Public Enemies (20 page)

“Who are they?” Nelson asked.

“One is Homer Van Meter,” Bentz said. “Went to stir for eight years for shooting at a policeman in South Bend. The other’s name is Dillinger.”

No, Nelson said, no strangers.
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As FBI agents fanned out across the Southwest in search of Machine Gun Kelly, they assembled a list of Kelly’s known associates. Topping the list was his bank-robbing partner, Eddie Bentz. On August 18, as the names and addresses of Bentz’s brothers and sisters spit out of FBI Teletype machines across the country, Bentz was standing in a grove of trees outside of Grand Haven, Michigan, a resort town on Lake Michigan. Standing beside him was his new protégé, the former Lester Gillis. This was the day Baby Face Nelson would stage his first real bank robbery. “Now if you fellows will crowd around here I’ll explain where each man should go,” Bentz announced. He went over each man’s role. Nelson was to lead the gang inside the bank.

Something was bothering Nelson. “Bentz,” he interrupted, “I’m afraid we’ll miss the big money by you staying outside.”

“What the hell do you mean?” Bentz asked.

“Well, it requires experience to have those people open those safes.”

“You got me up here against my better judgment,” Bentz said. “I agreed to take the street and drive; now you expect me to go inside? Who’s to take the street?”

Nelson nodded toward their driver, a Touhy man named Monahan. “Freddie here could drive and take care of the street.”

“Impossible!” Bentz blurted. “You propose to put an inexperienced man on the street? He doesn’t know the first thing about cleaning a street.
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I wouldn’t agree to it—not in this town.”

“Will you go in if we leave two men outside?” Nelson asked.

Bentz fumed. “All right,” he finally said. “But now we’ll take one machine gun in with us. You take it in.”

“Okay with me,” Nelson said.

Then Bentz took out his diagrams, and they went over everything one last time.

A cool breeze was blowing off Lake Michigan as Bentz and Nelson strode into the Peoples Savings Bank a few minutes before its three o’clock closing time. Nelson, carrying a picnic basket, walked down to the last teller cage, slid a twenty-dollar bill beneath the grillwork, and asked for two dollars in nickels. He was nervous. When the teller slid him the nickels, Nelson asked for another two dollars in dimes. Beside him, Bentz snickered. Nelson and the teller exchanged glances. Nelson awkwardly whipped the Thompson out of the picnic basket and yelled, “Hands up!” The teller pressed a silent alarm.

Two other gang members entered the lobby as Bentz ordered the bank employees and two customers to lie on the floor. Nelson covered them as the others yanked down window shades. Their driver pulled up in an alley behind the bank. As the others rifled the teller cages, Bentz ordered the cashier to open the vault. Bentz stepped in and began shoveling packages of bonds into laundry sacks.

The alarm rang at a furniture store across the street. The store owner, Edward Kinkema, who doubled as Grand Haven’s mortician, grabbed a shotgun and ran into the street. Spying the getaway car in the alley, Kinkema raised his gun, and the getaway driver drove off. Kinkema began yelling that the bank was being robbed.

Inside the bank, Nelson turned his head. “Hurry, we got a rank!” he yelled. A policeman. Bentz peeked through the window and saw people running up and down the streets. “Don’t shoot unless they start shooting first,” he ordered.

Nelson was first out the door, pushing the cashier in front of him. Across the street Kinkema saw him and fired. Nelson ducked, then fired in return, bullets from his submachine gun shattering several car windows. Bentz came out next, one arm around the waist of a teller. The others followed, herding hostages before them.

Then they noticed the getaway car was gone. “Our car—where the hell is it?” someone yelled.

For a moment Bentz was too stunned to speak. Then, spying Kinkema crouched behind a car across the street, he raised his pistol and shot out more car windows. Kinkema ran back into his store. Other gang members fired bursts up and down the street, sending townspeople fleeing for cover. Bentz and Nelson gathered the hostages into a scrum and walked the group down the street, away from the bank. When he reached an intersection, Bentz jogged into the oncoming traffic, waving his pistol, and forced a Chevrolet to stop. The woman driving the car refused to get out until Bentz shoved his gun in her face. Nelson and the others leaped inside—all except a gang member named Earl Doyle, who was tackled by a bank manager and arrested. Nelson demanded that Bentz circle back for Doyle, but Bentz was stopping for no one.

