Public Enemies (12 page)

Several members of the gang also returned to the Twin Cities that morning, and if not for the intervention of Tom Brown, the Barkers’ careers would have ended that day. At the house Fred Barker was renting on Vernon Street, neighbors had noticed his strange habits and the arrival and departures of all sorts of large cars at all hours, and had taken to joking that the home’s occupants were gangsters, maybe even the Hamm kidnappers. As the gang piled out of its Buick that morning, one neighbor joked, “There goes the ransom money.”

Not everyone was joking. One young man was suspicious enough to phone in a tip to an editor at the
St. Paul Pioneer Press.
The editor phoned the police who, to the Barkers’ good fortune, turned the matter over to Tom Brown. Brown slipped out of his office and phoned a friend, who alerted the Barkers. All that evening neighbors watched as the gang scurried through the house, slamming doors and tossing suitcases into their cars. When two officers arrived to check out the house the next morning, they found it empty.

 

 

By that Monday, as the Barkers scrambled to escape St. Paul, the rest of the gang had already decamped to apartments in Chicago. There they read in amazement newspaper stories of the Kansas City Massacre. Everyone affiliated with the gang realized Verne Miller must have done it to rescue his best friend, Frank Nash.

In the suburb of Maywood, Dock Barker’s friend Volney Davis paced his second-floor apartment all that morning. “That shooting is sure going to turn the heat on,” he told his girlfriend, Edna “Rabbits” Murray. Davis and Murray were still debating what to do around noon when they heard a car horn blaring. Murray stepped to the window. To her horror, she looked down on the blond head of Verne Miller.

“Is Curly there?” Miller asked.

“Yes,” Murray said.

Davis stepped to the window. “Come downstairs for a minute,” Miller hollered.

Murray watched as Davis walked downstairs, drove Miller’s car into a garage across the street, then handed Miller the keys to his own car. Afterward Miller came upstairs, plopping down on a divan. “I’m all in,” he said. “Had a tough time getting out of Kansas City. Got any iodine?” He had a small wound on one finger. As Murray swabbed it with iodine, Miller’s discourse grew fatalistic. “I’m the hottest man in the country,” he said. “I know I’ll hang for this. I talked to Nash’s wife the night before it happened and told her I would do all I could for Jelly. She’ll put the finger on me.”
²

The next day, Miller returned with his girlfriend, Vi Mathias. They stayed in the Davis apartment for three days, then vanished.

With ten seconds of machine-gun fire and the deaths of five men, the Kansas City Massacre forever changed the American legal landscape. It put the FBI on a wartime footing that in coming months would transform it into the country’s first federal police force. It probably saved Hoover’s job; six weeks later, he was formally reappointed as the Bureau’s director. Most important, it led to the public declaration of an ambitious federal War on Crime that in time would thrust Hoover’s men into their first confrontations with real criminals.

None of this happened overnight. Contrary to myth, there was no morning-after press conference in which Hoover declared war on gangsters. He took calls from reporters in his office, but his answers were limited to the massacre itself. “We will never stop until we get our men,” he told the
Kansas City Star
hours after the shootings, “if it takes ages to accomplish it. There will be no letup in this case.”

In fact, the driving force behind the broader War on Crime was not Hoover but his new boss, the attorney general Homer Cummings, who had spent the spring studying the feasibility of some kind of federal drive on organized crime. The massacre gave the administration the pretext it needed to sell this idea to the public. On June 29, twelve days after the massacre, Cummings announced a series of measures that composed the new War on Crime: the hiring of a special prosecutor, Joseph Keenan; a legislative package that would, among other things, make it a federal crime to kill a federal agent; and the formation of “special squads” inside the Bureau to tackle major cases. Cummings suggested he would study the formation of a federal police force, built around the Bureau, augmented by agents from the soon-to-be disbanded Prohibition Bureau. The
New York Times
carried the story on Page 1.

“Racketeering has got to a point when the government as such must take a hand and try to stamp out this underworld army,” Cummings told reporters, in the first of a series of interviews and speeches he was to give that summer. “We are now engaged in a war,” he told the Daughters of the American Revolution in August, “that threatens the safety of our country—a war with the organized forces of crime.”

Public reaction to this new “war” was by turns encouraging and doubtful. “Defiance of law,” the
Washington Post
editorialized the same day, “has seldom been more flagrantly manifested than it was at Kansas City Saturday.” But government officials had called for wars against gangsters before, and many doubted whether the FBI or any other agency could make a difference. “Department of Justice officials are marvelous at finding and arresting counterfeiters,” one columnist wrote. “Perhaps they will do as well with highway murderers.”

The call for a War on Crime wasn’t without self-interest; Cummings badly wanted a way to focus and grow his shrinking Justice Department. Nor did it create any immediate groundswell of support for federal policing; that was yet to come. In fact, national interest surrounding the FBI’s new headline cases—the Kansas City Massacre and the Hamm kidnapping—paled before that of, say, the Lindbergh kidnapping; intensive coverage was limited to Midwestern newspapers.

But Cummings’s call dovetailed with the desires of New Dealers in Roosevelt’s cabinet, who picked up the attorney general’s cries and placed them in the context of the government’s fight to overcome the Depression. By that autumn the War on Crime would become a centerpiece of Roosevelt’s push to centralize many facets of American government. It would be a focal point of his State of the Union Address in January. Thus a little-known bureau of the Justice Department became a cutting edge of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. If Hoover and his neophyte agents could defeat “name brand” gangsters, it would be immediate and tangible evidence of the New Deal’s worth.

