Public Enemies (56 page)

They were swamped. Purvis was grappling with a deluge of new information that flowed to the FBI in the wake of Little Bohemia. New leads, most of them worthless, poured into the office. Dillinger was dead, Dillinger was in California, Dillinger was in Canada. By now reporters had created a permanent encampment in the hallway in front of Doris Rogers’s desk; Purvis couldn’t go to the bathroom without one of them shouting questions. Worse, every sheriff in Indiana was certain Dillinger was hiding in his jurisdiction, and each one cried out to be debriefed. Every day that week, while Dillinger sat watching John Hamilton die in Aurora, Purvis dispatched agents to a new town to check out a new tip: On Wednesday it was East Chicago, Thursday Muncie, Friday Fort Wayne, Saturday South Bend. None of it led anywhere.

The three Dillinger women captured at Little Bohemia, ferried to a jail in Madison, Wisconsin, were all but useless. Facing charges of conspiracy and harboring a fugitive, they gave fake names and fake stories and initially resisted all efforts to question them. After a few days Jean Delaney and Mickey Conforti finally talked, but they said little the agents could use. Conforti gave her correct name but said she had no idea her boyfriend “Wayne Huttner” was really Homer Van Meter. Agents found Conforti’s invalid mother in a Chicago-area sanatorium and fired questions at her as she drooled. Just the fact the women were in FBI custody was a cause for mockery. Coming on the heels of Billie Frechette’s capture, wiseacres cracked that the Bureau may not always get its man, but it always got his women.

What Purvis had was cars. They found the ones Nelson and Tommy Carroll used to escape, both abandoned on dirt roads deep in the north woods. They found the car Nelson had wrecked on the way to Little Bohemia. They ran checks on the two cars Dillinger had left in Little Bohemia’s garage. None of it led anywhere.

Purvis had high hopes they would find something useful in the sixteen pieces of luggage the gang abandoned. But other than an enormous collection of guns and license plates, the bags proved only that the gang members were pedestrian dressers. There were black suits and green ties and blue silk bathrobes, scraps of Mickey Conforti’s poetry, an overdue novel from the St. Paul library. The best lead was a business card found in Nelson’s bag for a priest named Philip Coughlin, an old family friend whom agents tracked down in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette. Coughlin cooperated, filling the Bureau’s growing file on Nelson.
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Purvis put Nelson’s mother and sister under surveillance.

 

 

That Saturday night, as Boss McLaughlin’s questioning continued, Volney Davis drove into Chicago and stole a car for Dillinger. The next day Dillinger and Van Meter thanked Dock Barker for his help and, after leaving their bloodied car on the North Side, drove to East Chicago, where after two days they managed to reunite with Tommy Carroll.

The next evening, Wednesday, May 2, the three men pulled up behind a frame house in Fort Wayne. The house was owned by Audrey G. Russ, a construction worker who knew the Van Meter family. Startled by the appearance of the country’s most-wanted man on his doorstep, Russ agreed to let them stay the night. His wife and eleven-year-old daughter looked on, amazed, as Dillinger lugged in four submachine guns, several bulletproof vests, and a bundle of two dozen license plates.

According to an FBI report, Dillinger was in a voluble mood as he sat in the Russ’s kitchen, regaling the frightened family with details of his escapes from Crown Point and Little Bohemia. “Dillinger stated that they’d never take him alive and that before he went he would take several with him; the inference being that he would manage to kill a few officers before he could be taken,” the report says. “Dillinger also stated that he was sore about the fact that the newspapers thought that he had bought his way out of the Crown Point jail, stating that the credit for the best trick he had ever pulled was taken away from him. He also stated that he had rounded up ten trustees and seven deputy sheriffs before he managed to get his hands on a real gun.”

