Public Enemies (34 page)

Night had fallen when Karpis drove up to the safe house in Bensenville, the same house where William Hamm had been kept seven months before. One of Ziegler’s pals was waiting in the kitchen. They guided Bremer into a bedroom and sat him facing a boarded window.

They guarded him in shifts. Around eleven Karpis stuck his head in the kitchen, where Ziegler’s friend, Harold Alderton, was listening to the radio. “Heard anything yet?” Karpis asked.

“Oh Christ, yeah,” Alderton said. “This thing is going to be hot as hell.”

“What do you mean?”

“They think this guy’s dead. They found his car and it’s full of blood, and according to the radio, they think he’s been killed.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Karpis said. “This is going to be real bad.”

For two days members of the Bremer family paced Adolph Bremer’s stone mansion across from the Schmidt Brewery, waiting anxiously for news from the kidnappers. The “Alice” ad had run Thursday morning; there had been no response. News of the kidnapping had leaked to the newspapers, and Thursday night Bremer had given a statement to reporters, promising the kidnappers that his family had no plans to cooperate in any police investigations. “We want to get Eddie back home safe,” he said. FBI agents were posted at both Bremer homes.

Werner Hanni, the St. Paul SAC, tapped eighteen separate phone lines at the brewery and the Bremer homes. Hanni was so busy, in fact, he forgot to keep headquarters updated despite Hoover’s repeated admonishments. “It appears that it is necessary for me to rely upon the press for information concerning important cases being investigated by the Division under my supervision,” Hoover wrote Hanni after reading in the Washington
Post
of the blood found in Bremer’s car. “With such explicit, definite and repeated instructions it is difficult for me to understand why you neglected, in a case of such significance as the present one, to fully advise me.” Hoover’s anger, stoked by pressure from the White House, grew through the weekend when Hanni failed to forward some paperwork. “Phone and tell him I want these at once and to stop quibbling and procrastinating,” Hoover scrawled on one memo.

The family was deluged with phone calls and letters, many of them supportive, others from cranks. A postcard received that Friday stated that Edward Bremer had been killed and buried near the town of Anoka, Minnesota. Then, around six Saturday morning, H. T. Nippert, the Bremer family doctor, was in bed at his St. Paul home when he heard a crash downstairs. Thinking it was a fallen dish, he went back to sleep. An hour later, while he was shaving, his phone rang. “Go to the vestibule,” said a voice. “See what you can find.”

Downstairs Nippert discovered a bottle that had been thrown through his plate-glass front door. Beneath the door was an envelope containing three letters. One, written by Edward Bremer, directed him to take the other two to Adolph Bremer. Dr. Nippert drove to the Bremer mansion and disappeared with Bremer into the library. Neither man said a word to the FBI agent standing in the foyer, Edward Notesteen. Notesteen asked what was going on. He was told Adolph Bremer had suffered a mild heart attack. But ninety minutes later, when the elder Bremer emerged from the library, he seemed in perfect health.

Notesteen noticed an air of anxiety that seemed somehow different from concern for a son’s safety. During several quiet talks with family members, he learned that what worried Adolph Bremer most was the amount of the ransom. Because of flagging investments, he was cash-poor at the moment; if forced to pay the entire $200,000, one family member confided, the Bremers might lose the brewery. Weeks later the FBI would learn that Adolph Bremer suspected the kidnapping had been arranged by the chairman of another St. Paul bank in an effort to cripple and take over Edward Bremer’s First Commercial Bank.

The ransom payment was uppermost in Adolph Bremer’s mind Saturday afternoon when he paid a visit to Minnesota governor Floyd Olson. That morning’s note directed the family to place four blue NRA eagle stickers in Walter Magee’s office windows when the ransom was ready to be paid. Bremer was candid with Olson about his finances, and the governor suggested displaying half a sticker, as a message to the kidnappers that the family sought to negotiate the ransom amount. Late that afternoon Magee posted the half-stickers.

The next day, Sunday, the FBI’s second-in-command, Pop Nathan, met with Adolph Bremer and his financial advisers, a pair of New York bankers. Bremer asked Nathan whether he felt the kidnappers would accept only $50,000, which one of the bankers declared was an “outside figure.” Nathan, who still knew nothing of the notes delivered by Dr. Nippert, said negotiations hadn’t led to reduced ransoms in other cases. He emphasized that the Bureau would remain in the background until the ransom was paid, but that once Bremer was released, it would expect the family’s full cooperation.

