Public Enemies (57 page)

Hoover handed the whole mess to Pop Nathan, directing him to “make a very thorough and vigorous inquiry.”
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, Nathan’s report, finished three weeks later, defended the Bureau’s actions and excoriated poor Hanni. Hanni’s allegations “would appear to indicate a disordered and possibly hysterical state of mind,” Nathan wrote Hoover, terming them “manifestly absurd.”
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Hanni was quietly shoved out of St. Paul and relocated to Omaha.

It was the last time any agent would criticize the Bureau for a very long while.

 

 

Little Bohemia persuaded Dillinger that for the moment there was no place safe for him to hide. After he and Van Meter spent a few nights huddled in a leaky shack outside East Chicago, Baby Face Nelson came to their rescue.
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On Monday, May 7, four days after the Fostoria robbery, Nelson arranged to purchase a red panel truck, a Ford Model A, the kind grocery stores used for deliveries, with an enclosed rear, windows in back, and a sliding door on the side. Dillinger intended to use the truck as a portable hideout and did; they threw a double mattress in back where they slept. The next few days he and Van Meter stayed on the move, driving the truck along the Indiana back roads as they planned their next step. More than anything, Dillinger wanted the cosmetic surgery he had been pestering Louis Piquett about for weeks.

Late on the night of Wednesday, May 9, running low on food, Dillinger and Van Meter pulled up behind Audrey Russ’s house in Fort Wayne. Had Purvis pursued the tip Russ’s boss gave him a week earlier, FBI agents might have been there to greet them. As it was, Russ climbed out of bed and let Dillinger inside while his wife prepared a meal. Both Dillinger and Van Meter appeared exhausted. They wore denim overalls, work shirts and battered caps. Mrs. Russ noticed Dillinger’s leg was still bothering him; he staggered when ascending the stairs, clutching the leg. Neither man said much, and after eating they left.

The next morning Audrey Russ went to his boss again. Together they telephoned the FBI, this time revealing their names, and told of Dillinger’s second visit. It was the FBI’s best lead since Little Bohemia. Though short of men, Purvis decided to station three agents at the Russ home. When Dillinger returned, they would be ready.
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It was another lazy spring afternoon at the Dillinger filling station on LaSalle Street. Outside, a little boy on a bicycle traced circles in the dirt. Dillinger’s cousin, Fred Hancock, was waiting on a customer at 3:45 when he noticed the stranger standing by a kerosene drum in one corner of the yard. Hancock didn’t recognize the man, who was unshaven and wore overalls, a sleeveless jacket, and rimless eyeglasses. When the customer left, the stranger stepped over to the station window and rapped on the glass. Hancock looked the man in the eyes and was startled: it was Dillinger. In a parked car across the street, an FBI man named Whitson saw the stranger, too.

Dillinger handed the package to Hancock. In it were four smaller packages containing $1,200 in small bills: $300 for his father, $300 for Hancock’s mother Audrey, and $100 each for Hancock and Hubert Dillinger. Tell my father, Dillinger told Hancock, that if anything happens to me, he should give some of the money to Billie. Then Dillinger left.

Agent Whitson watched as the stranger crossed LaSalle Street and walked toward Washington Street. Glimpsing a deep cleft in the man’s chin, Whitson got out of his car and decided to follow him. The man walked quickly, reaching the corner of Washington Street about thirty yards in front of Whitson. Whitson trotted up to the intersection and turned the corner—nothing. The man was gone. Whitson walked up and down the street, peering into parked cars. Nothing. After a bit he walked back to his car, wrote up the incident in his notebook, and dismissed it from his mind. The man was probably a bum.
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Dillinger’s legend was growing. By mid-May, though there had been no confirmed sighting of him since Little Bohemia three weeks before, most American newspapers were carrying daily stories of the manhunt, the Chicago papers three and four a day. Seemingly every Dillinger sighting, no matter how nonsensical, was grounds for a new article.

