Public Enemies (50 page)

 

 

While Purvis’s men questioned Anna Steve that Friday, Dillinger returned to Chicago and found refuge at a place that should no longer have been safe: Louie Cernocky’s Crystal Ballroom in Fox River Grove. A week earlier, Beth Green had told the FBI all about Cernocky’s tavern, how it served as a rest area for both the Barker and Dillinger Gangs; she described a visit there by Dillinger just weeks before.

The Bureau, in fact, had been sniffing around Cernocky since the previous summer, when Frank Nash’s widow told them of Nash’s fondness for the place. Cernocky’s name popped up repeatedly in the Bremer investigation; Hoover, in fact, had approved a tap on his phones in March. FBI men had interviewed Cernocky’s neighbors, and a squad of agents searching for the Bremer safe house had driven by the tavern just that weekend. Amid the blizzard of tips his men followed that week, however, Purvis never found time to place it under surveillance.

Had he done so, Purvis would have greeted a sight from his dreams, the gathering on Thursday, April 19, and Friday, April 20, of the entire Dillinger Gang. It was the first time the men had assembled in one group since scattering in St. Paul three weeks before; for some reason, Nelson brought along Harry Sawyer’s bartender, Pat Reilly. Everyone agreed they needed a spot to regroup, to kick back and decide their next move in safety. The weekend loomed; they needed a getaway. Maybe it would improve Dillinger’s mood. Cernocky said he knew just the place, a country inn in far northern Wisconsin run by an old friend who could be trusted. No one, Cernocky assured Nelson, would look for them there. Cernocky scribbled out an introductory note, sealed it in a white envelope, and handed it to Nelson.

By that point there were clear signs of tension among the gang members, much of it emanating from Nelson. There is very little concrete information about the gang members’ feelings toward one another. Many of those involved would die within the year, and the FBI didn’t much care how they got along; what little is known comes from asides Pat Cherrington and a handful of others would make months later.

From these comments, it appears Nelson’s problem with Dillinger was equal parts envy and resentment. Nelson felt, with considerable justification, that it was he who had sheltered Dillinger after Crown Point, who invited him along on the Sioux Falls and Mason City raids, who arranged for Cernocky to act as their host. And what did he get for his trouble? Not acclaim: all the newspapers could write about was Dillinger—Dillinger, Dillinger, Dillinger. Nelson considered this the Baby Face Nelson Gang. But to the public he remained unknown.

But envy was only part of it. Both Nelson and his wife Helen felt Dillinger was reckless; Mrs. Steve’s arrest made the papers that Friday, and the Nelsons feared it was only a matter of time before Dillinger brought the FBI down on all of them. It was a high price to pay for doing a man a favor, and Nelson resented it. For his part, Dillinger viewed Nelson as unstable. The only time he spent with him was planning and carrying out robberies. As Cherrington told the FBI months later, “all [the gang] knew Nelson as a vicious character and one who loved blood, and had a great desire to kill anyone who got in his path; . . . none of [them] desired Nelson’s company but it was often necessary to have him in on a job when they had one to perform.”
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For the moment, at least, everyone got along. Cernocky roused the gang early Friday morning, served them breakfast and pushed them out the door around seven. Their timing was fortuitous; a few hours later a group of Chicago cops, unaware of Cernocky’s role as a way station on Dillinger’s underground railroad, dropped by for lunch. The gang drove north through Wisconsin in four cars. Dillinger’s group left first, followed by Van Meter’s. The Nelsons and Carroll brought up the rear.

The trip was uneventful until Nelson passed east of Madison. Driving north on Highway 51 he ran a red light. A car slammed broadside into his driver’s-side door, caving in the Ford’s left side. Everyone involved was lucky. Nelson and his wife were shaken but unhurt, as was the driver of the second car, owned by a local cannery. Better yet, Nelson kept his temper; no one got shot. Best of all, Tommy Carroll was behind him and stood by to help. Worried that police would appear, Nelson got his car started and enticed the other driver to follow him to a garage. There Nelson shoved $83 into the man’s hand and drove off. With Carroll following, Nelson managed to reach the next town north, Portage—where Dock Barker had left his fingerprints on a gas can two months earlier—and left the Ford at a garage. When the manager walked inside for a pencil and paper, he discovered that the polite young man in the brown suede jacket had vanished.
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Van Meter was the first to reach their destination, an isolated area of interconnected lakes and thick pine forests; it was around one o’clock. Just before the village of Manitowish he turned left off the potholed oil-and-gravel Route 51 and drove beneath an imposing cement arch with white letters announcing the little lodge’s name: Little Bohemia.

