Public Enemies (61 page)

Little Bohemia made several things clear to Hoover. More than anything it demonstrated how unprepared his men were for gunfights. Despite months of crash training, the College Boys remained hopeless with guns and utterly lost in anything approaching a combat situation. Hoover was determined that the next time the FBI shot it out with Dillinger, they would be ready. That meant one thing: bringing in the Cowboys. Hoover had Pop Nathan canvas the Southwestern bureaus in search of men with firearms skills. Several fit the bill, and that May they began trickling into Chicago.

Among the first to arrive was thirty-eight-year-old Charles Winstead, the craggy Texan who had chased Machine Gun Kelly and Bonnie and Clyde, and had taken part in the capture of Harvey Bailey. Winstead arrived on May 12, flying up from Love Field in Dallas. Arriving on the nineteenth floor, Winstead renewed acquaintances with another old Texan, the onetime Ranger J. C. “Doc” White, a wisecracking younger brother of Tom White, Hoover’s best man during the 1920s. At fifty-five, Doc White became the eldest member of the Dillinger Squad and a mentor to many younger agents.

Not all the new men arriving in Chicago were Texans. One of the best was thirty-one-year-old Herman Hollis, the resident agent in Tulsa, who has been nosing around the Barker Gang’s old Eastern Oklahoma haunts for months. Hollis, known as “Ed,” was the rare College Boy who could handle a gun; a long-nosed lawyer from Des Moines, he earned a sharp-shooter’s medal with the Thompson submachine gun. Energetic and hardworking, Hollis was rated as one of the FBI’s top investigators.

But Hollis had issues. He had been the Detroit SAC until performance reviews questioned his administrative abilities. He was forever pestering the Bureau to transfer him to California or Arizona; his wife, Genevieve, had “a nervous condition” that doctors said would improve in a warmer climate. A lady’s man, chatty with the stenographers, Hollis was also vain. “He possibly takes an unusual amount of pride in the neatness of his attire,” Hugh Clegg noted in one memo, “particularly when passing mirrors.”
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But Hollis was a capable investigator, good with a gun, and Hoover didn’t have enough men like him. In fact, when Pop Nathan drew up a roster of agents “particularly qualified . . . for work of a dangerous character,” Hollis was one of only eleven names on the list. In desperation Hoover cast his eyes to Southwest police departments. From Dallas he hired the chief of detectives, R. L. “Bob” Jones. From Waco he brought a detective named Buck Buchanan. From Oklahoma City, Hoover lured two members of the department’s pistol team, a thirty-year-old detective named Jerry Campbell and the night police chief, Clarence Hurt, thirty-nine, who had taken part in the Underhill shoot-out; both men were destined for long FBI careers. Hurt’s earlier application to the Bureau had been turned down, Pop Nathan noting he “sees nothing in applicant to indicate the possession of any particularly constructive imagination.” But Hurt was good with a gun, and that was enough.

These men were to form the heart of a new and improved Dillinger Squad. The new hires were sent to Washington for a month of training. The day they finished, Clarence Hurt wrote a friend that he and his partner Jerry Campbell were the only men in the class who weren’t lawyers.
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That was the point; all the new men understood they were brought in not to capture the likes of Dillinger, but in all likelihood to kill them. “They hired me as a hired gun, no question about it; they were getting too many accountants and lawyers killed,” D. A. “Jelly” Bryce, an Oklahoma City detective hired later that year, told friends, according to Bryce biographer Ron Owens.

But importing gunmen alone wouldn’t find Dillinger, Hoover realized. The problem was leadership. The problem was Purvis. In later years Purvis’s fall from Hoover’s favor would be attributed to jealousy. Hoover, a generation of writers concluded, couldn’t abide the attention his subordinate drew from the nation’s press as he pursued Dillinger. While this may have been true, the roots of Purvis’s demise lay less in his thirst for publicity than in his own yearlong series of blunders. Arresting the wrong suspects in the Hamm kidnapping and “forgetting” orders to capture Machine Gun Kelly were bad enough. Hoover stuck with his beloved “Little Mel” through it all, even defending his performance at Little Bohemia. But there was no denying Purvis’s ineptitude in the Dillinger hunt. Suspects were found then lost. His informants were hopeless. He raided the wrong apartments. He built no bridges to the Chicago police while annoying other departments. He’d had his car stolen from in front of his house.

