Public Enemies (90 page)

Harry Campbell was still in a federal prison hospital in Missouri in 1958; his fate is unknown. Volney Davis was paroled from Alcatraz in the 1950s; according to one source, he died in Oregon in 1978. Wrongfully convicted of taking part in the Urschel kidnapping, Harvey Bailey was finally released from federal custody in 1961 but was immediately rearrested for an old Kansas bank robbery. Released for good in 1965, he married Deafy Farmer’s widow and settled down to a quiet life of carpentry in Joplin. He died in 1979 at the age of ninety-one.

The Barker Gang’s girlfriends and wives faded from public view. Paula Harmon was last seen living with her parents in Port Arthur, Texas, in the late 1930s. Wynona Burdette disappeared, as did Delores Delaney and Harry Sawyer’s wife, Gladys. Mildred Kuhlmann, the Toledo girl whose dalliance with Dock Barker led to the demise of the gang, returned to Ohio, where she married a Sandusky man named Joseph Auerbach; the couple operated a lounge for years. The Auerbachs had two children; today their daughter is married to one of New York’s most prominent criminal-defense attorneys. According to family members, Mildred Kuhlmann Auerbach never spoke of the role she played in the FBI’s war against the Barkers. She died at the age of eighty-five in a Sandusky nursing home on December 10, 1993.
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Then there was Alvin Karpis. After thirty-three years behind bars, Karpis was paroled from the federal prison at McNeil Island, Washington, in January 1969 and deported to Canada. He authored two ghostwritten books, including an autobiography, before moving to Spain in the early 1970s. He died in Torremolinos, Spain, apparently from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, on August 26, 1979.

 

 

 

So much has changed in seventy years, and so little. Many of the War on Crime’s battle sites remain as they did then, out-of-the-way spots, now dusty and cobwebbed, of interest only to the middle-aged crime buffs who come with their cameras and trivia questions. In northern Wisconsin Little Bohemia still sits on the shores of Star Lake. It’s bigger now, with a new bar and lacquered wooden tables in the dining room, the kind of sturdy place where tourists can grab a cheeseburger before an afternoon swim. The foyer walls are lined with cuttings about that night in 1934, but the simplest questions draw friendly shrugs from the bartenders. On a bright August afternoon in 2002 Emil Wanatka’s son was there, visiting from his Florida retirement; the poor man couldn’t get away fast enough when someone asked what it was like playing catch with Baby Face Nelson.

The Barker deathhouse in Oklawaha, Florida, still sits amid silent oaks dripping with Spanish moss on the shores of Lake Weir. Abandoned for years now, it’s filled with an absentee owner’s garbage, empty boxes, and a child’s yellowing hobby horse; close your eyes and you can almost see Earl Connelley scrambling across the grass to escape Freddie Barker’s bullets. There’s a historical marker beside the field where Pretty Boy Floyd died in far eastern Ohio. Ellen Conkle’s home was torn down years ago, and the area is being reclaimed by the surrounding woods. On a cold December day the wind blows leaves across the yard where Purvis shouted for his men to “Fire!” There’s not another farm in sight. It’s an eerie, barren place.

A concrete marker was erected on the country road not far from where Bonnie and Clyde were killed in northwest Louisiana. It’s a sad, forgotten spot, hard to find, littered with green-glass shards of broken beer bottles and used condoms. The Biograph is still there, despite periodic attempts to tear it down; there’s no marker where Dillinger fell, just a cracked stretch of concrete, pockmarked with black splotches of ancient bubble gum. In the summer of 2003 an office building was going up in the rear parking lot where Chicago detectives accosted the Dillinger Squad that night.

People still live in Dillinger’s flat on Lexington Avenue in St. Paul, in the Joplin apartment where Bonnie and Clyde killed two policemen, in the Dillinger farmhouse outside Mooresville, and in the small frame house where Baby Face Nelson died. Some occupants know their home’s history; others, like the family living in the Italianate home Alvin Karpis rented at the Indiana lakeshore, are startled to learn that a murderer once laid his head in their master bedroom.

Jimmy Probasco’s place is gone. So is Louis Cernocky’s; the ladies at the local historical society look skeptical when told one of the area’s leading citizens was a welcoming host for John Dillinger. The Green Lantern is gone, too; not even photographs remain. So is the house in suburban Chicago where the Barkers held William Hamm and Edward Bremer. The Crown Point jail sits abandoned. There’s a faded pink marker on the building where Frank Nash was snatched off Central Avenue in Hot Springs. On a blustery January day, a man and his teenage son linger a second to read it, then shrug, then walk on.

