Public Enemies (87 page)

Anderson would have made a first-rate FBI agent. Within weeks, working his contacts in the Tulsa underworld, he had identified Sam Coker as a participant in the Garrettsville job; Coker had disappeared in the days before Karpis struck, stupidly telling friends he was heading east to participate in a mail robbery. At first Anderson and the postal inspectors freely cooperated with the FBI, passing on tips about Coker and others. When Connelley heard the rumor Karpis had robbed the Garrettsville train, he asked the Cleveland office to investigate; agents there simply chatted up the inspectors, who happily shared their leads. For the most part the FBI ignored them.

Through December and into January the inspectors’ investigation gained momentum. They traced the car used in the robbery to Akron, where a salesman identified Milton Lett as its purchaser.
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They soon identified the steelworker Clayton Hall, and then Freddie Hunter. Connelley ignored it all. From all appearances the FBI simply couldn’t bring itself to believe a rival agency had mounted a more credible investigation than its own. Despite the obvious progress the inspectors were making, Connelley was dismissive.

“[T]he Post Office Inspectors have themselves all worked up to a heat, and think they are going to catch Karpis and Campbell in a short time,” an aide wrote Hoover after a talk with Connelley. “Connelley said that he does not believe they have half as much as they would have you believe; that they have a few leads here and there, and when these are exhausted they will probably let us have the information.”
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Instead the Bureau stepped up its surveillance of the Karpis and Campbell families. In Chicago agents had the Karpis family apartment thoroughly bugged, going so far as hiring a Lithuanian man to translate conversations between Karpis’s parents. All they learned was how much his mother and father bickered over who was more responsible for their son’s life of crime. In Tulsa they kept watch on Karpis’s friend Burrhead Keady, even as rumors flew that the inspectors would arrest him. Connelley demanded regular updates on the inspectors’ progress. “[W]e should protect our interests in this,” he wrote the Oklahoma City office on February 17, “to see that nothing is done which will interfere with [our] investigation.”
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The FBI learned of Keady’s arrest only when the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
announced it on February 27. When agents demanded to know if the report was true, the senior inspector, Sylvester Hettrick, denied it. Arguments broke out between Hettrick’s men and the Cleveland office; the inspectors, openly resentful of the adoring publicity lavished on the Bureau, finally stopped sharing leads with Hoover’s men. Pop Nathan, who shared Connelley’s contempt for the inspectors, ordered agents to ignore them and concentrate on breaking the case on their own. Two weeks later the inspectors picked up Keady’s bartender.

Many of the same leads flowed to the Bureau, but Hoover’s men repeatedly failed to follow them up. Joe Rich, the heroin addict who had robbed the Warren payroll with Karpis, washed up in a Canton, Ohio, jail, where he attempted to swap knowledge for freedom; FBI agents who debriefed Rich simply didn’t believe his tale of robbing the Warren train with Karpis, terming it “quite a fanciful story.” Nor were they all that interested in Clayton Hall. The FBI fielded tips on Hall’s involvement with Karpis from at least three sources. Still, it wasn’t until March 1, six weeks after hearing the first of these tips, that two agents drove out to Hall’s home outside Youngstown. They watched it a few hours, then left. The idea that Karpis might be employing a sheet-metal worker was apparently too far-fetched for the agents to pursue. They left Clayton Hall for the inspectors.
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In Chicago, Connelley wearily took stock of their investigation. They

On Wednesday, March 25, Connelley telephoned the Cleveland SAC and asked him to find Hall. An agent named E. J. Wynn drove to Youngstown that day and discovered him at home. Hall conceded that he had known Freddie Hunter for years. He identified a photo of Karpis as Hunter’s pal “Ed King,” and admitted the two men had visited him as recently as January. It was the best lead the FBI had uncovered in more than a year. Agent Wynn gave Hall $5 and told him to be at the Bureau’s Cleveland office for a debriefing the next day at 1:00.

