Public Enemies (44 page)
Authors: Bryan Burrough
For the moment, Hamilton and Cherrington had the place to themselves, for Dillinger had business to attend to. On the Wednesday morning after his midnight visit to Dr. Mortensen, he took Billie and drove to Chicago. Art O’Leary was in Piquett’s office when the phone rang. “Be in front of your office, on the Wacker Drive side,” a voice said. “I’ll pick you up in about fifteen minutes.”
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It was a short meeting. O’Leary listened as Dillinger talked and drove. He wanted Piquett to help Billie arrange a divorce so they could be married. O’Leary promised to relay the message. Piquett could only roll his eyes. For the trouble of representing America’s most-wanted man, he had yet to receive a cent. That night and the next, Dillinger and Billie bunked in a basement room at Louis Cernocky’s Crystal Ball Room in Fox River Grove. They had another quick meeting with O’Leary Sunday afternoon, in which O’Leary had the pleasant task of explaining to Dillinger that Piquett wasn’t a divorce attorney. If Billie wanted a divorce attorney, O’Leary said, she should find one herself.
The next morning Dillinger dropped off a package of money for O’Leary. It contained $2,300, including a thousand each for Piquett and Pete Pierpont’s parents. He then drove Billie to the airport, where she boarded a flight to Indianapolis to see Dillinger’s father. In Mooresville, Billie gave the elder Dillinger several bundles of cash and the wooden gun Dillinger had used to escape from Crown Point.
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Billie also passed on a note Dillinger had written his sister Audrey. It read:
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Billie also passed on a note Dillinger had written his sister Audrey. It read:
Dear Sis:
I thought I would write you a few lines and let you know I am still perculating [
sic
]. Don’t worry about me honey, for that wont help any, and besides I having a lot of fun. I am sending Emmett [Audrey’s husband] my wooden gun and I want him to always keep it. I see that Deputy Blunk says I had a real forty five that’s just a lot of hooey to cover up because they don’t like to admit that I locked eight deputys and a dozen trustys up with my wooden gun before I got my hands on the two machine guns and you should have seen their faces Ha! Ha! Ha! Pulling that off was worth ten years of my life Ha! Ha! I will be around to see all of you when the roads are better, it is so hot around Indiana now that I would have trouble getting through so I am sending my wife Billie . . . Now honey if any of you need any thing I wont forgive you if you don’t let me know. I got shot a week ago but I am all right now just a little sore I bane one tough sweed Ha! Ha! . . . Lots of love from Johnnie.
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sic
]. Don’t worry about me honey, for that wont help any, and besides I having a lot of fun. I am sending Emmett [Audrey’s husband] my wooden gun and I want him to always keep it. I see that Deputy Blunk says I had a real forty five that’s just a lot of hooey to cover up because they don’t like to admit that I locked eight deputys and a dozen trustys up with my wooden gun before I got my hands on the two machine guns and you should have seen their faces Ha! Ha! Ha! Pulling that off was worth ten years of my life Ha! Ha! I will be around to see all of you when the roads are better, it is so hot around Indiana now that I would have trouble getting through so I am sending my wife Billie . . . Now honey if any of you need any thing I wont forgive you if you don’t let me know. I got shot a week ago but I am all right now just a little sore I bane one tough sweed Ha! Ha! . . . Lots of love from Johnnie.
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While Billie spent that Friday at the Dillinger home in Indiana, Dillinger drove east to visit Pete Pierpont’s parents in Ohio, where he sat on the front porch and made sure the family had received the money he had sent for his partner’s defense. Afterward he returned to Chicago, where he reunited with Billie. Amazingly, the FBI still hadn’t put the Dillinger or Pierpont homes under surveillance.
While Dillinger crisscrossed Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, Baby Face Nelson headed west to Reno, where within days his homicidal tendencies embroiled him in a mystery it would take the FBI years to solve. Reno’s two crime bosses, Bill Graham and Jim McKay, were in the midst of fighting a federal mail-fraud case involving their support for a gang of con men that flourished in the city. Somehow the two had learned that the government’s star witness against them was to be Roy Fritsch, the controller of a Reno bank Graham and McKay owned.
On Thursday, March 22, a week after the Mason City robbery, Fritsch disappeared after parking his car near his home. An eyewitness later told the FBI he had seen two men hit Fritsch over the head and drag him to a waiting car. The crime has officially never been solved. But according to informants who spoke to the FBI in later years, the culprits were Nelson and his friend John Chase. According to FBI files, Nelson murdered Fritsch and dumped his corpse down a mineshaft. Fritsch’s body has never been found.
