Public Enemies (98 page)

“Cleaning a street” refers to the job of keeping armed citizens and law officers away from a robbery in progress.

Fred Barker and his girlfriend Paula Harmon had spent the summer at a rented house in Long Lake, Illinois.

According to a gang member who was debriefed by the FBI in 1935, the largest share of the Hamm ransom, $25,000, had gone to the corrupt detective Tom Brown. Jack Peifer received $10,000. The six men who actually carried out the kidnapping—Karpis, the Barker brothers, Shotgun George Ziegler, Charles Fitzgerald, and Bryan Bolton—each received $7,800. The gang also gave its old friend Deafy Farmer $2,500 to cover legal expenses for his defense in the Kansas City Massacre case.

Weaver, an Arkansas-born prison pal of Dock Barker’s, had been with Karpis and the Barkers since their first bank robbery in southern Missouri in early 1931. He had a rap sheet dating to 1918 and had been paroled for murdering an Oklahoma policeman. Weaver would work alongside Karpis and Barker for the rest of their careers.

The name is a pseudonym; the maid’s actual name is blacked out in FBI files.

This brief conversation, reported verbatim in an October 3, 1933, FBI memo, is curious. It suggests the FBI tapped Sayers’s phone, though approval for such a tap is mentioned nowhere in FBI files. The FBI memo further indicates that Sayers went to Waco in search of Kathryn that day but failed to locate her.

Luther Arnold’s sadsack story about the Oklahoma farm was true, but he pointedly failed to mention his two arrests for passing bad checks in Los Angeles.

Both “Mae” and “Hilda” are pseudonyms; the women’s actual names are blacked out in FBI reports.

Afterward Kelly would claim he had stayed up all night, watching for the possibility of a raid. Given the half-dozen gin bottles in his bedroom, and the ten more empty bottles of Old Log Cabin bourbon on the back porch, that’s unlikely. Whether he slept or not, Kelly had risen early, waiting for the newspaper’s delivery. Around seven he heard a thump on the front porch, the sound of the paper being delivered. He walked out and grabbed it, then returned inside, failing to relock the front door.

All those involved in harboring Kelly, including Lang Ramsey, drew brief prison sentences.

Pierpont was the kind of inmate who seemed at war with the world. His problems began at nineteen, when he tried to steal a car; when the owner intervened, Pierpont drew a gun and fired at him four times, missing. He drew a term in a reformatory, until his mother told the superintendent he had been mentally unstable since he’d been hit on the head with a baseball bat as a boy. He was released to a hospital for the insane, then paroled, then sent to Pendleton for the Kokomo robbery. Pierpont cursed the guards, launched innumerable escape attempts, and drew the respect of other inmates as a result. The superintendent wrote his mother’s lawyer that he was “a mustang and must be curbed.”

An unidentified Michigan City inmate later told the FBI that the gang initially hid at a Syndicate-operated hangout called the Steuben Club. According to this source, Dillinger was greeted personally at the club by Frank Nitti, who gave the gang free run of a gun room nicknamed “The Arsenal.” This would seem unlikely, especially given the gang’s subsequent armaments raid in Peru, Indiana, several days later.

In the lone major operation where his men had been prepared to fire their weapons, things had gone even worse. It happened in August, when the syndicate-connected con man Jake Factor reported someone was trying to extort him. A meeting was arranged with the extortionists at a 22nd Street park, and Purvis, commanding an army of two hundred Chicago cops and FBI agents—the largest such strike force in memory, the
Chicago American
reported—prepared to move in when they appeared. When the extortionists arrived, the police moved. In the confusion, their quarry managed to get away. The
American
dubbed it “a huge fiasco.”

Seventy years later, Doris Rogers (now, in 2004, Doris Lockerman) is the only denizen of the nineteenth floor who remains alive, an alert, gregarious ninety-four-year-old living in Atlanta.

Purvis brought Smith, known as “D.O.,” to Chicago from Oklahoma City to be his number two, or ASAC. A popular mentor to many young agents during his distinguished FBI career, Smith had been married the week before the Sherone Apartments stakeout; he had been introduced to his wife by Frank Smith, the agent who survived the Kansas City Massacre. A native of Fort Smith, Arkansas, D. O. Smith served in the FBI from 1928 to 1958. In later years he taught in the Fort Smith schools. He died in January 1977 at the age of seventy-nine.

