Public Enemies (88 page)

“I mean crime school,” McKellar said.

“I learned first-hand,” Hoover said.

“Did you ever make an arrest?”

“No sir; I have made investigations.”

“How many arrests have you made, and who were they?”

Hoover mentioned several cases he had handled as a Justice Department prosecutor. “Did you make the arrests?” McKellar asked.

“The arrests were made by . . . officers under my supervision.”

“I am talking about the actual arrests,” McKellar said. “You never arrested them, actually?”
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Afterward, Hoover returned to his office, as angry as he had been in his life. It was galling that after everything the Bureau had achieved—Dillinger, Kelly, Floyd, Nelson, the Barkers—he was still subject to petty politics. He got on the phone with Earl Connelley. His message to Connelley was clear: he wanted Alvin Karpis arrested, he wanted it done immediately, and he wanted to do it himself.

 

 

By the time FBI agents realized Grace Goldstein was missing she was already in New Orleans, strolling through Audubon Park at Karpis’s side; he had slipped into Hot Springs unnoticed and picked her up himself. After reuniting with Freddie Hunter and Connie Morris, they took a vacation, stopping in Biloxi before heading to Florida. Along the way Morris got sick; she had a bad case of syphilis. The couples returned to New Orleans and Morris began treatments. Karpis ferried Goldstein back to Hot Springs. The FBI was waiting for her.

By now the town was teeming with both postal inspectors and FBI men, each group determined to reap the credit for capturing Public Enemy #1. Hoover’s desire to personally arrest Karpis only increased the pressure on his agents. Agent John Madala kept out of sight, babysitting Clayton Hall at a tourist camp. The moment Goldstein returned, Hall was certain he could get her to divulge Karpis’s whereabouts. The FBI men spent as much time watching the inspectors as they did the Hatterie. Connelley had assigned Frank Smith, the old Cowboy who had survived the Kansas City Massacre, to work alongside the inspectors and their point man, Joe Anderson; Agent Smith’s sole duty, an aide wrote Hoover, was “to keep an eye on [Anderson] and find out what he is doing and why at all times.”
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Finally, on Friday, April 24, one of the Hatterie whores told an agent that Goldstein was expected back any day. Hoover’s men were beside themselves. Somehow they had to eject the inspectors from Hot Springs. That day the Little Rock SAC, Chapmon Fletcher, “instructed Agent Smith to use his best efforts to get [the inspectors] out of Hot Springs using any excuse that he might think best in order.”
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Somehow Smith pulled it off. That afternoon, via a ruse undisclosed in FBI files, all the inspectors were pulled out of Hot Springs.

And just in time. The next day, Saturday, April 25, Goldstein returned to the Hatterie. But before FBI agents could move in, she was picked up by Detective Dutch Akers and the Hot Springs police chief Joe Wakelin, who spent three hours haranguing her to turn over Karpis; the two corrupt cops promised Goldstein she could split the $12,000 reward with them if she did. That night, after Goldstein returned to the Hatterie, John Madala sent in Clayton Hall. For once an informant was as good as his word; Hall and the unsuspecting Goldstein talked for hours. At 4:00 A.M. agents saw Hall emerge from the brothel and walk to the Southern Grill restaurant. Hall was jubilant: Goldstein had told him everything. She said Karpis and Hunter were now renting apartments in New Orleans, where Connie Morris was taking syphilis treatments. The only thing she failed to mention was Karpis’s address.

Connelley needed that address. He left Ohio that afternoon, after telling John Madala to send Hall back to the Hatterie that night. Hall talked with Goldstein again that evening, but was unable to learn the address. Connelley couldn’t wait another night. Monday morning he boarded a train for New Orleans. They would find Karpis themselves.

Everyone involved realized they were close. In Washington, Hoover was already busy lining up a national audience for his moment on the stage. On Monday, April 27, the morning Connelley arrived in New Orleans, Hoover met with executives from the NBC radio network. NBC was proposing to broadcast two separate programs on Karpis’s capture, both of which would highlight the director’s personal involvement.
¹⁵
Hoover’s memo to Clyde Tolson afterward was entitled “Proposed broadcast of the capture of Alvin Karpis.”

There was just one hang-up: the FBI still wasn’t sure where in New Orleans Karpis was hiding. Connelley told Hoover he planned to check every doctor in the city until he found the one treating Connie Morris. Their only hope of a faster conclusion was Grace Goldstein. Agents arrested her on the street in Hot Springs Monday afternoon. Whisked away to Little Rock, she was subjected to intense questioning. For the moment, Goldstein refused to reveal Karpis’s address.

