Public Enemies (89 page)

In the years since the War on Crime, critics have questioned almost everything about it: Was it necessary? Was it real? Were rural bank robbers the public menace the FBI said they were? A number of historians have argued that the War on Crime was little more than a public-relations ploy, a federal giant stomping out criminal insects, a dovetailing of Hoover’s ambition with the needs of the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal policies. This line of thinking suggests that the events of 1933-34 were all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

It’s certainly true it wasn’t much of a “war.” In the narrowest sense, the War on Crime constituted only four groupings of criminal cases: Machine Gun Kelly’s kidnapping of Charles Urschel, the Barker-Karpis kidnappings of Edward Bremer and William Hamm, the Dillinger manhunt, and the Kansas City massacre; there were no broader drives on the Chicago syndicate or Italian mafias, no war on counterfeiting or other crimes. Nor can one argue that the public enemies of 1933-34 could have been extinguished only by the federal government; Frank Hamer’s work suggests otherwise. Bank robbery was a problem in 1933, but one that didn’t require federal intervention.

Still, it’s baseless to argue that the War on Crime was some kind of ploy. Though he reaped its benefits, Hoover didn’t create the war. It sprang from real events. Its immediate cause was the Kansas City Massacre; few would question the FBI’s decision to pursue the killers of its own men, never mind that it technically had no jurisdiction. The underlying cause was the Lindbergh Law, which made it the FBI’s job to track down kidnappers. For the Bureau, the only “elective” segment of the War on Crime was the decision to pursue Dillinger. Here Hoover was indeed hemmed in by his own ambitions. But Hoover didn’t “create” Dillinger, as some have argued; Dillinger was already a national figure when the FBI entered the case. He was precisely the type of interstate criminal a national police force should attempt to apprehend.

No one involved in the War on Crime believed it would end criminality or capture every major criminal. It didn’t. More than anything, the War on Crime was a war on the
idea
of crime, the idea that too many Americans had come to tolerate crime. When judged on this basis, it’s difficult to say it wasn’t a success. Once the FBI became involved, kidnapping rates fell immediately and precipitously. Hoover’s emphasis on indicting those who harbored criminals gradually eliminated safe havens such as St. Paul and Hot Springs. (The FBI helped clean up Hot Springs itself; the detective Dutch Akers and several other corrupt city officials served jail terms after trials in 1938.)

The War on Crime’s legacy was deep and enduring. In the short term, it served as powerful evidence of the effectiveness of the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal policies, boosting faith in the very idea of an activist central government. On a broader scale, it reassured a demoralized populace that American values could overcome anything, even the Depression. Despite the crowds of theatergoers who applauded them in life, in death John Dillinger and his peers were seen as symbols of all that was wrong in America. Coming as the worst of the Depression was passing, their defeat was the Depression’s symbolic defeat; overnight their pedestals were reoccupied by clean, upstanding symbols of moral rectitude, the first being Melvin Purvis.

“The country seized on Melvin Purvis,” the historian Richard Gid Powers has noted, “with his squeaky voice and diminutive build as a kind of Frank Capra hero, proof that ordinary citizens, provided they stuck together, could lick anything and anybody, even John Dillinger, the age’s chosen symbol of social disintegration.”

In short order Purvis was replaced in the pantheon of American heroism by the Bureau itself. Indeed, the most important legacy of the War on Crime is the modern FBI. Everything the Bureau has achieved since, every crime it has solved, every abuse its overzealous agents committed, sprang from the powers it accrued during the War on Crime. The manhunts for Dillinger and his peers introduced America to an idea that we take for granted today: that the federal government bears the ultimate responsibility for the nation’s law and order.

The War on Crime not only enshrined Hoover’s FBI as the bearer of this responsibility, it made Americans comfortable with its existence. It created a public trust so enduring that the Bureau’s later abuses were only belatedly questioned. As Claire Bond Potter notes, “[T]he War on Crime produced lasting changes in the ways Americans would come to understand crime as a national problem, police power as socially positive, and crime control as a federal responsibility.”
¹

But while the FBI’s “socially positive” role was on public display during 1933 and 1934, so too can the seeds of the FBI’s later abuses be seen: the beating of suspects; the “kidnapping” of Verne Miller’s girlfriend, Vi Mathias; the conviction of Adam Richetti on perjured FBI testimony; and the arrest and trial of Roger Touhy for the Hamm kidnapping. The War on Crime bestowed upon Hoover’s FBI something close to absolute power, and the day eventually came when Hoover’s FBI was corrupted absolutely by it. The Bureau wrestles with its legacy to this day.