Just as it struggled to come to grips with its most ambitious manhunt to date, the FBI discovered something that was to open an entirely new front of the War on Crime. In February the Kansas City office had belatedly forwarded to Washington seventeen latent fingerprints taken from Verne Miller’s home after the Kansas City Massacre. It took weeks for technicians to compare the prints against those of dozens of suspects. But on March 14, the day after Dillinger’s Mason City robbery, they made a jaw-dropping discovery: a print taken from a beer bottle in Miller’s basement matched that of Adam Richetti, Pretty Boy Floyd’s moonshine-swilling sidekick. The conclusion was inescapable: despite widespread doubts about their involvement, Richetti and Floyd really were Miller’s partners in the massacre.
The news triggered a series of thunderbolt memos from Hoover to the Kansas City office, demanding to know how the prints had been overlooked and who was responsible. More important, it prompted a sweeping reassessment of the massacre investigation to date. The supposed involvement of the Barkers was forgotten. The FBI made no public announcement of its discovery, but agents involved in the case now focused all their efforts on finding Floyd and Richetti.
There was just one problem: there hadn’t been a reliable sighting of the two in six months. From all appearances, Floyd had fallen off the face of the earth. An army of over a thousand Oklahoma lawmen and National Guardsmen had swept the Cookson Hills in February, but found no sign of him. The Bureau’s own search for Floyd had been desultory; unless he was involved in the massacre, Floyd was not a federal fugitive. Agents in Kansas City and Oklahoma City collected tips as they came, but did little digging on their own. Kansas City didn’t identify Floyd’s longtime girlfriend Juanita Baird till February.
All that changed on March 14. Suddenly Floyd catapulted into the front ranks of FBI fugitives, joining Dillinger and the Barkers. Responsibility for finding him fell heavily on the Oklahoma City office, whose agents were already straining under the weight of thirty-one separate major cases, including the hunts for the Barkers and Bonnie and Clyde. Hoover dispatched Pop Nathan to Oklahoma to assess the situation, and Nathan’s report was bleak. The SAC, Dwight Brantley, was working till midnight most evenings, yet Nathan found dozens of new leads on the Barkers and Bonnie and Clyde piling up in the files, untouched. Brantley complained he didn’t have enough men.
Nathan thought the problem was quality, not quantity. Only two of the ten agents in Oklahoma City, he told Hoover, were sufficiently “competent” to handle a major case. The best, Frank Smith, the old Cowboy who had survived the massacre, was assigned to pursue Floyd full-time, and he began making the rounds of Oklahoma sheriffs and snitches, dredging up what tips he could. But Nathan could see the writing on the wall. If a posse of a thousand men couldn’t find Pretty Boy Floyd, the chances that the FBI’s young and inexperienced agents—already burdened with searches for Dillinger, the Barkers, and many others—would succeed were close to zero.
Chicago, Illinois The Irving Hotel, Room 234bt
Fred Barker sat at the table in his pajamas. Dr. Joseph Moran, his eyes rheumy and bloodshot, leaned over and grasped his fingers, a scalpel already in his hand.
“You ready?” Moran asked.
Beside them Karpis looked on, transfixed. They had come to Dr. Moran’s office after dinner, carrying overnight bags with underwear and fresh shirts. The doctor was a sad-eyed drunk who coughed a lot and had a pulsing red vein in his nose. Moran had fought in World War I and trained at the Tufts medical school in Boston, then had done a brief stretch in Joliet for performing illegal abortions. On his parole in late 1931 he had gone to work for a Touhy-controlled union in Cicero, and had performed successful surgeries on several of Roger Touhy’s men. When Capone interests took control of the union the following spring, Moran had gone into private practice.
The ever cautious Karpis, asking around for someone who could alter their fingerprints, had heard about him in an underground tavern.
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When they arrived that evening, Moran wrapped rubber bands around the first joint of each of Barker’s fingers. Then he mixed a batch of a purplish antiseptic liquid and swabbed it on his fingertips. When Barker’s fingers went numb, Moran injected each one with cocaine.
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When they arrived that evening, Moran wrapped rubber bands around the first joint of each of Barker’s fingers. Then he mixed a batch of a purplish antiseptic liquid and swabbed it on his fingertips. When Barker’s fingers went numb, Moran injected each one with cocaine.
Barker took a deep breath. “I’m ready,” he said.
Moran leaned over and slowly began whittling the meat off the end of one of Barker’s fingers. Karpis couldn’t believe it; it was exactly like sharpening a pencil. Thanks to the rubber bands there was little blood, but as the skin sliced away, Karpis could see even the doctor growing pale. Freckles on Moran’s forehead pulsed. He was sweating.
When Moran finished carving the fingers on Barker’s right hand, he excused himself and stepped into a back room. “How you feeling?” he asked when he returned a moment later. “You want a drink?” It was obvious the doctor did. “Yeah, I’d take a drink,” Barker said. “I’d take about anything I could get right now.”
Moran handed Barker a bottle of whiskey and he drank deeply, lifting the bottle with his left hand. It took another ten minutes for Moran to carve the ends off the fingertips on Barker’s left hand. When he was done he applied large cotton swabs to both hands and wrapped them in bandages. “I’m gonna give you a shot of morphine,” Moran said, “because you’re gonna start hurtin’ in a few hours.”
