Public Enemies (99 page)

In a 1941 series of articles for
True Detective Adventures,
Nelson’s friend Fatso Negri quoted Nelson’s version of the Kidder murder. “[W]e happened to cut in ahead of another car,” Nelson said. “The driver, one of those fresh guys, cut right back in front of us. He stopped the car, got out, and came back toward us and said to me: ‘What the hell do you mean? Get out of that car and I’ll slap your face for you.’ He had taken a step or two toward us when I leveled on him and hit him. Then we had to tear out of that place.” overcoat and drew his Thompson gun. “This is a holdup!” he shouted. “Everyone on the floor!”

In later years, Hoover became notorious for inserting into FBI files memoranda that tended to absolve himself of blame in controversial matters. The morning after speaking to Purvis, he wrote a memo to Pop Nathan that appears to be an early example of this:

This was remarkably disingenuous. The FBI had done next to nothing to pursue Dillinger that fall. No SAC would dare initiate a major new case without Hoover’s approval, and Hoover hadn’t given any. If the FBI was tardy in its pursuit of Dillinger that week, Hoover had only himself to blame.

To this day, local historians have no idea who Kunkleman was or why he was filming that day. His footage of the robbery’s prelude and aftermath was later developed and shown in a Mason City theater. It then disappeared. For decades local historians tried in vain to locate Kunkleman or his fabled film. It was finally found in the hands of a Mason City camera-store owner in 1996.

The precise date of Barker’s and Karpis’s surgeries has never been definitely established. The best guess is March 10, give or take a day.

The bar was called the Green Lantern, named after but unrelated to Harry Sawyer’s place in St. Paul.

Ziegler’s murder was never solved.

The most vigorous questioning the FBI did wasn’t of anyone associated with the Barkers: it was of FBI agents themselves. When news of Dock Barker’s identification leaked to the St. Paul newspapers, Hoover exploded. He demanded to know the source of the leak, firing off a cascade of angry memos at the two most likely sources, the offices in Minneapolis and Oklahoma City. Pop Nathan interrogated several Oklahoma agents who appeared to have mentioned the fingerprints to local lawmen, who had then mentioned them to a Minnesota reporter doing research on the Barkers. The likely leaker was an agent named Herman Hollis, a former SAC in Detroit; Hollis denied it. The investigation dragged on for weeks, until Nathan admitted they would probably never find the source.

Rosser Nalls was born in Washington, D.C., joined the Bureau in 1929, and served in many offices before his retirement in 1956. He died in 1983 at the age of eighty-two.

Rufus C. Coulter was born in Tennessee and orphaned at an early age. Without graduating from elementary school, he attended night classes and managed to obtain a law degree from the University of Arkansas. Coulter served in the FBI from 1929 to 1945 and worked for many years afterward for Motorola. He died in 1975 at the age of seventy-two.

There remained widespread confusion among Hoover’s men exactly when and how they were to include local police on FBI raids. According to a memo Hoover wrote to file, when he asked Inspector William Rorer that Sunday why he had requested help from St. Paul police, Rorer said “he had been proceeding on the assumption that to take a suspect into custody it was necessary to have a police officer along.” Hoover replied “that this assumption is entirely wrong,” that there were only two instances where local police could join an FBI raid: when the FBI needed extra men or extra equipment. Rorer apparently also complained that not all his men knew how to use submachine guns. “If the agents cannot handle the equipment,” Hoover said, “they should be instructed immediately in the use of it.”

George Gross was a St. Louis native who served in the FBI between 1930 and 1935. In later years he was an attorney. He died in 1958.

Roy T. Noonan, a Minnesota native nicknamed “Stub,” was a popular FBI agent from 1928 until his retirement in 1954. From 1955 to 1967 he served as superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. He died in 1981.

An FBI memo explicitly states Larry Strong was not its informant that day. Either the memo was drafted in an effort to obscure Strong’s identity or Strong talked to someone else, perhaps his brother, who then notified the FBI.