Edward N. Notesteen, a graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School, served in the FBI from 1930 to 1956. He died in San Diego in 1970 at the age of seventy-one.

Allen Lockerman married Purvis’s secretary, Doris Rogers. He retired from the FBI in the mid-1930s and went on to a career as a successful attorney in Atlanta.

Julius H. Rice was in the third year of a distinguished forty-one-year FBI career. In later years Rice emerged as a favorite of Hoover’s; they called each other by their first names. Born in 1904, Rice was another George Washington graduate, joining the Bureau in 1931. He was based in Portland, Oregon, from 1946 until his retirement in 1972. He died there in 1975, at the age of seventy.

The FBI’s subsequent review of Miller’s escape, written by Assistant Director Vincent W. Hughes, was scathing. Hughes found that “the plan to take Miller was far from perfect and the execution of the plan even more to be criticized.” Among the “vital errors” Hughes cited: The lack of a single supervising agent and the absence of cars in position to give pursuit. Hughes suggested that Miller’s apartment should have been raided, a rare if indirect criticism of Hoover, who had ordered the agents to hold off. Miller’s escape underscored the FBI’s lack of experience in fundamental law-enforcement techniques.

FBI agents in Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati actually did do some poking around on the Dillinger case that autumn, writing a half-dozen reports and attending a conference or two. But, by and large, the Bureau ignored the case, just as Hoover wished.

According to some stories it was a ringworm infection.

The gang’s exact lineup at Racine has long been in dispute. Witnesses uniformly counted five robbers that day. A man named Leslie Homer later confessed and was convicted of taking part. If so, that means one of the others, probably Russell Clark, did not come along.

There’s a chance Ted Hinton’s car stories, especially the gravel truck episode, were apocryphal. He told them in a 1978 book,
Ambush,
published shortly after his death.

Today the site lies just outside the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport.

Touhy would be convicted the following February of the Jake Factor kidnapping.

These conversations are taken from the Karpis transcripts.

After his parole, Van Meter lingered around East Chicago. He met Nelson in Indiana Harbor, and FBI files indicate he bunked with both Dillinger and Nelson for periods that summer. Eager to flee Indiana, where he felt police knew him, Van Meter followed Nelson to St. Paul and signed on for anything he planned.

Nelson had visited the Texas city twice already that summer to buy guns from a gunsmith named Heinie Leibman. Eddie Bentz had introduced them.

Chuck Fisher gave the San Antonio police nothing. “All I got out of him you could put in your eye and not get hurt,” the city’s police commissioner told reporters. Fisher was sent to Leavenworth on an outstanding robbery warrant, where he told the FBI nothing, too. Not for four more months would anyone realize Nelson had been in San Antonio.

Born in Falls Church, Virginia, in 1901, Tyler M. Birch joined the Bureau just two months before the Underhill shooting. He resigned from the FBI in 1938, fought in World War II and the Korean War, and died in December 1981 at the age of eighty.

Dillinger’s cross-country drive may not have been uneventful. According to FBI files, he received a traffic ticket in Albuquerque.

Bremer’s note to Dickman read,

Dear Lil: As my old standby I am calling on you to do something for me that it seems no-one else can do. I must get the enclosed letter to my father—unopened—& I know if I intrust it in your case it will be done. I suppose you know that my father has made a special appeal to everybody police & government officers included to lay off for three days so that he can make his own arrangements to get me back. Now the next thing is—is to get the instructions to him—& your old pal will not fail me I know . . .

Please girl hurry—but don’t loose your head—I know you wont & I’m sure you’ll do just as I ask you to do. We always did understand each other.

It’s a living hell here & the time I’ve been here seems like ages. Please do your part & I’m assured I’ll be home soon. Please hurry & be careful

As always
ED

The role Piquett and O’Leary played in Dillinger’s story was not fully understood until the 1990 discovery of an unpublished manuscript written by a Chicago advertising man and would-be novelist named Russell Girardin. The manuscript’s unveiling was a story in itself. In late 1934, Girardin secured the cooperation of both Piquett and O’Leary for a book he hoped to write about Dillinger. They told him everything, supplying dates and affidavits to back up their assertions, but Girardin was never able to publish more than a series of truncated magazine articles. His manuscript lay forgotten on a shelf in his Chicago home for five decades until, at the age of eighty-nine, he was tracked down by two Dillinger enthusiasts, William Helmer and Joseph Pinkston. The Girardin manuscript sheds a swath of new light on Dillinger’s story; many of its key points can be confirmed in newly released FBI documents.

