Public Enemies (13 page)

“Yes?” Blanche answered. She was washing some of Bonnie’s things in a sink. “Who is it?”

“I need to talk to the boys,” Sheriff Coffey answered.

“Just a minute,” Blanche said. “Let us get dressed.”

Clyde was lying in bed beside Bonnie in the adjoining cabin when he heard the exchange. He rose and grabbed his Browning. “That’s the law,” he whispered to W.D. “Get the car started.”

W.D. slipped into the garage as Clyde stepped to the front door. Opening it a few inches, he saw the armored car blocking their escape. He ran to join W.D. in the garage and jumped up on the rear fender of their Ford, peeking through a high window in the door. There, barely ten feet away, standing on the front porch of the leftmost cabin, stood Sheriff Coffey. Clyde raised his Browning and fired through the window. A bullet grazed the sheriff’s neck and he fell, then gathered himself and ran for the tavern.

All the officers opened fire, their bullets chewing up the cabins’ brick facades and shattering windows. Clyde dashed back through his cabin like a madman, firing the Browning through the windows. Everywhere officers scattered; inside the tavern, a crowd of the curious dived beneath the tables. Reloading, Clyde stepped to the front door, kicked it open, and fired an entire clip into the armored car, the bullets pinging up and down its sides. One struck the driver, a deputy named George Highfill, in the knees. A second hit the horn, which began blaring steadily. Highfill panicked and threw the armored car into reverse, backing away from the garage.

As bullets whizzed through the cabins, Buck and Blanche found themselves trapped; there was no entrance to the garage from their cabin. They decided to run for it. Hoisting a mattress in front of them, they walked out their front door and began to step toward the garage.
⁵
The mattress was too bulky, however, and they dropped it. Buck had taken only a step or two when he stumbled, his automatic rifle firing wildly as he fell; a .45 caliber bullet struck him flush in the left temple, boring a hole through his skull and exiting out his forehead. Blanche screamed for Clyde to open the garage door as she helped Buck to his feet; he was alive.

Braving the hail of bullets, Clyde opened the doors and helped the couple inside. They shoved Buck into the Ford, where he joined Bonnie, who had limped in unaided. Clyde jumped into the car and backed out of the garage into the storm of gunfire. A bullet fragment struck Blanche in the forehead; a glass shard struck her in the left eye.

“Oh my God!” she screamed. “I’m blinded!”

Standing on the running board, W.D. opened up with one of the Brownings as Clyde ran the gauntlet of gunfire, bullets hitting the car from all directions. The Ford barreled through the yard, vaulting over a ditch before hitting the highway. Behind it, the deputies and highway patrolmen raced for telephones to arrange pursuit. Three had suffered minor bullet wounds. As the gang drove north, Blanche begged Clyde to stop the car to minister to Buck, who was dying. “No,” Clyde said. “We ain’t stoppin’. Shut up about it.”

 

 

After a whirlwind trip to the World’s Fair, John Dillinger had returned to Indianapolis on July 7, intent on quickening the pace of his crime spree. For the first time he explained his plans for a prison breakout to his teenage partner William Shaw. Together the two men bought Dillinger his first car, a maroon 1928 Chevrolet sports coupe. Dillinger didn’t know how to drive, so Shaw taught him.

Impatient for a major score, Dillinger began casing a downtown bank Shaw had mentioned, the Massachusetts Avenue State Bank. While he did, Shaw disappeared. A few days later, Dillinger received a message Shaw had decamped to Muncie, fifty miles east, after learning police were looking for him in connection with a robbery pulled while Dillinger was still in prison.

Dillinger drove to Muncie on Friday, July 14, and found Shaw and a group of friends lying around an apartment on South Council Street. The apartment’s other occupant was a hard-drinking ex-con named Harry Copeland, a dim bulb Dillinger would use on a number of later bank jobs. That afternoon they took Copeland and drove ten miles west to the farm town of Dalesville, whose bank Dillinger had scouted; they agreed to rob it on Monday.

