Public Enemies (60 page)

Soon a wrecker arrived, towing away the death car. By lunchtime the bodies had arrived at Conger’s Furniture Store in Arcadia, which doubled as the parish funeral parlor. A crowd, later estimated at sixteen thousand people, thronged the streets, struggling for glimpses of the fallen outlaws. When they loaded Clyde’s body onto a stretcher, someone cried out, “He was nothing but a little bitty fart!”

The next day family members arrived and carted the corpses back to Dallas for burial. Enormous crowds greeted Bonnie and Clyde on their return. Bonnie’s body was put on display at the McCamy-Campbell Funeral Home, and in a single day twenty thousand people passed in to stare at her. Amid crowds of newspapermen and photographers, she was buried in the Fishtrap Cemetery. Clyde was laid to rest beside his brother Buck in the Western Heights Cemetery, a mile away. At the funeral home beforehand, a drunk weaved in to view his body, dropped a cigarette butt on the carpet, ground it in, and said, “I’m glad he’s dead.”

In death Bonnie and Clyde proved far more newsworthy than in life. The story of their killings was splashed across the front pages of dozens of Northern newspapers, including the
New York Times,
the first and last time the couple would rate such coverage. That their profiles should rise so precipitously was a byproduct of the ongoing hysteria over Dillinger: the idea that there were other Dillinger-like desperadoes at work across the country’s midsection was an idea that appealed to editors eager to spot a trend. Within days, however, the story would ebb, in part because Frank Hamer, Sheriff Jordan, and other posse members refused to discuss the ambush in detail.

For the next thirty years Bonnie and Clyde would remain dimly remembered, the province of detective magazines and pulp writers, until a pair of Hollywood screenwriters read of their exploits in John Toland’s 1963
Dillinger Days
and created the 1967 movie that led to their rediscovery. Art has now done for Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow something they could never achieve in life: it has taken a shark-eyed multiple murderer and his deluded girlfriend and transformed them into sympathetic characters, imbuing them with a cuddly likability they did not possess, and a cultural significance they do not deserve.

 

We sure did run down a lot of bum leads and embarrass ourselves and innocent people a lot of times.

—SPECIALAGENT JOHNWELLES

 

The morning after Bonnie and Clyde were killed, Dillinger was still wandering the back roads of northwest Indiana in his red panel truck. He and Van Meter had been living in the truck three weeks now, and Dillinger knew they couldn’t do it much longer. The last time he had seen Art O’Leary, O’Leary said Louis Piquett had a cosmetic surgeon standing by who could render Dillinger’s face unrecognizable. As soon as he got the word, Dillinger was prepared to go under the knife.

That night, a little after eleven, two detectives from the East Chicago Police Department, Martin O’Brien and Lloyd Mulvihill, left their station house to check a Dillinger sighting. The two had investigated the East Chicago bank robbery that January and had been working the Dillinger case off and on ever since. Barely a half hour after they left their posts, the two detectives were found dead in their car on a lonely road outside town. They had been shot multiple times in the head and neck, apparently by a machine gun.

Dillinger later told O’Leary what happened. He said the two detectives had spotted the red truck, pulled alongside, and ordered Dillinger to pull over. Van Meter machine-gunned them from the passenger seat, raking the two men with his bullets as they sat in the car.

From Dillinger’s later remarks, it appears the killings were linked to protection money Dillinger was paying members of the East Chicago Police Department; the only cop Dillinger mentioned by name was a detective named Martin Zarkovich. Dillinger claimed at one point that the two detectives had been attempting to “shake him down” for more money. Another time he suggested the two were honest men who had become suspicious of Zarkovich’s relationship with Dillinger. Zarkovich, Dillinger said, had dispatched the two to find the red truck knowing they would be killed.

“Those two police should never have been bumped off,” O’Leary quoted Dillinger saying. “They were just trying to do their job and there’s nothing wrong with that. Their trouble was that they were getting to know too much and Zark was getting antsy. They were sent off to shake down a couple of suspicious characters who were driving around in a red truck. I think Van felt bad about it, too, but there was nothing else that he could do, and Zark knew what was going to happen.”
¹
Whether or not Martin Zarkovich played a role in the murders, it wasn’t to be his last appearance in the Dillinger drama.