The doctor led Barker into an adjoining room and laid him on a bed. In minutes Barker was asleep. “Come on,” Moran said to Karpis. “I’m gonna work on you now.”
Karpis sat at the doctor’s table.
“What the hell is it you’re going to do?” he asked.
“Well, your face is kind of lopsided,” Moran said. “I’m going to straighten it up.” He described the series of incisions he planned to make around the temples and how he would use them to pull the skin of Karpis’s face taut. Karpis had no idea what he was talking about. “You just be damn sure you know what you’re doing,” he said.
Moran gave Karpis a shot of morphine. In minutes Karpis felt as if he were floating in a happy sky; he didn’t care what the doctor did next. Moran then administered several small shots of cocaine around the edges of Karpis’s face and began making the incisions. Karpis felt so good he barely paid attention.
“Are you ready for your hands?” he asked after a bit.
“Yeah,” Karpis mumbled.
Afterward Moran and his assistant tucked Karpis into a bed in another room. He awoke the next morning in incredible pain. The assistant showed him how to prop up his hands so that the blood would run out of his fingers and ease the throbbing.
“How’s Freddie?” Karpis asked.
“Oh, he woke up in the middle of the night,” the assistant said. “He was hurting like hell. I gave him a real stiff shot of morphine. Hell, he’ll be out another few hours.”
For three days Barker and Karpis drifted in and out of consciousness. In waking hours Karpis read the newspapers. On Thursday, March 15, he saw an article that stunned him: the Barker gang had been named the FBI’s primary suspects in the Bremer kidnapping. Karpis read how the Bureau had identified Dock Barker through fingerprints found on the gas cans in Wisconsin. He cursed. “We’d better plan on getting the hell out of Chicago,” he told Fred.
Barker was falling asleep. “I don’t know what to do,” he mumbled. “When I wake up, I’ll talk. I want to sleep now.”
Karpis sat up in a chair and watched Barker sleep until he, too, finally dozed off. Sometime before dawn Barker woke him.
“Where do you think we ought to go?” Barker asked.
“Well, what do you mean by ‘we’ now? Just who is we?”
“Well,” said Barker, “Ma and me and you.”
“No, not Ma,” Karpis said. “She ain’t going with us, Freddie. I’ve told you this before. She’s gonna get you killed. Mark my words.”
Barker made a face. “Well maybe you’re right. Maybe we’d better make her stay here. You think she’ll stay?”
“She’ll have no choice.”
“How are we gonna do this?”
“You want me to talk to her?” Karpis asked.
“You think you can do it?”
“You’re damn right I can do it.”
They moved into a Winthrop Avenue boardinghouse to recuperate; both men remained swathed in bandages and didn’t want to be seen at their apartments. It gave Karpis an excuse to put off confronting Ma. He dreaded it. He procrastinated several days until they received a second dose of startling news: Shotgun George Ziegler was dead. It happened in Cicero. Ziegler was walking out of a bar when a car drove by and someone fired a shotgun, nearly blowing his head off. For the first time in months, Karpis was frightened. It was clearly a Syndicate hit. Did Frank Nitti want them dead?
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Dock Barker came by the next morning. Ziegler’s death, they agreed, meant Chicago was no longer safe; if they had somehow roused the Syndicate’s ire, every minute counted. Dock suggested they move to Toledo. A friend knew people there. Karpis and Fred agreed; it sounded as good as anywhere else. The next day Dock drove to Ohio and rented an apartment. When he returned Karpis faced the moment he had been dreading for days: telling Ma.
He made Dock go with him. Freddie was too scared.
“Jesus Christ!” Ma exclaimed the moment they entered her apartment. “Were you with George Ziegler?”
“No, why?” Karpis asked. His face was still bandaged.
“Well, look at your face. What the hell happened to you?”
“Oh, I had a, a car wreck.”
“Where’s Freddie?” Ma demanded. “What’s wrong with Freddie? Why ain’t he here?” She insisted that Freddie be brought to her.
“Well, he was in the wreck too,” Karpis said. “And he got hurt a little worse than I did, and they’ve got him where he’s real safe.” Ma got angry. “He couldn’t be no safer than he would be here!”
Karpis tried to give it to her easy. He didn’t mention that they were moving, not at first. He said they wouldn’t be visiting her any longer, not much anyway. Ma grew hysterical. For an hour she railed. She and Freddie were going to Florida, she insisted. And if they didn’t, well, she was going back to Oklahoma. Karpis let her vent. Dock looked on the whole time, never saying a word. “Now, are you finished?” Karpis finally asked. “We’re moving, and I ain’t gonna tell you where the hell we’re going. We’ll keep in touch. You got plenty of money.”
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