For some reason, probably because they were low on cash, they decided to rob a Muncie roadhouse, the Bide-a-Wee Tavern, that same night. A few minutes after midnight, Dillinger and a partner walked in, guns drawn, handkerchiefs over their faces, and within minutes backed out of the bar with about $70. On the way out the front door, Dillinger encountered a couple coming in. With a grin he pinched the woman’s bottom; when her male friend objected, Dillinger slugged him.
⁶

Robbing the tavern turned out to be a mistake. The next morning, a Saturday, Dillinger and Copeland had just left the boardinghouse to move Dillinger’s car into the rear garage when they heard someone yell, “Hands up!” It was a pair of Muncie detectives, backed by two patrolmen, who had guns trained on Shaw and the others in an alley behind the house. The detectives, following up on the previous night’s robbery, had easily traced Copeland’s car, a green sedan with yellow-wire wheels.
⁷
Dillinger encountered the officers as he turned his new Chevrolet into the alley. Without a word he threw the car into reverse and backed away. The policemen never saw him. Shaw and the others were taken to the Muncie jail, where they named their accomplice as “Dan Dillinger,” a name that meant nothing to detectives.
^l

Dillinger, shrugging off the arrests of his confederates, went forward with plans to rob the bank in nearby Dalesville. A twenty-two-year-old teller, Margaret Good, was alone in the bank when Dillinger, wearing gray summer slacks and a straw boater, strolled in at 12:45. He asked for the bank president. When Miss Good said he wasn’t in, Dillinger smiled and slid a pistol through the teller cage. “Well, this is a stickup,” he said. “Get me the money, honey.”
⁸

Miss Good, who had been robbed twice in the preceding two years, pointed at the open vault and raised her hands. As Harry Copeland stood by, cradling a pistol, Dillinger leaped over a low railing leading to the vault area. Copeland corralled a trio of customers who arrived as Dillinger scooped up an estimated $3, 500 in cash and a grouping of diamond rings inside the vault. When he was finished, Dillinger led Miss Good and the customers into the vault, shut the door, and strolled out to the getaway car, a green Chevrolet sedan. The two men were in and out of the bank in less than ten minutes.
⁹

It was a smooth and easy job, and he had done it on his own. Dillinger’s confidence was growing.

 

 

After a month, the pursuit of William Hamm’s kidnappers had gone nowhere. Agents in St. Paul had interviewed any number of underworld characters but hadn’t yet uncovered any clue that the job had been masterminded by Alvin Karpis and the Barker brothers, who had settled into lakeside cottages around Chicago for the summer. Ma Barker remained in her Chicago apartment, immersed in her jigsaw puzzles.

Then, on Wednesday, July 19, a call came into the FBI’s Chicago office. A secretary passed it to the SAC, a boyish twenty-nine-year-old South Carolinian named Melvin Purvis who was destined to become a pivotal figure in the War on Crime. Unhappy as an attorney in his hometown, Purvis had enrolled at the Bureau in 1926 and swiftly moved up the ranks. At five-feet-seven, with delicate facial bones and a high, reedy voice, he could pass for a teenager. He was Hoover’s favorite SAC. Their correspondence strikes a far more familiar tone than the director’s letters to other agents. Hoover’s notes began “Dear Mel” and were signed “J.E.H.” or “Jayee.” Purvis addressed Hoover as “Mr. Hoover” until Hoover admonished him to “stop using
mister
.” One of Hoover’s favorite themes was Purvis’s attractiveness to women. At one point, he told Purvis that should he come to Washington for a costume ball, an FBI secretary would escort him “in a cellophane gown.” Hoover ribbed Purvis that a newspaper’s description of him made him sound suited for Hollywood: “I don’t see how the movies could miss a ‘slender, blond-haired, brown-eyed gentleman.’ All power to the Clark Gable of the service.”
¹⁰

“We all suspected Melvin was Hoover’s favorite—we thought he was Daddy’s boy early on,” Purvis’s secretary Doris Rogers remembers. “He obviously was someone Hoover thought was very polished, a kind of ornament, but very bright and ready for the job.”
^m

What set Purvis apart from the deskrows of stolid young agents in their dark suits and shiny black shoes was an air of Southern privilege. Confident to the point of cockiness, he had an ego, a sense of style and entitlement, and he wasn’t afraid to show it. He wore sharply cut double-breasted suits, puff handkerchiefs, and straw boaters. Where other bachelor agents lived six to an apartment and rode the El to work, Purvis arrived in Chicago with his own horse, which he stabled in Lincoln Park and rode on weekends. He brought a manservant, a black man named President, who chauffeured Purvis through the streets in a sparkling Pierce Arrow, “an old-fashioned but real name-droppy car,” Doris Rogers remembers, “the kind of car that turned heads. That’s the way Melvin was. He was seen as very South Carolina.”
ⁿ

That Wednesday, Purvis had been the Chicago SAC for eight months, and as his behavior would show, he hadn’t yet mastered the arcane politics of gangland Chicago. On the phone was the chief investigator of the state prosecutor’s office, a former Chicago cop named Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert. Purvis was working with Gilbert to crack the strange kidnapping of a syndicate con man named Jake “The Barber” Factor. Many in Chicago thought the kidnapping a sham, an effort by Factor to evade extradition to face criminal charges in Great Britain. Purvis believed it was genuine. It was his first major kidnapping case.