Connelley hurried to Cleveland for the meeting. But at 1:00 Hall didn’t show. When he hadn’t appeared by nightfall, Connelley drove to Youngstown to look for him. His wife said he had left that morning. She thought he was going to the FBI. The next morning two more agents visited the Hall home. Mrs. Hall said her husband had come home late the previous night, but had left again that morning. Suspecting Hall was trying to avoid them, the two agents parked nearby and watched the house. A few minutes later a Ford drove by. One of the two men inside could be seen jotting down their license plate number. They were postal inspectors; the agents were sure of it. Irked, the agents drove to the Youngstown post office, where the inspectors were based. They saw the Ford parked outside. From an upstairs window, the inspectors saw them.

A little bit later, the phone rang in the Cleveland office. On the line was Sylvester Hettrick, the lead postal inspector. He wanted to meet. Agent Wynn drove to the Youngstown post office and found himself in a room with eight irritated inspectors, their point man, Joe Anderson, and two members of the Ohio State Highway Patrol. Inspector Hettrick announced that they had detained Clayton Hall. After being threatened with prosecution for the Garrettsville robbery, Hall was now claiming he could produce Karpis. But he insisted he would divulge all details only if an FBI agent was in the room.

The next morning Connelley sat down in the Cleveland office with one of the inspectors, who reluctantly agreed to let him talk to Hall. Just before noon Connelley phoned Pop Nathan in Washington to break the news. Nathan was palpably unimpressed. His lack of enthusiasm was attributable to the humiliating fact that the Bureau was piggy-backing on the inspectors’ work. “[I]f this goes through,” Nathan told Hoover, “this incident is going to break into the newspapers.”
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The next morning Connelley drove to Youngstown and spent several hours closeted with Hall. Afterward he called Washington to say the frightened steelworker had given them everything, including the location of the house Karpis was renting seven miles south of Hot Springs. Connelley was already arranging a charter flight to Arkansas. With luck, he said, he could be on the ground there by noon the next day. He was obliged to take a group of inspectors along, he admitted, “for the reason that the informant [Hall] is theirs, and it was only through their cooperation that we have the information at all.”
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Connelley’s group didn’t arrive in Little Rock until 4:35 on Sunday afternoon, March 30.
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A reporter caught wind of their arrival. G-MEN HERE ON MYSTERIOUS MISSION, read the next morning’s headline in the Arkansas
Gazette.
Realizing he had only hours before that news broke, Connelley hurried to Hot Springs at nightfall and found the house Hall had told them of; it stood alone on a wooded hill overlooking the Malvern Road seven miles south of town. Lights blazed inside. Someone was there.

“Examined place designated by informant Clayton Hall and it checks in every way,” Connelley notified Hoover in a coded telegram at 3:05 Sunday morning. “House fully lighted and party apparently there . . . at about daybreak will arrest party at place above indicated.”
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Connelley had fourteen men for the raid, including Clarence Hurt, one of the agents who shot Dillinger; Rufus Coulter, who had traded gunfire with Homer Van Meter in St. Paul; and Loyde Kingman, who had shared an elevator with Karpis in Havana. In the predawn darkness they crept into positions around the house. In Washington, Hoover waited by the phone. He wanted Karpis, but just as important he wanted the FBI and not the postal inspectors to get credit for his capture; he had told Connelley to “spare no expense” to make certain he received the news first so that he could make the announcement. In Little Rock agents phoned Washington every fifteen minutes, just to say they hadn’t heard anything.

By 8:00 Connelley’s men were ready to move in. It was quiet; it appeared they had achieved total surprise. Connelley called for Karpis to come out with his hands up. There was no answer. With a wave of his hand Connelley signaled for the tear-gas guns. Canisters whistled through the air, crashing through windows into the house. As tentacles of gas began to waft through the shattered panes, Connelley again called for Karpis to surrender. He called again, and again, but there was no answer. When the FBI stormed the house, they found it empty.
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Karpis and Hunter had fled Hot Springs four days earlier, after learning of the inspectors’ presence in town. It was a stupid thing: one of the inspectors had approached a taxi driver who was sweet on Fred Hunter’s girlfriend, Connie Morris, and the man had gotten drunk and lectured Morris that agents were prepared to arrest her. Grace Goldstein warned the men. They were gone within minutes, leaving behind their clothes. After the raid agents marveled at how much weight Karpis had lost. The pants they discovered had a twenty-six-inch waistline.

