Public Enemies (18 page)

It was then that the FBI arrived in town. Dallas agents had discovered that Kathryn had family in Coleman and fanned out across the area, seeking to question them. It took only a day for word of their arrival to reach Kelly. Just before noon on August 23, he drove up to Coleman’s farmhouse. He ran inside and told Coleman, “I need a piece of paper.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Coleman asked. Kelly explained. When Coleman handed him a piece of paper, Kelly wrote something down, slipped it into an envelope, and sealed it.

“Give that to Kathryn,” he said, “and tell her ‘Mississippi.’ ”

Kelly hopped back in the car and drove off, heading east. When Kathryn arrived back at the farm several nights later, she read Kelly’s note and cursed. “He’s a damned fool,” she told her uncle before driving off in search of her wayward husband.

 

 

Throughout those blazing-hot late-summer days, as the nation’s attention remained riveted by the hunt for Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger kept busy on his own little-noticed crime spree, ricocheting between dozens of towns in Indiana, Ohio, and northern Kentucky, casing banks between side trips to visit the World’s Fair and a girlfriend or two. He kept on the move, though at some point he appears to have rented two apartments, in East Chicago and Gary, to use as hideouts.

Dillinger remained unknown to the public, but his robberies had attracted the notice of a detective named Matt Leach, who worked for the fledgling Indiana State Police. Leach, whose obsessive pursuit of Dillinger would become an Indiana legend, was a Serbian immigrant who arrived in western Pennsylvania in 1907 at the age of thirteen.
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Three years later the family moved to Indiana when Leach’s father took a job in a Gary steel mill, and Leach worked in the mills before joining the U.S. Army in 1915. After serving with John J. Pershing’s expedition against Pancho Villa and on the Western Front during World War I, he returned to Gary and became a policeman, moving up through the ranks to head the department’s vice division. As a local cop Leach was active in the American Legion, and when its national chairman, Paul McNutt, was elected governor of Indiana in 1932, Leach was named first captain of the state police force McNutt formed. Only the superintendent of police, Al Feeney, ranked above him.

Much like the FBI, the Indiana State Police was ill equipped to fight crime. In 1933 its forty-one members (including clerks) were, like Leach and Feeney, political appointees, charged with cruising state highways on motorcycles and a handful of old cars with no two-way radios; before Dillinger, their biggest headaches consisted of directing World’s Fair traffic and apprehending a band of chicken thieves.
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But Leach, gaunt and serious, was game for bigger things. He read books on psychology and prided himself on being an astute analyst of criminal types. Unfortunately, what most people noticed about him was his stutter, which became more pronounced at times of stress.

When newspaper articles described an unidentified bank robber as having leaped over a railing to rob the bank in Dalesville, Leach was intrigued. This yegg had a flamboyant streak, which suggested to Leach that he might move on to bigger and better targets. On a hunch, Leach drove to Muncie to interview Dillinger’s teenage partner, William Shaw, who was in the jail. Shaw named Dillinger. Leach checked with Dillinger’s parole officer, who reported that he had disappeared.

Two weeks after the Dalesville job, on Friday afternoon, August 4, farmers spotted a dark blue Chrysler sedan cruising past the green cornfields outside the eastern Indiana farm town of Montpelier. At precisely 2:40 P.M. the car stopped in front of the First National Bank on Main Street, which had been robbed just three years earlier. Dillinger, wearing a straw boater, walked inside, drew a revolver, and smiled. “This is a stickup,” he announced, chewing a piece of gum.

As his partner Harry Copeland forced three employees onto the floor, Dillinger leaped a low railing and asked the bank manager, Merle Tewksbury, how much money the bank had on hand. As Dillinger scooped cash off the counters, Copeland corralled a pair of arriving customers, also forcing them to the floor. At one point a teller reached for an alarm. “What are you trying to do, set off that alarm?” Dillinger demanded, still chewing his gum.

“I would if I could,” the woman snapped.