 

 

The pine woods around Manitowish were settled by loggers in the late 1800s, but when logging began to wane in the 1920s, the locals, many of them second-generation French-Canadian and Scandinavian immigrants, turned their attention to tourism. Tiny resorts, no more than clusters of rustic cabins, sprang up as early as 1908, drawing people from as far south as Chicago who came in the summers to fish the sparkling blue lakes, swim off the rocky beaches, and hunt. In the spring of 1934 Manitowish was the kind of inbred backwoods village where everyone knew everyone, everyone married someone’s sister and every little lake had at least one illegal still working overtime.

The first family of the Manitowish area was the LaPortes. The elder daughter, Ruth, married a Milwaukee printer named Henry Voss, who began building tourist cabins in 1912. In 1928 the Vosses completed the area’s premier resort, the grand Birchwood Lodge on Route 51, which boasted a modern kitchen, a lavish dining room overlooking Spider Lake and a roaring fire in its great lobby hearth. There were three LaPorte boys: Lloyd, a fishing guide; lean, stoic George, who ran the grocery store; and the black sheep, Louis, a bootlegger who kept two stills running on Grants Lake all through the Depression.
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The younger daughter, Nan, transported her brother’s moonshine downstate, selling it to speakeasies there. In Racine, Nan met Emil Wanatka, a squat, gregarious Austro-Hungarian restaurateur. The two married and moved to Chicago, where they ran a rough little bar, a favorite of underworld figures, called Little Bohemia. In 1926 the Wanatkas returned to Manitowish and Emil bought land on Star Lake, just up from Birchwood Lodge, for a lodge of his own, a new Little Bohemia, completed in 1931. More a roadhouse than a lodge, the new Little Bohemia was little more than a two-story log cabin with a barroom, kitchen, and dance floor downstairs, a row of bedrooms above, and a cottage beside the back porch. It lay out of sight of the road, two hundred yards down a tunnel of towering pines from Route 51. Wanatka borrowed heavily to build it, forcing him to keep it open all winter. He ran dinner specials to lure the locals and kept his fingers crossed.

Working in the barroom that Friday afternoon, Wanatka was surprised when Van Meter entered and hailed him by name, explaining that he had a party of ten en route to Duluth and needed a place to stay. Wanatka said that was fine, and served the trio a pork-chop lunch while Mickey Conforti’s little bulldog, Rex, lapped at a saucer of milk. Van Meter spent the afternoon pacing the grounds, making his mental getaway map. The lodge was remote and empty. It would do fine.

Around five Nelson and Tommy Carroll drove up. Dillinger arrived a little later. Six men and four women now, they were the lodge’s only guests. At first Wanatka was thrilled. But he wasn’t stupid. He saw how Nelson ripped up the introductory note from Cernocky after letting him read it.
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The lodge’s sixteen-year-old waiter, George Baczo, carried the gang’s luggage and noticed that the bags seemed extremely heavy.

“There must be lead in this one,” he joked to Wanatka. “What are these guys, hardware salesmen?” Wanatka nodded. He knew these kinds of men from Chicago. With luck they wouldn’t stay long. Wanatka’s wife, Nan, sensed it, too. Everyone was given rooms upstairs except for Nelson and Carroll, who unpacked their bags in the cottage. Nelson was irked that Dillinger got a better room. “Well, who in the hell does he think he is?” Nelson snapped. “We’ll put
him
in the cottage.”
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Nan Wanatka served the gang steaks for dinner. “You play cards?” Tommy Carroll asked Wanatka once the dishes were cleared.

“Pinochle,” Wanatka said.

“How about poker?”

They played in the barroom, seven-card stud, Wanatka, Carroll, Dillinger, Nelson, and Hamilton. On the third or fourth hand the pot grew to $34, no small amount during the Depression. The last two in were Wanatka, showing a six and a king, and Dillinger, a king and an eight. When the bidding ended Wanatka reached for his winnings.

“Wait a minute,” Dillinger said. “Whaddya got?”

“I got kings and sixes.”

“Too bad, Emil. I got kings and eights.”