Karpis drove west into Texas. He dropped a suitcase containing his machine guns at the home of Goldstein’s brother, then headed to Corpus Christi, where he met Hunter and Morris and took rooms in a tourist camp. They spent several days fishing in the gulf, until Karpis picked up a newspaper and read of the Hot Springs raid. Hunter bought a new car, and when he walked into a police station to register it, he overheard a police scanner broadcasting details of the red coupe Karpis was driving. Karpis abandoned the car and drove to Mississippi, where on April 2, he rented a pair of rooms outside Biloxi. A week later they moved into New Orleans. Karpis rented an apartment on St. Charles Avenue. Hunter and Morris took rooms in a building on Canal Street.

The FBI was one step behind. Connie Morris was naïve enough to mail a letter to her mother from Corpus Christi. Agents were on the Texas coast within hours, but Karpis was gone. Connelley, meanwhile, had Grace Goldstein picked up. She confirmed that Karpis had visited the Hatterie, but said little else. Connelley, unaware how well she actually knew Karpis, released her and returned to Ohio. He didn’t think her important enough to place under surveillance.

Karpis was gone, but agents lingered in Hot Springs. Everyone they contacted pointed them to Grace Goldstein. In Youngstown, Clayton Hall said he thought he could get her to confide in him. Connelley approved the plan, and on Tuesday, April 10, Hall arrived in Hot Springs, escorted by Agent John Madala. The two checked into the Majestic Hotel, and at 2:00 Hall telephoned the Hatterie. He was told Goldstein had left town, and wasn’t expected back for two weeks. News of Goldstein’s disappearance triggered a frantic scramble to find her; agents now assumed she had run off with Karpis. When Clayton Hall said Karpis had once mentioned visiting Goldstein’s family in East Texas, agents poured into the area trying to locate them.

It was notable that Washington politics had seldom interfered with the War on Crime. The day of Goldstein’s disappearance produced a moment when it did. That morning Hoover walked into a Senate hearing room to seek a doubling of the FBI’s budget. He was expecting trouble. All the hoopla over the War on Crime—the fawning press, the movies, the radio serials—was generating a backlash against the Bureau, especially among supporters of other law-enforcement arms. The budget subcommittee’s chairman, a Tennessee senator named Kenneth McKellar, was an old Hoover enemy, his animus dating to Hoover’s refusal to hire a pair of Tennessee men the senator had endorsed. When McKellar complained, Hoover had promptly fired three Tennessee agents.
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That morning Hoover made his case with an array of statistics, charts, and graphs, pointing out that the FBI had all but eliminated kidnapping as a national threat. When he finished, McKellar attacked.

“Is any money directly or indirectly spent for advertising?” he asked.

“There is not,” Hoover said. “We are not permitted in any way to engage in advertising.”

“Do you take part, for instance, in the making of any moving pictures?”

“That is one thing that the Bureau has very strongly objected to. You have seen several of the G-men pictures, I believe.” Hoover had in fact objected to some of the movies, but only because he wanted the FBI, not Hollywood, to produce them and reap the profits.

“I have,” McKellar said. “They virtually advertised the Bureau, because your picture was shown in conjunction with them frequently . . . I think they have hurt the Department [of Justice] by advertising your methods.”

McKellar was just getting warmed up. He pressed Hoover whether any writers or publicists were on the FBI payroll. Another senator asked why the Bureau didn’t cooperate more with local police. Hoover insisted it did, when they weren’t corrupt.

“It seems to me that your department is just running wild, Mr. Hoover,” McKellar said. “I just think that, Mr. Hoover, with all the money in your hands you are just extravagant.”

“Will you let me make a statement?” Hoover interjected.

“I think that is the statement,” McKellar said.

They proceeded to quibble over how many cases the FBI had solved. “How many people have been killed by your department since you have been allowed to use guns?” McKellar asked.

“I think there have been eight desperadoes killed by our agents and we have had four agents in our service killed by them.”

“In other words the net effect of turning guns over to your department has been the killing of eight desperadoes and four G-men.”

Now clearly seeking to embarrass Hoover, McKellar pressed for his qualifications to run the Bureau. Hoover pointed out he had been with the Department of Justice nineteen years.