Public Enemies (10 page)

“Joplin,” said Lackey.

Lackey headed northwest up Highway 64. “I sure hope we get out of this state alive,” Nash said a bit later.

“You and me both,” said Lackey.

News of Nash’s sighting in Little Rock, as well as the agents’ plans to head to Joplin, was relayed to Hot Springs, and thus to Galatas. He dialed a Joplin number. The phone rang at the home of Deafy Farmer, the hulking confidence man who eighteen months earlier had sent Alvin Karpis and Fred Barker to St. Paul. Galatas spoke to Farmer for a minute, then hung up and turned to Frances. “This is all going to be taken care of,” he said. “You can meet Frank in Joplin.”

 

 

Two hundred miles north of Hot Springs, amid the browning fields of western Missouri, a very different pursuit continued through that same hot Friday afternoon. Police from across the state, alerted by Floyd’s kidnapping of Sheriff Jack Killingsworth, had scrambled in pursuit, soon aided by dozens of local sheriffs and policemen.

Floyd was steering northwest for Kansas City, speeding up Highway 83, then zigzagging across dirt roads into Hickory County. Thirty-five miles out of Boliver, he had taken over the driving from Richetti, whose moonshine swigging made Floyd nervous. To the sheriff’s surprise, Floyd was downright chatty. For his part, Killingsworth did his best to help the two outlaws. He was acutely aware of the shoot-out that would ensue if they were caught, and he wanted no part of it: he’d noticed the automatic pistol Floyd had in his lap.

Floyd stayed cool as they headed into Henry County, about halfway to Kansas City. At a country store they stopped for candy bars and sodas, and Floyd asked the woman behind the counter whether she had heard any news of the kidnapping down in Boliver. She said a group of officers had just passed by, saying they figured Floyd was making for the Oklahoma border. Floyd smiled.

At midmorning, police were alerted that Floyd’s car had roared through the towns of Wheatland and Quincy. Finally, outside the village of Brownington, Floyd spotted a state patrol car in his rearview mirror. Richetti grabbed the submachine gun. Floyd took the safety off his pistol and calmly told the sheriff, “Wave ’em back.”

Killingsworth took off his panama hat and waved it furiously out the window. It worked; before long the car disappeared. They had been spotted, though, and Floyd was taking no chances. Two miles west of Deepwater, he slowed the car and began looking for a replacement. Within minutes a Pontiac zoomed past. “That looks like a likely car,” Floyd said. He hit the accelerator and gave chase, and they waved the other car to a stop.

The Pontiac’s driver, a Baptist deacon named Walter L. Griffith, appeared confused as Floyd opened the driver’s door and barked, “Move over!” Griffith did as he was told; Richetti and Killingsworth slid into the backseat. In seconds Floyd had the big car rolling north. He told Griffith not to worry. “You seem like pretty good fellas. I believe I’ll let you get out of this.”

At one point an airplane glided over the highway in front of them. Floyd hunched forward and watched it. Around six o’clock he coasted off the road east of Ottawa, Kansas, and brought the Pontiac to a stop in a ravine. They would wait till it was dark to drive into Kansas City.

 

 

Frank Nash and his three captors stopped for a bite to eat in Conway, Arkansas. At a pay phone, Agent Joe Lackey called his boss, Ralph Colvin, at the FBI’s Oklahoma City office. Colvin was thrilled that Nash had been arrested, but he didn’t like the sound of two agents being tracked across rural Arkansas by gun-toting posses. He told Lackey to forget driving to Joplin and to head to Fort Smith instead, where they could catch an overnight train to Leavenworth. Colvin checked train schedules. There was a train leaving Fort Smith at 8:30 that night. It arrived in Kansas City at 7:00 A.M. before going on to Leavenworth. He called Kansas City to arrange an escort.

Meanwhile, in Hot Springs, Dick Galatas took Frances Nash and her daughter to the airport, where he arranged for a plane to fly them to Joplin. When Frances said she was too frightened to fly, Galatas climbed in after her to calm her nerves. At 5:45 the plane touched down in Joplin. By nightfall they were at Deafy Farmer’s house south of town.

 

 

“It’s a hell of a life being dogged around, and having to hide all the time,” Floyd was saying. In the secluded Kansas ravine, he sat on the grass, talking to Sheriff Killingsworth, who leaned back, his head resting on a rock. Walter Griffith sat in his Pontiac, as if guarding it, while Richetti snored lightly in the backseat.

