Public Enemies (25 page)

On Monday a deputy sheriff drove out to the Dillinger farmhouse and arrested him. A prosecutor suggested the judge might be lenient if Dillinger pled guilty and apologized. Dillinger went along, not even bothering to hire a lawyer. It was a fatal misjudgment. Judge Joseph W. Williams decided to make an example of him, sentencing Dillinger to a jaw-dropping sentence of ten to twenty years in a state reformatory. The Dillingers were floored, the more so when Ed Singleton hired a lawyer, wangled a new judge, and, despite Dillinger’s testimony against him, received a sentence of two to fourteen years; Singleton ultimately served two. “When we got the word,” Audrey recalled, “my dad just about keeled over. It liked to kill him. I think he died of a broken heart. And when John got that sentence, it just seemed like he went from bad to worse.”
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In late 1924 Dillinger arrived at Indiana’s Pendleton Reformatory a bitter young man. In his first weeks at Pendleton, Dillinger tried twice to escape. Once he was caught hiding in a trash pile. Another time, while being transported to Mooresville to testify against Singleton, he lit out down an alley and was recaptured within minutes.

Dillinger’s career would be defined by a series of close friendships. Two of the most influential he made at Pendleton. One was Harry “Pete” Pierpont, a strikingly handsome hard case with piercing gray eyes doing ten to twenty-one years for a bank robbery in Kokomo, Indiana.
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Another was Homer Van Meter, a tall, gangly runaway from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who was to be Dillinger’s longest-running associate. A loner and a bit of a flake, Van Meter had a harder childhood than Dillinger, running away to Chicago in the sixth grade. He worked as a bellboy until convicted of stealing a car at seventeen. Paroled a year later, he was free for two months before he and a pal were arrested for robbing passengers on a train in Toledo. “This fellow is a criminal of the most dangerous type,” a Pendleton official wrote. “Moral sense is perverted and he has no intention of following anything but a life of crime . . . He is a murderer at heart, and if society is to be safeguarded, his type must be confined throughout their natural lives.”

His friendships with Pierpont and Van Meter hardened Dillinger. When the two were transferred to the state prison at Michigan City, Dillinger asked to be transferred, too. On July 15, 1929, he got his wish. He was twenty-six. The transfer introduced Dillinger to a wide new world of crime. In Pendleton the inmates had been kids—stickup artists and car thieves. At Michigan City the men were older, their crimes more serious. There were raw-boned bank men out of Texas and Oklahoma, smooth syndicate murderers, and gray-haired confidence men.

If not a model prisoner, Dillinger managed to pass three years with few problems. He drew various punishments, including two stretches in solitary, for stealing a watermelon, for hiding a straight razor in his cell, and, once, for being caught in bed with another inmate; like Alvin Karpis, Dillinger may have dabbled in homosexuality behind bars. At Michigan City, Dillinger grew up. By and large, he was easygoing and nonconfrontational. He made friends easily.

His friend Pete Pierpont was forever trying to escape, hiding in garbage cans and the like. In mid-1932, Pierpont began talking about a different kind of escape, a mass breakout using weapons. The inmate who appears to have influenced Pierpont’s thinking was Charles Makley, a forty-three-year-old bootlegger-turned-bank man serving fifteen years following a 1928 arrest in Hammond. Squat and roundish, with an anvil-like jaw and twinkling eyes, Makley counseled patience and planning.

As they studied the feasibility of a large-scale escape, Pierpont and Makley were joined by two other bank men: Russell Clark, a handsome, garrulous Detroit yegg doing twenty years for a 1927 bank job, and John “Red” Hamilton, an absentminded thirty-four-year-old from northern Michigan doing twenty-five years. Hamilton, who had lost two fingers on his right hand in a childhood sledding accident, would be at Dillinger’s side for much of his career. For several months these four men debated the best way to break out. In the end, all their planning had one glaring deficiency: the guns. They couldn’t escape without them, yet there was no easy way to get them inside. What they needed, they could see, was someone on the outside.