They were in trouble. The “git” was in the getaway car, forcing Bentz to drive the escape route from memory. Worse, the commandeered Chevy had barely a gallon of gas. Eight miles south of Grand Haven they spotted a car parked at the side of the road. They ordered the two women inside to get out and took the car, but two of its tires soon went flat. The gang commandeered yet another car, this one driven by four college students. They didn’t reach Long Beach until dawn.

They pulled up near a local riding academy and counted the take. It was miserable, barely $3,500, or roughly $600 a man. The next morning, Bentz moved out of his Long Beach bungalow. He’d had enough of Baby Face Nelson and his little gang of amateurs. He would never see Nelson or any of the others again. Back at his beach house, meanwhile, Nelson crossed the road to tell Alvin Karpis about his first real bank robbery. But Karpis was gone. He had a job of his own to handle.
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“Have you checked out that medicine kit and everything’s all right?” Freddie Barker asked.

“Yeah,” said Karpis. “We’ve got everything in there.”

The mood in the living room was tense. Everyone was there: Freddie and Dock Barker, Alvin Karpis, Bill Weaver, old Chuck Fitzgerald. Everything was set: the guns were oiled, the ammo checked. No one was eager for this job but they needed the money. Karpis had flown out to Reno and passed the Hamm ransom at a cost of 7.5 percent, but even in 1933, $95,000 cut fourteen ways didn’t last forever.
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“We’ve got the booze,” Karpis went on, “in case we have to wash out any holes anybody gets put in them, and I’ve got the morphine and all those little vials with them. I got quarter-grain and half-grain vials there. Plenty of bandages and everything.”

Barker forced a laugh. “You know,” he said, “it just might be that we’re going to need some of that stuff on all of us today.”

The five men rose and walked out to the cars.

Every Wednesday morning the Minneapolis Federal Reserve shipped the payroll for the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant to the railway depot in South St. Paul. There two messengers picked up the heavy bags of cash and, escorted by two police officers, walked around the corner to the South St. Paul post office, where they picked up more cash.

That morning when the train coasted to a stop at 9:19, Karpis and the Barkers were waiting. The two young messengers, Joe Hamilton, twenty-one, and Herbert Cheyne, twenty, took the bags, exited the station, and turned up an alley along with the two uniformed officers assigned to escort them that morning: Leo Pavlak, a rookie patrolman and father of two, and John Yeaman, a father of three. Standing at the head of the alley, inside a café on North Concord Street, Dock Barker’s friend Bill Weaver watched them approach.
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Nervous, he had already downed a beer. In his right hand he carried a shotgun wrapped in newspaper.

Weaver watched as Officer Yeaman slipped into his squad car in the alley in front of him. From watching the policemen work the last two weeks, the gang knew Yeaman would sit in the car and wait for the others to come out of the post office next door. Weaver was assigned to make certain Officer Yeaman stayed put. Meanwhile, Officer Pavlak accompanied the messengersaround the corner into the post office, where a few moments later they reemerged in front of the building.

Just then a black sedan pulled up in front of the post office. Karpis was behind the wheel. Dock Barker, dressed in denim overalls, jumped out and trained a sawed-off shotgun on Officer Pavlak. Chuck Fitzgerald, wearing a gray suit, followed, a pistol in his hand. “Stick ’em up!” Barker yelled.

Pavlak froze, then slowly raised his hands above his head. Fitzgerald bent forward and took his gun.

“Throw down those bags!” Barker commanded. The two men did as they were told. Fred Barker slipped out of the car and positioned himself in the street, circling warily, a submachine gun in his hands.