The more he talked, the more depressed Floyd appeared. “There’s no turning back for me now,” he said at one point. “Too many policemen want me. I haven’t got a chance except to fight it out. I don’t aim to let anybody take me alive.”

Killingsworth gave him a look. “They’ll get me,” Floyd said. “Sooner or later, I’ll go down full of lead. That’s the way it will end. I might not have to been this way, you know, but for the damned police. I might be going straight, be living with a family and working for a living. I finally decided, you’re determined I’m a tough guy, a bank robber, that’s what I’ll be. They have themselves to thank.”

Killingsworth, hoping to gain Floyd’s sympathy, mentioned his own family, his wife and young son. A cloud fell over Floyd’s face.

“You shouldn’t kick about one day,” he said. “How would you like to be hunted night and day, day and night? How would you like to sleep every night with this thing across your knees?” He fingered the submachine gun lying beside him on the grass. “I have a son, too. Maybe you think I wouldn’t like to see him. When you get home, you can have your son with you every day and sit and talk with him. All I ever get to do is see mine once in a long while. Then all I can do is stand off and look at him for a minute.”

At nightfall they drove into Kansas City without event. Around ten Floyd pulled to a stop in the packinghouse district. Floyd left the car and made a phone call, then drove to a spot near the corner of Ninth and Hickory. Another car soon coasted up. Killingsworth watched as Floyd and Richetti transferred their guns and a footlocker into the second car. After a minute Floyd got back in the Pontiac and ordered his two captives out onto the sidewalk.

“Wait five minutes and then walk down and get the car,” Floyd said, motioning toward a spot where he intended to leave the Pontiac. “Drive on home and don’t call anyone, ’cause you’ll be watched.” As he drove off, Floyd told Killingsworth to take a set of golf clubs he had left in the trunk. “Something to remember me by,” Floyd said.

“I won’t need anything to remember you by,” said the sheriff.

The train to Kansas City was ten minutes late, and the three lawmen—Frank Smith, Joe Lackey, and Otto Reed—were nervous. They stood on the platform, peering down the track, glancing at the exits. Nash stood by in handcuffs. Suddenly a man approached Lackey. Everyone relaxed when he introduced himself as an Associated Press reporter, in the station by chance. The reporter motioned to Nash: Who was the prisoner?

For the rest of his life, Joe Lackey swore he never answered the reporter’s questions. But someone did. A half hour after the three men and their prisoner boarded the train for Kansas City, the reporter’s dispatch crossed the AP wire:
Frank Nash, one of the last surviving members of the notorious Al Spencer Gang of bank and train robbers that operated a decade ago, was recaptured today at Hot Springs, Arkansas, by three Department of Justice agents—who “kidnapped” him on the streets of the resort city.
The six-paragraph flash described the kidnapping, the escape, and, amazingly, the agents’ intention to take the night train to Kansas City. It went out to dozens of AP offices, including the one in Hot Springs, where Dick Galatas had friends.

Oblivious to the AP story, Nash and the three lawmen traveled to Kansas City in Drawing Room A, Car 11, Nash handcuffed to the upper berth. They were scheduled to arrive at Kansas City’s Union Station at 7:00 the next morning.

 

 

In a hotel room barely two miles from where Frank Nash was stepping onto the train to Kansas City, Bonnie Parker was emerging from her delirium. It had taken six full days, her family would recall, for Bonnie even to recognize her sister Billie, who remained at her side, wiping her brow, changing her bandages. Clyde, too, stayed at her bedside all that week, never leaving for more than minutes.

They were in a bind. They couldn’t stay in Fort Smith much longer. Clyde searched his mind for a safe place Bonnie could convalesce. Dallas was too risky. What they needed was a friend of importance, someone who knew how to hide. The more he thought about it, the more he was certain only one person fit the bill. As soon as Bonnie could travel, Clyde decided, he would go in search of Pretty Boy Floyd.

The phone rang at Deafy Farmer’s house. It was Hot Springs, for Galatas. Galatas took it, listened, then hung up. There was a change in plans. “They’re taking Frank by train to Kansas City,” he said.

Frances Nash searched her mind for someone who could rescue her husband. She had only one hope, her husband’s best friend, Verne Miller. A onetime South Dakota sheriff who turned to crime after an embezzlement conviction, Miller was a rarity among Midwestern yeggs, a successful bank robber who moonlighted as a hit man for the Chicago and New York syndicates; his marksmanship was so accurate it was said he could write his name with a Thompson. A loner, cool and Nordic, Miller robbed banks alongside Harvey Bailey and the Barkers. At the moment, he was living in Kansas City with his girlfriend.

