Public Enemies (42 page)

A few miles later the Packard began to falter, and everyone jumped out, hailed an oncoming Dodge, and sent the frightened owner scurrying out into the fields. They shoved the hostages out onto the highway and began transferring a set of gas cans to the new car.

Just then Sheriff Melvin L. Sells, in pursuit with three men in a squad car, spotted the cars parked on the highway. Sells stopped a hundred yards back, not wanting to jeopardize the hostages. One of the robbers, probably Nelson, fired a volley their way. The officers saw Dillinger grab Nelson and pull him into the car.

The gang sped off south. Years later Sheriff Sells insisted he chased the speeding bandits for two hours, giving up only after he lost them somewhere in Iowa. In fact, the next morning’s newspaper reported that the sheriff and two other cars turned back the moment the robbers opened fire. The gang’s fleeing car was last seen in southwestern Minnesota, heading toward St. Paul, but the local sheriffs who gave chase were unable to catch up to it.
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“Was it Dillinger?” a headline in the
Daily Argus-Leader
of Sioux Falls asked that evening. Several eyewitnesses, including the bank president, insisted it was. Almost no one believed them, including the FBI. The idea that Dillinger could strike three states away from Crown Point only three days after his escape was considered outlandish. A St. Paul agent arrived in Sioux Falls the next day, but the Bureau investigation went little further.

The gang returned to its apartments in the Twin Cities to count the haul. It came to roughly $46,000, nearly $8,000 a man. What Dillinger thought of Nelson’s crazed display is unknown, but the day’s events were a clear indication of the two gang leaders’ philosophical differences. Whatever he thought, Dillinger needed Nelson’s gang. For the first time, he had bills to pay, to Piquett, and to attorneys representing Pete Pierpont, Charles Makley, and his other former gangmates, whose trial for the murder of Sheriff Jess Sarber opened that week in Lima, Ohio. He needed more money, and fast.

 

 

The hunt for John Dillinger would become the most important case in FBI history. More than any other single event, it would validate the Roosevelt administration’s push for a national law-enforcement authority and enshrine the Bureau as an American institution. Conventional wisdom holds that Hoover eagerly joined the manhunt. In fact, as FBI files make clear, Hoover viewed the Dillinger case as a potential quagmire and long resisted being drawn into it.

The previous fall, when the governor of Indiana made direct pleas for the FBI’s help following the death of Sheriff Sarber, Hoover had ignored them. When the attorney general asked him to review the situation, Hoover notified the Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati offices to render “all available assistance,” but that help had been limited to a smattering of interviews. Melvin Purvis and other SACs attended a conference or two with local officials, but only to monitor the situation. Hoover showed little interest in anything more.

Nor was Hoover any more eager to chase Dillinger in the hours after his escape from Crown Point. The massacre and Bremer investigations were still unresolved, and drew the daily attention of dozens of agents, fourteen on Bremer in Chicago alone. Purvis drove down to Crown Point to survey the situation that Saturday, but reporters’ calls to the Bureau produced only shrugs. “[Newsmen] inquired as to why we did not know more about [the escape],” an aide memoed Hoover, “and I informed them that Dillinger was not a federal prisoner.”
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But when Dillinger’s escape dominated national newspaper headlines Monday morning, Hoover telephoned Purvis. He did not immediately order Purvis onto the case. Instead, FBI memoranda indicate he attempted to gauge the Bureau’s chances of success if it joined the manhunt. Specifically, Hoover asked Purvis what information his informants could furnish that might lead to Dillinger’s arrest. Purvis’s reply was sobering, as Hoover noted the next day.

“In talking with you last evening,” Hoover wrote Purvis, “I gathered that you had practically no underworld informants or connections with which your office could contact in the event of an emergency arising . . . I am somewhat concerned.”
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And with good reason. Purvis not only had no informants in place, he was unsure how to proceed with any information he might gather. In fact, his questions to FBI headquarters suggest an investigator badly out of his depth. Purvis thought he might want to tap some telephones, but he was unclear as to the legality of wiretaps in Illinois. He twice called Sam Cowley, the agent who served as the Bureau’s investigative chief, and asked whether he needed to bring Chicago police along to launch a raid. By law he did, Cowley reminded him. Hoover sarcastically suggested Purvis needed a police escort to buoy his confidence. “He must have some brass buttons along,” Hoover scrawled on a memo that Wednesday, “otherwise he would feel lost.”
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Stung by Hoover’s criticism, Purvis hired a confidential informant—a source he had used before, at five dollars a day—and mounted a raid with Chicago police that Tuesday night. They stormed the apartment of a woman named Anne Baker, whom the informant erroneously charged with harboring Dillinger after his escape. The raid was a debacle. No one named Baker was home. Not till the next morning did Purvis learn that he had raided the wrong address.

