Public Enemies (100 page)

Purvis missed another opportunity by failing to broadcast an alert on the red panel truck Dillinger was driving. The Russes gave the Bureau a complete description of the vehicle, everything but the license number.

FBI agents wouldn’t learn the stranger’s actual identity until several months later, when Hancock told a reporter of the incident.

While the number of FBI agents on the Dillinger case fluctuated, about thirty-eight were devoted full time that spring, twenty-two in Chicago, sixteen in Indiana under Earl Connelley.

That morning in Memphis, Clyde mailed a letter to the Dallas sheriff, Smoot Schmid. It was about Raymond Hamilton. Hamilton had been captured that Wednesday following the robbery of a bank in Lewisville, north of Dallas. Carted back to the Dallas County Jail, he freely sparred with reporters, answering questions about his break with Bonnie and Clyde. Though he stopped short of criticizing Clyde, the interviews angered Clyde nonetheless, as had a letter Hamilton had written to his lawyer denying involvement in the killing of Constable Cal Campbell; the lawyer had given it to reporters. The reply Clyde mailed from Memphis mentioned both the Lancaster robbery and the subsequent argument over division of the loot, excoriated Mary O’Dare and, oddly, accused Hamilton of being “too yellow to fight” during the Reeds Spring shoot-out in February.

This suggests that Sheriff Jordan had no contact with Frank Hamer before early March. Some versions suggest Hamer spoke with Jordan as early as February.

In testimony during Henry Methvin’s 1936 murder trial, John Joyner said this meeting occurred near the town of Castor in Bienville Parish.

Sometime in late April or early May, Hamer claimed, he came close to capturing Bonnie and Clyde at the John Cole house. “The end would have come [then],” Hamer remembered, “had not some local and federal officers made a drag on Ruston, Louisiana, and when Clyde heard of it, he quit the country and I had to wait for him to return.”

Forty years later, Ted Hinton put this discussion on Sunday, May 20, leading many researchers to believe Methvin separated from Bonnie and Clyde on Saturday, May 19; in fact, if Hinton did talk with the Shreveport police about the sighting of Clyde, it must have been Tuesday afternoon, May 22. In his 1936 testimony, Methvin clearly stated the incident at the Majestic Café occurred that Tuesday morning.

Ted Hinton claimed Methvin grew so bothersome he was briefly handcuffed to a tree.

James J. Probasco was no stranger to Chicago police. Since 1921 he had two arrests for possession of stolen goods but had never been convicted. Over the years he had dabbled in everything from prize fighting to a veterinary business.

News of Helen Gillis’s disappearance did not surface in the Chicago papers for three weeks. When it did, on June 22, Ed Tamm called Sam Cowley and told him to deny the story.

It is not clear from FBI files how or when Purvis learned of his demotion. The files contain a single mention of a trip Purvis made to Washington that week; presumably it was then that Hoover explained the changes to him.

On June 11 Dillinger accompanied Hamilton to the Chicago medical examiner’s downtown office, where she received injections and filled out papers necessary for a new waitressing job. That visit, and three others to the same office, were disclosed by the
Chicago Daily Times
after Dillinger’s death.

Now the suburb of Skokie, Illinois.

The Bureau had made a stab at tailing Piquett on May 19 but had given up the surveillance after barely two days. Apparently it took too many men.

The schoolhouse, which no longer exists, stood two miles north of the intersection of State Highways 53 and 62 (now Algonquin Road), in the town of Arlington Heights.

It was Lieder who stowed Dillinger’s red panel truck in his garage that May. At the same time, he sold Van Meter his new maroon Ford.

Negri was thoroughly debriefed by the FBI after his capture in December 1934. He gave the Bureau only fragmentary accounts of the South Bend planning meetings. In 1941 Negri co-authored a series of lurid articles on Baby Face Nelson’s career in
Master Detective
magazine. In these articles, he elaborated considerably. Unfortunately, many of these details, including a tale of a Dillinger visit and aborted raid on Nevada’s Hoover Dam, are clearly figments of his imagination. The author has accepted Negri’s accounts only where they parallel what he told the FBI in 1934 and 1935.

Dillinger knew the neighborhood: the address was one block from the apartment of Billie Frechette’s sister, where he had taken refuge the night of his Crown Point escape.