As portrayed in FBI files, the death of Eddie Green amounted to an execution. The official rationale behind the shooting, as explained to reporters, was that Green was shot after making “a menacing gesture.” In their reports, every agent present used that same phrase, “menacing gesture.” Some added that Green wheeled around as if to shoot, or stuck his hand in a pocket as if to pull a gun. There was no gun. Hugh Clegg’s report even quoted the reluctant Agent Notesteen as seeing the “menacing gesture.” But Notesteen’s own report pointedly says he could not see Green. Notesteen clearly states he ordered the shooting on the strength of Mrs. Goodman’s identification alone. The key words had been uttered by Inspector Rorer hours before: “Kill him.”

Inspector Rorer’s order was probably the all-too-human product of overwhelming public pressure and the Bureau’s vengeful mindset, spiced by sleep deprivation, nerves, and inexperience. Even so, senior FBI officials were keenly aware of their vulnerability on the Green killing. When a reporter named Tommy Thompson persuaded the local coroner’s office to investigate, the Bureau moved swiftly to defend itself. If anyone asked, Clegg told Hoover, he would refuse to name the agent who shot Green, or any witnesses; they would be subpoenaed, Clegg said, which would be “undesirable.” Thompson, meanwhile, had taken loans from underworld figures, Clegg said: “If necessary, [we] could bring pressure to bear to prevent any adverse publicity on his part.” In the end, the FBI needn’t have worried; the coroner ruled the killing justified.

Following the shoot-out in St. Paul, the trio had hidden out at Harry Sawyer’s farm, then driven to Tennessee, where they took rooms in a tourist court outside Nashville. One morning Van Meter and Hamilton returned from a shopping excursion in a terrific hurry. As Cherrington later related the story to the FBI, Van Meter said he and Hamilton had been parked outside a Nashville drugstore, drinking Coca-Colas, when they spied two teenage loiterers they suspected were about to rob the store. Lingering to watch, Van Meter said, they were suddenly approached by a uniformed patrolman who asked their names. According to Van Meter’s story, he produced a submachine gun, barking, “Here’s your credentials.” The officer stumbled and fled.

The FBI would later find articles of clothing belonging to Van Meter and Hamilton that contained tags from a Nashville men’s store, apparently confirming Cherrington’s story.

It’s possible Dillinger returned to Chicago via Louisville, Kentucky. That Saturday, the day after the Warsaw raid, a Louisville doctor claimed he had been approached by a man asking for help with a wounded leg; he identified photographs of Dillinger as the man. Earl Connelley, who was already investigating a tip Dillinger was in the area, established a surveillance of the doctor’s office, but when the tip surfaced in the Louisville newspapers, he abandoned it. The story of Dillinger’s visit to Louisville was later lent some credence by Pat Cherrington, who told the FBI she and Hamilton met Dillinger at an unidentified Kentucky “resort” that Saturday, April 14. If Dillinger did visit Louisville, he was back in Chicago by that afternoon, when he met with Art O’Leary.

When questioned later by FBI agents, the attendant said he thought he recognized Dillinger but refrained from calling the local sheriff because he felt it couldn’t be true.

They weren’t. Even though the FBI now knew the identities of Hamilton and Van Meter, Purvis had made no effort to place their families under surveillance.

Other agents confirmed this. “We had no particular orders as to where we would be,” Agent William Ryan said in his debriefing. Agent Arthur McLawhon: “The only orders that I received from the time we left Rhinelander to the time of arrival was to drive the automobile.” Agent Ken McIntire: “The situation arose so quickly that it was almost impossible for orders to be given, every man doing as he thought best.” Agent Sam Hardy: “Mr. Purvis and Mr. Clegg seemed to be directing the party, but this Agent did not know just what actual plan was to be used on arrival at the Little Bohemia Resort.”

Thomas J. Dodd was a Connecticut lawyer who served as an FBI agent from 1933 to 1935 before embarking on a career in politics. After World War II he was the chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of German military leaders. In 1958 he was elected to the first of two terms in the U.S. Senate; his son is the current Connecticut senator Christopher Dodd. Thomas Dodd died in 1971.

Born and raised in New Hampshire, John T. McLaughlin served in the FBI from 1926 to 1941. He was a prominent Reno, Nevada, attorney until his death in 1975.