Dillinger laughed at the police who were hunting him, calling them “a lot of clucks.” It was the “Feds” he said he feared; they could go anywhere, he said, spend anything, even rent airplanes. As he talked he rubbed his leg, the one wounded in St. Paul. He’d aggravated it in a fender bender a couple of days before, he said, when Tommy Carroll lost control of their car and smashed into a tree.
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The next morning Dillinger and Van Meter asked for steaks for breakfast. They were hungry; they had a big day ahead. For the first time in two months, they had a bank to rob.

 

 

By that Monday, April 30, though he had missed his chance to capture Dillinger in Aurora, Purvis felt he was making progress. After the debriefing of Boss McLaughlin, agents dispatched to the Irving Park Hotel identified the mysterious “Smith and Jones” as Russell Gibson and Izzy Berg; a doorman said the two had been working on something with Dr. Moran the last few weeks. Unfortunately, Moran and his pals had disappeared the previous Friday, the day the papers carried news of McLaughlin’s arrest. Agents fanned out across Chicago, interviewing anyone who knew Moran in hopes of finding his wastrel bunch.
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In Indiana, meanwhile, Earl Connelley increased pressure on Dillinger’s family. His men had been questioning Hubert Dillinger and other relatives for weeks. The outlaw’s nephew Norman Hancock proved the most pliable. That day Connelley persuaded Hancock to drive to help John Dillinger, Sr., build a fence. If Dillinger was hiding at his father’s farmhouse, Connelley told Hancock to take out his handkerchief and wipe his face. Two dozen Indianapolis cops stood by to move if the signal was given. Connelley and a half-dozen agents were stationed in haystacks and outbuildings when Hancock drove up and disappeared inside the house. At 2:10 he and the elder Dillinger appeared on the porch. Hancock took out his handkerchief and twice wiped his face.

As Hancock and Mr. Dillinger trudged down the road to build the fence, a squadron of FBI cars screeched to a halt beside them. Agents leaped out and surrounded the two men, taking them aside for questioning. Hancock appeared dazed. Once they were out of earshot, he told Connelley it was a mistake. Dillinger wasn’t at the house. That morning Mr. Dillinger had received an anonymous letter from someone in Minnesota, saying Dillinger was safe there. He had given the signal, Hancock insisted, only to tell the FBI about the letter.
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Connelley fumed. The agents climbed back in their cars; the Indianapolis police retreated. By the following day Matt Leach was complaining to reporters that Connelley’s ham-handed raid had ruined any chances of capturing Dillinger in the state of Indiana. Ill will between the FBI and the state police was growing by the hour.

Two days later, on Wednesday, May 2, the car Dillinger had stolen outside St. Paul was found on a North Side street. From the dried blood on the backseat, Purvis could see one of the gang members had been wounded. The evening headlines screamed the news that Dillinger was back in the city, probably recovering from gunshot wounds. Purvis wasn’t so sure. He thought the car might be a plant to dupe agents into concentrating their search in Chicago. For once Purvis was right.

Sipping coffee from a pair of Thermos jugs, Dillinger, Van Meter, and Tommy Carroll drove east to Toledo, where they stole another car. They were almost out of money. Van Meter said he knew a bank.

People in Fostoria, a rail hub forty miles south of Toledo, considered the town’s banks robbery-proof; so many slow-moving trains crisscrossed the area that police believed they would dissuade any robbers from putting together a getaway map. But Van Meter knew the town from boyhood vacations. He and Dillinger didn’t spend much time canvassing the First National Bank or drawing gits. They just needed money.

At 2:50, as the bank was preparing for its 3:00 close, two men walked in with submachine guns hidden beneath overcoats over their arms. The lobby, though almost empty of customers, presented an immediate challenge; there was a mezzanine above, and two side entrances, one opening directly into the O. C. Harding Jewelry Store, the other leading into a drugstore. While Tommy Carroll waited outside with the car, Van Meter laid his overcoat across a railing and pointed his Thompson at the teller cages. “Stick ’em up!” he shouted.