The onslaught of headlines forced Hoover’s hand. On Wednesday morning, March 7, the day after the Sioux Falls robbery, he sent a wire to all FBI offices, directing SACs to “give preferred and immediate attention” to the Dillinger case. The rationale for the FBI’s entry into the case was ostensibly that Dillinger had stolen a car during his escape and driven it into Illinois, a violation of the federal Dyer Act. It was the thinnest of fig leaves. The fact was, Hoover was forced into the Dillinger case by his own ambitions: if the FBI wasn’t hunting the nation’s most wanted man, what good was it?

With no evidence that Dillinger had left the Chicago area, the impact of Hoover’s directive fell heavily on the overmatched Purvis. Unsure where to begin, Purvis sought guidance from John Stege of the Chicago Police Department’s Dillinger Squad. But Stege, as Purvis wrote Hoover, “has not been particularly anxious to furnish any information concerning any of his activities to anyone, including other police.”
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Purvis thus started from scratch, pulling five agents off the Bremer case to hunt Dillinger. It’s difficult to say whether the miserable quality of this group’s work in the ensuing weeks was due to the Bureau’s ambivalence or Purvis’s ineptitude. Agents descended on the Crown Point jail, taking statements from everyone involved in the escape, and visited the prison at Michigan City, where Dillinger’s onetime gangmate Ed Shouse gave them Billie Frechette’s name. For ten days, as Dillinger sightings poured in from cities as far afield as Los Angeles and Seattle, Purvis and his men probed the backgrounds of Frechette and various relatives of Dillinger’s jailed partners. They found precisely nothing.

 

 

Dillinger would dominate headlines around the country for weeks to come. With no sign of the man himself, crowds of reporters descended on Lima, Ohio, to attend the trials of his former partners Pete Pierpont, Charles Makley, and Russell Clark. One line of speculation ran through every story: would Dillinger ride to their rescue?

Ohio officials were ready if he did. Lima was an armed camp. Governor George White called out the National Guard, and guardsmen patrolled the town’s streets day and night. Their commander, a bellicose artilleryman named Harold Bush, surrounded the Allen County Courthouse with sand bags and a trio of machine-gun nests. After a rumor spread that Dillinger intended to kidnap Governor White, two squads of guardsmen took up positions outside the governor’s mansion.

The three trials themselves were cursory affairs. Ed Shouse was brought under guard from Indiana, and his terse recitation of events leading to Sheriff Sarber’s murder was all the ammunition the juries needed. In three consecutive trials spanning two weeks, Pierpont was convicted, then Makley, then Russell Clark. Pierpont and Makley received death sentences. Clark got life. Dillinger never showed.

Wet clots of snow were blowing diagonally across the yellow fields of northern Iowa as two cars came to a stop at a sandpit just beyond the southern edge of town. A harsh wind tore at the flaps of the men’s overcoats as Homer Van Meter and Eddie Green stepped out of one of the cars, a navy Buick. The rest of the gang—Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, John Hamilton, and Tommy Carroll—emerged from the second. They huddled together in a ragged circle, talking.

Green and Van Meter had spent the weekend in Mason City studying the layout of the First National Bank, staying in a room at the YMCA. They briefed the others, who had driven down from St. Paul. Everyone knew this was a high-risk job. Years of robberies had turned many Midwestern banks into small fortresses, and the Mason City bank, located on the town’s main square, was Iowa’s Fort Knox. A guard sat in a steel cage behind bulletproof glass on the second floor of the lobby, fifteen feet above the front door. He was armed with tear gas and a rifle. But the payoff, Green emphasized, was huge. He estimated the vault held a quarter million dollars. If everything went according to plan, they wouldn’t have to work again for months.