It was a perfect robbery. After herding the employees and customers into the vault, Dillinger and Copeland stepped back onto the sidewalk ten minutes after entering the bank, carrying $10,110 in cash and coins in a single sack; they had left behind exactly forty cents. “Looks like the bank’s being held up again,” an old man standing on Main Street remarked as they emerged.

Dillinger turned and smiled. “I’m not surprised,” he said, before ducking into the Chrysler and driving off.
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Neither was Matt Leach. The rail-leaping stunt convinced Leach that Dillinger was behind the Montpelier robbery, and he redoubled his efforts to bring him in, putting the homes of Dillinger’s father and sister under surveillance. A few days later, Leach received unexpected assistance from a private detective named Forrest Huntington, who worked for the Montpelier bank’s insurance company. At the Muncie jail, Huntington grilled William Shaw for names of anyone Dillinger might contact. Shaw produced the name of an ex-con in Lebanon, Kentucky, and from the Kentucky man Huntington wrangled the address of an apartment Dillinger was using in East Chicago, Indiana.
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On Monday, August 14, Leach and a squad of state police raided the East Chicago apartment and arrested three ex-cons. One claimed Dillinger had been staying off and on at East Chicago’s Inland Hotel. A few days later the snitch volunteered he had heard that Dillinger had relocated to an apartment in Gary. Leach raided that apartment, but Dillinger had moved on, taking an apartment in Chicago.

By late August, the manhunt was gaining momentum. More insurance investigators joined the chase, and on August 25 one of them, a divisional manager for the Pinkerton Agency in Cincinnati, passed a tip to the Dayton Police Department that Dillinger was dating the sister of a state prison inmate named Jenkins. A phone call to Michigan City produced the name of Mary Longnaker. Two Dayton detectives swung by Longnaker’s rooming house on West First Street and, ushered in by the landlady, searched her room. They found a letter from Dillinger.

The landlady volunteered that this Mr. Dillinger wrote regular letters to her tenant Miss Longnaker; she volunteered to telephone the detectives the next time one arrived. A few days later she proved as good as her word: a new letter had arrived. In it, Dillinger promised to visit soon. Excited, the detectives prevailed on the landlady to rent them a room, and she agreed. A few days later they moved in and sat in wait for Dillinger.

 

 

The house Alvin Karpis rented for the summer lay on a secluded thread of dirt road that snaked along the southern shore of Lake Michigan east of Michigan City, Indiana. In the woods behind the dunes lay scores of bungalows, many the summer homes of wealthy Chicagoans. Karpis rented his from a Cicero politician connected to the Syndicate. Located on a rise above the lake, the house was a striking Spanish mansionette, with white stucco walls and a red-tile roof. The sunken dining room featured a brass chandelier and a Steinway piano.
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Most days Karpis and his teenage girlfriend Delores Delaney lazed on the beach or barbecued with friends, chief among them the old yegg Ed Bentz, who had parted with Machine Gun Kelly before the Urschel kidnapping. For amusement they watched Bentz teach the fine art of robbing banks to another neighbor, a small, blond twenty-four-year-old from the rough Polish neighborhoods around Chicago’s Humboldt park. It was the same kid who until that spring had been a gangland chauffeur in Reno, and whom Karpis had introduced around St. Paul. Everyone called him Jimmy—Jimmy Burnell, Jimmy Burke, Jimmy Williams, whatever alias he was using at the time. His real name was Lester Joseph Gillis.

History would know him as Baby Face Nelson.

Seven decades after he entered American public life, Baby Face Nelson remains the least known of the Great Crime Wave’s major figures. Overshadowed by Dillinger, his eventual partner, Nelson and his background were long cloaked in mystery; for years what little information detective magazines gathered was riddled with myths and half-truths. Writing in 1963 John Toland introduced Nelson simply as “a young man the [Dillinger] gang . . . met in an underworld tavern.”