They don’t know the stories. So many people don’t. More than two dozen sons and daughters of the Dillinger Squad’s men were interviewed for this book; only a handful fully understood what their fathers had lived through. By and large, relatives of the outlaws and their “molls” knew even less or didn’t care to know more. The dark side of their heritage has split more than one of these families. The sons of Frank Nash’s widow do not speak to this day. One beseeched the author to tell him more about his mother. His half-brother hung up the phone.

You can still find the public enemies, if you know where to look. Their graves lie, mostly unnoticed, in remote country cemeteries and along the busy avenues of twenty-first-century Middle America. In the Crown Hill Memorial Park in Dallas, Bonnie Parker is buried beside a budding hedge, a Bally Total Fitness in view to her left, an H&R Block and a Hollywood Video to her right. Three bundles of artificial flowers wreath her headstone and its jarring inscription: AS THE FLOWERS ARE ALL MADE SWEETER BY SUNSHINE AND THE DEW, SO THIS OLD WORLD IS MADE BRIGHTER BY THE LIKES OF FOLKS LIKE YOU. Clyde lies across town in a padlocked, weed-strewn graveyard in west Dallas. He is buried in a corner with his brother Buck, next to their parents, about thirty feet from the white-concrete side wall of Many’s Transmission Service. The headstone’s inscription reads, GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN.

That’s more than one can say about Machine Gun Kelly and the Barker family. An hour northwest of Dallas, in the tidy country cemetery at Cottondale, Texas, Kelly molders in a pauper’s grave. The only marker is a six-by-eight-inch brick with his name misspelled: GEORGE B. KELLEY, 1954. The Barkers couldn’t afford that much. Their graves lie in a row in a windswept graveyard outside the town of Welch in far northeastern Oklahoma. For decades several of their resting places were unmarked. Recently someone adorned them with tiny steel markers inscribed with Biblical verse. LET US NOT FORGET, Fred’s reads. HE WHO GAVE US LIFE, UNDERSTANDS ALL THE REASONS.

Two hours south, Pretty Boy Floyd is buried in the Akins Cemetery beside his parents, in a quiet field dotted with Floyd family tombstones; there is a comforting, familial quality here, as if Floyd were welcomed back into the bosom of his kin. By contrast, Baby Face Nelson’s grave feels cold and functional. Buried beside an access road at the St. Joseph’s Cemetery in the River Grove section of Chicago, Nelson lies between his wife, Helen, and his mother, beneath a string of five identical blue-gray markers. The Gillis family tombstones have the look and feel of discarded paving stones; standing among the graves, one is distracted by the distant roar of jetliners at O’Hare International Airport a few miles north. LESTER J. GILLIS, Nelson’s marker reads. DIED NOVEMBER 27 1934. AGE 26 YEARS.

Fittingly, only Dillinger’s grave retains a dash of flair. He is buried in a meadow of thick grass in Indianapolis’s vast Crown Hill Cemetery. His tombstone, a four-foot obelisk that looms over neighboring graves, has a single word, DILLINGER, flanked on both sides by an ivylike decorative flourish. Tourists come to see it all the time. In 1991 the children of a woman named Maude A. Grubb asked the cemetery to bury her near Dillinger. She lies a hundred feet away, the words JOHN D. carved in a corner of her headstone. “They said she always had a thing about Dillinger,” a cemetery official says.

It’s a peaceful place, in the way cemeteries are. Squatting in the damp grass, surrounded by the graves of grocers, lawyers, and farmers, you hear no echoes of machine-gun fire, no ghostly screams of dying men, no reminder at all of Dillinger’s fourteen months of fame. Like his peers, Dillinger was not Indiana Jones or Luke Skywalker. He was a man, five-feet-seven, 145 pounds. It’s startling to realize he’s actually still there, just an arm’s length beneath the grass. You can sit beside Dillinger’s grave with the morbid knowledge that, given a shovel and a few hours, you could literally touch the man’s body. You won’t do that, of course. Instead you run your hand over his tombstone. It is nothing more and nothing less than polished granite—smooth, hard, cold. Real.