There was no joy to Dillinger that day, no smiles or courtesies anyone would remember; his days of leaping over teller cages were a vague memory now. His movements were grim and mechanical. As the employees raised their arms, Dillinger stepped through a swinging door and began clearing piles of cash off the counters into sacks. Van Meter gathered the tellers and a few other employees together in a group. Two women began to cry. “Don’t kill me,” one begged Van Meter.

“You be quiet,” Van Meter said, “and I won’t.”
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Neither Dillinger nor Van Meter noticed a teller named Frances Hillyard slip out a door. Hillyard ran to find the police chief, a man named Frank Culp. As Culp ran toward the bank, he got an idea: if he could just get up to the mezzanine, he could take the high ground and drive the robbers away. Bursting into the lobby, he found the mezzanine elevator was on the second floor. Van Meter fired his submachine gun; a single bullet ripped into Culp’s chest and burst a lung. Culp staggered backward into the jewelry store and hollered for more men.
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When Tommy Carroll heard gunfire, he stepped out of the getaway car and began firing wildly. His bullets shattered windows up and down the street, sending citizens ducking for cover. The slow and the unlucky got hit, one man in the leg, another in the foot. Inside the bank, Dillinger hustled to clear the remaining cash off the counters; the bank’s president later estimated he made off with more than $17,000. “It’s too hot out there,” a customer overheard Van Meter say. “Let’s go through the drugstore.”

They grabbed two employees, a man and a woman, shoving them through the drugstore. Outside, the two were loaded onto the running boards; as the car roared off down Tifflin Street, Van Meter kept a tight grip on the woman’s hand. They sped west out of town, tossing roofing nails in their wake. Outside town they let the hostages go.
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Back in Fort Wayne, meanwhile, Van Meter’s old friend Audrey Russ was paralyzed with fear that Dillinger would return to his home. He approached his boss at the Western Gas Construction Company, told him everything and asked what to do. His boss had once met the FBI’s resident agent at South Bend, W. J. Devereaux. That Thursday, as Dillinger was busy in Fostoria, he telephoned Devereaux and, withholding his name, described in general terms what had happened. Devereaux thought he recognized the man’s voice. Afterward he phoned Chicago, briefed Purvis, and asked if he should follow up. For the moment Purvis told him to do nothing.

It was an order he would soon come to regret.

 

 

Inside the FBI, it took two weeks for the simmering frustrations born at Little Bohemia to come to a boil. While recriminations might be expected in other agencies, the Bureau had no history of internal dissension; throughout the high-pressure manhunts of 1934, the squabbling that ensued in the wake of Little Bohemia was unique.

The unlikely squeaky wheel turned out to be the St. Paul SAC, the mild-tempered Werner Hanni. Hanni had clearly not enjoyed having his office commandeered by Inspector Rorer and Hugh Clegg, and his annoyance turned to outrage in the days after the raid. The final straw had been his encounter on a darkened country road with the fleeing Baby Face Nelson, which had left him deeply shaken. Hanni’s anger came to light when Clegg, sorting through papers on a desk, found a memo from Hanni he had never seen. It was a lightning bolt, addressed but apparently never sent to Hoover. It read in part:

Hanni had a bad word for almost everyone. He criticized Inspector Rorer for failing to help lift Carter Baum’s dead body; Rorer, he said, had complained of a “kink in his back.” Nor did he limit his broadsides to the events at Little Bohemia. He criticized Hugh Clegg, though not by name, for hindering the earlier pursuit of Dillinger by pestering his men with questions about Eddie Green’s death.

Everyone involved wrote sharply worded memos disagreeing with Hanni. As Hoover studied these memos, he received a far more worrisome bit of news. The Justice Department prosecutor, Joe Keenan, told him he had heard a reliable story that the agents at Little Bohemia had mutinied against Purvis and Clegg, and actually locked them inside a shed while Dillinger got away. Hoover pressed Keenan for the source of the story, and Keenan named a former agent named Thomas Cullen. Agents interviewed Cullen and confirmed he was the source.