Around the corner, Officer Yeaman finished his break and began to back the car up the alley toward Concord Street. Standing beside the car, Bill Weaver threw the newspaper off his shotgun, raised it, and fired through the driver’s window. The blast struck Yeaman in the head, knocking his cap off; he slumped in his seat, badly wounded.

Startled by the shots, Dock Barker thought the gang was under attack. He raised his shotgun into Officer Pavlak’s face, shouted, “You dirty rat son-of-a-bitch!” and fired. The blast all but decapitated Pavlak; he died instantly. Fred Barker began firing as well. Spotting Yeaman’s squad car, he opened fire, hitting the wounded officer in the head and chest. Fred then wheeled in a circle, shooting into storefronts all around him. Everywhere passersby dived for cover. The two messengers hit the ground, then scrambled beneath a parked truck.

Behind the wheel of the getaway car, Karpis also thought they were under attack. In fact, no policeman had fired a single round. Suddenly Fitzgerald fell, struck by a ricochet. “I’m hit!” he yelled. Both Barker brothers thought Fitzgerald had been hit by fire coming from inside the post office. Dock pulled two .45 caliber pistols from his overalls and joined Freddie as he fired on the building’s brick facade. Windows shattered. Women screamed.

After a minute the Barkers stopped firing, picked up the money bags, and turned toward the car. “Goddamnit, don’t leave me here!” cried Fitzgerald. He lay on the sidewalk. The Barkers threw the money bags in the car and returned for Fitzgerald, lifting him into the backseat. Bill Weaver ran up and jumped in the car, and Karpis stomped the accelerator. The car shot forward, swerving to avoid a streetcar. With Freddie shouting out directions from the git, Karpis turned up a hill and within minutes was into the countryside.
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“Fuck! Fuck!” Fitzgerald cursed from the backseat. Blood was streaming down his legs.

“Where ya hit?” Freddie asked. “It looks like you’re hit in the leg.”

“In the hip!” Fitzgerald said. Stopping at the first gasoline cache, they jabbed Fitzgerald with a shot of morphine and washed his wound with alcohol. Karpis headed toward Chicago. They gave Fitzgerald two more shots of morphine on the way, but by the time they crossed the Illinois line he was thrashing in pain. Karpis drove past downtown, left the highway, and coasted to a stop in the driveway of a friend’s home in Calumet City, a gritty suburb on the Indiana border.

After finding a doctor for Fitzgerald, Karpis drove back to his lake house. At the house he and Delores Delaney sat around the kitchen table talking until it got late. He told her he had been on a business trip to New York; she knew enough not to ask questions. At one point, Delores said, “Well, I got something to tell you.”

Karpis braced himself. “What is it?” he asked.

“I’m pregnant.”

“You’re what?”

“Yeah, I’m pregnant.”

“Well, how in the hell did this happen?”

“You’re grown up,” Delaney said. “How in the hell do you think it happened?”

“You should have been a little more careful,” Karpis said. Immediately he saw it was the wrong thing to say. He bent over and kissed her. “Well, it’s okay,” he said quietly. “We’ll figure out what to do. I’m sure you don’t want a baby right now, do you?”

Delaney sulked.

“I tell you what,” Karpis said. “I’m going to have you go to St. Paul and visit your sister and I’ll make arrangements for an abortion. You want to do that?”

After a moment she nodded.

Karpis adopted a cheerful, encouraging tone. “While we’re at this,” he went on, “why don’t you go ahead and have your tonsils taken out at the same time? You get everything done at once.” Nels Mortenson, a prominent St. Paul doctor they knew, could do it.

“All right?” Karpis asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “All right.”

The next day, Karpis swung by Freddie Barker’s South Side apartment. “George Ziegler wants to see you,” Barker said.

Karpis found Ziegler at a Cicero tavern. “What’s going on, George?” Karpis asked.

“Well, I don’t exactly want to see you,” Ziegler said. “But there’s some fellows in the outfit downtown, they want to ask you some questions.” The outfit. The Syndicate. Karpis was immediately on guard. “What have you been up to, anyway?” Ziegler asked. He meant:
What have you done to anger the Mob?