Public Enemies (75 page)

It was slow going. For days Backman refused to say anything about her travels with Nelson. Then Guinane decided to use her love for Chase against her. If Chase stayed with Nelson, Guinane said, he would almost certainly be killed. Chase’s only chance to live, he insisted, was to leave Nelson.Backman asked for a promise that FBI agents wouldn’t kill Chase when he was arrested. Guinane said they would do everything they could to bring Chase in unharmed.

It worked. By Monday, October 8, Backman was installed in a room at the Shaw Hotel in San Francisco, pouring out her story. After parting with Nelson outside Chicago, she said, Chase had taken her to New York City, where they checked into the St. Andrews Hotel at the corner of Broadway and 72nd Street as “Mr. and Mrs. John Madison.” For three weeks they melted into the crowds of Manhattan, two young lovers spending their days ogling Radio City Music Hall and the new Empire State Building. Their only scare came a few days after arriving when Chase walked into a barbershop and a man yelled, “Johnny Chase!”

It turned out to be an old bootlegging pal of Chase’s named Arthur “Fat” Pratt, who had left the Bay Area to join his family’s jewelry business in Helena, Montana. Pratt and his girlfriend, who were also on vacation, joined Chase and Backman for a trip to Coney Island, a few dinners, and a Mae West movie,
Belle of the Nineties.

In quiet moments Backman begged Chase to leave Nelson permanently, and Chase seemed to be swayed. A simple man, he talked of buying a gas station somewhere and settling down, and Backman believed him. They couldn’t stay in New York forever. In bed at night, they discussed whether it was safe for Backman to return to Sausalito. Chase told her the FBI would pick her up for questioning. She promised she wouldn’t talk. He told her how to reach him, via a personal ad in the
San Francisco Examiner.
^ef
Once she returned to Sausalito and got her things in order, Chase promised, she could return to him and they would go straight. On September 30, Chase put her on a bus to the Newark airport. Back in San Francisco, she flitted between friends’ apartments for five days before Chief Menotti arrested her.

Backman’s story represented a trove of new leads. In New York, agents descended on the St. Andrews Hotel, where they identified a car Chase had purchased as an Airflow DeSoto sedan. Teletypes listing the car’s license plate number were sent to FBI offices and police stations across the West. Just as promising was the discovery that Chase had mailed a parcel to an Arthur Pratt in Helena, Montana. This information was relayed to the FBI’s Butte office on Tuesday, October 9, which called the sheriff’s department in Helena and asked it to check hotels for a man using the name “John Madison.” Hours later came word from Helena: Chase, aka Madison, had left the city just that morning.

After picking up a package of money he had mailed to Pratt for safe-keeping, Chase drove south to Nevada, reaching Reno that afternoon, just as the FBI learned he had been in Montana. Chase left his car at Frank Cochran’s garage on Virginia Avenue, asked for some minor repairs, then walked downtown and checked into the El Cortez Hotel, again using the name “John Madison.” The FBI was right behind him. Reno police found Chase’s car at Cochran’s garage the next day, Wednesday, October 10. That night, Agent Guinane and a group of agents arrived in Reno. The next morning they interviewed Cochran, who said a man had brought the car into his garage for repairs on Tuesday. “I don’t know him,” Cochran lied. “I presume he is a tourist.”

Guinane set a trap. “I’m going to need several armed men in the garage,” he told Cochran. “Chase will be back for the machine and we will grab him.” Guinane had brought along the Sausalito police chief, Manuel Menotti, who had known Chase for years. “Your duty, Chief,” Guinane told Menotti, “is to walk up to Chase when he comes into the garage. You talk to him and I believe you can get him away from Nelson. We’ll make Chase put the finger on Nelson.”

Though the agents didn’t know it, their plan was stillborn. That morning, even as Guinane arrayed his agents around the garage, Chase walked out of his hotel to stretch his legs. He decided to stroll by Cochran’s garage to check on his car. A block from the garage, Chase noticed two men in suits, talking. He suspected they were plainclothes policemen or FBI agents. Slowing to eavesdrop, he heard the words “federal agents” and “car.”
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Keeping his head, Chase walked to the offices of the
Reno Evening Gazette,
where he placed an ad in the personals section. The next day Nelson saw it. That night he took Helen and Fatso Negri and drove by Frank Cochran’s house to find Chase. Cochran’s car was in the driveway, a prearranged signal that Cochran was “hot.” Helen pleaded with Nelson to leave. Instead Nelson drove out into the desert and stopped the car. “C’mon, let’s put on our vests,” he told Negri. Negri protested: hadn’t he seen the car in the driveway?