 

 

 

Few of the FBI agents who fought the War on Crime ever received any public credit for their work. A number enjoyed long careers in the Bureau before retiring in the 1960s and 1970s. Others left the Bureau as soon as they could, bolting in 1935 and 1936 to join hometown law firms or to become corporate executives. The last surviving member of the Dillinger Squad, the rookie agent Tom McDade, died in 1996.

Frank Smith, who survived the Kansas City Massacre, resigned from the FBI in 1939 to become Oklahoma City’s police chief. He died in 1953. Reed Vetterli, the Kansas City SAC, became Salt Lake City’s police chief. He died in 1949. Despite his statements to the contrary in FBI files, the massacre’s third survivor, Joe Lackey, insisted until his death that he was able to identify Richetti, Floyd, and Miller.

Gus Jones, who led the Urschel investigation, retired from the FBI in 1940. He died in 1963. Bill Rorer, the agent who arrested Machine Gun Kelly and exchanged gunfire with Dillinger at Little Bohemia, left the FBI in 1937. He was CEO of a Georgia dairy until his death in 1967. The agent whose bullets felled Dillinger, Charles Winstead, retired from the FBI in 1943. He died at the age of eighty-two in 1973. His partner, Clarence Hurt, retired in 1955 and was a sheriff in his native Oklahoma for several years. He died in 1975. Jerry Campbell, the FBI marksman who captured Dock Barker, died in Palo Alto in 1991.

Hugh Clegg, the assistant director who nominally headed the agents at Little Bohemia, founded the FBI Academy in 1935. After his retirement, he served as a special assistant to the chancellor at the University of Mississippi, where he was a pivotal figure in the school’s acceptance of its first black student, James Meredith. Likewise, Earl Connelley remained a top FBI administrator for two decades after the War on Crime. He retired in 1956 and died a year later. Pop Nathan, often called “the grand old man of the FBI,” retired from the FBI in 1945. He died in 1963.

After working as a public spokesman for several companies during the 1930s, Melvin Purvis faded from public view. He served as a colonel in World War II, then returned to South Carolina, where for several years he ran a radio station. Hoover never forgave Purvis for his hubris in the wake of the Dillinger and Floyd cases. He repeatedly frustrated Purvis’s attempts to return to the public eye, blocking his chance for a federal judgeship in 1952. Hoover, in fact, did everything possible to destroy his onetime protégé’s legacy; Purvis’s name did not appear once in the Bureau’s 1956 authorized history,
The FBI Story.

On February 29, 1960, Purvis was found dead in his study, a single bullet wound to the head. The gun in his hand had been given him by fellow agents upon his retirement. Some called it suicide, others an accident. Hoover made no public comment and sent no note of condolence. “We are honored that you ignored Melvin’s death,” his widow wrote Hoover. “Your jealousy hurt him very much but until the end I think he loved you.” At the time of his death, Melvin Purvis was fifty-six.

For the rest of his life Hoover remained obsessed with the War on Crime era. As the FBI sank into controversies over its handling of civil rights and other cases, his fascination with Dillinger and his peers only grew. “Hoover had a thing about Dillinger,” the FBI assistant director William Sullivan once said. “If he were alive today and you went to see him, he’d tell you about Dillinger. The older he got the more he talked about John Dillinger, Ma Barker, and all those old cases of the thirties. He would talk on and on about this stuff.”
²
One senses in Hoover’s reveries a longing for the clear-cut distinctions of good versus evil the War on Crime afforded the FBI. In a way, Dillinger became Hoover’s “Rosebud.”

J. Edgar Hoover died in his sleep on May 1, 1972.

 

 

 

Of those the FBI captured, many became the earliest inmates at Alcatraz, which opened in January 1935. When Alvin Karpis arrived as its 325th inmate on August 7, 1936, he quipped that it was like Old Home Week. On his first day on The Rock, Karpis, as Prisoner AZ-325, renewed acquaintances with Machine Gun Kelly (AZ-117), Kelly’s partner Albert Bates (AZ-137), and their old mentor Harvey Bailey (AZ-139). In the cafeteria he saw Dock Barker (AZ-268), Harry Sawyer (AZ-299), Volney Davis (AZ- 271), and Elmer Farmer (AZ-299). He later came to know Dick Galatas, Deafy Farmer, John Chase, and many others.