A number of latter-day Dillinger enthusiasts have theorized that in this role Zarkovich aided Dillinger at several key moments in his career, providing the shack that May and suggesting the robbery of the East Chicago bank in January. It’s even been speculated it was Zarkovich who smuggled the wooden gun to Dillinger at Crown Point. The notion is not altogether far-fetched; FBI records indicate Zarkovich visited Dillinger at the jail. After Dillinger’s escape Zarkovich did become deeply involved in the escape investigation, a fact some found curious. “I never could understand why Zarkovich was so active in the grand jury investigation,” Judge William Murray told the
Chicago Tribune
later that summer. “He practically wore a path between the grand jury room and [the prosecutor’s] office.”

It’s likely Dillinger met Hamilton the weekend of June 9-10, during the first days after having his facial bandages removed.

The informant may have been Piquett’s gofer, Meyer Bogue. It might also have been Piquett’s secretary.

This actually occurred at an apartment Sage had rented at 2838 North Clark Street.

Not, as legend has it, a red dress.

The call had come from inside the Biograph, where the manager believed the mysterious men lurking outside were about to rob the theater.

In his 1936 book,
American Agent,
Purvis claimed he yelled, “Stick ’em up, Johnny, we have you surrounded.” In numerous newspaper interviews and memos he authored on that night, this is the only time Purvis made such a claim. It is not substantiated by any other interviews or memos authored by any other agent present that night. It’s tempting to suggest Purvis concocted the claim to offset occasional sentiment that the FBI’s killing of Dillinger amounted to an assassination.

For decades, no one in the FBI would confirm which agent fired the bullets that killed Dillinger. Inside the Bureau, however, there was little doubt. “Upon my inquiry,” Hoover wrote in a memo the next day, July 23, “Mr. Purvis stated there is no question but that Mr. Winstead fired the fatal shots . . . Mr. Purvis said that nobody knows it was Winstead who actually killed Dillinger.” In fact, Winstead, Purvis, and other agents made a pact among themselves never to disclose who fired the fatal bullets.

Not until 1970 did Winstead break his silence. In an interview with the FBI agents’ alumni newsletter,
The Grapevine,
he said, “I knew right away it was Dillinger . . . Polly knew something was up. She grabbed Dillinger by the shirt. He whirled around and reached for his right front pocket. He started running sideways toward the alley. When a guy like Dillinger reaches for his pocket, you don’t ask questions. Or read a warrant from the U.S. attorney. Clarence and I fired about the same time. The first shot hit him. He started spinning like a top. When the shooting started he was about six feet from the alley. After Dillinger whirled around he fell face down in the entrance to the alley. He never did get to the alley. I was the first to reach him. I leaned down. He mumbled some words that I couldn’t understand. That was the end. Mel Purvis took a .380 automatic out of his hand. It was loaded and he had an extra clip of bullets in his pocket.”

Dillinger’s autopsy report was misplaced after his death. It was eventually found in 1984, in a paper sack at the Cook County Medical Examiner. Interestingly, it said the autopsy found evidence that Dillinger had suffered from “rheumatic heart disease.”

Born in 1906, Daniel P. Sullivan joined the FBI after graduating from Georgetown University Law School in 1932. After leaving the Bureau in 1942, he became executive director of the Crime Commission of Greater Miami for thirty years.

In later years FBI agents gossiped that the ill-fated Probasco had struck a fire escape during his long fall, beheading him.

It was the same Ed Guinane who had supervised the Halloween stakeout of Verne Miller in Chicago.

This trip, and others like it, spawned a new nickname for the Dillinger Squad, “The Flying Squad.” In time it would become known simply as the Special Squad.

Karpis’s new friends weren’t limited to criminals. He would later claim to have dined with Joseph Keenan, the Justice Department attorney who prosecuted Machine Gun Kelly and Roger Touhy. In interviews recorded years later, Karpis said the introduction was made by one of Keenan’s high school class-mates, a Cleveland detective named Frank Noonan. Karpis claimed that he masqueraded as a gambler and that Keenan had no idea who he really was. During their dinner Keenan boasted of “putting Harvey Bailey away” even though everyone in the FBI knew he wasn’t guilty of the Urschel kidnapping. The story is impossible to confirm, and although Karpis would seem too smart to take such a risk, there is circumstantial evidence to back it up. The FBI would later investigate Noonan for harboring Karpis. And according to FBI files, Keenan was in Cleveland during the week of July 20, 1934.