Monday morning another letter arrived at the Bremer mansion. It had been left outside the office of a local coal company executive.

The note left Adolph Bremer confused. Contact the kidnappers? How? He was incensed at the St. Paul police. Too many details were leaking to the newspapers, which angered his son’s captors, and he suspected someone in the department. He decided it was time to come clean with the FBI. He sent for Pop Nathan. When Nathan arrived at the mansion at three, Bremer took him into his mahogany-paneled library and briefed him on the notes from the kidnappers. Bremer handed all the notes to Nathan, who wrapped them in cellophane, took them to the Bureau’s downtown office, and air-mailed them to Washington.

A half hour later, Nathan was handed a copy of the afternoon
St. Paul Daily News;
he was stunned to see that the lead article contained full details of the ransom notes. Nathan phoned the police chief, Dahill, and told him to meet him at his hotel room. Somewhere there was a leak, and a bad one, Nathan said. Dahill said he had no doubt who it was: Detective Tom Brown. And then Dahill went one step further. “It is my belief,” he told Nathan, “that Tom Brown ‘cased’ both the Hamm and the Bremer kidnappings.”
⁶

At the safe house outside Chicago, tensions were rising. Unlike the stoic William Hamm, Ed Bremer was a complainer: he was cold, his head hurt, his knee hurt. It made Karpis tired. All day Bremer sat in front of a boarded window, the taped goggles over his eyes. The Hamm job had lasted four days, and Karpis couldn’t fathom why things were dragging on. At one point he asked Bremer.

“Well, I’d have to know how much money you’re asking for first,” Bremer said.

“I ain’t having anything to do with that,” Karpis said. “It shouldn’t be too much trouble getting the money, don’t you think?”

“It depends on how much.”

“Goddamn, your family’s the richest in the Northwest, what do you mean, ‘depends on how much’? How much money is in that bank?”

“Sometimes we have twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars in there,” Bremer said. “That’s at the peak of the business month.”

“Supposing we were to turn you loose,” Karpis said. “Would you go in and get this money and bring it back for us?”

Bremer got excited when Karpis talked this way. He suggested several schemes to raise money; at one point, to Karpis’s dismay, he named a wealthy St. Paul railroad executive he felt could be kidnapped. In an effort to bond with his captors, Bremer was candid about his own dealings with the underworld. He talked openly about how he had fenced Harvey Bailey’s stolen bonds. At one point, he asked Karpis whether he knew Harry Sawyer or his partner, Jack Peifer. Karpis said no.

“Well,” Bremer said, “they run the town and if you find out who they are, then you’ll find out who I am. You just ask them about me and how many times I’ve handled hot bonds for them. I’m a good guy. If you guys had come to me first instead of kidnapping me, you’d have made more money by kidnapping somebody else that I told you about.”

“Well, let’s wait and see first if we get that $25,000 you’re talking about,” Karpis said. “Maybe we’ll get forty.”

Bremer became glum. “I don’t think they can pay that much.”

One night Freddie and George Ziegler arrived unannounced from St. Paul. They were tired and frustrated. They had seen the eagle stickers split in two, and concluded that the Bremers wanted to pay only half the ransom. “I don’t know what the hell to tell you,” Ziegler said. “That town is so hot, every time we try to get a note to them people, the G beats us to it. Every time we try to phone and tell them where there’s a note, the G’s listening in. They just don’t want to make the payoff, they don’t want anything. Did you hear what Roosevelt had to say?”

“The president?” Karpis asked.

In a radio address, Roosevelt had termed the Bremer kidnapping “an attack on all we hold dear.” “Yeah,” Ziegler said, “he brought it up about Bremer being a friend of his and that he would see to it that this crime wasn’t going to go unpunished. This is the hottest goddamn thing since the Lindbergh kidnapping.”

“Well, what do you think about them paying the money, or turning him loose without any money?”

“No, no, no,” Ziegler said. “We’d never be any hotter than we are right now, whether we get the money or not. Don’t tell them other guys I said this, but we’re gonna be in big trouble after this is over with. This might even turn out worse if we have to kill the guy.”