A few minutes after two o’clock, the circle broke. They transferred the guns into the Buick and headed into town. Tommy Carroll drove. As he headed up Pennsylvania Avenue, a local couple, Mr. and Mrs. W. E. Barr, fell in behind the car. “Isn’t that peculiar?” Mrs. Barr remarked, motioning at the Buick. “They have the rear window [knocked] out.”

“It’s probably hot,” said Mr. Barr, eyeing the carload of well-dressed men. “There’s an awful lot of them. It looks like a car full of pallbearers.”
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A minute later, a freelance cameraman named H. C. Kunkleman watched as the Buick pulled to a stop beside the First National Bank’s towering seven-story red-brick facade. Standing beside a tripod in the square, Kunkleman watched, curious, as five of the six men inside stepped from the car. One of them noticed Kunkleman’s camera. “Hey you,” the man snapped. “If there’s any shooting to be done, we’ll do it. Get that thing outta here.” Kunkleman, startled, stopped filming.
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Carroll remained in the car, cradling a rifle. Nelson, wearing a charcoal cap, black leather gloves, and a camel-hair overcoat, trotted up the sidewalk beside the bank, taking a position at the head of its rear alley. Dillinger, wearing a gray fedora, matching overcoat, and a striped muffler, lingered outside the front door as the others—Van Meter, Hamilton, and Eddie Green—hustled inside the bank.

The two-story lobby was filled with customers, about two dozen of them, standing in short lines in front of the teller cages; the trio’s first challenge was to get their attention. This was achieved in short order when one of the men raised a submachine gun and fired a deafening volley into the ceiling. Bits of plaster fell like rain as all three men began yelling, “Hands up! Hands up! Everybody on the floor!” The effect was akin to three wild-eyed berserkers storming a prayer meeting. Forty years later it was the sheer manic intensity of the gang’s orders that stuck in the mind of the guard perched above them in the steel cage, Tom Walters. “I swear they were all doped up or something,” he remembered in a 1973 interview. “Their faces were purple and their eyes were blazing. They never stopped screaming. I had never seen anything like it.”
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Tellers looked up, startled. A few employees ducked into closets and beneath desks. “Down! Down!” Eddie Green screamed. “Everybody on the floor!” One of the adrenalized robbers, apparently Van Meter, strode toward the bank’s president, Willis Bagley, who sat at his desk near the front door, talking to a customer. Bagley, dumbfounded to see a man stalking toward him carrying a Thompson submachine gun, had the presence of mind to duck into his office and slam the door.

Van Meter thrust his submachine gun forward, preventing the door from closing. Bagley threw his weight into the door as Van Meter, after a moment of struggle, pulled the gun free. Stepping back, he fired a burst of bullets through the door. Women screamed. Bagley, a bullet creasing his chest, dived for cover as Van Meter gave up and began storming through the lobby, ordering everyone onto the floor.

As he did, Tom Walters, the thirty-three-year-old guard sitting on a chair in the steel cage above the front door, recovered from his initial shock and jammed an eight-inch canister into his tear-gas gun. He aimed it through a gun slit in the bulletproof glass and fired at Eddie Green, directly below him. The canister struck Green in the back and fell to the floor amid a tangle of prone customers. A man on the floor kicked the spewing canister away. It skidded toward another man, who kicked it back. “It was funny,” a teller named Emmett Ryan recalled in 1982. “But it wasn’t funny at the time.”
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Standing in the middle of the lobby, a dense cloud of tear gas rising around him, Green swore and glanced up at Walters, who was struggling to clear his gas gun. The gun was jammed and nothing he could do would clear it. Green collared a bank executive named R. L. Stephenson, thrust him forward as a shield, and opened fire on Walters. The bulletproof glass cracked and splintered, and a bullet ricocheted through the gun slit, searing a bloody line across the guard’s chin and right ear. Furious, Green demanded to know how he could access the cage. “Get that son of a bitch with the tear gas!” Green yelled at Hamilton, who was already scooping money off the counters.

Hamilton looked up and saw Walters crouching on his chair, struggling with the tear-gas gun even as he grabbed a Winchester rifle. For several moments they engaged in a face-off: Hamilton could see it was no use firing at bulletproof glass, and Walters couldn’t fire his gun without endangering the innocent. “Hamilton called me every obscenity in the book, and dared me to shoot,” Walters recalled. “But I couldn’t because I would’ve plugged half the people in the lobby.”