If Karpis’s memory is correct, it’s unclear who these men were. The Cleveland police would not locate Campbell’s apartment for several days.

The list was the gang’s git from the South St. Paul payroll robbery. It showed detailed driving instructions from St. Paul to Davenport, Iowa.

On Thursday afternoon, twenty-four hours after the women’s arrest, Captain Story did telephone the resident agent in Cleveland. He described the arrest and speculated that it might be linked to the “kidnappings in St. Paul.” But according to an FBI report, Captain Story did not mention the possibility that Karpis or the Barkers were hiding in Cleveland. The FBI did nothing until seeing newspaper stories the next morning.

There is no indication Cowley even assigned agents to observe Ferguson at the Sears store, a decision that would at least allow agents to note the license plate number of any car that picked her up. It’s unclear whether his failure to do so was a lack of confidence in Ferguson or a fear for her safety.

New Orleans newspapers would later identify the informant as a job-seeker who had answered a help-wanted ad “Lee” placed in the
New Orleans Times-Picayune.

The informant who turned in Frank Nash is identified in FBI files as “Informant A.” Several memos carry indications that Informant A was a policeman. In all likelihood, the informant was Akers.

An agent actually walked into the hospital and saw Chuck Fitzgerald, the Barker Gang member who was recovering from a gunshot wound, on October 11. He failed to recognize him.

Her ad was to read,
Mother received radio. Communicate with me.

On October 2 Hoover sent Purvis a telegram berating him for failing to report a man who had visited the Chicago office with a tip on the Lindbergh kidnapping. “I am instructing Mr. Cowley to take personal charge of this matter,” Hoover wrote, “so that it will be given the proper attention.”

Purvis would later claim to have kicked the pistol out of Floyd’s hand. He may have kicked it to one side after it was removed.

Pretty Boy Floyd’s death was the most controversial of all the public enemies the FBI hunted down in 1934. Forty-five years later, in 1979, one of the East Liverpool policemen, Chester Smith, made international headlines with the charge that the FBI had murdered Floyd as he lay helpless in Mrs. Conkle’s field. According to Smith, who first told this story to the
Akron Beacon-Journal
in 1974, Purvis had briefly questioned Floyd about the massacre. When Floyd refused to answer his questions, Smith claimed, Purvis ordered Agent Ed Hollis to “Fire into him,” at which point Hollis fired a single shot into Floyd’s chest, killing him.

It is a story that achieved wide currency; one otherwise credible author entitles his chapter on Floyd’s death “The Assassination.” This is entirely unfounded. Agent Hollis was not even at the Conkle farm that afternoon. According to the local coroner’s report, there was no gunshot wound to the chest. Floyd had been hit twice, as he admitted to lawmen; neither bullet entered through his chest. No one present that day even hinted such a thing might have occurred.

So why, a number of writers have asked, would Chester Smith make up such a story? Smith’s old friends sigh when the question is put to them. “I knew Chester; we were close,” says Bob “Brassy” Beresford, a former Columbiana County sheriff. “We called him ‘Cap.’ Cap would tell different stories at different times. I heard a couple of different versions. That version [involving Agent Hollis] was a new version. I don’t much think anyone around here took it seriously.”

For all the stories Cap Smith told over the years, the one constant was his own crucial role in Floyd’s death. He told the East Liverpool
Review
in 1969 that it was he, not Glenn Montgomery, who first spotted Floyd, he, not Montgomery, who was the first man out of the car that day. These assertions are contradicted by testimony given by other officers two days after the killing. Further, Smith claimed, it was his own shots that killed Floyd. This was demonstrably untrue, inasmuch as Smith admitted carrying a rifle and Floyd was killed by .45 caliber ammunition. Most tellingly, Smith in a 1969 interview said nothing about anyone murdering Floyd; that version cropped up only later. In the end, Smith’s allegations must be dismissed as a canard generated by an elderly man embittered that others received the fame he felt he deserved.