The next day, as Connelley’s men began canvassing doctor’s offices in New Orleans, Goldstein continued to hold out. She said she didn’t want to end up a pariah like Ana Sage. The FBI’s leverage was her family. Agents had tracked her siblings to their homes in Texas. They made clear to Goldstein that they could be indicted for harboring Karpis. It worked. The next day, Wednesday, April 29, Goldstein agreed to a deal: If the FBI promised not to prosecute her family, she would hand over Karpis’s address—but only to Connelley himself.

That night agents drove Goldstein to Jackson, Mississippi, and checked her into a motel. Connelley hurried up from New Orleans and debriefed Goldstein for three hours, winding up at 3:00 A.M. As it turned out, she didn’t know Karpis’s address. But she knew Freddie Hunter’s, and she said Karpis ate most of his meals there. By daylight agents in New Orleans had Hunter’s apartment building under surveillance. It was right on Canal Street, on the busy corner with Jefferson Davis Parkway. Two of the Bureau’s most reliable shooters, Clarence Hurt and Jerry Campbell, flew down to join the raiding party.

Now all they needed was Hoover. A charter flight, a DC-3, was arranged via Trans World Airlines; Hoover and Tolson arrived in New Orleans that evening at 9:30, taking rooms at the Roosevelt Hotel. Connelley told Hoover there would probably be no raid until morning. He had two men in a vacant house across from Hunter’s apartment building, but there had been no sign of Hunter or Karpis.

By daylight the next morning, Friday, May 1, the situation remained unchanged. In his hotel room, Hoover paced. Then, at 9:45, from his position in the vacant house, a rookie agent named Raymond Tollett spotted a red Essex Terraplane coast to a stop in front of Hunter’s apartment. A man got out. Tollett lifted his binoculars to study his face. It was Karpis. He entered the building, then emerged with another man. Both got into cars. When they drove off, Tollett trotted to a drugstore to telephone Connelley.

 

 

Karpis had been in Mississippi several days, studying a pair of possible jobs, a construction-company payroll and a train score in the town of Iuka. He had returned just that morning, dropping his things in his apartment on St. Charles Avenue before swinging by to pick up Hunter. They headed to a deserted street near Lake Pontchartrain, where Karpis transferred his guns to Hunter’s car. Then they dropped Karpis’s car at a garage to be serviced. While they waited, they drove idly around the city. Hunter was nervous. He had seen strangers around his building. At one point, Hunter thought a maroon coupe was following them. Worried, they drove back to the apartment.

In the vacant house across the street, Connelley watched them pull up. Everything was in place. Leaving two men behind, he headed downtown to the FBI office. Hoover was waiting. Connelley gathered the raiding party and drew a diagram of the neighborhood on a blackboard. He had fourteen men. Two would remain in the vacant house. Two groups would guard the rear of Hunter’s building. When they were certain both Hunter and Karpis were still inside the apartment, the raiding party itself—Connelley, Hoover, Dwight Brantley, and the Cowboys Clarence Hurt and Buck Buchanan—would go in the front door.

At 4:30, as Connelley finalized his plans, Connie Morris asked Karpis and Hunter to run to the grocery to buy strawberries for dinner. Karpis and Hunter exchanged glances. As Karpis stood by the window cradling a submachine gun, Hunter stepped onto the sidewalk, testing the air. He walked to the car; everything seemed fine. Karpis put the gun down and followed. At the grocery Karpis remained in the car. He watched as a DeSoto sedan pulled behind him. Hunter came out a minute later and said he had seen the DeSoto the day before. Karpis said they were imagining things. They had to calm down.

They returned to the apartment. It was a muggy day; the temperature had risen to eighty-seven degrees. In the kitchen Morris had changed into a white halter top and shorts. Karpis tried to relax but couldn’t. He walked to a drugstore—the same one the FBI agents were using—and bought a pack of Chesterfields and a
Reader’s Digest.
He walked back to the apartment, studying every man on the street. Karpis willed himself to relax, and in time he did. His car was to be ready at 5:00, and a few minutes after that he stood, announcing it was time to pick it up. He put on his straw boater. It was too hot to wear his suit jacket, so he slid his pistol beneath a sofa cushion.