As Dillinger raked in the pot, his coat opened and Wanatka glimpsed the holstered pistol he was wearing. As he dealt the next hand the innkeeper peered at Nelson, sitting to his left, and the other players. All had similar bulges in their coats. After the hand Dillinger asked, “Where’s the washroom?”

Wanatka told him, then stepped into the kitchen. This was worse than he thought. Six men with guns in a remote lodge on a late-winter weekend: the first thing he thought of was Dillinger. In the kitchen he found a
Chicago Tribune.
On the front page was a photo of Dillinger. It was him. Wanatka’s heart raced. He returned to the table but found he had lost his appetite for cards. He studied the men. They appeared to be split into two groups. The cool one, Johnnie, seemed closest to the one with the missing fingers, Red. The chatty kid, Jimmy, was with the pug-nosed Tom. The quiet skinny one, Wayne, was the loner.

At one point Nan’s sister Ruth brought her daughter over from Birchwood Lodge to chat. Dillinger asked Wanatka who they were, then bought them drinks. Ruth’s daughter asked why the nice man had hair a different color from his eyebrows.
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The women shushed her.

Around ten Wanatka, urgently wanting to quit the game, began to fake yawn. He rose to say he was turning in,
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walked upstairs with his two collies, Shadow and Prince, and readied for bed. In a minute Nan was beside him, pestering him with questions: Who were they? Bank robbers? What should they do? Wanatka took a deep breath. “I think the one with the dyed-red hair,” he said, “is Dillinger.”

They lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Eventually Emil nodded off, but Nan lay awake, listening. Every time one of the dogs yipped, every time a door opened during the night, she froze. She heard someone—a man, she thought—pacing the corridor.

The next morning Emil was first to awake, padding downstairs to let the dogs out at six. Tommy Carroll was already in the barroom, stretching. “Good morning, Emil,” he said. “Boy did I sleep. How about breakfast?”
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Wanatka said he’d have something ready when everyone got up. Carroll went upstairs to wake the others, and before long all the gang came shuffling down the stairs, yawning, the women in their robes. They ate in the kitchen. When they were finishing up, Wanatka said to Dillinger, “Johnnie, could I talk to you?”

The two men walked into the lodge office, where Wanatka shut the door. “Emil, what’s wrong?” Dillinger said.

Wanatka couldn’t stand it any longer. He had to know.

“You’re John Dillinger,” Wanatka said.

Dillinger’s expression remained unchanged.

“You’re not afraid, are you?” he said.

“No,” Wanatka lied. “But everything I have to my name, including my family, is right here, and every policeman in America is looking for you. If I can help it, there isn’t gonna be any shooting match.” Dillinger placed a hand on Wanatka’s shoulder. “Emil, all we want is to eat and rest for a few days,” he said. “We’ll pay you well and get out. There won’t be no trouble.”
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Afterward the mood at Little Bohemia took a sharp turn; Dillinger presumably told other gang members Wanatka knew who they were. From that point on, Dillinger or Nelson kept a watch on the lodge phone and made an effort to overhear any conversations; whenever a car entered the drive, Dillinger asked Wanatka who it was. After breakfast Dillinger sent Pat Reilly on a run to St. Paul. They were low on ammunition, and Van Meter wanted some cash Harry Sawyer was keeping for him. Pat Cherrington volunteered to go as well. They left around eight, promising to return the next day.
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When they left, Dillinger got out a .22 rifle, and he and Van Meter and Nelson took target practice, shooting at a can on a snowbank a hundred yards away. Dillinger asked Wanatka to take a few shots as well. For years afterward Wanatka would brag that only he and Van Meter could hit the target. Van Meter grabbed a submachine gun, and everyone shot that, too. A little later the Wanatkas’ eight-year-son, Emil, Jr., brought out his baseball mitt. Dillinger and Nelson played catch with the boy until he quit, complaining that Nelson threw too hard.

This was too much for Nan Wanatka. She didn’t want her son around these kinds of men: who knew what they could do? Worse, the morning paper carried the news of Anna Steve’s arrest by the FBI: they could all end up in jail. After lunch Nan announced she was sending Emil, Jr., to a birthday party. Dillinger gave the kid a quarter for ice cream, but as father and son readied to leave, he decided to send Van Meter along, just in case. By nightfall, in fact, Dillinger had gang members watching all the Wanatkas. When Nan ran into town to buy groceries, she was certain she saw Baby Face Nelson watching her from the parking lot.