Public Enemies (62 page)

From all appearances, Purvis accepted his demotion without comment. But from the tone of their memoranda it’s clear there was little warmth between the two; in his 1936 book,
American Agent,
Purvis tellingly fails to mention either Cowley or his own demotion.
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“You could see the strain on their faces,” Doris Rogers recalls. “I felt sorry for Cowley. He was just doing his job. He was as ill at ease as Purvis. When you looked at Cowley, and you looked at Purvis, we all knew the fix was in. There was a sense Melvin had been betrayed. We all felt betrayed, defeated. You could see it by the way [Purvis] walked, by the way he wore his hat. A little hunched, a little bit shoulders. We all felt under siege. The enemy was moving in. The friends we had [in Washington] had all turned to enemies.”

On the nineteenth floor, morale sagged. It wasn’t just that Purvis’s men were exhausted, that their loyalty to Washington was shaken. The nature of their jobs had changed. Few sought a career in law enforcement. For most the FBI was to be a temporary job, a postcollege adventure, something to do till the Depression ended and real jobs beckoned. They hadn’t signed up to be killed. Doris Rogers was dating several of the agents, and many confided their doubts to her.

“When the feeling came that Purvis was being undermined, every agent in the office would have resigned if he could,” she remembers. “It wasn’t just loyalty to Melvin. By that time the agents were all tired, worn out. They wished they were home jerking sodas in a drugstore. They would have done anything to get out. They were being thrown into situations where they could get killed. None of them asked for that. It wouldn’t get them a Medal of Honor. It would only get them dead. They knew that. This was not their goal in life. The sense was, ‘What are we doing in this dreadful job?’”

Tension hung thick that Sunday afternoon as Cowley and Purvis drove to Fort Wayne to assess Purvis’s second major surveillance, at the Audrey Russ home. It, too, had degenerated into a fiasco. The three agents had actually moved from the Russ home to a hotel twelve miles away because the combative Mrs. Russ was expecting houseguests; she had graciously consented to telephone if Dillinger appeared. After an all-night debriefing, Cowley ordered the agents back to Chicago. He and Purvis returned to the Bankers Building at 5:15 A.M.
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Cowley, whose capacity for work appeared boundless, spent Monday reviewing the rest of Purvis’s apparatus, quizzing him on the efficacy of informants and getting up to speed on the Bremer case, on which six agents were working full-time. That night he drove to Indianapolis, where the next morning he toured the Mooresville area with Earl Connelley; Connelley had sixteen agents on the ground around Indianapolis, watching the Dillinger farmhouse and other family homes, two more men in Dayton and another in Columbus, Ohio. Cowley was skeptical Connelley’s stakeouts could accomplish anything. “[Cowley] remarked that they have had the covers there for a month or six weeks,” Hoover wrote in a memo that night, “and it is hardly believable that it is not known, and it is likewise hardly believable that [Dillinger is] going to contact [them] when they know this.”
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Still, Cowley told Hoover he could see no changes worth making. Hoover liked what he heard. For the first time in weeks, he seemed pleased. Two days later he phoned Cowley and, as he wrote in a memo, “advised that I was of the opinion that the [new] situation at Chicago would work out all right, and that I had told Mr. Purvis that until we complete the Dillinger investigation I wanted Mr. Cowley to take complete charge.”
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While Cowley assumed command, Purvis’s run of bad luck continued. Pete Pierpont’s old girlfriend, Mary Kinder, had gotten engaged, and Connelley had befriended her fiancé; the boy told him Kinder expected to meet Dillinger soon. That Tuesday, Purvis drove down to the town of Mishawaka, where agents had trailed Kinder to a shack where Pierpont’s parents were opening a barbecue stand. Purvis and his men watched the building until midnight when, to their dismay, a convoy of eight police cars drove up. Out spilled a dozen cops in bulletproof vests; rifles raised, they demanded to know who Purvis was. Sheepishly Purvis explained, apologizing for his failure to notify authorities he was in the area. Afterward he trudged to a phone to once again break bad news to Washington. “Mr. Purvis stated that of course the matter is ‘shot’ from our point of view,” an aide wrote Hoover, “and I approved his suggestion that it be turned over to the police to cover. I told him to caution the police, however, to give the matter no publicity.”
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On the Sunday Sam Cowley arrived in Chicago, Van Meter followed Dillinger into the brave new world of cosmetic surgery. He paid $5,000 for it. Once again Dr. Loeser came to Probasco’s house to perform the procedure, with Harold Cassidy assisting. This time everything went smoothly. Loeser slit open Van Meter’s nose, flattening a bump and removing tissue from the bulb. After cutting down the size of Van Meter’s upper lip, Loeser used acid to remove the “Hope” tattoo on his right forearm. Apparently, no one viewed this as a bad omen.

Two mornings later Loeser returned and used a hydrochloric acid solution to remove both Van Meter’s and Dillinger’s fingerprints. Dillinger endured the treatment in silence, grimacing, beads of sweat appearing on his forehead. Van Meter cursed loudly, dancing around the room, flapping his hands in an effort to fight the pain. Afterward Baby Face Nelson dropped by, plopping on a living room couch to smirk at his partners’ faces. “So you two decided to go out and buy yourselves a pair of new mugs,” he cracked. “Maybe you needed them.”

“At least I’ll be able to go out on the street and get around now,” Dillinger said.
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At one point, Piquett dropped by and told Dillinger he needed cash to pay attorneys who had helped represent Billie Frechette at her trial in St. Paul; as expected, she had drawn a yearlong sentence in a federal women’s prison. Dillinger sent O’Leary to his father for the money. On Wednesday night, June 6, O’Leary checked into the Claypool Hotel in Indianapolis. The next morning he found Hubert Dillinger at his filling station. Hubert cocked his head in the direction of Art McGinnis, the FBI informant who had been loitering around the station for over a month. “Be careful what you say,” Hubert said.