Hoover’s doubts were mounting when Purvis was handed the best bait the Bureau had been served in months. On May 26 a federal judge in Wisconsin granted the Little Bohemia women—Helen Gillis, Jean Delaney, and Mickey Conforti—probation. Before being released, the three women were questioned at the Bankers Building. Purvis assigned a half-dozen men to shadow them. Conforti went to her foster parents’ home, while Gillis and Delaney went to the apartment of Nelson’s sister, Juliette Fitzsimmons, on South Marshfield Avenue. All three women settled into quiet routines. They knew they were being watched.

Purvis searched for a way to make his agents less noticeable. There was a gas station across from the Fitzsimmons home, and he pressed the owner to let an agent work there. On Tuesday, May 29, three days after Helen’s release, Purvis called on the man, and was stunned when he mentioned he had seen Nelson visiting his wife the day before. Nelson had circled the block four times, apparently looking for surveillance, then walked right up to the building and gone inside.
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This was too much for Hoover. He fired off an ominously worded letter to Purvis. “I am becoming quite concerned over some of these developments in the Chicago district,” Hoover wrote Purvis. “We have had too many instances where surveillances have not been properly conducted, and where persons under surveillance have been able to avoid the same . . . I cannot continue to tolerate action of investigators that permits leads to remain uncovered, or at least improperly covered. It is imperative that you exercise the proper supervision over the handling of this case.”
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Purvis’s position deteriorated further that same day when a Chicago newspaper reported that Eddie Green’s widow had arrived in the city and was talking with the FBI. When a Hoover aide questioned Purvis about the leak, Purvis said the reporter had probably “concocted” it. “It’s strange they should concoct the truth,” Hoover scrawled on a memo.
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Hoover had just sent a terse wire to Purvis requesting an explanation when a rash of articles the next morning quoted Purvis saying he thought Dillinger was dead. Once again Hoover demanded an explanation. Once again Purvis insisted it was all a product of reporters’ imaginations. “I would not have made such a statement to the effect that John Dillinger is dead because, primarily, I do not believe that he is dead,” Purvis wrote Hoover.
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For Hoover the turning point came the next night, Thursday, May 31, the same day Dillinger had his facial bandages removed across town. The agents watching Helen Gillis were staying in an apartment across the street. Purvis had put Ed Hollis in charge. It was a problematic stakeout from the outset, as “[Helen] is quite aware that she is being followed at all times,” Purvis wrote Hoover. Still, he assured him, “This matter is receiving my closest attention.”
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What was needed, Purvis decided, was someone who could gain Helen’s trust. His choice for the assignment was a poor one, a Michigan City parolee named George Nelson. A convicted swindler, Nelson claimed he had known Dillinger in prison; he further claimed Baby Face Nelson had “stolen” his name. Purvis agreed to pay Nelson $20 a day. That Thursday night he dispatched him to the building on Marshfield Avenue.

From their position across the street, Hollis and the other agents watched as George Nelson drove up. As he did, Helen and Jean Delaney emerged from the building. Nelson approached the women, saying he was a messenger sent by Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson. Neither woman knew him, however, and both would later say they assumed he was an FBI plant. Helen and Delaney then walked around a corner, where Helen disappeared into a movie theater. Nelson followed.

Rather than tail the women themselves, Hollis and his men decided to wait, assuming they would return shortly. When there was no sign of them after fifteen minutes, the agents scrambled down to the street and jogged around the corner. There they saw Nelson sitting in his car. To their surprise, Nelson recognized them and came over to talk. He said Helen was in the theater and assured them he had the situation in hand. He didn’t. Hollis and his men returned to their apartment and waited for the women to return. At dawn they were still waiting.
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The women were gone. Purvis passed the bad news to Hoover in a phone call Saturday morning, June 2. Later that day Hoover took aside one of his top aides, an agent named Sam Cowley. It was time to make some changes, he said. Cowley, who had spent the last year riding a desk at FBI headquarters, was being sent to Chicago to assume command of the Dillinger case.

