Public Enemies (54 page)

A little after four o’clock McLaughlin ran forward and lobbed gas grenades into the lodge. One or two of the deputies fired guns as well, until Clegg told them to stop. As the first curls of gas rose inside the house, a woman’s voice yelled out from inside: “We’ll come out if you’ll stop firing.”

“Come out and bring everyone with you, with your hands up,” Purvis shouted. A moment later the gang’s women—Jean Delaney, Helen Gillis, and Mickey Conforti, hugging her bulldog pup—appeared on the porch. Agents rushed into the lodge but found no one inside. On the beach behind the building they discovered footprints leading into the woods. For the first time the enormity of the debacle hit Purvis. As the women were led off he stood and stared, dumbfounded, running the events of the night through his mind, as he would again and again for the rest of his life. Two men were dead, and Dillinger was gone.

 

It was beginning to snow as the agents trickled into Birchwood Lodge for breakfast that morning. Purvis couldn’t bring himself to eat. In his darkest dreams he’d never conceived of a moment as nightmarish as this: Dillinger was gone, one of his men was dead, and they had killed a civilian. Purvis felt personally responsible.

On the drive to the airport Purvis thought of tendering his resignation. Out on the runway, waiting for the plane back to Chicago, he overheard a group of men cursing him by name for bungling what the press was already calling “The Battle of Little Bohemia.” It got worse when Purvis returned to the Bankers Building that afternoon. A petition had begun circulating in Wisconsin calling for his resignation. URGE PURVIS OUSTER, blared the
Chicago American
’s evening headline. DEMAND PURVIS QUIT IN DILLINGER FIASCO.

By noon Little Bohemia was a national scandal. In Washington, Hoover stepped before a crowd of reporters and tried to explain what had happened; for the moment, he wasn’t so sure himself. Testifying before a House committee that afternoon, Homer Cummings pleaded for armored cars and airplanes. “If we had had an armored car up there in Wisconsin,” he said, “our men could have driven up to the house where Dillinger was. The terrible tragedy then would not have happened.”

Cummings’s pleas were drowned out in the din of scathing commentary, much of it fueled by the Bureau’s go-it-alone policies. Wisconsin politicians, echoing complaints from the Chicago police and Matt Leach’s Indiana State Police, criticized the Bureau for failing to work with local authorities. “There has been a pathetic lack of cooperation between federal, state, and local authorities,” snapped Senator Royal Copeland, chairman of the Senate Racket Investigating Committee. The special prosecutor, Joe Keenan, shot back: “I don’t know where or when we will get [Dillinger], but we will get him. And you can say for me that I hope we get him under such circumstances that the government won’t have to stand the expense of a trial.”

For the first time, the Bureau found itself the target of withering press attacks. In fact, it was the first many Americans had ever heard of the Bureau of Investigation or J. Edgar Hoover or Melvin Purvis; several newspapers ran articles explaining who they were. More than one suggested Hoover would be forced to resign. COMIC OPERA COPS, the
Milwaukee Sentinal
called them. “The government authorities . . . have made [the Dillinger manhunt] a farce-comedy—except that it has turned to tragedy in killing innocent bystanders rather than the hunted desperado,” the
Chicago Times
editorialized. In his syndicated column, Will Rogers joined the jeering section. “Well, they had Dillinger surrounded,” Rogers quipped, “and were all ready to shoot him when he came out. But another bunch of folks came out ahead; so they shot them instead. Dillinger is going to get in accidentally with some innocent bystanders some time, then he will got shot.”
¹

Back on the nineteenth floor, Purvis tried to avoid the reporters, but it was impossible; they thronged the hallway beyond Doris Rogers’s desk. Simply walking to the elevator meant running a gauntlet. When they managed to corner him Monday night, Purvis tried to put a positive spin on things. “We’ve got more evidence to work on than we ever had before in hunting Dillinger,” he said. “We’ll have him before long. His trail is getting broader every minute.”

Doris Rogers was struck by how beaten the agents appeared as they returned to their desks that day. They seemed shell-shocked, but it was more than that; it was the first time, Rogers realized, that many of the younger men understood they could actually get killed. Their thrilling postgraduate job was no longer a game. For the moment, none of the men could bring themselves to talk about what had happened. No one wanted to talk about Jay Newman, who lay in a Wisconsin hospital bed, nor about Carter Baum, an office favorite. Baum’s body was returned to Washington, where it was buried in Rock Creek Cemetery.

