J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (24 page)

T
he press gave them their names—Handsome Johnny Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, Ma Barker, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd—and glamorized their exploits. In the stale weariness of the deepening Depression, their crimes, chases, and—as often as not—escapes were like a continuing serial at the Saturday matinee.

The “midwestern crime wave”—which, more than any other event, catapulted the Bureau into national prominence—was of relatively short duration. It began in 1933 and was, for the most part, over by the end of the following year. It was also restricted to a limited area. Most of the crimes occurred in seven states: Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa.

But while the crime wave lasted, it caught the public fancy, in a way that “outraged J. Edgar Hoover’s Presbyterian concept of right and wrong.”
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Everyone knew that Handsome Johnny was a good boy gone bad, but perhaps not all that bad; that Verne Miller was a war hero and former sheriff; that Ma, for all her killing ways, was still filled with maternal love for her “murderous brood.”

From a safe distance, they often appeared to be Robin Hoods, robbing from the rich to benefit the poor. Whenever he hit a bank, Pretty Boy took not only the cash but also the bank’s loan and mortgage records. Not surprisingly, in a time when banks were foreclosing on thousands of homes, farms, and businesses, Floyd and others like him became nearly national heroes. The Dillinger gang member Harry Pierpont summed it up after his capture when he told a reporter, “My conscience doesn’t hurt me. I stole from the bankers. They stole from the people. All we did was help raise the insurance rates.”
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It was almost hard not to cheer them, as when Dillinger escaped Crown Point jail by means of a wooden gun (or so he claimed), then, short of real guns, held up police stations to get them.

They were, for the most part, rural rather than urban criminals, far removed from the big-city gangs and criminal syndicates that had sprung up in the wake of Prohibition. For all their much publicized cunning, none of them were very bright. It took little ingenuity to rob a bank, and, unlike most other crimes, kidnapping, much favored by the gangs, placed the kidnappers in jeopardy at least three times: when the crime occurred, when the ransom was paid, and when it was spent.

The public, caught in the vicarious excitement of their exploits, tended to forget that many of them were also vicious killers.

Until, that is, June 17, 1933.

It was early morning, and the street in front of Kansas City’s Union Station was crowded with arriving and departing passengers. One group, leaving the station, kept to themselves. In the center, in handcuffs, was Frank “Jelly” Nash, an escaped bank robber who had been captured two days earlier. Surrounding him were four special agents of the Bureau and three policemen. The group had just reached the vehicle which was to take Nash to Leavenworth prison when they were suddenly ambushed by three men carrying pistols and submachine guns. By the time the firing had stopped, four of the lawmen, including Special Agent Raymond Caffery, were dead and two others wounded. Also dead was Nash, the man they’d tried to free.

The killings outraged the nation. This was no Saint Valentine’s Day massacre, where gangsters killed each other. Blatantly, arrogantly, the gunmen had shot down seven people in broad daylight in a public place. To Hoover this flagrant disregard for all constituted authority was nothing less than “a challenge to law and order and civilization itself.”

And Hoover was quick to accept that challenge. In a speech delivered to the International Association of Chiefs of Police the following month, the BI director asked all the police forces of the country to unite in a national war on crime. “Those who participated in this cold-blooded murder will be hunted down,” Hoover promised. “Sooner or later the penalty which is their due will be paid.”
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In May and June of 1934—in part as a result of public reaction to the Kansas City massacre and the midwestern crime wave, but also, in a very large measure, because of the lobbying efforts of Director Hoover and Attorney General Cummings—Congress passed, almost without opposition, a package of nine major crime bills.