“What’s that rat doing here?” O’Leary asked.

“I want him around where I can keep an eye on him.”

“I have a note from Johnnie for your dad,” O’Leary said.
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Telling McGinnis that O’Leary was an FBI agent who wanted to see his father, Hubert drove him out to the Dillinger farmhouse in Mooresville. John Dillinger, Sr., met them at the roadside. O’Leary handed him the note. It read in part:

“How is Johnnie?” Mr. Dillinger asked.

“He’s fine, Mr. Dillinger,” O’Leary said.

The elder Dillinger walked out to his barn. After a moment he returned with a package wrapped in newspaper. Inside, O’Leary found $3,000; it was the money Dillinger had given his father after the Fostoria robbery. “If you see Johnnie when you get back,” Hubert told O’Leary, “mention to him that Art McGinnis is at the filling station with me.”
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O’Leary promised he would.

There is no indication in FBI files that agents watching the Dillinger home noted O’Leary’s visit; if they had, they might have followed him back to Jimmy Probasco’s house in Chicago that night. Art McGinnis, however, had his suspicions. The next day, Earl Connelley called Washington to report “that some private individual endeavoring to locate Dillinger has represented himself as a Government Officer, in contacting John Dillinger’s half-brother, Hubert. Mr. Connelley states that he has an informant advising that an unknown person took Hubert away for several hours yesterday and talked to him.”
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The FBI never learned the person’s identity; presumably, this was O’Leary.

When he returned to Chicago that night, O’Leary found Dillinger at Probasco’s house, pacing from room to room in a foul mood. They had heard the news on the radio, he said. It was Tommy Carroll.

Carroll and his girlfriend Jean Delaney had taken a trip through Iowa, intending to end up at Delaney’s parents’ home in St. Paul. After spending the night outside Cedar Rapids, they were cruising through the town of Waterloo when they had car trouble and stopped at a filling station to have the car serviced. Afterward, about lunchtime, a Waterloo police detective named Emil Steffen took a call from the station’s mechanic, who said he had just worked on a bronze Hudson and had seen a rifle and a collection of license plates beneath a floor mat. He said the driver looked like a “tough customer.”

Detective Steffen grabbed another officer, P. E. Walker, and went cruising the streets of Waterloo, looking for the car. They couldn’t find it, and after an hour or so returned to the police station downtown. There, parked across the street, they saw the car. They pulled up beside it and waited. After a bit they saw a young man and a pretty blonde approach the car. As the detectives watched, Carroll opened the passenger door of the Hudson, allowing Delaney to slide in. Then he walked around to the driver’s-side door.

The detectives stepped out of their car. “Hey!” Officer Walker said. “Just a minute there. Who are you?”

“Who are you?” Carroll said.

“Police officers,” Walker said.

Carroll took a step backward and reached beneath his coat. Thinking he was going for a gun, Walker charged. Just as Carroll drew his pistol, Walker swung his fist and smashed him in the nose. Carroll fell onto his rear, by the curb. In an instant he was up, the gun in his right hand. He ran onto the sidewalk. Detective Steffen drew his revolver and fired. From a distance of about fifteen feet, his bullet struck Carroll beneath the left armpit. Delaney screamed.

Dropping his gun, Carroll stumbled away from the sidewalk, into an alley. Detective Steffen set his feet and fired three times; two of the bullets struck home. Carroll fell on his side in the alley.

Steffen ran up. Standing over the fallen man, he demanded to know his name. “Tommy Carroll,” he rasped. Carroll refused to answer any more questions. “I got seven hundred dollars on me,” he said. “Be sure the little girl gets it. She doesn’t know what it’s all about.”

They placed Jean Delaney under arrest and took Carroll to the hospital. Two agents from the St. Paul office made it to the hospital that afternoon. Doctors said Carroll didn’t have long. The agents stood over his hospital bed and fired questions at him for forty-five minutes, but it was no use. Tommy Carroll died at 6:55 that evening.
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Closeted at Jimmy Probasco’s house, Dillinger and Van Meter had sharply different reactions to their friend’s passing. Van Meter swore he would never die like that, gunned down in some filthy alley, and the rest of his career he did his best to stay out of public view.

Not Dillinger. Once his wrappings were removed, he wanted nothing more than to taste life. The day after Carroll’s death, Friday, June 8, Dillinger decided to attend a Chicago Cubs baseball game at Wrigley Field. Piquett went with him, and later said he saw John Stege of the Chicago police’s Dillinger Squad there as well. “Fuzz,”
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Piquett whispered to Dillinger outside the ballpark. “Big fuzz.”

If Dillinger worried about being seen, he rarely showed it. By all accounts, he appeared intoxicated by his ability to circulate among the crowds without being recognized. Later, some would attribute this to his “new face,” others to his burgeoning ego. By that weekend Dillinger was feeling well enough to visit a Chicago nightclub, and he may have visited a whorehouse. By the following Monday, June 11, he had met a pretty waitress named Polly Hamilton and was thinking of seeing more of her.
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“That reminds me of Marie,” Van Meter remarked, mentioning his former girlfriend, Mickey Conforti, whom he hadn’t seen since abandoning her at Little Bohemia two months earlier.
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By Wednesday morning, June 13, Van Meter was feeling chipper enough to go in search of his old flame. He rose early, put on his best dark suit and white shoes, then added his latest bit of disguise, a set of delicate pince-nez eyeglasses, attached by a long black ribbon to his vest. Thus attired, he walked outside and slid behind the wheel of his maroon Ford sedan. Reuniting with Mickey Conforti, he knew, was a calculated risk. The FBI had been watching her for weeks.