Public Enemies (36 page)

Sensing a friendly crowd, Dillinger freely unspooled his life story. “I was just an unfortunate boy,” Dillinger said. “Back in Mooresville, the old hometown, I got drunk ten years ago and held up a grocery. I got $550 and then I got caught . . . In the prison I met a lot of good fellas. I wanted to help them out. There’s no denying that I helped fix up the break at Michigan City last September, when ten men got away. Why not? I stick to my friends and they stick to me.”

One could sense the reporters’ excitement as Dillinger spoke. “How long does it take you to go through a bank?” someone asked. Dillinger chuckled. “One minute and forty seconds flat,” he said.

The unhurried way he chewed his gum, the easy quips, the lopsided grin, the poise, the obvious charisma—it all made a powerful impression on a group of reporters accustomed to tight-faced syndicate gangsters. But then John Dillinger, more than any other Depression-era criminal, had star quality. “He had none of the look of the conventional killer—none of the advertised earmarks of the crook,” a starstruck
Chicago Daily News
reporter wrote the next day. “Given a little more time and a wider circle of acquaintances, one can see that he might presently become the central figure of a nationwide campaign, largely female, to prevent his frying in the electric chair for the murder of Policeman Patrick O’Malley.” The
Daily News
went on:

For a national press that uniformly painted criminals as “rats” and “cold-blooded killers,” this and similar reviews were unprecedented. It was a turning point in Dillinger’s career, the moment he molted the skin of a regionally notorious yegg and emerged as a true national figure, an accessible, amiable, down-to-earth fellow, someone Northern audiences, unaccustomed to identifying with criminals, would soon find themselves rooting for. No less an organ than the
New York Times
took note of the spectacle, noting that Dillinger’s appearance came off “as a modern version of the return of the Prodigal son.”

The half hour Dillinger spent joshing with reporters in the Crown Point jail set the tone for all the press coverage of his coming exploits: Dillinger the accidental yegg, the misunderstood farm boy, the loyal friend who had robbed banks only to help his pals. Dillinger seemed to understand how well he was doing that night and cannily played it for sympathy. “I am not a bad fellow, ladies and gentlemen,” he said as deputies finally led him away. “I was just an unfortunate boy who started wrong.” The
Tribune
noted the next morning, “something like a tear glistened in one eye as [the] interviewers left.” It was the performance of a lifetime.

 

 

For seven days the Bremer family paced the hallways of the family mansion, waiting for word from the kidnappers. By Saturday, February 3, they were desperate. Several feared Edward was dead.

That morning the FBI’s Pop Nathan received a summons to the Lowry Hotel suite of Adolph Bremer’s New York bankers. The two bankers told Nathan the family was preparing to make one final appeal to the kidnappers. The catalyst was not just a concern for Edward’s life, but pressure from the newspapers. Several reporters told of disquieting rumors that might find their way into print. One rumor was that Edward Bremer’s bank was failing; it was suggested that he faked the kidnapping to extort money from his father to save it. Another concerned a supposed swindle of a man named Wunderlich, who had for some reason blamed Edward Bremer for his losses and kidnapped him.

The two bankers showed Nathan a letter Adolph Bremer planned to read to the press. Nathan objected only to a line that promised that the family wouldn’t cooperate with the FBI. “I told them that the Division would never tolerate any such situation,” Nathan wrote Hoover.
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The bankers ignored him.

Sunday afternoon Adolph Bremer walked out his front door and handed the statement to reporters. In it he candidly warned the kidnappers not to attempt to contact the family directly, since their phones were tapped. Instead he suggested they try some new intermediary; the Bremer family would then deliver the ransom.

“[I]f the following suggestions are carried out I will have no interest in any activity after my son is returned,” Bremer said. “If I have not heard from Edward within three days and three nights, I shall understand that you do not wish to deal with me and I will feel I am released from any obligations as contained in this note.”

In Washington, Adolph Bremer’s appeal enraged Hoover. At the safe house in the Chicago suburb of Bensenville, it cheered the gang. Fred Barker ordered Edward Bremer to write two more notes to his father and a pair of intermediaries he had suggested. “If we get the money this time, good,” Barker told Karpis afterward. “If we don’t we’d better forget it and that guy’s had it.”

The next evening, Monday, February 5, the game was renewed. Around seven-thirty Lillian Dickman, a cashier at Edward Bremer’s bank, was sitting in her parents’ home on Cortland Street in St. Paul when she heard a knock at her backdoor. On the doorstep was a man.

“Are you Lillian Dickman?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

He handed her two envelopes. Dickman hurried to Adolph Bremer’s mansion and handed them to him. In one was another handwritten appeal from Edward for his father to pay the ransom.
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“Now please do just as the boys instruct you to & don’t waste any time. The sooner the better,” Bremer wrote. “Pa I’m relying on you this is most unbearable. Its just a living hell. I’m trying the best that’s in me to fight it through so I can see you . . . again.”

There was also a typewritten letter from the kidnappers. It promised they would make one last attempt to receive the ransom. Instructions were to follow. An hour after the notes were passed to Adolph Bremer, one of his bankers knocked on Pop Nathan’s door at the St. Paul Hotel. To avoid reporters, the two men sneaked down a fire escape to a suite where Bremer was waiting. He needed Nathan’s word that the FBI wouldn’t interfere in delivery of the ransom. Nathan said it wouldn’t. For the moment, the Bremers were on their own.