As the days passed, Karpis grew steadily more depressed. At best he was a babysitter with a machine gun. At worst he would be an assassin. This, he thought, was not why he became a thief.

 

 

Tucson, Arizona, a sun-baked desert city of thirty thousand people, was about as far from the Dillinger Gang’s Midwestern roots as they were likely to get. After the long drive from St. Louis, Dillinger arrived that Sunday a changed man, the hubris he had displayed in East Chicago knocked from his personality as if by a punch. The shoot-out on the sidewalk that day taught him a lesson, to take fewer chances, to live more quietly; there would be no more nights machine-gunning the moon.

Dillinger and Billie found the others already enjoying the city’s tequila-fueled nightclubs and whorehouses.
^be
Russell Clark was staying with Charles Makley at the city’s premier place of lodging, the Congress Hotel. Makley had hooked up with a torch singer, and everyone was having a grand time. Dillinger and Billie checked into a tourist court on South Sixth Street, registering as “Mr. and Mrs. Frank Sullivan” of Green Bay, Wisconsin. A few hours later Pete Pierpont and Mary Kinder drove in as well, after several days visiting family around Albuquerque.

To the men of the Dillinger gang, whose lives to that point had been confined to Midwestern farms and jail cells, Tucson seemed like another planet. Men wore cowboy hats and boots. Mariachi music floated through the evening air. There were mountains and cacti and rattlesnakes; downtown, there were hitching posts on the sidewalks. It was like visiting the set of a Western; Chicago seemed a world away.

It was intoxicating, and it made them careless. On his first afternoon driving the streets, Pierpont inexplicably stopped to chat with a pair of policemen. He introduced himself as a Florida vacationer, then pointed out a car and told the officers he thought he was being followed. One of the cops chatted with Pierpont while the other followed the strange car. Pierpont proudly showed him his new Buick’s appointments, the speedometer, the power steering. They talked about the desert weather, getting so friendly Pierpont volunteered the name of the place he was staying. When the second officer returned he said the other car was harmless. With a wave and a thank-you, Pierpont drove off. All in all, it was a perfectly idiotic thing to do.

Days they spent sightseeing, nights in the clubs. Things went smoothly until Tuesday morning around six, when a leaky oil furnace in the Congress Hotel’s basement caught fire. Flames leaped up the elevator shaft, and the building was soon wreathed in smoke. Firefighters arrived within minutes, and one, William Benedict, was puzzled to see two men propping a ladder against a third-floor window. It was Makley and Clark, who explained they were trying to retrieve their luggage. Once the fire was under control, Benedict went upstairs to Room 329, kicked down the door, and brought out a heavy fabric box. Unbeknownst to Benedict, it contained Makley and Clark’s submachine guns. Makley thanked him profusely and tipped him two dollars.

Three days passed. On Friday morning, January 25, the fireman who had helped Makley and Clark, William Benedict, was leafing through an issue of
True Detective
magazine when there, staring up at him from the page, was the “Mr. Davies” whose luggage he had rescued from Room 329. When a deputy sheriff drove by, Benedict hollered and showed him the magazine. By lunchtime Benedict’s story was making the rounds at police headquarters. It struck a chord with a patrolman named Harry Lesly, who had heard a strange story from a pair of tourists that same morning. The night before the hotel fire, the tourists said, they had shared a few drinks at a nightclub with a man who introduced himself as Art Long. Mr. Long, actually Russell Clark, had a few too many tequilas, and was soon telling the pair how easy it was to weather the Depression if a person could use a submachine gun. The two noticed that the men in Mr. Long’s party appeared to be wearing shoulder holsters.

The two stories sent detectives thumbing through Wanted posters. “Mr. Davies,” it turned out, perfectly matched a photo of Charles Makley. A patrolman telephoned the Hotel Congress and learned that Mr. Davies’s luggage had been taken to a rented bungalow on East Second Street. By 1:30 that afternoon three Tucson policemen were sitting in a squad car watching the house. Not long after they arrived, Makley walked out to his Studebaker with his torch-singer girlfriend. As he pulled away from the curb, the squad car slid out behind him.