Hoover’s New York friends may be an allusion to his friend Walter Winchell.

Born and raised in Oregon, Harold E. Anderson served in the FBI from 1927 to 1943. He later served as an investigator for the National Board of Fire Underwriters and the State Gaming Control Board in Nevada. He died in Las Vegas at the age of seventy-five in 1975. flattery. “I think that’s a very nice jail you have here,” he said to Mrs. Holley. “What makes you think there’s anything wrong with it?”

Few books on Bonnie and Clyde include the Rembrandt robbery, perhaps because its only mention comes in the handwritten notes Lee Simmons took of Joe Palmer’s debriefing. The notes are included verbatim in Simmons’s 1957 memoir,
Assignment Huntsville.
Contemporary news accounts report the bank’s robbery on January 25.

Some authors, including E. J. Milner in
The Lives and Times of Bonnie & Clyde
(Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), have put this incident several weeks later. However, according to Simmons’s notes, Palmer clearly said it occurred “about the 1st of February,” putting it immediately after the Rembrandt robbery. Milner does not mention the Rembrandt robbery.

O’Dare’s husband was Gene O’Dare, the man who had been arrested with Hamilton at a Michigan ice-skating rink in late 1932.

Worley’s 1984 version differs from the story he told newspapers fifty years earlier. The day of the robbery, he told Dallas reporters he thought it was Hamilton who had returned his money, which he said was $3.00, not $27.00.

The sole source for this discussion is the Karpis transcripts, and his chronology is clearly confused. Karpis puts the meeting in late March. In all likelihood it occurred in late February.

Youngblood was killed in a police shoot-out in Michigan two weeks later.

Seventy years later, the questions that swirled in the wake of Dillinger’s spectacular escape from Crown Point’s “escape-proof” jail still prompt debate among historians of American crime. Two loom largest: Did Dillinger really use a wooden gun, as he claimed? And what, if any, help did he receive from allies in and out of the jail?

As for the gun, many still refuse to believe Dillinger was able to escape using only a wooden replica. Ernest Blunk and others would later insist Dillinger had used a real pistol. Some writers, including John Toland, agree; Toland posited that Dillinger had used a wooden gun
and
a real gun. But FBI files make clear Dillinger, at least initially, had only the wooden gun. Agents took statements from everyone involved that morning, and several, including Warden Baker, saw it up close. Some, including Sam Cahoon, insisted Dillinger had whittled the gun himself from shelving in his cell. In fact, as the Girardin manuscript makes clear, the wooden gun was smuggled in from outside. Art O’Leary did it. After reading of a Wisconsin man who had escaped a local jail using a toy gun, O’Leary asked a Chicago gunsmith to whittle him one.

The second and far thornier question surrounds what, if any, help Dillinger received from allies in Crown Point. Ernest Blunk and Sam Cahoon were later indicted for helping Dillinger; both were acquitted after perfunctory trials. Afterward, an assistant state attorney general named Edward Barce was tasked with investigating the escape. Eight months later, in November 1934, Barce produced a secret report for Governor Paul McNutt, a copy of which survives in FBI files. On its face, the Barce report was a bombshell. In it, Barce alleged that Art O’Leary held two meetings with Warden Lew Baker, one at a barbecue stand on the outskirts of Crown Point, and handed Baker $1,800 to help Dillinger escape. Barce quoted employees of the barbecue stand and a Crown Point tavern, who claimed that Piquett boasted that Dillinger had promised him $50,000 if he could arrange his freedom. Barce even uncovered a series of letters O’Leary had supposedly written to a corrupt East Chicago politician to further the conspiracy.

It was stirring stuff, but almost certainly untrue. The Barce report had a single glaring flaw. Its sole source of information was Meyer Bogue, the slender con man who had briefly functioned as Piquett’s gofer; not long after the Crown Point escape, Bogue went to work for Barce at $15 a day. FBI agents later interviewed every person mentioned in the Barce-Bogue conspiracy, as well as the supposed eyewitnesses. All denied every salient point Barce made. None of those named were ever indicted, much less prosecuted.

If there was a conspiracy, it was a small one, perhaps a single man, the man who smuggled Dillinger the wooden gun. O’Leary or Piquett could have done it. They later told Russell Girardin that the gun had, in fact, been smuggled into the jail by Ernest Blunk, who they insisted had taken a bribe to do so. The truth is lost to history.