Public Enemies (26 page)

Only then did Pierpont and Dillinger feel strong enough to take a bank. They decided on the Central National Bank in Greencastle, Indiana, west of Indianapolis, the home of DePauw University. That Saturday was Home-coming, and Makley argued that the banks would be bursting with cash. At 2:45 that Monday afternoon, a black Studebaker eased along Jackson Street in downtown Greencastle and parked in front of the bank. Five men emerged: Dillinger, Pierpont, Makley, John Hamilton, and either Harry Copeland or Russell Clark. All wore overcoats, guns tucked inside. Walking into the bank, Pierpont stepped to a teller’s window and asked to change a twenty-dollar bill. The teller suggested he go to another window. Pierpont pulled his tommy gun.

Dillinger, pistol in hand, vaulted a railing and trained his guns on the tellers, herding them into the vault. Later, the bank employees and their customers would all say they were struck by how calm and methodical the robbers were. The gang cleared the cash from drawers and counters into muslin sacks so quietly that no one at the sheriff’s office across the street realized a robbery was in progress.

When they were finished they threw the heavy muslin bags over their shoulders like a band of evil Santas and walked out to the Studebaker. In moments they were gone, easily evading pursuit. From Greencastle the gang sped to Chicago, where they counted the money; it came to almost $75,000, roughly $15,000 a man. All told, it had been an eventful two weeks. Now it was time to have some fun.
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The Dillinger Gang returned to Chicago just after the Barker Gang left to escape the dragnet spreading in the wake of the Federal Reserve fiasco. Leaving in ones and twos, the men drove across the Great Plains all the way to Reno. Karpis and Delores Delaney were the first to arrive, on September 27, after overnight stops in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Rawlings, Wyoming. In Reno, Karpis parked outside the Bank Club, gave Delaney $20 to play the slots, then went in back to meet with the city’s crime boss, Bill Graham. After backslapping hellos, Graham’s partner, Jim McKay, took Karpis aside. “You remember that kid we had out here, that Jimmy?” McKay asked. He meant Baby Face Nelson.

“Yeah,” said Karpis. He described how he had introduced Nelson around St. Paul and Chicago.

“That damn kid, he’s dangerous,” McKay said. “He’s gonna wind up real bad. I hope to Christ you guys ain’t got him with you, do you? He’s not coming back out here, is he?”

Karpis smiled. “He’s just a wild kid, Jim.”

“That’s the problem,” McKay said. “The guy’ll shoot in a minute. I was with him one time over in California up by Lake Tahoe and one of them State Patrol cars stopped us, to check our lights, and he damn near killed the guy. He was almost ready to shoot.”

The others trickled in over the following days, Dock Barker arriving with the gang’s newest member, a drunken boyhood friend named Harry Campbell. Ma was left in Chicago. She had sullenly accepted the decision, barely glancing up from her jigsaw puzzle when Karpis went to bid farewell. In Reno the days drifted into weeks. Karpis and Delaney took weekends at a dude ranch, shooting jackrabbits, taking hikes, turning in early. The others lolled in the casinos and took in movies.

At one point Karpis drove Delaney to San Francisco. They dropped Dock Barker, whose wounded finger had become infected, at a Vallejo, California, hospital run by an underworld character named Tobe Williams, a onetime safecracker whose doctors operated on gangsters from around the country. In San Francisco they looked in on a group of bootleggers Bill Graham had mentioned, who turned out to be Baby Face Nelson’s old gang. They met a bartender who claimed to know people in Hollywood, and afterward it was all Delaney talked about.

“Do you think if we took him down to Hollywood he could introduce us to some of the movie stars?” she asked.

Delaney’s pleading continued after they returned to Reno, and Karpis finally agreed to take her to Los Angeles. Promising to return in a week, they cruised south to a sleepy desert town named Las Vegas, where they looked in on a pair of Harry Sawyer’s friends who were running a desultory little casino; Karpis thought Vegas was the end of the world. After a few days they headed west to Los Angeles, found a hotel downtown, then struck off into Beverly Hills, hoping to spot a movie star. Karpis drove up and down the palm-lined avenues, looking for a recognizable face. It was no use. Delaney was crestfallen.

“How in the hell would you know these people, everyone running around with sunglasses on?” she groused. “I mean, the only way you’d know someone is a movie star is if some people would all crowd around them and start asking for autographs.”

They drove up into the Hollywood hills, trying to find Clark Gable’s house. Once or twice Karpis got lost, and after a while he noticed a patrol car behind him. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he mumbled. “We’re gonna get stopped if we don’t.”