The next morning the Chicago papers carried speculation that Dillinger was responsible. At the Bankers Building, Purvis studied the reports and decided to ignore them; when one of Hoover’s aides called and asked why, Purvis explained that “it would be practically impossible to determine the identity of those doing the killing in that there were no eyewitnesses except those who were killed.”
²

Despite the FBI’s lack of interest, the May 24 killings appear to have convinced Dillinger that his nomadic life was no longer safe. That same night he and Van Meter drove into Chicago, where they reestablished contact with Baby Face Nelson and Tommy Carroll. Both were living in a cottage in Wauconda, northwest of Chicago, taking some meals at Louis Cernocky’s tavern in Fox River Grove. Nelson had spent much of May plotting ways to free his wife, Helen, who remained in custody in Madison, Wisconsin; he arranged for a lawyer instead.

Other than Piquett and O’Leary, Dillinger had no one he could trust in Chicago. But Nelson did. That night, after stowing the red truck in a friend’s garage, Nelson drove Dillinger and Van Meter to the Rain-Bo Inn, where he persuaded an old friend, a fence named Jimmy Murray, to shelter them in an attic room. Murray consented, but soon had second thoughts. The next night, Murray told Nelson things weren’t working out. Dillinger had broken his promise to stay hidden and, to Murray’s dismay, had come downstairs and circulated among his patrons, several of whom remarked how much he resembled John Dillinger.

Everyone involved—Nelson, Murray, and Piquett, who was drawn into the situation—realized they needed a place for Dillinger to hide. As it happened, Murray and Piquett had a mutual friend in Jimmy Probasco, a grimy little Italian who worked the fringes of Chicago’s underworld, fencing stolen goods and selling liquor.
^da
The sixty-seven-year-old Probasco had his eye on a tavern he wanted to buy but needed money. On Sunday, May 27, Probasco got house guests.

Jimmy Probasco’s weatherbeaten frame house stood beside a Shell station at 2509 Crawford Avenue, in an industrial area of Chicago’s North Side. It had a sickly green hedge in front and a board fence that extended around the back, where Probasco kept his two temperamental police dogs, King and Queen. From what the neighbors could hear, his favorite pastime appeared to be cursing at the dogs. The house had two stories. Probasco rented out the top floor.

Piquett and O’Leary were standing outside the Shell station at midnight when Dillinger appeared with Van Meter. Probasco was startled when he opened his front door and found Piquett and two strangers on his doorstep; in the interest of secrecy, no one had told him they were coming. “Jimmy, this is my famous client, John Dillinger,” Piquett said. “Have you got someplace we can all sit down and talk?”
³

Dillinger and Van Meter stepped inside. There was a living room and two bedrooms, one in front, the other in back. Probasco shook their hands and led them into the kitchen. He was nervous.

“So this is it,” Dillinger said, looking around. “Have you worked out the price, Mr. Piquett?”

Piquett said $50 a day.

“Don’t you think that’s high?” Dillinger asked.

“Well, you’re pretty hot, you know,” Probasco said, “but I want you to be satisfied. What do you think is fair?”

“How about thirty-five a day?” Dillinger asked.

Agreed. Dillinger asked Piquett about the doctors. Everything was set. They would come to Probasco’s house the next night to perform the surgery. Dillinger took out his wallet and counted out $3,000. “You’ll get the rest after the operation,” he said.

Just then a stout woman with dark hair entered the kitchen. Dillinger looked annoyed. “Who’s the woman?” he asked. She was Probasco’s live-in girlfriend, Piquett explained, a nurse who worked during the days. When Probasco promised she was a great cook, Dillinger said she could stay.
⁴
Afterward, Probasco showed Dillinger the front bedroom, pointing out the fold-out couch where the outlaws could bed down. Dillinger said it was fine. And then he went to sleep.

Art O’Leary brought the two doctors to Probasco’s house the following night. They edged into the front bedroom and looked around; Probasco had laid out a cot for the surgery. The man who was to lay his scalpel on Dillinger’s face was a tall, thin German named Wilhelm Loeser, who went by the alias “Ralph Robiend.” Loeser was already known to the FBI; the Bureau’s Oklahoma City office, looking for the doctor in an unrelated case, had alerted Chicago to watch for him that spring. The fifty-eight-year-old Loeser, a self-important type who had immigrated to America at the age of twelve, had studied medicine at the University of Kansas and Northwestern University. In the mid-1920s, he made his living selling illegal drugs out of his Chicago pharmacy; arrested and sentenced to a three-year term in Leavenworth in 1931, he obtained parole and promptly skipped it, fleeing to Mexico when it appeared he might be rearrested. Piquett was his attorney. When Loeser slipped back into Chicago as “Ralph Robiend” in early 1934, Piquett hired him to perform cosmetic surgery on a con man named William Elmer Meade.

