
, and Be careful to take care of my clothes for they are all I have so don’t lose them.

The FBI closed in. Nathan telephoned the Chicago office and briefed Melvin Purvis. All Purvis had to do was to stake out the Michigan Tavern. When the Kellys arrived, they could be arrested. Purvis listened and promised to take care of it. And then he did something extraordinary: he forgot about it. Weeks later, when Hoover realized the blunder and demanded an explanation, Purvis was unable to come up with one. “I recall that upon receipt of this information I omitted making a memorandum, which was possibly due to the fact that at that time there were so many important developments . . .” he wrote Hoover.
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The next morning, as luck would have it, Kelly was preparing to leave Chicago. Between angry letters he had spent much of his time wandering the streets of the North Side, stopping at pay phones to make calls in search of anyone who would help him. He reached a member of Frank Nitti’s mob, who told Kelly he was “too hot,” adding that “he would not be seen talking to [the Kellys] for $10,000.” Finally, Kelly arranged to buy a car through an intermediary, Abe Kaplan, who ran the Michigan Tavern. Leaving his old car on the street, Kelly took Kathryn and Geralene, piled their bags into a taxi, and headed to the bar.

Inside, they settled into a rear booth. Kaplan arrived after fifteen minutes, plunking down a whiskey bottle. He started to speak, then hesitated, glancing at Geralene. “She’s a nice little girl,” Kelly said, taking out a roll of bills. “She’s all right.”

By coincidence, at a bit after nine, just when the Kellys were en route to the Michigan Tavern, Melvin Purvis suddenly remembered Pop Nathan’s call. But instead of dispatching his men to the tavern itself, Purvis sent two agents to the downtown post office to find the postman who delivered the tavern’s mail. After being told that the postman was walking his route, the agents drove to the tavern’s neighborhood, arriving around quarter past ten, while the Kellys were sitting in their booth. The agents found the postman, who said he knew nothing about any Special Delivery letters sent to or from the Michigan Tavern. Rather than check the tavern itself, the agents returned to the Bankers Building.
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