Dillinger shuffled into the courtroom, his hands and feet in shackles, a grin on his face. The Lake County Criminal Courts Building was lined with forty deputies for his initial hearing. The newspapers were carrying reports of rumors that John Hamilton, the only gang member still at large, would stage a raid to rescue Dillinger, and deputies searched everyone who entered the courtroom. Hundreds crowded the hallways, straining to get a look at the prisoner.

Dillinger, wearing a blue shirt and the vest of his blue serge suit, listened quietly as a one-armed attorney his father had hired, Joseph Ryan, argued for more time to prepare his case. Ryan spoke in a low voice, so low many struggled to hear him. From Dillinger’s body language, he seemed unimpressed with his representation. Judge William Murray listened and gave Ryan four days. Dillinger would be arraigned on Friday, February 9.

Among the spectators that afternoon was a white-haired forty-nine-year-old Chicago attorney named Louis Piquett. Piquett was a caricature of the gangland mouthpiece, a melodramatic, arm-waving former bartender who worked his way through Democratic circles to become Chicago’s chief prosecutor in the early 1920s until his indictment on corruption charges in 1923, charges that were later dropped. In Piquett’s private practice, his clients were the scum of syndicate Chicago, abortionists, bootleggers, and killers; in his spare time, Piquett engaged in a variety of minor stock market swindles. Like a host of Chicago criminal-defense attorneys, he saw Dillinger as a ticket to fame, and he had managed to have one of his cards slipped to him the week before. When Dillinger sent word he would meet him, the two met twice inside the jail. They were perfunctory conversations, both men feeling each other out, and ended when Dillinger’s father hired Joe Ryan.

After the hearing Monday afternoon, the head jailer, Lewis Baker, took Piquett aside: Dillinger wanted to see him. They met in a cell at the jail. Worried their conversation might be overheard, Piquett loudly tapped a coin throughout their talk. Gone was the cocky front Dillinger had erected for reporters. Here was a man worried about the electric chair. “Mr. Piquett,” Dillinger said, “I can’t have that fellow Ryan. My God, he’s going to send me to the hot seat! He all but convicted me just in asking for a continuance.”

“Ryan’s all right,” Piquett said.

“I want you to represent me. How about it?”

“I’ll be frank with you,” Piquett said. “It’s going to cost you money.”

“All right.”

Dillinger said he could raise the lawyer’s fee, and Piquett agreed to represent him.
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Piquett quickly became, in every way imaginable, the most important person in John Dillinger’s life. Publicly, he became Dillinger’s principal defender, the flamboyant leader of the burgeoning John Dillinger admiration society. But it was behind closed doors that Piquett was to serve Dillinger most ably, doing everything from ferrying secret messages to fielding book offers. Dillinger’s relationship with Piquett, and with Piquett’s investigator, an easygoing mook named Arthur O’Leary, became the foundation upon which the outlaw’s future exploits would be built. In time the two became his secret partners, his enablers, fixers who handled his every need.
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For now, Piquett returned to his Chicago office and got to work preparing for Dillinger’s trial. It was to be the high point of his legal career; it would bring him untold fame and fortune. And it would never happen.

Father Deere, a Catholic priest who lived outside St. Paul, answered a knock on his door at 4:30 that afternoon. A man with sunken eyes and a pasty complexion stood on his doorstep.

“Are you Father Deere?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Can you get to St. Paul by six o’clock?”

“Yes.”

The man thrust an envelope into the priest’s hands, then walked out to a waiting brown sedan and was driven off. Father Deere, an acquaintance of the Bremer family, saw that the envelope was addressed to Adolph Bremer. He returned inside and picked up the phone.

By 6:00 the envelope was in Adolph Bremer’s hands. It contained detailed instructions for delivery of the ransom. The money, $200,000 in small bills whose serial numbers the FBI had recorded, had been loaded into two suit boxes. A little after seven the boxes were loaded into Walter Magee’s car at the brewery. Worried about being robbed, Magee drove through backstreets to the spot on University Avenue where, as the kidnappers’ note promised, he found a parked Chevrolet coupe. Shell Oil signs were bolted to the front doors, giving it the appearance of a company car. Magee slid behind the wheel of the Chevrolet. He noticed that the windows had been clouded with some kind of chemical that made it difficult for him to see out.

In the left-door pocket Magee found the keys and a typewritten note. Following its instructions, he drove to the town of Farmington, twenty miles south of St. Paul, where he pulled up to the bus station. The bus to Rochester left at 9:15. Magee fell in behind it. He followed the bus through the towns of Cannon Falls and Zumbrota, pulling over when the bus stopped to disgorge passengers. Then, four miles south of Zumbrota, Magee saw the four red lights on a hill above the highway. He hit the brakes. Three hundred feet farther, just as the instructions promised, there was a dirt road. Magee turned into it.

Magee inched down the darkened road. About a half mile later, a car materialized behind him and flashed its headlights five times. Magee got out, walked around to the passenger door, took out the two suit boxes, and placed them on the road. Then he got back in the car and drove forward, eventually reaching the small town of Mazeppa.

Fred Barker was wearing a huge smile when he reached the safe house outside of Chicago the next morning. “We got it!” Barker shouted as they lugged the suit boxes into the kitchen.

“How much did you get?” Karpis asked.

“We got the whole thing,” Barker said. “Two hundred thousand dollars.”

It fell to Karpis to return Bremer. They forced him to shave and gave him a new suit of clothes to wear. Karpis explained to Bremer that he had read an article that outlined how the FBI could retrieve fingerprints from clothing, and he wanted to ensure Bremer returned with nothing they had handled. They burned his old clothes, even his underwear. Bremer asked for his garters back, but Karpis refused.