Spooked, Karpis checked out of the hotel and drove straight back to Reno, taking the direct route, across Death Valley. Rejoining the gang, they fell back into its routines, hanging around the casinos, playing keno, talking about Hawaiian vacations they would never take, debating whether to rob a bank outside of San Francisco. The only excitement came when the new man, Harry Campbell, shoved a pistol into his pocket and it went off, nearly blowing off his testicles. Everyone agreed it was time to head back to Chicago.
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Leaves were beginning to fall across the Midwest, and the mystery of the Kansas City Massacre was no closer to being solved. On September 13, Missouri prosecutors had indicted a dozen figures in the case, but it was a half-hearted gesture, a compromise between federal lawyers who wanted murder indictments and local prosecutors who found scant evidence for any case at all. The known conspirators—Deafy Farmer and company—were charged along with a half-dozen possible assassins—Pretty Boy Floyd, Harvey Bailey and Bailey’s gang—but only for obstruction of justice. The Bureau’s theory remained that Verne Miller had carried out the massacre with Bailey and the Kansas escapees; Bailey, of course, strenuously denied any involvement as he was packed off to Leavenworth following his conviction in the Urschel kidnapping.

Hoover’s men couldn’t shake Bailey’s alibi. After three months, they hadn’t uncovered any evidence placing him or his men at Union Station. Their best witness, Samuel Link, who placed Bailey at the scene, had been discredited after a friend told agents that “Link makes very wild statements at times and claims that he was with Teddy Roosevelt in South America and has personally met all the crown heads of Europe.”
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Worse, bullets from Bailey’s guns didn’t match those at the scene. Almost every time a Midwestern bank was robbed, bullets were sent to a Kansas City lab. It checked rounds fired by Bonnie and Clyde at Platte City, by Baby Face Nelson at Grand Haven, but found no matches.

With the case against Bailey’s gang tenuous at best, agents focused on finding the remaining conspirators. Dick Galatas, the Hot Springs gambler, had vanished. Members of Bailey’s gang were robbing banks all across Oklahoma; one, Big Bob Brady, was shot and captured in New Mexico in early October, but one of the massacre survivors, Reed Vetterli, returned dejected from his hospital room, unable to identify him. Most important, there were still no leads on Verne Miller or his girlfriend, Vi Mathias. In St. Paul, Chicago, and Kansas City, agents returned to the files to check leads pushed aside that summer.

Three weeks later, the break came in Chicago. Agents there remembered a months-old tip that a nightclub waitress named Bobbie Moore was Vi Mathias’s best friend. Melvin Purvis had placed Moore under surveillance for a time that summer but had dropped her once agents began chasing Mathias all over the East Coast. Inexplicably, it took weeks before anyone suggested they recheck Bobbie Moore. Her last known address was the Sherone Apartments on Sheridan Road. When the building’s manager was summoned to the FBI office on Friday, October 26, she identified not only Moore’s photograph but that of Vi Mathias as well. Verne Miller’s girlfriend, or a woman who looked strikingly like her, had moved into the building in late August.

 

 

In late 1933, the FBI was still only a shadow of the professional crime-fighting organization it was to become. The capture of Machine Gun Kelly was anomalous. Hoover’s College Boys were long on energy but short on experience, and it showed: suspects like Vi Mathias were found, then lost; tantalizing leads went ignored in file cabinets; most of the men were still learning how to use a pistol.

In retrospect, Melvin Purvis’s Chicago office was worse than most. So far that year, as we have seen, Purvis and his men had solved their first two kidnappings—the William Hamm and Jake Factor cases—and in both it would turn out they had arrested innocent men. In his first attempt to capture a major criminal, Machine Gun Kelly, Purvis had “forgotten” the assignment.
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The office that would eventually become the War on Crime’s epicenter occupied the entire nineteenth floor of the Bankers Building in Chicago’s financial district. The entrance was at the end of a hallway lined with chairs; these were usually occupied by reporters from the wire services and the six Chicago newspapers. The reporters passed the hours reading, smoking cigarettes, and pestering Purvis’s twenty-four-year-old secretary, Doris Rogers.
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Purvis had brought Rogers from his previous posting, in Birmingham, Alabama. She was his gatekeeper; no one passed through the swinging gate beside her desk without her say. Purvis’s office door opened behind her.

“Melvin’s office had no glamour at all,” she recalls. “A standard SAC desk, wooden. No pictures or memorabilia. This was not a nest, not some guy’s hangout, with his baby’s pictures. It was very restricted and disciplined.”