The primary source materials for this book are the FBI’s files on the War on Crime’s major cases, which have been released in bits and pieces since the mid-1980s. The files themselves line a series of shelves in a basement reading room at FBI headquarters in Washington. You can leaf through them there or, if you’re hardheaded (like me), you can buy them outright, several hundred thousand pages of internal reports, telegrams, correspondence and witness statements, at a cost of ten cents per page. My copies fill a half-dozen file cabinets. I’ve cited a sampling of the documents I used for this book in the Notes. (The codes in the Notes refer to the FBI cases: “BKF” is the Bremer kidnapping file; “UF” is the Urschel kidnapping; “Jodil” is the John Dillinger file; and so on.)

The main areas where I’ve relied on published sources are the background sections on the FBI and the criminal gangs. There are several good biographies of J. Edgar Hoover. Probably the best remains Curt Gentry’s
J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets.
Also helpful were Fred J. Cook’s
The FBI Nobody Knows;
Ralph de Toledano’s
J. Edgar Hoover, the Man in His Time; The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI,
by William Sullivan with Bill Brown; the salacious but well-researched
Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover,
by Anthony Summers;
The FBI Story: A Report to the People,
by Don Whitehead; and two books by Richard Gid Powers,
G-Men: Hoover’s FBI in American Popular Culture
and
Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover.
An outstanding analysis of the War on Crime’s sociological context can be found in Claire Bond Potter’s
War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men, and the Politics of Mass Culture.
Also worth reading is David E. Ruth’s
Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918-1934.

Many books were helpful in understanding Depression-era America. Among the best were
The ’30s: A Time to Remember,
a collection of articles edited by Don Congdon; and two books by T. H. Watkins,
The Great Depression: America in the 1930s
and
The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America.

For background on Pretty Boy Floyd’s early career, I relied on FBI files, newspapers in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, and Michael Wallis’s outstanding
The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd.
Wallis enjoyed extensive access to Floyd’s family, and it shows. Curiously, he made no use of the FBI’s Kansas City Massacre file, which was released during the 1980s to a dogged Kansas City newspaper-reporter-turned-professor, Robert Unger. A book that does is Jeffrey King’s
The Life and Death of Pretty Boy Floyd,
which suffers from a lack of firsthand sources and feels colorless by comparison. For anyone interested in the Kansas City Massacre, I heartily recommend Unger’s
The Union Station Massacre: The Original Sin of Hoover’s FBI.

The story of Bonnie and Clyde has been told in more than a dozen books. One of the best remains the first,
Fugitives: The Story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker,
by Emma Parker and Nell Barrow Cowan. I also recommend
Running with Bonnie and Clyde: The Ten Fast Years of Ralph Fults,
by John Neal Phillips. Phillips did a good deal of original research for his book, including interviews with Blanche Barrow.

Background on Melvin Purvis can be found in Purvis’s FBI file, which is available via Freedom of Information Request. Purvis told a sanitized version of his life story in the book he published after leaving the FBI,
American Agent.
For personal detail, I am deeply indebted to Purvis’s son Alston, who is writing a biography of his father, and to Purvis’s former secretary, Doris Lockerman. The story of how Purvis was hoodwinked into arresting Roger Touhy was pieced together from FBI files, Touhy’s 1954 appeal at the Federal Archives in Chicago, and Touhy’s own book,
The Stolen Years.

Details of Machine Gun Kelly’s early life can be found in multiple articles that appeared in various Memphis newspapers, and in an odd little book his son Bruce Barnes published in 1991,
Machine Gun Kelly: To Right a Wrong.
While accepting a number of canards his father passed on, Barnes does an admirable job of filling in gaps in Kelly’s life story. The Urschel ransom negotiations are chronicled in FBI files and in a florid 1934 book written by E. E. Kirkpatrick,
Crimes’ Paradise: The Authentic Inside Story of the Urschel Kidnapping.

I found background on Baby Face Nelson’s early career in a series of 1930 and 1931
Chicago Tribune
articles pointed out by that indefatigable researcher, Tom Smusyn. The first biography of Nelson,
Baby Face Nelson: Portrait of a Public Enemy,
written by Steven Nickel and William J. Helmer, was issued during my research. I found this a disquieting book, laden with all manner of unsourced information, including a story of Nelson meeting with Dillinger in the summer of 1933. After finding no one in the field who could substantiate these stories, I ignored them.