That morning Tubbo Gilbert broke the news that the Factor and Hamm kidnappings had suddenly become intertwined. Two weeks earlier, Gilbert had announced to the press that Jake Factor had probably been kidnapped by an Irish gangster named Roger Touhy, whose suburban bootlegging and gambling empire was an old rival of Al Capone’s. With Capone in a federal prison after his conviction on tax evasion charges, Touhy was locked in a struggle with Capone’s successor, Frank Nitti, to take control of several large Chicago unions.

Now Gilbert claimed he had evidence that Touhy had kidnapped Hamm, too. Better yet, Gilbert told Purvis, he had just learned that Touhy and three of his gangmates were in custody after a fender bender that morning in Elkhorn, Wisconsin. There are no records of the conversations between Gilbert and Purvis, but by late that afternoon Gilbert had Purvis believing Touhy was responsible for the Hamm kidnapping, too. Purvis made no independent investigation of Touhy. As far as he was concerned, Gilbert’s word was enough for the Bureau.

Friday morning Gilbert and a pair of Purvis’s men arrived in Elkhorn, and afterward the prisoners were ferried to Chicago, where they were fingerprinted by an FBI man. Touhy was led into Purvis’s office. Purvis told him he was being held for the Hamm kidnapping. “What do you mean a ham, Mr. Purvis? A ham sandwich?” Touhy cracked. “Or did I kidnap a ham steak?”

The next day, William Hamm and several eyewitnesses to his kidnapping were brought to Chicago to identify Hamm’s kidnappers. Looking through a one-way mirror, Hamm wasn’t at all sure they were his kidnappers and said so to reporters. But one eyewitness, a cab driver named Leo J. Allison, was, and that was all Purvis needed. He emerged from his office to tell reporters that the Bureau had assembled “an ironclad case against Touhy” for the Hamm kidnapping.

“We have positive identification of all four of the prisoners,” Purvis said. “The government men worked carefully and thoroughly on this case, and we are sure of ourselves.”
¹¹
In Washington, Hoover was thrilled. “[T]his is a splendid piece of work, which was consummated only by the untiring and resourceful efforts of the entire Chicago staff,” he wrote Purvis.
¹²

It was nothing of the sort. In fact, Purvis was fooled into arresting the wrong men by a corrupt investigator in league with the Chicago Syndicate, a fact that would be confirmed twenty years later by a federal court. Roger Touhy would ultimately be convicted of the false kidnapping of Jake Factor; only after two decades in prison was he able to convince a judge he had been framed. In 1954 Judge John Barnes, in an opinion that led to Touhy’s release, noted that the Illinois state prosecutor’s office, which he found to be dominated by Tubbo Gilbert, had never brought charges against a single member of the syndicate. Judge Barnes found “sinister motives [by] Captain Gilbert and the politico-criminal syndicate for wanting to remove [Touhy] permanently from the scene.” With Purvis as his unwitting ally, the judge found, Gilbert and the FBI “worked in concert to convict Touhy of
something.
”
¹³

“That Touhy was indicted at all in the Hamm matter,” the judge concluded, “is something for which the Department of Justice should answer.” Of course, it never did. Within days several prosecutors involved in the case expressed doubts about its strength, but for the moment no one cared. That Saturday Hoover and his College Boys could rejoice: one of the two major fronts in their new War on Crime had been conquered. No one realized that night would bring a third.

Two miles west of the Oklahoma Capitol, in a beige-brick mansion topped by a burgundy Mission-style roof, two couples were sitting in wicker chairs around a card table in their sunroom, playing bridge. The man of the house, a stolid forty-three-year-old oilman named Charles F. Urschel, sat across from his wife, Berenice. He wore linen slacks and a tie and had comb marks in his oiled hair. His wife, one of the wealthiest women in the Southwest, was the widow of famed wildcatter Tom Slick, who before his death had run the world’s largest independent oil company. Charles Urschel had been Slick’s partner and was now an executor of his estate, estimated to be worth $50 million before Wall Street’s collapse. When Urschel’s wife died, it was only natural he should marry Berenice. The couple’s partners were Walter Jarrett, a roundish, balding oilman, and his wife.