“To hell with the signal,” Nelson snapped. “You put on that bulletproof vest and go up to the front door.”

They drove back into Reno and Nelson parked down the street from Cochran’s house. Approaching the house was a risk Nelson was fully prepared for Negri to take. “Go ring that front door bell and ask Frank where Johnny is,” he repeated.

Negri was afraid. “Jimmy, it’s slaughter for me to go across this street and ring that bell,” Negri said. “The G-men are there, and they’d just riddle me. I can’t do [it].”

“Go ahead,” Nelson urged. “I’ll stay here, and if I see anybody, I’ll let ’em have it. I’ll have good aim from here.”

Negri was sweating now. “I know, Jimmy, but that’s murder for me,” he said. “They’ve probably got us spotted now. Have a heart, Jimmy. I wouldn’t do [this] to you.”

Nelson wouldn’t be deterred. “Go ahead, Fatso; it’s all right,” he said. “I can plug ’em first.”

“Well, let’s both go,” Negri said.

Nelson lost his temper. “No! Go ahead!” he said. “I’ll protect you.”

Negri got out of the car, trotted to Cochran’s front porch and rang the bell. Cochran opened the door, but only a few inches. “Get away from here,” he hissed. “Didn’t I tell you what that car meant? Get away from this door.”

“Where is Johnny Chase?” Negri asked.

“He’s walking down the highway,” Cochran said before closing the door. “Get away from here!”
¹²

Negri hustled back to the car without incident; the FBI, which had no idea Cochran was secretly helping Nelson, wasn’t watching the house. Nelson drove out toward the town of Sparks, looking for Chase. After a while a red sedan passed them; inside was Cochran, along with Chase. Nelson yelled, “Follow us,” and led Cochran into the desert.

They parked in the sagebrush. Jackrabbits scampered about in the cool evening air. Cochran told Nelson about the FBI trap at his garage. “To hell with them G-men!” Nelson snapped. “I’m going back to the garage and fill them with lead. I’ll get Johnny’s car for him!”

Cochran pleaded with Nelson not to do anything rash. “I know how to handle one of these tommies,” Nelson said. “I won’t splatter up your garage too much!” Chase interceded, saying they had nothing to gain from killing FBI men. Nelson calmed down when Cochran promised to furnish him the license plate numbers of FBI cars. If he couldn’t shoot the agents in Cochran’s garage, he would get them someplace else.

On the drive back to Wally Hot Springs, Chase told Nelson all about his trip to New York. “The heat’s everywhere,” he said. “It’s in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Reno, and all spots in between. In New York I contacted some of the boys in various rackets, and they all gave me the cold shoulder, in a polite way, but firmly.”

“Aw, those yellow racketeers back East,” Nelson snapped. “The G-men can’t bluff us. All we need right now is a little time for one or two more good jobs, like the Milwaukee train. And then we can beat it over to Europe and take it easy.” Negri recognized the familiar refrain: One more job, always one more job, and then retirement.

All that night Nelson, Chase, and Negri kept watch in shifts, anticipating an FBI raid that never came. As they stood out in the desert night, cradling their submachine guns, Sam Cowley arrived at the Reno airport, having just handed the $5,000 Dillinger reward to Ana Sage in Los Angeles the day before. All that next day, Friday, October 12, Cowley joined agents staking out Frank Cochran’s garage. Cowley was discouraged by Cochran’s failure to identify the photographs of either Chase or Nelson. In a phone call to Washington that afternoon, he reported “the situation does not look any too hopeful.”
¹³

That night Cochran met Nelson in the desert outside Reno. He handed over the license plate numbers of several FBI cars and even furnished Nelson the address of the apartment house where several agents were staying. Nelson was all for driving into town and murdering every FBI agent he could find, but Chase calmed him down.

Neither Baby Face Nelson nor Sam Cowley ever learned how close they came to facing off that day. Cowley left Reno the next morning for Salt Lake City before moving on to Montana, where agents were questioning Chase’s friend, Arthur Pratt. No one knew it at the time, but the day Cowley would finally confront Nelson was coming, and sooner than anyone expected.

