Public Enemies (97 page)

For simplicity’s sake, it will be referred to as “FBI” throughout this book.

Nell Barrow said Clyde had later attempted to rob another Missouri bank by himself but failed. The bank had been closed for weeks.

Crime historians have long speculated that bribery was behind Dock Barker’s release. According to FBI files, it was. In 1934 an FBI agent interviewed Jack Glynn, a private detective in Leavenworth, Kansas. A local fixer who specialized in securing paroles for federal prisoners, Glynn admitted he had been approached by Freddie’s friend Jess Doyle, who wanted to know how much it would cost to get Dock Barker out of prison. They met at Leavenworth’s National Hotel. Glynn said it would cost between $150 and $300 to get Barker out of prison. Doyle gave him $200 and told him to try. Glynn visited Barker in prison, and on the way out asked a guard the best way to “spring” him. The guard suggested he contact a state senator named Pres Lester. Lester was an old Okie pol; as the senator for McAlester’s district, he had tremendous pull at the prison.

According to Glynn, Lester said $200 would get Barker paroled. Glynn deposited the money in a McAlester bank, payable to Lester. It worked so well Glynn tried it again a month later to free Dock Barker’s old friend Volney Davis. With a bribe paid to Pres Lester, Davis too was furloughed.

Seldom did the worlds of syndicate hit men and rural bank robbers like the Barkers cross, but in Ziegler they did. A rarity among Capone’s gunmen, Ziegler moonlighted as a bank robber, driving out from Chicago to hit banks in rural Illinois and Wisconsin. His claim to fame, however, was the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929, in which he was believed to have been one of the gangsters dressed as policemen who machine-gunned seven associates of gang boss Bugs Moran in a North Side garage. The identities of the shooters have never been proven, but the FBI and Ziegler’s friends believed the story.

No one knew how Ziegler entered Capone’s orbit. He had been a varsity football player at the University of Illinois and served as a second lieutenant during World War I. But in 1925, while working as a lifeguard on a Chicago beach, he had been arrested for attempting to rape a seven-year-old girl. He jumped bail and soon surfaced as a creative hit man for the Capone mob. Among Ziegler’s inventions, it was said, was a time bomb with leather straps that could be tied to a kidnapping victim; it did wonders for extorting money from the target. Ziegler was known for his unfailing courtesy to strangers. “His character was one of infinite contradictions,” one FBI agent wrote. “Well mannered, always polite, he was capable of generous kindness and conscienceless cruelty.”

Ziegler’s partner, Bryan Bolton, was a weak link, and everyone except Ziegler knew it. At forty Bolton had worked as a carpenter, a car salesman and a golf pro before emerging as a driver for another of the St. Valentine’s shooters, “Killer” Fred Burke. Bolton too, the FBI later learned, played a role in the massacre. It was Bolton, two sources told the Bureau, who as a lookout that day in 1929 had given Capone’s gunmen the premature go-ahead to begin shooting, a mistake that allowed Bugs Moran himself to escape. Irate, Capone was said to have ordered Bolton’s execution, a fate he avoided only after Ziegler’s intervention. Bolton’s loyalty to Ziegler was unquestioned.

For decades St. Paul historians have debated what role, if any, six-foot-three-inch, 280-pound “Big Tom” Brown played in the Hamm kidnapping. There were always rumors, but not until FBI files were opened in the late 1980s would the extent of his involvement become clear. According to FBI files, the forty-four-year-old Brown agreed to keep the gang fully updated on what police were doing. In return he was to receive a full quarter of the $100,000 ransom, a cut three times larger than any of the actual kidnappers. The files even raise the possibility that it was Brown who initiated the scheme.

Akers was to play a recurring role in the War on Crime. Though the identity of the informant who tipped the FBI to Nash’s appearance in Hot Springs has never been disclosed, the Bureau’s files strongly indicate that it was Akers who later claimed the $500 reward on Nash.

The raid was conducted by Joplin’s chief of detectives, Ed Portley, who would later write a series of magazine articles about his pursuit of Bonnie and Clyde in the wake of the murders they committed in Joplin that spring.

No one dwelled on the fact that the Bureau had no jurisdiction whatsoever to investigate the massacre. Even though one of its own men had been murdered, it was not yet a federal crime to kill a federal agent. Such a law would not be passed until the following spring.

Jones achieved prominence inside the Bureau with his role in the case of the first FBI agent murdered in the line of duty, Ed Shanahan. Shanahan was a tall, slender I agent in Chicago who one evening in October 1925 stepped up to a car blocking his path in a downtown garage and tapped at the driver’s window. Unfortunately for Shanahan, the driver turned out to be a car thief named Martin Durkin. When Shanahan produced his Bureau identification card and asked him to move his car, Durkin brandished a pistol and shot him through the chest.