The new laws were, as Sanford Ungar has noted, “one of the most important, if least recognized, New Deal reforms.” They gave the federal government, for the first time, a comprehensive criminal code. And they gave Hoover’s Bureau of Investigation not only a greatly expanded mandate but also vast new authority with which to enforce it.
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The Bureau was no longer limited to investigating white-slave cases, interstate auto theft, and federal bankruptcy violations. Under the new laws, the robbery of a national bank or member bank of the Federal Reserve System was made a violation of federal law, as were the transportation of stolen property, the transmission of threats, racketeering in interstate commerce, and the flight of a felon or witness across state lines to avoid prosecution or giving testimony. The Lindbergh Law was amended to add the death penalty and to create a presumption of interstate transportation of the victim after seven days, thus allowing the Bureau to enter the case. And—in keeping with Hoover’s promise following Shanahan’s death—special agents of the Bureau of Investigation were given the right to make arrests, execute warrants, and carry firearms, while the killing or assaulting of a government agent was made a federal offense.

The days of the small Bureau were over. Gone, too, were the days when special agents were merely investigators.

Quietly and without publicity, for the Bureau was still maintaining that it employed only law school graduates and accountants, Hoover used part of his increased appropriation to go shopping for “hired guns”—former lawmen with practical police experience. There were already a few in the Bureau, among them John Keith and Charles Winstead. But Hoover greatly increased their number, hiring, among others, Gus T. Jones (an ex-Texas ranger), C.G. “Jerry” Campbell and Clarence Hurt (both from Oklahoma City, the latter formerly chief of detectives), and Bob Jones (who’d held the same post in Dallas).

Few had attended college, much less studied law, and none fit Hoover’s prescribed image of a special agent. Most wore cowboy boots and Stetsons and carried their own guns—Keith a matched pair of Colt .45s, Winstead a .357 Magnum—and all were inclined to react out of instinct and experience rather than according to the manual. But Hoover was wise enough to realize he needed them, for a time. Although they attained legendary status within the Bureau, and figured prominently in some of its most famous early cases,
Hoover made sure their exploits and backgrounds went unpublicized.
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He was less successful with Melvin “Little Mel” Purvis.

When Melvin Purvis arrived in Washington, D.C., in January 1927—the train trip north was the first time he’d been outside his home state of South Carolina—it was with the intention of becoming a diplomat. He’d tried practicing small-town law, but it had quickly bored him; he craved travel and excitement. But, on being told there were no positions open in the State Department, he walked over to the Department of Justice and applied for a job as a special agent.

He had three strikes against him. Very slight in build and just a shade under five feet tall, he failed to meet the minimum weight and height requirements, and, although he was what was then the minimum age, twenty-three, he didn’t look it. When Pop Nathan suggested, not unkindly, “You look pretty much like a kid,” Purvis responded with two lies: that he’d had considerable experience and that he’d traveled a lot. To which Nathan smiled and said, “Probably all over the state of South Carolina.”
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But a few days later he received his letter of acceptance, and by 1932, only five years after joining the Bureau, he was special agent in charge of its second-most-important field office, Chicago.

Contrary to another well-publicized myth, that no candidate was ever accepted into the Bureau or received advancement therein because of political connections, there were, over the years, various presidents, senators, congressmen, governors, and even some large-corporation heads whose good graces the director wished to cultivate or retain. Just having some personal contact with a new president-elect, for example, was often enough to merit a fast express elevator ride up the Bureau pyramid, to a specially created post with a title such as White House liaison. The ride often lasted only as long as the sponsor remained in power, but there were many such “exceptions.”

Melvin Purvis was one, the son of an aristocratic plantation owner who had close personal and business ties to South Carolina’s powerful Senator Ed “Cotton” Smith. Yet, even without this link, Purvis might well have become a Hoover favorite. At this time the director still personally reviewed each application for the job of special agent. And he must have noticed that Purvis, too slight to make the high school football team, had gone on to become captain of his local cadet corps. Moreover, next to “Little Mel,” even the director looked tall.
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“John Dillinger escaped from the Crown Point jail a few minutes ago,” SAC Purvis teletyped Hoover on March 3, 1934.
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Details were sketchy, Purvis having received his information from a reporter, and not until the following day was he able to verify that, after breaking out of the “escape proof” Indiana jail, Dillinger had stolen the sheriffs car and driven it across the state line into Illinois.