Beside Purvis’s office was the door to the nineteenth floor’s inner sanctum, the file room. Nowhere was Hoover’s passion for order more apparent than a Bureau file room. Seven carbon copies were made of every memo, Teletype, and telegram; a single typographical error was grounds for disciplinary action. The files were housed in government-issue gray-metal cabinets. Agents were not allowed in the file room. Only the clerk, Helen Dunkel, or her assistant had access. When an agent wanted a file, he asked one of them.

There was a single spartan conference room, usually used for interrogations. Out to Doris Rogers’s left stretched the pool, sometimes called the bullpen, a vast room lined with nearly one hundred identical wooden desks where the agents sat. Each desktop was the same, just a black telephone and a blotter; personal memorabilia or family pictures were not allowed. Desktops were left spotless at the end of each day; any work was expected to be returned to the file room or taken home. Agents did not type their own reports. They were dictated to the two stenographers, twin sisters surnamed Barber. Only Purvis ate at his desk; crumbs or stains were grounds for disciplinary action. Most of the forty or so agents grabbed sandwiches at a lunch counter in the lobby, which featured a thirty-five-cent special. “I remember Melvin saying, ‘I’ll be so goddamn glad when I get to someplace where they don’t call a ham sandwich a gentleman’s lunch,’” Rogers recalls.

On the surface, the agents were as similar as their desks: dark suits, black socks, shiny black shoes, crisp parts in their oiled hair. They signed in on entry and exit; if an agent was even one minute late for work, Purvis had to explain why to Washington. Two tardies risked a suspension. Many of the men, like Purvis and his number two that autumn, a kindly Arkansan named Douglas O. Smith, were Southerners with state-college degrees.
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A few were married; most shared apartments.

Seven decades later, few of the men she worked with have left lasting impressions on Doris Rogers. One who did was the office boy, an energetic Polish kid from the South Side named Johnny Madala who was forever pestering Purvis to let him do something official. “Johnny was my favorite: laughing, smiling, helpful, unprepossessing, unassuming,” Rogers remembers. “Everyone loved Johnny Madala.”

In an unusual twist, both Madala and Doris Rogers were to be pulled into the hunt for Verne Miller. Purvis was out of town the day the tentative identification of Vi Mathias was made. Madala volunteered to watch her. Posing as a traveling auditor, he moved into her apartment building that weekend. His unit, 211, was tucked into an alcove sixty feet down a carpeted hallway from Mathias’s. The only view of her door was through a shuttered ventilator grate in his kitchenette.

Three days after moving in, Madala got his first glimpse of their suspect on the street below. She was five-feet-six, slender, and blonde, with a mole on her left cheek. It was Mathias. That afternoon Madala watched as a stream of children began filing into Mathias’s apartment. It took him a few minutes to realize that she was having a Halloween party. Then, at 4:30, Madala heard a commotion in the hallway outside. He stepped to the ventilation shutter and saw Bobbie Moore running down the corridor, hollering for Mathias, who stepped out of her apartment.

“He’s here, Vi, he’s here!” Moore enthused.

Standing at her apartment door, Mathias grew excited. “Where is he, Bobbie?” she asked. “Quick, tell me where is he?”

“He’s downstairs,” Moore said. “I told him you had a lot of children in your apartment and that you would be downstairs just as soon as you could get rid of your kids.”

“Tell him I’ll be down in a few minutes,” Vi said, disappearing back into her apartment.

Just then Madala saw a man round the corner from the elevators and enter the hallway. He had a sandy mustache and wore horned-rim glasses. Bobbie Moore ran to the man, threw her arms around him, and kissed him. Together they turned and walked back toward the elevators. Madala slid away from the ventilator opening.

It looked like Miller. Madala called the Bankers Building and briefed a senior agent, Ed Guinane. At 6:15, Guinane arrived to take charge of the situation. He arrayed groupings of agents and Chicago cops around the building. A half-dozen others clustered in Madala’s apartment. To make sure it really was Miller, Guinane brought along Doris Rogers, who had grown up in Huron, South Dakota, and seen Miller when he was a deputy sheriff there. Guinane positioned her at the ventilation shutter. When and if she saw Miller leave Mathias’s apartment, an agent alongside her was to make a chopping motion with his hand, the signal for the squad to rush into the hallway. Guinane told the men outside to watch his window. If Miller appeared, he would flap a jacket in the window as a signal.