Hoover declared Durkin’s apprehension the Bureau’s top priority, and in the ensuing three months, with agents across the country working nights and weekends, Durkin was tracked to New York, then to Los Angeles and San Diego. From California Durkin and his wife drove east across Arizona and New Mexico until a deputy sheriff in Pecos, Texas, spotted a pistol on his front seat. Durkin drove off, but not before the sheriff called the Bureau office in El Paso. A search was launched, and Durkin’s car was found abandoned nearby, at the height of a January blizzard. It was Jones who discovered Durkin had boarded a train to Chicago. Agents arrested him outside of St. Louis.

Nash had visited the Barkers in St. Paul a week before the kidnapping, a fact the Bureau would not learn for months.

A native of North Carolina, Dwight Brantley served in the FBI from 1924 to 1950. In 1957 he was named Kansas City’s police commissioner. He died in 1967 at the age of sixty-eight.

Under questioning William Shaw admitted participating in several Indianapolis robberies. He received a sentence of ten years in a state reformatory for the Bide-a-Wee robbery. Twenty-five years later, Shaw became the principal source for writers researching Dillinger’s early months as a bank robber. He gave extensive interviews to John Toland, Dillinger historian Joseph Pinkston, and a writer named Allanna Nash. In and out of various Midwestern prisons for all but seventeen months of his next forty-four years, Shaw burned to death in a Chicago hotel in 1977 after falling asleep holding a lit cigarette. His body lay unclaimed for a week.

Purvis’s son Alston, now a professor at Boston University, speculates that Hoover’s infatuation with his father was romantic in nature. If so, it was unrequited. Purvis was a dedicated lady’s man who would later marry.

Another sign of Purvis’s Southern heritage: he called black people “darkies.”

Born in 1883, Frank Blake attended Vanderbilt University, where upon graduation he briefly coached the football team. After five years as a rancher, he joined the Bureau in 1919, moving up through the ranks to become the Dallas SAC in 1930. Small and wiry, with a soft Texas drawl, Blake served in the FBI until a heart attack forced his retirement in 1942. He died at his home in suburban Dallas in 1948.

As Depression-era ransom notes go, this one was commendably free of melodramatic threats. It included only one:
Remember this—if any trickery is attempted you will find the remains of Urschel and instead of joy there will be double grief—for some-one
[sic]
very near and dear to the Urschel family is under constant surveillance and will likewise suffer for your error.

Born in Illinois in 1905, Dwight L. McCormack served in the FBI from 1929 to 1944. In later years he served as a juvenile court judge in Dallas. He died there in 1959.

One year later the Majestic would figure prominently in the Lindbergh kidnapping case, when a German-born carpenter named Bruno Richard Hauptmann said he couldn’t possibly have kidnapped the Lindbergh baby because he had been working at the Majestic.

Kelly D. Deaderick, a World War I veteran born in Jonesboro, Tennessee, served in the FBI from 1927 to 1951. In later years he was a prosecutor in Yakima, Washington. He died there in 1970 at the age of seventy-one.

Two other Lansing escapees, “Big” Bob Brady and Ed Davis, had arrived at the Shannon Ranch the previous night with Bailey but had left after dinner. Had FBI agents staged their raid the previous night, as planned, they might have faced a major shoot-out.

For years afterward, Hoover allowed writers chronicling the Urschel case to report that the FBI had apprehended Bates. In fact, as case files make clear, Bates was arrested following an exhaustive investigation by an unlikely source, the American Express Company. Company investigators had been after Bates since he passed traveler’s checks stolen in the Tupelo, Mississippi, robbery in 1932. In the end, his arrest was pure luck. According to an FBI report, an American Express operative was riding a train to Denver from Omaha that Friday, August 11, when he saw Bates aboard the train. The AmEx man alerted Denver police, who made the arrest.

According to an excellent 1992 article in
Serb World USA
magazine, Leach’s real name was Matija Licanin. His family came from the Serbian town of Kordun.

Dillinger cased and may have robbed at least one bank in northern Kentucky. He was suspected but never charged with the August 11 robbery of a bank in Gravel Switch, Kentucky.

The home still stands, at 2000 Golden Gate Drive, in Long Beach, Indiana.

It was probably through the garage owner that Nelson made his first contacts in Roger Touhy’s gang. According to Touhy’s 1959 biography, Nelson worked briefly as a “torpedo” in the labor struggles between the Touhy and Capone outfits; the assignments did not last long, but Nelson’s association with the Touhys would cause him trouble in later years.

In a 1953 article for
Argosy
mgazine, Bentz recalls being introduced to Nelson by an Indiana tavern owner. While possible, he was more likely to have befriended Nelson with the endorsement of a fellow yegg like Karpis.

The establishment was Art’s Army Store at 3318 Michigan Avenue, a retailer of military clothing whose back room was a gathering spot for local hoodlums. Bentz and Nelson were known to have frequented the store in June 1933, as were John Dillinger and Homer Van Meter. Nelson and Dillinger may have met there.