Hoover was delighted with this information. He’d been waiting for over a year to take on America’s most famous outlaw. At this time, several months before the passage of the crime bills, neither bank robbery nor interstate flight was a federal crime—but taking a stolen vehicle across a state line was, and this violation of the National Motor Vehicle Act gave Hoover the justification he needed to bring the Bureau into the case.

A special operation was quickly mounted, with the code name JODIL, the Bureau’s telegraphic shorthand for “John Dillinger.” But it wasn’t for another month and a half—during which the outlaw managed to evade two Bureau traps—that Purvis received a telephone tip that Dillinger and five other members of his gang were holed up at Little Bohemia, a summer resort some fifty miles north of Rhinelander, Wisconsin.

Checking the large wall map in his office, Hoover determined that the two field offices closest to Rhinelander were St. Paul (185 air miles) and Chicago (275 air miles), and ordered squads flown in from both.

While the agents were still en route, Hoover called in reporters and announced that his men had Dillinger surrounded. They should notify their papers, he told them, to be ready for good news.

It was almost dark when the first agents landed. Racing to Little Bohemia in whatever automobiles they could commandeer, they arrived too late to scout out the area around the lodge. Also, as they crept forward, intending to surround the building, a dog started barking. Sure the suspects had been alerted, Purvis told his men to be ready to fire. Moments later, as if confirming Purvis’s suspicions, three men hurried out of the lodge and got into an automobile. It was now dark and they didn’t see the agents; nor, with the radio on and the motor running, did they hear the command to surrender. As they started to drive away, the agents let loose a barrage of shots, killing one man and seriously wounding the other two. All three were local workers who’d stopped by the lodge for a drink.

Now alerted by the gunfire, Dillinger and his whole gang—“probably the largest aggregation of modern desperadoes ever bottled up in one place,” Melvin Purvis would ruefully recall
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—escaped through the back windows. A short time later, on a back road some miles from Little Bohemia, the Dillinger gang member Lester Gillis, a.k.a. Baby Face Nelson, encountered three lawmen and shot them before they could even draw their guns, killing Special Agent Carter Baum and wounding another special agent and a local constable.

Those papers which had saved space for Hoover’s promised “good news” got another story instead. Before daybreak, reporters from all over the Midwest were descending on Little Bohemia. According to John Toland, author of
The Dillinger Days,
“No crime story in America had ever caught such excitement.”
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Once details of the botched raid got out, criticism of the Bureau, and its director, was immediate and widespread.

As Will Rogers put it, “Well, they had Dillinger surrounded and was all ready to shoot him when he came out, but another bunch of folks came out ahead, so they just shot them instead. Dillinger is going to accidentally get with some innocent bystanders some time, then he will get shot.”
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This time the BI director let the attorney general talk to the press. Cummings denied that J. Edgar Hoover was to be demoted or discharged. His explanation for the fiasco—that if the Bureau had been given enough funds for an armored car, the result would have been entirely different—was soundly ridiculed by Republican members of Congress.

Under fire, Hoover looked for a scapegoat and chose his once-favorite SAC. Melvin Purvis reluctantly submitted his resignation. It was not accepted. But, although Purvis remained head of the Chicago field office, Hoover gave command of the Dillinger squad to Sam Cowley. A former Mormon missionary who had been working as an assistant to Pop Nathan, Cowley had had no practical experience on the firing line. He was, however, a tough taskmaster, and he drove himself even harder than his men.

Hoover instructed Cowley, “Take him alive if you can but protect yourself.” The attorney general was even more blunt: “Shoot to kill—then count to 10.”
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Hoover also more than doubled the size of the squad, upped the reward to $10,000, and on June 22, 1934—John Dillinger’s thirty-first birthday—in a stroke of public relations genius dubbed him Public Enemy Number One.
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