Those who avoided Alcatraz, and those who chased them, met a multitude of fates. The man who betrayed Bonnie and Clyde, Henry Methvin, was run over and killed by a train, apparently while sleeping, in 1948. Frank Hamer died in 1955. W. D. Jones lived long enough to watch the 1967 movie
Bonnie and Clyde
and wrote an article in
Playboy
about the gang. Jones was killed during a fight in Houston in 1974. Clyde Barrow’s last sibling, Marie Barrow Scoma, died in 1999.

The Urschel mansion still stands in Oklahoma City; a historical society plaque is the only reminder of that warm night in July 1933 when Kelly paid his only visit. Ed Weatherford, the Texas detective who brought Kelly to the FBI’s attention, never received credit outside Fort Worth for his work on the case; he died in 1949. Kathryn Kelly’s father, Boss Shannon, was paroled from prison in 1944; he died in 1956. Albert Bates died of a heart attack at Alcatraz in 1948. Kelly died, also of a heart attack, at Leavenworth six years later.

Kathryn Kelly outlived her husband. In 1958, after years of begging Hoover for her release, she persuaded an Oklahoma judge to grant her a new trial. The Bureau, caught off guard, scrambled to reassemble its twenty-five-year-old case. It was all but impossible. Frank Blake, the Dallas SAC, had retired in 1942 after a heart attack and died six years later. Ralph Colvin, the Oklahoma City SAC, died in Tulsa in 1947. The Urschels’ bridge partner, Walter Jarrett, died in Midland, Texas, in 1947. The Bureau spent months trying to locate the Luther Arnold family, the sharecroppers who figured prominently in the Kellys’ capture. At one point agents pursued rumors that twelve-year-old Geralene Arnold had changed her name and become a famous movie actress. The Arnolds were never found. When the FBI was unable to provide evidence to reconvict her, Kathryn was freed. She worked in an Oklahoma hospital for many years before her death in 1985.

The bit players of the Dillinger case died in obscurity. Harold Cassidy, the doctor who assisted in Dillinger’s surgery, committed suicide in Chicago in 1946. The FBI paid reward money to Ana Sage, the “Woman in Red,” but it couldn’t prevent her deportation; she died of liver failure in Romania in April 1947. Patricia Cherrington died two years later, apparently of natural causes, her body discovered in a Chicago flophouse. Louis Piquett became a bartender after his release from prison. He died of a heart attack in Chicago in 1951. Pete Pierpont and Charles Makley attempted to escape from Ohio’s death row in September 1934, using fake guns carved from soap. Makley was killed; Pierpont was later executed. The last surviving member of the Dillinger Gang, Russell Clark, was released from prison in August 1968, having served thirty-four years. He had inoperable cancer and died four months later.

Billie Frechette married a Wisconsin man named Arthur Tic, bore him children, and died in January 1969. Dillinger’s last girlfriend, Polly Hamilton, lived quietly in Chicago for years as a salesman’s wife. She died a month after Frechette. Nine months later, in October 1969, Martin Zarkovich died. Whatever secrets he harbored about the East Chicago Police Department’s ties to Dillinger went with him to the grave. John Chase was paroled from Leavenworth in 1966. He became a janitor in Palo Alto and died there in 1973. Baby Face Nelson’s widow, Helen Gillis, lived out her years working in a Chicago factory and raising the couple’s children. She died in 1987. The fates of Fatso Negri and Chase’s girlfriend, Sally Backman, are unknown.

Friends say William Hamm was never the same after his kidnapping by the Barker Gang. Though he continued as chairman of Hamm Brewing until his retirement in 1965, he tended to brood, and he surrounded himself with bodyguards. He died in 1970. Roger Touhy, the gangster who was acquitted in the Hamm case, was wrongfully convicted of the kidnapping of the syndicate con man Jake Factor. He served more than twenty years in prison before his release in November 1959. Touhy was shot and killed on the front porch of his sister’s home less than a month later, presumably by old enemies in the syndicate.

Edward Bremer died of a heart attack following a swim at his Florida home in 1965. His father, Adolph, had met the same fate in a Seattle hotel in 1939. Tom Brown, the corrupt detective who conspired with the Barkers, was never prosecuted. He was fired after a civil inquiry and died in 1959 in Ely, Minnesota, where he ran a liquor store.

Dock Barker was shot and killed attempting to escape from Alcatraz in January 1939. Ma Barker’s last living son, Lloyd, who never joined the Barker Gang, was released from Leavenworth in 1947 and was shot to death two years later by his wife at their Denver home. The Barker Gang’s Bill Weaver was felled by a heart attack in Alcatraz in June 1944. Charles Fitzgerald died seven months later, at Leavenworth. Harry Sawyer was released from prison in February 1955 after doctors diagnosed him with inoperable cancer. He died four months later.