In fact, by the time he joined forces with Dillinger in 1934, Nelson was an up-and-coming gang leader in his own right, his exploits notable for both their geographic diversity—he was equally at home in San Francisco, Reno, and Chicago—and their gratuitous violence. He was a figure of contradiction: a family man who traveled with his wife and sometimes their two small children, he was to earn—and wholeheartedly deserve—a reputation as the most violent of the Depression-era outlaws, a manic multiple murderer who drew disdain even as Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd attained the status of folk heroes. At his worst, Nelson was a caricature of the public enemy, a callous, wild-eyed machine-gunner who actually laughed as he sprayed bullets toward women and children in at least two of his robberies. Nelson’s behavior was so clichéd that it was as if he were acting out scenes from a gangster movie, perhaps Jimmy Cagney’s 1931 hit
Public Enemy.

Gillis, or Nelson as he will be referred to hereinafter, was tiny, just over five-feet-four, which begins to explain the boulder-size chip on his shoulder. He was born on December 6, 1908, the seventh and last child of Belgian immigrants, Joseph and Mary Gillis. His father, described as a brooding man who drank heavily, worked in a tannery. The Gillises were upstanding people, with no history of problems with the law. The high hopes they had for their blond little boy would be dashed again and again. From an early age, Nelson was headstrong and insecure, the kind of boy who picked fights with teenagers a head taller. By the time he was eleven he was running with a gang of teenage toughs, leaping over soda counters to yank money from cash registers and stealing cars. Among his friends was a kid named Jack Perkins, who would be at his side in 1934. In time, Nelson’s truancy became so chronic he landed at a school for wayward boys.

On July 4, 1921, when Nelson was twelve, he found a pistol in the car of a friend’s father. Thinking he might scare some children playing in an alley, Nelson fired the gun over their heads. A ricochet lodged in one boy’s jaw. The police arrested Nelson. It was his first encounter with the law; it also began his obsession with guns. Even at the height of his pursuit by the FBI, Nelson rarely missed an issue of
Field & Stream,
with its articles on the latest weaponry. A juvenile court, ignoring Nelson’s pleas that the shooting was an accident, sentenced him to twelve to fifteen months in a state reformatory.

He served a year. Back at home, Nelson was free to pursue his second obsession—automobiles. As an adult, Nelson was a car nut; between robberies, he could often be found hanging around a garage, talking with mechanics. As a thirteen-year-old the only way he could drive was to steal a car, and he did—often. The police arrested him again, and this time, in October 1922, he was packed off to the Illinois State School for Boys in St. Charles. Eighteen months later he was paroled. This time he managed to remain free five months. Caught in a stolen car, he was sent back to St. Charles in September 1924.

By the time Nelson was paroled the following summer, his father was dead. Joseph Gillis had quit his job to buy a restaurant that was now failing, and he had grown despondent. He was found dead, his head beside a kitchen gas jet. Low on money, Mary Gillis was forced to take in boarders, and Nelson tried to help out, taking a job as a mechanic at a Chrysler dealership. Three months later the cops caught him in another stolen car. Back to the reformatory he went. Nine months later he earned a parole, and went back to work at the dealership.

In early 1927 he was laid off. Nelson was eighteen now, a skinny blond brimming with nervous energy. He joined a couple of pals stealing tires, until police caught them one night inside a car dealership. He got off with a year’s probation and managed to wangle a job in the garage at Commonwealth Edison. It was while working at Commonwealth Edison that Nelson fell in love. Her name was Helen Wawrzyniak, a surname her family Anglicized to Warwick. She was a neighborhood girl, a mousy fifteen-year-old who worked after school as a clerk in the toy department at Goldblatt’s on Western Avenue. When she got pregnant, they married, signing papers at the Porter County Courthouse in Valparaiso, Indiana, on October 30, 1928. The following April Helen gave birth to a son they named Ronald, who was followed two years later by a daughter, Darlene. The family moved in with Nelson’s mother.