When night fell, Pretty Boy Floyd, Adam Richetti, and their long-suffering girlfriends, sisters named Juanita and Beulah Baird, left Buffalo. In darkness they drove through Pennsylvania and crossed into Ohio, then turned south. Richetti had relatives in Dillonvale, across from Wheeling, West Virginia, and they may have been heading there. Floyd drove past Youngstown and around three A.M. reached the Ohio River at East Liverpool, where he turned onto Highway 7, the two-lane blacktop that ran along the west side of the Ohio. Rain was falling as fog rolled off the river, and just before the city limits of Wellsville, four miles below East Liverpool, Floyd lost control of the car on the wet pavement and skidded into a telephone pole.

Steam rose from the hood as Floyd stepped out to inspect the damage. Irked, he looked up and down the road. An abandoned brickyard stretched into the gloom to their right. Moonlight sparkled on the river to their left; a mile across the water they could make out the lights of West Virginia. They managed to get the car back on the road, but Floyd saw they wouldn’t make it far without repairs. He told the Baird sisters to drive into Wellsville and find a mechanic. The girls coaxed the car south, disappearing toward the dwindling river town.

Frost lay silver on the grass as Floyd and Richetti took some blankets and their guns and hiked up a wooded hill to await the girls’ return. From their position above the brickyard Floyd could see up and down Highway 7 and across a set of railroad tracks to the river below. A few dozen yards behind them, at the top of the hill, sat a row of darkened houses, several no more than shacks. It was cold, and they gathered some leaves and twigs, started a fire, and sat back to wait.

Hours passed. At dawn lights began flickering in the homes above them. By eight there was still no sign of the women. Around ten a man named Joe Fryman emerged from his hilltop home to check his riverside vegetable garden. He was standing near the highway with his son-in-law when his eye caught a flash of white on the hill below. He said they should investigate. Halfway down the hill Fryman stumbled onto Floyd and Richetti, sitting on their blankets. At first he thought they were tramps; a glance at their clothing—Floyd was wearing a navy suit with no tie—suggested otherwise. “We’re out taking pictures,” Floyd said. “We had a couple of girls and got lost. We’re waiting for them.”

Suspicious, Fryman climbed the hill to his home, where he found a neighbor named Lon Israel. “It looks kind of fishy to me,” Israel agreed. Israel walked to a store and phoned the chief of Wellsville’s two-man police force, a pugnacious little fellow named John H. Fultz. That Thursday a bank had been robbed in Tiltonsville, an hour’s drive south, and it occurred to Fultz the two strangers might be connected. Before leaving he deputized two local men, William Erwin and Grover Potts, and asked them to come along. A few minutes later the three arrived on the hilltop. None wore a uniform. Only Fultz had a gun, a .38. “Do you know where these people are located?” Fultz asked.

“I don’t know exactly but I can tell you about the location, pretty near,” Israel said.

Israel led the group down a muddy path. About twenty-five feet down the hill, just as they rounded a clump of bushes, Floyd materialized before them. “What do you want?” Floyd demanded. Without waiting for an answer, he pulled out a pistol and leveled it at Fultz.

“Stick ’em up!” Floyd said.

Fultz tried to pass himself off as a worker on his way to the brickyard. “I won’t stick ’em up,” Fultz said.

“I said put ’em up,” Floyd said.

“I won’t put ’em up,” Fultz said. “I’m going down to the brickyard and I don’t see why I should put my hands up.”

Fultz took a step forward. “Don’t come another inch, fellow, or I will pump you,” Floyd said.

“You wouldn’t shoot a working man,” Fultz said. Floyd stepped forward and stuck his pistol into the chief’s stomach. Fultz brazenly pushed past him, followed by Lon Israel and the two deputies. Floyd let them walk by, then descended the path after them, his gun still aimed at Fultz. “Now don’t run or I will shoot you,” he said.

“There’s nobody going to run,” Fultz said.

They descended another hundred feet down the dirt path. They bickered all the way to the point where Fultz came upon Richetti, still lying on his blanket. “Hello, buddy, how are you?” Fultz asked. “You seem to be taking it pretty easy.”

“Yeah,” Richetti said.

Floyd had had enough. “Don’t let him kid you,” Floyd said. “Shoot him! He’s an officer!”

Richetti dutifully produced his .45, aimed at Fultz, and pulled the trigger. The gun misfired. Fultz pulled his .38, turned back toward Floyd, and snarled, “You big yellow son of a bitch.” He fired at Floyd, missing, then turned and fired toward Richetti. In the confusion the other men scattered into the trees. Fultz stopped to reload his gun. When he was finished, Floyd was nowhere to be seen. Fultz spied Richetti running through the woods. He ran after him.