Loeser’s assistant that night was a jittery thirty-two-year-old alcoholic named Harold Cassidy. He was Art O’Leary’s cousin. Seven years out of the University of Illinois medical school, the cash-strapped Cassidy had an ex-wife who was forever pestering him for alimony; Piquett was his lawyer, too. In his North Side office, located above one of Al Capone’s old speakeasies, Cassidy performed illegal abortions and anything else to make money. He had assisted Loeser in the earlier surgery and was to receive $600 for his work on Dillinger.

Standing in Jimmy Probasco’s front bedroom, Dillinger told Loeser what he wanted from the surgery; Loeser said he foresaw no difficulties. “Do you want a general or a local anesthetic?” he asked Dillinger.

“A general would put me completely out, wouldn’t it?” Dillinger asked.

“Yes, it would.”

“Are you going to be here, Art?” Dillinger asked O’Leary.

“I’ll stay if you want me, Johnnie,” O’Leary said.

“I want you to stay.”

Loeser asked what Dillinger had eaten that day. Only a grapefruit and some toast for breakfast, Dillinger said. It wasn’t true. Dillinger, in fact, had a full meal just an hour earlier, but he was anxious to get started. While Loeser washed his hands in a bathroom, Dillinger stripped off his shirt and lay on the cot. After assembling his things, Cassidy leaned over him, placed a towel over his face, and began dripping ether onto it.

“You there, Art?” Dillinger asked.

“I’m right with you, Johnnie,” O’Leary said.

After a minute or two Dillinger was still semiconscious. Frustrated, Cassidy emptied an entire can of ether onto the towel. Suddenly, he noticed a change in Dillinger’s complexion. He seemed to be turning blue. His breathing stopped. Cassidy panicked, backing up against the wall. “What is it?” O’Leary asked.

“He’s not breathing!” Cassidy yelped.

Dillinger’s food intake was causing a reaction to the anesthesia. Loeser darted into the room and furiously began pumping Dillinger’s chest. Behind him Probasco appeared in the doorway, a panic-stricken look on his face. “My God he’s dead!” he shouted. “Oh my God!”

As O’Leary opened a window to vent the ether fumes, Loeser continued pumping Dillinger’s chest. Finally, after a few more tense minutes, he began breathing. O’Leary and Probasco exchanged sighs of relief. They had no doubt what Van Meter and Nelson would do to them had Dillinger died; no one would believe they hadn’t betrayed him.

Once Dillinger was stabilized, Loeser leaned over his face and began. It was slow going. Dillinger vomited several times during the surgery and bled heavily, staining the cot. Loeser cleaned away the vomit and blood and pressed on. He first removed three facial moles. He then gave Dillinger a facelift, making slits beneath each of the outlaw’s ears, then pulling back the skin to eliminate wrinkles. With skin from the cheek incisions, he filled Dillinger’s chin dimple. Then he sutured the wounds and bandaged them. When he was finished, Dillinger looked like a bloody mummy. In an hour he came to.

He was very groggy. O’Leary explained that he had almost died. Dillinger managed a tiny laugh. “It might just as well have been now as some other time,” he said.

Dillinger remained in the small bedroom, recuperating, for two days. On Thursday, May 31, Cassidy visited and took off the bandages. Dillinger stared at himself in a mirror. The telltale chin dimple was gone, as were the moles. He smiled. He looked like a new man.

 

 

All that May Hoover brooded on the disastrous course the War on Crime had taken. Little Bohemia had made the Bureau a national laughingstock. Dillinger had vanished. So had the Barkers. The mystery of the Kansas City Massacre remained unsolved, and there hadn’t been a reliable sighting of Pretty Boy Floyd in months. The Bureau received—and deserved—no credit for the killings of Bonnie and Clyde. Frank Hamer gave an interview saying he would hunt down Dillinger if the FBI asked. Hoover’s position was obvious: over my dead body.