“I am in a rather depressed mood,” Cummings told reporters after the private service. “In any event, this will serve to accentuate the seriousness of the problem which confronts the people of this nation. As I have said before, those who had expected that the campaign against organized crime would be easily won were those who did not realize the situation. As things move along, there inevitably will be disappointments, setbacks, and sorrows. We have had a setback. We have been touched by sorrow. That is the part which makes all of us the more determined to go on. We will go on. This campaign against predatory crime will be finished.”
²

Internally, Hoover’s reaction to Little Bohemia was curiously muted. The man who fired off blistering memos to agents a minute late for work had almost no criticism for Clegg and Purvis. Too many senior men were involved—men Hoover had hired—to identify a scapegoat. Of all the internal reports generated in the following two weeks, the sole note of disfavor came in a memo Hoover wrote three nights after the raid, summarizing a talk with Purvis. In an out-of-character bit of understatement, Hoover wrote he told Purvis “that I wanted less raiding and more confidential informants.”
³

The more Hoover learned, the more ringing his defense of his men. In a memo to the attorney general, Hoover wrote, “I do not believe . . . the facts which have been presented me to date [justify] any criticism leveled at the Agents for the action which they took in this matter. They were approaching a known gangsters’ hide-out, and they saw three men leaving this hideout. These three were called upon to halt, but instead of doing so, they entered an automobile and proceeded to drive away, and consequently, the Agents fired.” In the same memo, Hoover went out of his way to defend Purvis, pointing out that Hugh Clegg, as Assistant Director, “was in charge of the detail at all times.”
⁴

He would not be so sanguine for long.

 

 

As Hoover spent that Monday trying to fathom what had gone wrong, the five men of the Dillinger Gang struggled to reach safe havens. None had an easy time of it. By daylight police had thrown up roadblocks all across Wisconsin and Minnesota. Hundreds of flannel-clad lumberjacks and vigilantes poured from their homes, grabbed up shotguns, and piled into cars, scouring the back roads in search of the gang. First to reach safety was Tommy Carroll. His car bogged down on a muddy logging road; striking out on foot, he managed to hitchhike back to St. Paul.

Dillinger, meanwhile, accompanied by Van Meter and Hamilton, drove their stolen Ford coupe south, dropping the car’s owner outside the village of Park Falls, Wisconsin, around nine A.M. Then they, too, headed for St. Paul. Sticking to country roads, they dodged the posses and crossed into Minnesota without incident. Figuring the city’s northern approaches would be guarded, Dillinger circled south.

There, at 10:30, the trio approached the bridge over the Mississippi River at Hastings, twenty miles below St. Paul. A policeman named Fred McArdle, accompanied by three deputy sheriffs, was parked at the bridge’s southern end, checking license numbers against an FBI bulletin in his lap. As Dillinger approached the bridge, McArdle was startled to recognize the plate. He pulled out to give chase, but just as he did, a cattle truck edged in front of him. By the time McArdle’s car reached the far side, Dillinger was gone.

McArdle and the three deputies pressed northward, toward St. Paul, hoping to catch up; they had no radio, and thus no way to alert anyone that Dillinger was heading into the city. Ten miles north of the bridge, McArdle spotted the Ford, which was driving at barely forty miles an hour in an effort to avoid attention. One of the deputies fired at its rear tires, missing. The Ford surged forward. Dillinger bashed out the rear window and opened fire.

For several minutes a wild running gunfight ensued at more than eighty miles per hour. As the two cars hurtled toward South St. Paul, a bullet struck John Hamilton in the lower back, and he slumped down in the front seat, badly wounded. Rounding a sharp curve, Van Meter spun to the right, veering onto a dirt path called Cemetery Road. Momentarily losing sight of the car, Officer McArdle drove past. By the time he noticed the Ford was no longer in front of him, it was gone.