As Karpis rose to leave, the five-man raiding party was sitting in two parked cars across the intersection of Canal and Jefferson Davis. Connelley and Clarence Hurt were in the lead car, Hoover and the others behind them.
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A few minutes after five, word was relayed that the other groups were in position. The two cars slid away from the curb and began to cross the intersection. Their plan was to park beyond the building and return on foot. Just then, Karpis and Hunter emerged onto the sidewalk and stepped toward their waiting Plymouth. Karpis slid behind the wheel, rolled down the window, and popped the lock for Hunter. Connelley saw them and reacted immediately; he swerved his car in front of the Plymouth and jammed on the brakes to block it. In the second car Hoover saw a boy on a bicycle veer between him and Karpis.
¹⁷
The boy was just moving past when Connelley and Hurt leaped from the car, guns drawn.

What happened next is in dispute. According to Hoover’s version of events, recounted in dozens of articles and books in subsequent years, he jumped from the second car and rushed to the driver’s-side door while Connelley took the passenger door. Before Karpis could reach for a rifle on the backseat, Hoover said he grabbed Karpis by the collar.

“Stammering, stuttering, shaking as though he had palsy,” a reporter briefed by Hoover wrote the next day, “the man upon whom was bestowed the title of public enemy number one folded up like the yellow rat he is.” Karpis offered no resistance, raising his hands as he stepped from the car. “Put the cuffs on him, boys,” Hoover said.
¹⁸

Hoover’s story of the arrest, as told to reporters the next day, was flat wrong in several details. He said, for instance, that Connie Morris had been in the car when Karpis was arrested. “We nabbed the three after they had entered their car,” Hoover told the Associated Press. “Hunter and the woman stepped from the car with their hands over their heads.”
¹⁹

One possible explanation for Hoover’s confusion was raised in 1971, when Karpis published his autobiography. According to Karpis, at the moment he was arrested, Hoover was nowhere to be seen. He didn’t reach for a rifle on the backseat, he claimed, because the coupe had no backseat. An agent from the blocking car, apparently Connelley, jumped out and aimed a gun at him. “All right, Karpis,” Connelley barked, “just keep your hands on that steering wheel.”
²⁰
It was only after he surrendered, Karpis claimed, that one of the agents began yelling, “Chief, we got him!” It was then, Karpis said, that Hoover emerged from behind the apartment building and helped arrest him.

“The story of Hoover the Hero is false,” Karpis wrote. “He didn’t lead the attack on me. He waited until he was told the coast was clear. Then he came out to reap the glory.” Hoover’s reaction to the allegation was to be expected. On a 1971 memo summarizing Karpis’s book, the last of the hundreds of comments he scribbled in the margins of reports on the War on Crime’s major figures, Hoover wrote, “Karpis or/and his coauthor must be on dope.”

FBI files, perhaps unsurprisingly, suggest Hoover’s version is closer to the truth. Both Connelley’s report on the arrest and an aide’s memo detailing a conversation with Hoover the next morning make clear that Hoover was in the raiding party, not behind the apartment building. But neither source—nor any other report in the massive Barker-Karpis file—says anything about Hoover approaching Karpis’s car, much less grabbing him by the collar.
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According to FBI files, Connelley and Clarence Hurt made the arrest, with Hoover arriving almost simultaneously in the second car. In the end it made little difference. The next day’s front-page headline in the
New York Times
read: KARPIS CAPTURED IN NEW ORLEANS BY HOOVER HIMSELF.
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However it happened, Karpis and Hunter gave up with no resistance. Within minutes a crowd began to form. All around people hung out of apartment windows, trying to see what the commotion was about. None of the agents had a pair of handcuffs handy, so one took off his tie and wrapped it around Karpis’s wrists. They loaded Karpis into a Bureau car and headed to the FBI office downtown. Clarence Hurt was driving, and he got lost. “Does anyone know where the Post Office Building is?” Hurt asked at one point.

“I can tell you,” Karpis said.

“How do you know where it is?” asked Clyde Tolson, who sat in the backseat with Hoover.

“We were thinking of robbing it,” Karpis said.
²¹

In the end, it took a circuitous twenty minutes to bring Karpis into a holding cell at the Post Office Building. It was a triumphant moment for Hoover. The odd Congressional critic aside, the Karpis arrest cemented Hoover’s position as a national hero, celebrated in newsreels, movies, and comic books. The spotlight shone only on him, not on the disgraced Melvin Purvis or the all-but-forgotten Homer Cummings, and certainly not on the dozens of anonymous FBI agents who had risked and in some cases given their lives ending the careers of John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Fred Barker, and Alvin Karpis. The FBI was now America’s preeminent national police force, the Bureau of Hoover’s dreams, a department whose unchallenged resources would make Hoover a power in American government for the next four decades. Three years after it began with the deaths of five men in a Kansas City parking lot, the War on Crime was over.
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