“Mr. Dillinger,” a
Chicago Tribune
columnist noted at the height of the hysteria, “was seen yesterday looking over the new spring gloves in a State Street store in Chicago; negotiating for a twelve-cylinder car in Springfield, Illinois; buying a half-dozen sassy cravats in Omaha, Nebraska; bargaining for a suburban bungalow at his home town of Mooresville, Indiana, and shaking hands with old friends; drinking a glass of soda water in a drugstore in Charleston, South Carolina; and strolling down Broadway swinging a Malacca cane in New York. He also bought a fishing rod in a sporting-goods store in Montreal and gave a dinner at a hotel in Yucatán, Mexico. But, anyhow, Mr. Dillinger seems to have kept very carefully out of London, Berlin, Rome, Moscow, and Vienna. Or at least if he did go to those places yesterday he was traveling [incognito].”
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Time
magazine noted, “If John [Killer] Dillinger has really been at all the places he was reported to have been in the last month, he must leap along the central plains like a demented Indian’s ghost.”
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Much of the press treated the manhunt as a rollicking adventure story. In its May 7 issue,
Time
portrayed it as a board game set in a Midwestern “Dillinger Land”; GAME STARTS HERE, read the notation above Crown Point. The
Time
spread went out of its way to categorize Dillinger as an all-American anti-hero. “Great Desperadoes from little urchins grow,” it read. “When John Dillinger was 10 he, like Tom Sawyer, was a poor country boy. Sometimes he may have dreamed of being another Abe Lincoln or Jesse James . . . [but not] that he would achieve a great unwritten odyssey: Through the Midwest with a Machine Gun.”

The tone of this and other articles suggested that Dillinger was a harmless Roadrunner pursued by a hapless federal Wile E. Coyote. Not surprisingly, children ate it up. When a Boy Scout named Richard Neff visited the Indiana governor’s office, a reporter asked what he thought of Dillinger. “Personally,” the boy said, “I’m for him.” When he glimpsed the governor’s look of amazement, the boy stammered, “Err . . . I mean, I’m always for the underdog.”
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That underdog quality, underscored by the widely published photos and interviews at Crown Point, struck a chord in a country in which many felt slighted by the government. In Chicago and New York moviegoers applauded when Dillinger’s face appeared in newsreels.
Detective
magazine polled theater owners and found Dillinger was drawing more applause than Roosevelt or Charles Lindbergh. “In point of popularity,” its editor wrote, “they ranked in that order, Dillinger first, President Roosevelt second, and Colonel Lindbergh third, thereby actually making this notorious thief, thug, and cold-blooded murderer the outstanding national hero of the hour!”

As his fame grew, Dillinger’s name was inevitably drawn into political debate. He was already a favorite in the London tabloids, and in Germany a Nazi newspaper used him to argue in favor of sterilizing criminals everywhere. In Washington, Attorney General Homer Cummings employed Dillinger’s name to urge passage of a half-dozen anticrime measures, including one that made it a federal crime to kill a federal agent, a law Hoover had been seeking for years. The measures passed the House of Representatives on May 5 even as several Republican senators continued criticizing the FBI. The pressure on the Roosevelt administration was growing. “Looks like if the Democrats don’t get Dillinger [they] may lose this fall’s election,” Will Rogers wrote.

The President himself got involved. Without mentioning Dillinger by name, Roosevelt urged radio listeners to cooperate with the authorities to wipe out gangsterism. “Law enforcement and gangster extermination,” he said, “cannot be made completely effective while a substantial part of the public looks with tolerance upon known criminals, or applauds efforts to romanticize crime.”

Every day brought new Dillinger sightings, almost all of them spurious. On May 4, after Louis Piquett made a joshing comment to a reporter, there was a flurry of articles that Dillinger was heading for England; Canadian, British, and American authorities searched dozens of transatlantic ships in vain. Every morning Purvis’s men shuttled out to a new town to check a new sighting; every night they returned to the nineteenth floor, exhausted and depressed. Two agents looked into the Fostoria robbery, but returned unpersuaded it was Dillinger’s work; not for two more months would the FBI confirm it was. One of the stranger reports agents repeatedly checked was that Dillinger was receiving coded messages from a pirate radio station. Despite dozens of similar tips, the FBI was never able to find such a station.