At 10:17 Frances Nash reached Miller at his house on Edgevale Road. Miller already knew Nash had been arrested; a bootlegger friend, Frank “Fritz” Mulloy, had tracked Miller down on the golf course, relaying the message left in Chicago. “What shall I do?” Frances asked Miller. “What shall I do?”

Miller assured Frances he would take care of everything, then hung up. Two hours later, the phone rang at the Farmer house.

“Let me answer it,” Frances said. “I know it must be for me.”

“This is Verne,” Miller said. “I’m down at the station.” Kansas City’s Union Station.

Frances broke down again, sobbing into the phone.

“Don’t take it so hard,” Miller told her. “You’ll see your Jelly again.”

“What shall I do?” Frances sniffled. “Where can I get in touch with you? I can’t go home. I have no place to go.”

They talked for a minute or two more. Miller knew he couldn’t handle the rescue alone. From the station he telephoned the Green Lantern in St. Paul looking for the Barkers, not knowing they were busy with the Hamm kidnapping. He was running out of time.

Joe Lackey, the Roman-nosed FBI agent, hung out the door as the train eased down Track 12 into Union Station. He had been awake for forty-eight hours and his nerves were on edge. Everyone knew what kind of town Kansas City was, rough and corrupt, a magnet for bank robbers, pimps, and confidence men from Chicago to the West Coast. Everything that mattered, from the police to the polls, was controlled by the political boss Thomas J. Pendergast, whose take from gambling, prostitution, and narcotics approached $30 million a year. (One cog in the sprawling Pendergast machine was a forty-nine-year-old county judge named Harry Truman, who would be elected to the U.S. Senate the following year.)

The train was scheduled for a one-hour layover before heading to Leavenworth, but the agents agreed that the risk of staying in Kansas City, even for an hour, was too great. Instead the Oklahoma City office had devised a plan with the Kansas City SAC, Reed Vetterli, a baby-faced twenty-nine-year-old Mormon. Vetterli assembled a squad of lawmen to drive Nash the thirty miles to Leavenworth.

Ahead on the platform, Lackey spied Vetterli, in a dark suit, standing with three men. When the train coasted to a stop, Lackey hopped off and Vetterli made the introductions. Agent Ray Caffrey was thirty years old, an earnest, plain Nebraska native who wore his brown hair parted down the middle. The other two men on the platform, older, seedy, and disheveled, were Kansas City policemen, snaggletoothed Frank Hermanson and Bill “Red” Grooms. Hermanson and Grooms had brought the department’s armor-plated “hot car.”

Lackey briefed the officers, then returned to the train to get Nash. A few moments later, the three lawmen emerged from the train, pushing their prisoner before them. Nash wore an open-necked white shirt and had a handkerchief thrown over his handcuffed hands. The plan was to drive Nash straight to Leavenworth, escorted by the hot car; with any luck, they would all be back by lunchtime.

There was little chitchat. Together the seven lawmen formed a wedge around Nash and herded him up the platform. Quickly they ascended the stairs into the cavernous expanse of Union Station, already filling with early-morning travelers. Agent Caffrey walked in back, his .38-caliber pistol jammed into Nash’s ribs. All across the station, heads turned as the strange phalanx strode across the dramatic open space toward the front archway and the parking lot beyond. Lottie West, a Traveler’s Aid Society worker, was standing in front of the Fred Harvey Restaurant, chatting with the manager, when the eight men marched by. “That must be Pretty Boy Floyd,” Mrs. West remarked, motioning toward the prisoner. The morning papers carried the news that Floyd had arrived in town the night before; it was all anyone was talking about.

The group strode across the plaza to Agent Caffrey’s two-door Chevrolet in the first row of cars. The parking lot was already coming to life, taxis swerving to the curb, a trio of nuns milling about. Caffrey unlocked the passenger door, and Joe Lackey slid in back, followed by Chief Reed. “Get up front,” Lackey told Nash. “We’ll ride like we did out of Hot Springs. That way we can all watch you.”

Nash climbed into the front seat. Frank Smith joined Reed and Lackey in back. The cops, Grooms and Hermanson, stood facing each other by the right front tire, waiting. Reed Vetterli stood beside the car, poised to slide in beside Nash. Ray Caffrey squeezed past the two cops and stepped around the front of the car, making for the driver’s door.