It was then, probably in late 1932, that they thought of Dillinger. He was perfect. Dillinger spent all these years peppering the parole board with letters, and his release finally appeared imminent. Pierpont took Dillinger aside and offered him a proposition. Thirty years later, prison officials said they believed Pierpont had filled Dillinger’s ears with stories of the riches bank robbers could reap, how they wore silk suits, stayed at the finest hotels, and bedded the most expensive whores. If Dillinger could help his group escape, Pierpont promised, he could become a member of their gang, perhaps as the driver. In all likelihood, Dillinger didn’t need much convincing. He could read the newspapers; every morning brought a new story of some Midwestern bank knocked off by an enterprising band of yeggs—seven different banks by the Barker-Karpis Gang alone. Everyone said it was easy money.

Whether he did it out of loyalty, ambition, or simply because he had no other goal in life, Dillinger agreed to help. According to lore, Pierpont then gave Dillinger two lists. One was of banks Pierpont and Makley thought he could rob; they may have tutored him on the best ways to “crack a jug,” the best times of day to strike, how to handle customers, how to get a safe opened. The second list ticked off a series of potential partners he could trust. If Dillinger could rob a few banks, Pierpont and Makley reasoned, he could raise enough money to have guns smuggled into the prison. Though the story is plausible, there is nothing in prison or FBI files to substantiate any of this.

In late April, the Dillinger family, along with John’s sentencing judge and the grocer he mugged nine years earlier, petitioned the board for a parole. They argued that Dillinger was needed on the family farm. Two of the three board members agreed; a third abstained. On May 10, Governor Paul McNutt approved Dillinger’s parole. He was a free man.

Once on the outside, as we have seen, Dillinger wasted no time fulfilling his promise to Pierpont. He waited three months before attempting to smuggle the guns into Michigan City, apparently going ahead only after Pierpont’s parole was denied. The escape, thanks to Dillinger’s smuggled guns, went off without a hitch. And now, in a crushing irony, Dillinger was back behind bars while his friends were free. Without a miracle, he would remain there the next twenty years.

That Thursday, October 12, was just another night in the Lima lockup. After a dinner of pork chops and mashed potatoes, Dillinger joined the pinochle game. Down the hallway, Sheriff Sarber sagged into his desk chair and opened the
Lima News
; the banner headline on the front page gave an update of Machine Gun Kelly’s trial in Oklahoma. Sheriff Sarber’s wife, Lucy, sat across from him, working a crossword puzzle. Around six their deputy, Wilbur Sharp, came in, loosened his gun belt, and threw it on a spare desk, then plopped onto a davenport. The Sarber’s dog Brownie nuzzled him. Sharp scratched its ears.

At 6:25 the jail’s outside door opened and three men in suits stepped in. Mrs. Sarber, buried in her puzzle, didn’t bother to look up. “Whaddya need?” Sheriff Sarber asked the first man, who wore a dark gray suit, an overcoat, and a light-felt fedora.

“We’re from Michigan City,” said the first man. “We want to see John Dillinger.”

“Let me see your credentials,” Sheriff Sarber said.

“Here’s our credentials,” said the first man. His piercing gray eyes were probably the last thing Jess Sarber saw before the man raised a pistol and fired straight into his chest.

 

 

The mass escape from Michigan City the night of September 26 was front-page news across the country. A hard rain had fallen as Pierpont, Makley, and eight other inmates, using the three .45 caliber pistols Dillinger had smuggled into the prison, took a group of guards hostage, then used them to parade into the administration building; guards on the wall, seeing the prisoners apparently escorted by the day captain, were not suspicious. Four of the inmates took a visiting sheriff hostage and forced him into his car. As they drove off, Pierpont took the other five inmates and sprinted to a Standard Oil station across the street, where they commandeered a car of their own.

That night, eluding roadblocks the Indiana State Police threw up across the state, Pierpont’s group, which included Charles Makley, Russell Clark, John Hamilton, a con named Ed Shouse, and Dillinger’s onetime cellmate Jim Jenkins, arrived safely at the Indianapolis apartment of Pierpont’s old girlfriend, Mary Kinder. They were lucky; three of the other four escapees ended up dead or recaptured within days. The next night, after one of Kinder’s girlfriends ran out to buy them clothes, Dillinger’s partner Harry Copeland arrived at the apartment and said he had arranged a hideout, at a rented house in Hamilton, Ohio, north of Cincinnati.