It was with these issues in mind that resources were shoveled toward Hoover in the days after the massacre. Dozens of new agents were hired and hustled into training classes. Guns were purchased and for the first time the men were shown how to use them—sort of. The FBI’s firearms-training program was initially a hit-and-miss affair. Agents in New York trained at one agent’s farm, shooting at pumpkins and soda bottles, while the Cincinnati office prevailed on local police to teach its men. In Chicago the SAC simply handed out pistols and said, “Here they are, boys. Learn how to shoot ’em.”
³
“We had one .32 caliber pistol in the Kansas City office,” one agent remembered. “That was it. I was told one time to get the gun and some bullets and come to a particular office. When I got there, I found out the bullets wouldn’t even fit the gun.”
⁴

This was the state of the army of raw young agents Hoover commanded in his mission to give the White House victories in its two lead cases in the War on Crime. The two investigations quickly became intertwined. On Thursday, June 22, five days after the massacre, Agent Gus Jones received a call from the St. Paul office. Agents there had searched the house Fred Barker had rented, suspecting it was linked to the Hamm kidnapping. They had no idea who lived there, but fingerprints taken from beer bottles at the house turned out to be Frank Nash’s. Hoover’s men scratched their heads: Was Nash somehow mixed up in the Hamm kidnapping?
^j

The same morning, the Kansas City office finally received Deafy Farmer’s telephone records. What they discovered changed the course of the investigation: A series of calls had been placed to an address, 6612 Edgevale, in Kansas City. Agents found the house empty. Agent Dwight Brantley, accompanied by the landlord and a Kansas City policeman, supervised the search.
^k
In a desk drawer they found a pile of papers, mostly telephone and electric bills made out to the Vincent Moore family. In the cellar Brantley discovered empty beer bottles, as well as a two-gallon milk can filled with roofing nails.

An FBI fingerprint expert arrived to dust the house, and within hours the identification was made: Vincent Moore was in fact Verne Miller, as several agents familiar with Frank Nash had begun to suspect. A week later, on July 6, the Kansas City newspapers broke the story, naming Miller and two local hoodlums as the massacre gunmen. For the FBI, Miller became the most wanted man in the country.

Within days agents began to reel in people. Deafy Farmer and his wife were arrested on July 7 when they inexplicably returned to Joplin. Agents tracked Frances Nash to a relative’s home in Illinois and took her into custody. After several days of questioning, all three broke down and told everything: the flight from Hot Springs, the phone calls to Miller. But none could answer the questions the FBI needed answered most: Where was Miller now? And who were his partners?

Gus Jones put together a list of likely gunmen. It included Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, Alvin Karpis, and the Barker brothers. But Jones remained convinced Miller’s confederates were the men Nash had broken out of the Kansas prison: Harvey Bailey, the Oklahoma bandit Wilbur Underhill, and their fellow escapees. Bailey knew it, too, and went to extraordinary lengths to proclaim his innocence. One morning Jones opened a letter and was stunned to see it was from Bailey and his comrades. The letter claimed that Bailey and the others could not have carried out the massacre for the simple reason that they had robbed a bank at Black Rock, Arkansas, that same morning.
We the undersigned are the perpetrators of the robbery,
Bailey wrote. He affixed a collection of the gang’s fingerprints to bolster their case.

Seated in the FBI’s Kansas City office, Jones was still studying the letter on Thursday morning, July 20, when word came of a massive firefight on the edge of town the night before.

It was Bonnie and Clyde.

That night around ten o’clock the Barrow Gang cruised into a tourist court just north of Kansas City, outside the town of Platte City, Missouri. They had fled Fort Smith three weeks earlier after Buck and W.D. got into a wild shoot-out following a grocery store robbery in Fayetteville, Arkansas. After a vain attempt to find Pretty Boy Floyd—they did manage to find his brother Bradley—they had spent much of the time holed up in a motel at Great Bend, Kansas. Their only crime of note had been a raid on a National Guard armory at Enid, Oklahoma, where they made off with five Browning automatic rifles, a half-dozen Colt .45 automatics, and ten thousand bullets. There were so many guns in the backseat, Clyde joked, it was hard to find a place to sit.

By most accounts, the gang had left Great Bend the day before, July 17, camping that night in a field in southern Kansas. On Tuesday morning a farmer found bloody bandages at their abandoned campground and phoned the Kansas State Police. Knowing of Bonnie’s injuries, the police broadcast a multistate alert, urging sheriffs to be on the watch for unusual purchases of medical supplies. That night, after robbing three filling stations at Fort Dodge, Clyde passed the outskirts of Kansas City and arrived at a highway junction in Platte City. The two red-brick cabins the gang checked into stood alone behind a bar, the Red Crown Tavern. Blanche and Buck went in for lunch the next day but left when they spotted the local sheriff, a man named Holt Coffey. That afternoon Blanche drove into town and bought hypodermic syringes and atropine sulfate from a druggist. The druggist thought her purchase odd and telephoned Sheriff Coffey, who remembered the police alert.

The druggist told Sheriff Coffey that Blanche had mentioned that she was staying at the Red Crown tourist court, and with a quick call Sheriff Coffey confirmed that two couples were staying there. Alerted by state-police circulars, he was convinced he was dealing with the Barrow Gang. The sheriff contacted the Missouri Highway Patrol, which sent reinforcements from Kansas City, including an armored car. They decided to strike that night: By evening Sheriff Coffey had gathered thirteen deputies and troopers for the raid. Convening at the Red Crown at midnight, the group had Thompson submachine guns, metal shields, tear gas, and riot guns.

Around one A.M. they moved in, taking positions in front of the two darkened cabins, which were linked by a small garage. Two state troopers climbed to the top of the tavern and trained their guns on the cabin doors. The armored car quietly coasted to a stop in front of the cabins themselves, blocking any exit from the garage. When the car was in position, Sheriff Coffey crept toward the cabin on the left, the one occupied by Buck and Blanche. He banged on the door.