Born in 1903 in Alabama and raised in Mississippi, Robert G. Gillespie served less than a year in the FBI. Afterward he practiced law in Jackson, Mississippi, and served as Chief Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court from 1954 to 1977.

How Dillinger knew of Moran has never been explained; it’s possible he heard Moran’s name from Baby Face Nelson, who had debriefed Alvin Karpis about his surgery. Several accounts claim Dillinger visited Moran that Tuesday, and that Moran turned him away. This is unlikely; none of Dr. Moran’s laundering confederates, several of whom would later be grilled by the FBI, mentioned such an episode. In fact, later statements from members of the Barker Gang suggest Dillinger tried to find Dr. Moran but couldn’t.

Curiously, there is no suggestion that Dillinger attempted to contact Louis Piquett or Art O’Leary upon returning to Chicago. In later conversations with the two men, in fact, Dillinger repeatedly lied about this period. He said he and Van Meter had hidden for a time in an abandoned mine in Wisconsin and later buried Hamilton in dunes near Lake Michigan. He never mentioned the Barkers, just as he never mentioned others who would give him aid in the coming weeks.

Agents questioned McLaughlin all that day at his apartment, but he would say nothing. While they talked, McLaughlin’s wife sat in a front window, smoking. At one point, agents saw her throw something out the window. Mrs. McLaughlin insisted it was just a cigarette butt. But when agents went outside to retrieve the thrown item, they found the McLaughlin’s son, Jimmy, standing on the sidewalk, reading a note his mother had tossed to him. It read in part: “Government men here since 10:00 A.M. . . . Don’t come in. Beat it. You will be held prisoner.” Taken into custody, the boy led agents to his locker at the Board of Trade, where they found a roll of Bremer money tucked into a hat.

The Bureau had begun investigating Nelson in the wake of the Mason City, Iowa, robbery in March, when a bank employee had identified his photograph. Purvis had no idea at the time that Dillinger had been present at Mason City as well, and it wasn’t until Little Bohemia that the Bureau belatedly realized the two were working together.

As they did, Purvis managed to locate the first of the Little Bohemia refugees. It was Pat Cherrington. After fleeing Little Bohemia, Cherrington and Harry Sawyer’s bartender, Pat Reilly, had returned to St. Paul, where after a week in hiding Cherrington boarded a train to Chicago, sending a telegram to her sister-in-law to meet her at the station. The FBI, who had the sister-in-law under surveillance, intercepted the telegram that Monday; agents boarded Cherrington’s train at a stop in Janesville, Wisconsin, and followed her to Chicago and then to Detroit. After a monthlong stakeout that produced no leads on Dillinger or anyone else, Cherrington would finally be arrested in late May. She drew a one-year sentence in a federal women’s prison.

Despite eyewitnesses who positively identified Van Meter, historians have traditionally dismissed Fostoria as just another of the many unconfirmed robberies credited to Dillinger. Town residents long insisted it was Dillinger that day, though as the local historian Paul Krupp wrote in 1981, “[T]here is no sound evidence that Dillinger himself came to town.” In fact, FBI files confirm it was Dillinger: the license plates of the Fostoria getaway car matched those of a car he would use in his next robbery, in June.

Though he avoided lingering in the city itself—he still feared Frank Nitti’s wrath—Nelson had a network of Chicago contacts Dillinger didn’t. He needed them. After stumbling into Louis Cernocky’s bar after his flight from Little Bohemia, Nelson had reached out to one of them, a veteran fence named Jimmy Murray, who owned a South Chicago roadhouse called the Rain-Bo Inn. Murray was the man who had masterminded the Newton Brothers’s famed train robbery at Roundout, Illinois, in 1924; after a stretch in the Atlanta federal prison, he had returned to Chicago and resumed business. The FBI would later establish that Murray had handled stolen bonds for both the Nelson and Dillinger gangs that autumn. After Little Bohemia, Murray allowed Nelson to stay in a cottage he owned in Wauconda, northwest of the city, where Nelson would spend most of the month of May. There he eventually reunited with Carroll and his California gofer, Johnny Chase.