 

 

Samuel P. Cowley, who would emerge as the unlikely star in the third act of Hoover’s War on Crime, was everything Melvin Purvis was not: sad-eyed, quiet, stern, jowly, clerkish, the very face of the faceless Washington bureaucrat. Cowley came from a prominent Mormon family in Utah. His father, Mathias, was one of the international church’s twelve governing apostles until forced to resign in 1903, when Cowley was four. The problem was Mathias’s devotion to polygamy, which the church had outlawed. Growing up, young Sam Cowley belonged to one of four separate families Mathias created with four separate wives.

After graduating from high school in 1916, Cowley served as a Mormon missionary in Hawaii; he spoke fluent Hawaiian. Returning home in 1920 he attended Utah Agricultural College, played on the football team, and in the summers worked as a salesman peddling knit goods across Nebraska and the Dakotas. He wanted to be a lawyer, but at the time Utah had no law school. He was accepted instead at Hoover’s alma mater, George Washington University, in 1925.

On graduating in 1929, Cowley wanted to practice law in Utah, but couldn’t find a job. As a stopgap he applied to the FBI, telling his family he would return west when the economy improved. He was accepted as a special agent. He was twenty-nine. In the next three years Cowley was shuffled through FBI offices in Detroit, Chicago, Butte, Salt Lake City, and finally Los Angeles, where he met and married a Utah girl, Lavon Chipman. He was a solid, industrious investigator, nothing special, distinguishing himself mostly in clerical duties; he peppered Washington with suggestions to improve the Bureau’s filing system.

Impressed, Hoover transferred him to headquarters in October 1932, putting him on the new kidnap desk. At five-feet-nine and 170 pounds, with an oatmeal complexion and baggy suits, Cowley was often underestimated. “This employee is frankly rather umimpressive in certain personal characteristics, which is accentuated by his thoughtlessness or carelessness in the selection of his tailor,” a reviewing officer wrote of Cowley in early 1934. Still, the reviewer went on, he “has acquired considerable poise and self-confidence . . . This employee has a habit of consistently doing things right.”

Bland but hardworking, Cowley was at his desk early in the morning, late at night, Sundays and holidays. He was a memo-writing machine, capable of condensing a towering stack of files into a single crisp page; he was so deskbound, in fact, he never bothered to qualify on the Bureau’s new pistol range. Vincent Hughes, the director of investigations, noticed Cowley’s appetite for work and made him his assistant in late 1933. This drew Cowley into the thick of the War on Crime. He spent hours each day on the phone with the field offices, relaying their tips, leads, needs, and concerns to Hoover.

His work was so impressive that when Hughes dropped dead in January 1934—overwork, some said—Cowley inherited his job. His workload mushroomed, to the detriment of his young family. When his wife gave birth to their second son that March, Cowley couldn’t make it to the hospital; he was so busy, in fact, he couldn’t find time to name the boy. Lavon joked that if he didn’t come up with a name soon she would name the child “Junior.”
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By May, as Hoover was souring on Purvis, Cowley had emerged as one of the director’s most trusted aides; hundreds of calls from SACs in the Bremer and Dillinger cases passed through his typewriter on the way to the director’s desk.

No announcement about Cowley’s appointment to supervise Purvis was made, publicly or privately, which would lead to years of confusion over Cowley’s role; in the months to come, newspaper accounts would repeatedly refer to him as “Purvis’s chief assistant.” At least initially, Purvis was told that Cowley’s assignment to Chicago was a kind of inspection tour, a chance for Hoover’s main aide to assess the organization Purvis had built to apprehend Dillinger.

But the truth was obvious to everyone the moment Cowley arrived in Chicago. “No one said anything, but we all knew,” Doris Rogers remembers. “It was on the office grapevine, you know, just whispering and glances. ‘Cowley is coming.’ You just nodded. We knew what that meant. You knew it without being told.”

Cowley wasted no time taking charge. After a morning flight from Washington on Sunday, June 3, he was at the Bankers Building by noon. When he reached the nineteenth floor Purvis wasn’t there, so he busied himself debriefing the agents responsible for losing Helen Gillis. It was shoddy work, and Cowley said so. When Purvis arrived he tried to defend his men, but Cowley decreed the surveillance a failure. Of the fourteen agents assigned to the Dillinger case, four were watching Nelson’s sister’s home. Cowley immediately designated three for reassignment.