Purvis’s best hope remained the stakeout at the Audrey Russ home in Fort Wayne. For the agents who pulled rotating assignments there, it was a nightmare. The problem was Mrs. Russ, who possessed, as one agent put it, “a mean and avaricious disposition.” In one memo, Agent John T. McLaughlin described her as “demented.” At various times Mrs. Russ accused agents of spitting on her floors, scratching her grand piano, and shooting out a window. The agents paid her $2.50 a day rent until Mrs. Russ demanded and received three dollars. “[H]er whole desire seemed [to be] to secure as much money from the agents as possible, and furnish them the least amount of food,” Agent McLaughlin complained. As the days wore on with no sign of Van Meter or Dillinger, the agents began to suspect Mrs. Russ had concocted the story of Dillinger’s visits in order to lure wealthy government boarders .
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In Mooresville, Earl Connelley’s men kept the Dillinger farmhouse under round-the-clock surveillance, but no one thought Dillinger would return there now. In desperation Purvis sent agents to interview anyone who had ever known Dillinger, including William Shaw, his teenage partner from the previous summer, and Mary Longnaker, the Dayton woman he romanced. Other agents began rounding up Baby Face Nelson’s boyhood pals and some of Tommy Carroll’s old girlfriends. None had anything useful to offer. For the moment Purvis had nothing. Nothing at all.

 

 

For two weeks Dillinger and Van Meter remained in their portable hideaway, the red truck. When they needed a bath, or just got tired of the truck, they ducked into a tourist camp. At one point they spent several nights in a cottage outside Crown Point. They were still living in the truck when Dillinger reestablished contact with Art O’Leary on May 19. O’Leary drove to a tavern on the outskirts of Chicago and waited until Dillinger drove up after nightfall. He followed the truck until it eased to the side of the road at a remote site.

Dillinger was sick. By O’Leary’s estimate, his temperature was 104. O’Leary hopped into the truck and they idly drove the back roads, Dillinger driving and talking, while Van Meter remained in the back, peering out the windows with his machine gun. Dillinger’s mood had grown bleak. He needed a doctor but was afraid to visit anyone he didn’t know. He asked about Billie Frechette, whose harboring trial was under way in St. Paul, and about the cosmetic surgery he still wanted Piquett to arrange. When they returned to O’Leary’s car, he asked him to return the next evening with medicine and cough syrup.

The next night O’Leary brought Dillinger his cough syrup and a pint of whiskey. Both Dillinger’s health and his mood were improved, and his spirits lifted further when O’Leary handed him a note from Frechette, who remained in a St. Paul jail cell. In it, O’Leary recalled, Billie beseeched Dillinger not to attempt her rescue. She would only be killed. She promised to do her time in prison and meet him afterward. Dillinger appeared moved. He handed O’Leary a letter for Billie, plus $600 in cash for Piquett. Afterward O’Leary opened and read Dillinger’s note. In it Dillinger expressed his love for Billie, offered again to rescue her and asked to die in her arms.
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While the nation thrilled to stories of Dillinger’s exploits, another, far less public pursuit was under way in the Southwest. Inexorably, Frank Hamer was closing in on Bonnie and Clyde.

The two manhunts were a study in contrasts. Newspapers from Chicago to London treated Dillinger as an international phenomenon, bringing in psychologists and sociologists to render opinions on his significance, but northern journalists all but ignored Bonnie and Clyde. Though they remained front-page news in Dallas, the couple’s crimes typically rated no more than five or six paragraphs in the New York and Chicago papers. Sunday features on Dillinger in places like Pittsburgh and Buffalo carried sidebars introducing readers to Clyde or Pretty Boy Floyd; both were treated as minor-league outlaws, gas-station bandits doing battle with hick sheriffs. Bonnie was seldom mentioned at all; her fame would be largely posthumous. No one, not even their fellow public enemies, gave Bonnie and Clyde respect.