From the moment Mary Kinder told them Dillinger had been arrested, there was never any question that Pierpont’s band wouldn’t try to free him. Their preparations weren’t without incident, however. After stealing a car for the drive to Hamilton, the six escapees were spotted by police outside Indianapolis; in a chase, Jim Jenkins somehow fell out an open car door. Fleeing on foot, he was spotted, shot, and killed by a group of vigilantes in the town of Bean Blossom. The remaining five escapees reached Hamilton that night.

There they began laying plans for Dillinger’s rescue. For food, cigarettes, and gasoline they needed money, and for that they decided to rob a bank. On Tuesday afternoon, October 3, a week after their escape, the gang filed into the First National Bank in Charles Makley’s hometown of St. Mary’s, Ohio, just south of where Dillinger was being held in Lima. The raid went smoothly, with no gunplay, and that night they returned to Hamilton $11,000 richer. The money was too new to spend, and Mary Kinder spent several days baking and ironing the bills to make them appear worn.
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Once the money was safe to pass, they began reconnoitering Lima. Despite Matt Leach’s hunch that they might attempt a rescue, Pierpont could see no additional guards around the jail. They decided to move in the next day, Columbus Day, Thursday, October 12.

 

 

Sheriff Sarber was mortally wounded. Blood spilled from the ragged hole in his chest as he tried to rise from the floor. Pierpont stood over him, screaming, “Give us the keys to the cells!” When Sarber didn’t answer, Makley leaned over and bashed him in the head with his gun butt. The gun accidentally went off, startling everyone. Pierpont pointed his gun at Sarber. “Give us the keys,” he repeated.

“Don’t hurt him no more!” Mrs. Sarber pleaded as she scrambled to her husband’s side. She grabbed the keys from a drawer and handed them to Pierpont, who stepped to the barred door of the cell block. When one of the inmates peeked his head around a corner, Pierpont raised his pistol and fired a shot into the bullpen area. “Get back, you motherfuckers!” Pierpont yelled. “We only want John!”

Dillinger ducked into his cell, grabbed his coat and hat, and jogged through the cell-block door. Sheriff Sarber was lying in a pool of blood. Dillinger looked down at the dying sheriff but said nothing as he hustled outside. “Oh men, why did you have to do this to me,” the sheriff moaned. He turned to his wife, who hovered above him. “Mother, I believe I am going to have to leave you.”

Ninety minutes later, Jess Sarber died at a local hospital. Sirens echoed through the streets of Lima all that evening, as police and vigilantes spilled from their homes to man roadblocks. Dillinger, meanwhile, sped south with the gang, arriving at the rented house in Hamilton that night. At that point, Dillinger faced a crossroads. He could have left the gang and fled to parts unknown. Instead, he decided to stick with his friends and become a full-time bank robber.

To rob a bank, they needed weapons—not just pistols, but Thompson submachine guns and bulletproof vests. That Saturday night in Auburn, a town just across the Indiana line, an officer named Fred Krueger had just sat down at the police station’s front desk to eat a bag of popcorn when two men in suits walked in. Both had two pistols in their hands. “You might as well sit still,” one said. “We don’t want to kill anyone unless we have to. Have you got any guns?”

“Yes,” Krueger said as he slid his hand toward his pistol.

“Oh no,” the man with the gun said politely. “I’ll get it.”
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Both Krueger and the desk officer were disarmed and locked in a cell. Taking the key to the gun cabinet, the intruders lugged a small arsenal out to their waiting car: a Thompson submachine gun, a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson pistol, a .401 Winchester rifle, a 44-40 Winchester sixteen-shot rifle, a .45 caliber Colt pistol, a Lugar, several hundred rounds of ammunition, and three bulletproof vests.

From Auburn the gang headed to Chicago, betting they could lose themselves in the city.
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They spent the next several days renting apartments. By October 20, four days after the Auburn raid, the gang was back on the road, in search of more guns and ammunition. That Friday night, three men walked into the city hall in Peru, Indiana, an hour north of Indianapolis, and leveled guns at the desk officers.

“I haven’t plugged anyone for a week,” one of the men, later identified as Pierpont, said, “and I would just as soon puncture one of you cops as not.”
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Pierpont covered the officers while his two confederates, one of them Dillinger, broke into the gun cabinet, emptied the contents onto a blanket, then lugged it all out to their car. The evening’s take came to six bulletproof vests, two sawed-off-shotguns, two Winchester rifles, and a half-dozen .38 caliber pistols. As they left, they stripped the officers of their guns and badges.