Van Meter found a secluded spot and pulled over. Hamilton was bleeding heavily and needed a doctor. First, Dillinger realized, they needed a new car. They cruised the dirt roads south of the city for an hour without spotting one. Finally, around noon, Van Meter parked on the side of a gravel road three miles south of South St. Paul. At 12:45 a Ford approached. It was driven by Roy Francis, a district manager for the Northern States Power Company. Francis was on his lunch hour, taking his wife and their infant son for a drive to help the baby sleep. Ahead, Francis saw a man standing in the road.

It was Van Meter. He was holding a pistol. “I’m sorry to trouble you,” he said as Francis stopped his car, “but I’ve got to have your machine.” Francis stepped out and began to raise his hands. “Keep your hands down,” Van Meter said, “we won’t shoot you.”

Mrs. Francis, carrying her baby, got out of the car as Dillinger helped Hamilton into the backseat. As he did, Van Meter was apparently struck by a pang of envy. “What do you do?” he asked Francis.

“I work at the power company,” Francis said.

“You’re lucky to have a nice job and family,” Van Meter said.

Before leaving, Dillinger patted the baby on the head. “Don’t worry,” he said, “we like kids.” After a few minutes, Van Meter and Dillinger drove both cars away. The Francis family walked two miles to a service station and called for help.

Hamilton was in excruciating pain as they hid the stolen coupe on a side road and transferred the guns to the Francis car. The shooting meant St. Paul would soon be crawling with FBI agents. Dillinger decided to head to Chicago, with a dying man in the backseat.

Outside a tarpaper shack deep in the north woods, a fifteen-year-old girl named Dorothy Schroeder was pinning up clothes to dry when she saw the man tromping through the brush toward her. His green fedora, tie, brown suede jacket, and gray slacks marked him as a stranger.

“Where is Woodruff from here?” the man called out as he approached. The man was clearly lost. Dorothy went and got her mother. The man was standing in the yard when Mrs. Schroeder walked out.

“Can I buy a cup of coffee?” Baby Face Nelson asked.

The FBI car Nelson had stolen had thrown a rod that morning, barely an hour’s drive west of Little Bohemia. Rather than raise suspicion by hailing a ride, Nelson had struck off across country. He’d walked twenty miles into the woods before he stumbled onto the shack.

In the kitchen Mrs. Schroeder handed him a cup of coffee and a slice of buttered bread; he thrust three dollar bills at her over her objections. Nelson was sipping the coffee a few minutes later when Mrs. Schroeder’s aunt and uncle, Ole “Ollie” Catfish and his wife, Maggie, walked up. Catfish, a weathered sixty-seven-year-old Chippewa who spoke broken English, used the shack to tap maple trees. He and his wife had walked the seven miles from their home outside the town of Lac Du Flambeau. Nelson explained that he was a game warden and would need to stay with them two or three days. Catfish didn’t object. That night Nelson slept in the Catfishes’ bedroom, on a bed beside the elderly couple. Chicago was a long way off. He had no idea how he would get there.

 

 

While the nation remained transfixed by the unfolding story of the FBI’s pursuit of Dillinger, the Barker-Karpis Gang’s days of relative anonymity were drawing to a close. While most of its members hid in Toledo, Dock Barker had remained behind in Chicago with his old Tulsa pal, Volney Davis. Both men chafed at the gang’s inability to launder the Bremer ransom; fences in Reno and St. Paul had declined to take it, saying it was simply too hot.

In early April, running low on money, Dock drove to Toledo to sit down with Karpis and his brother Fred. He had been talking with Dr. Moran, the drunken abortionist who performed their cosmetic surgeries. Moran insisted he could launder the Bremer ransom, and Dock wanted to try it. Against their better judgment, Karpis and Fred agreed.

Dr. Moran was almost giddy when Dock Barker came to his office in the Irving Park Hotel on April 15 and handed him $10,000 wrapped in a newspaper; the gang agreed to pay 6.25 percent for every dollar he exchanged at local banks. Moran gathered a motley assortment of his underworld clients, including one of Dock’s Oklahoma pals, a gonorrhea case named Russell Gibson, also known as Slim Gray; a neuralgia case, an old prison pal of Moran’s named Izzy Berg; and a diabetes case, an aging former state legislator named “Boss” John McLaughlin. McLaughlin brought in more men, including his chauffeur, his seventeen-year-old son Jack, and a thirty-four-year-old bookie runner named William Vidler.