Public Enemies (21 page)

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Well, they’re getting a little skeptical of you. They was asking me if you might be tied with the Touhy outfit or anything.” Frank Nitti’s Chicago Syndicate remained at war with the suburban Touhys.

“Well, you know I’m not,” Karpis said.

“Yeah, I told them that you wouldn’t have nothing to do with, but . . .” Ziegler’s voice trailed off. “Anyway, go on downtown, over to the Motion Picture Operators Union. There’s some guys waiting to see you there.”

As Karpis drove downtown, he tried to relax: if Nitti wanted him dead, he would already be dead. At the union office he found three Syndicate men waiting for him in a back room. Two Karpis knew: Willie “Three-Fingered” White and Klondike O’Donnell. A third man, Phil Deandre, pulled up a chair and asked Karpis whether he was involved with the Touhys. “Hell, you know I’m not,” Karpis said.

O’Donnell smiled. “We know,” he said. But Baby Face Nelson was another matter. Nelson had old ties to the Touhys, and for some reason Nitti wanted Nelson dead. “We found out these guys are out there by you, and well, we’re gonna wipe ’em out,” Deandre said. “What we want you to do is move out ’cause there’s gonna be a lot of heat out there, and we don’t want you getting caught in it.”

Karpis promised he would move immediately. He rose, and Deandre admonished him not to warn Nelson. He patted Karpis on the shoulder. “You’re all right,” he said. “It’s just too bad that you went to stealing and got hot. You should have come and worked for us guys. We need guys like you.”

Karpis’s mind raced. He had to move fast. He drove back to Long Beach and made reservations for Delores Delaney’s flight to St. Paul. The next night, with Delaney safely in St. Paul, Karpis crossed the road to Nelson’s bungalow. “You want to come out to the car with me for a minute?” Karpis asked Nelson.

The two men walked into the evening air. To the north, Lake Michigan was blacker than the night. “Have you got any of these Touhy guys out here?” Karpis asked.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Nelson said.

“Listen. If you have any of them here or whether you haven’t is beside the point. You guys get the hell out of here right away.”

“What the hell? Are you telling us what to do?”

Karpis explained the situation with Nitti. “I’m sticking my chin right out there for a real bad left hook if something goes wrong with this,” he told Nelson. “I’m not supposed to talk to you guys about this but I’m not going to see you guys get slaughtered out here when you shouldn’t be, because you haven’t done anything except steal. So I’m leaving, and I’m telling you guys if you don’t leave, once I’ve left, both of these houses are liable to get blown clear out in the lake.”

Nelson thought a moment. “We’ll be gone by midnight.” He suggested they relay messages through Louis Cernocky in Fox River Grove. Karpis said it wouldn’t be safe, since Frank Nash’s wife, who knew Cernocky’s place, was in FBI custody. Karpis then left, cleaned out the lake house, and drove to a new apartment he had rented, at the South Shore Country Club building in Chicago.

A few days later Ziegler dropped by with a disquieting message: Frank Nitti himself wanted to see him, right away. Karpis swallowed hard. The meeting was set at a downtown bar. Karpis arrived early. The bar was empty except for a bartender, who eyed him nervously. When Nitti, along with Three-Fingered Willie White, walked in, his greeting was chilly. They took seats in a back room. There was a long silence.

“I’m gonna tell you something, Ray,” White began, using Karpis’s alias. “I vouched for you with the outfit. Now we got some questions we want to ask you.”

“Well, go ahead,” Karpis said. “What are they?”

“Well,” White said, “the first one is, did you say anything to those fellas living in them two houses over there? And the second is, can you tell us why they were gone right after we talked to you?”

Karpis had already decided what to say. “I’m gonna tell you the truth,” he began. “I talked to them, and Nelson assured me that there was no rackets guys around there with them, especially none from the Touhy outfit, and that they were strictly bank robbers, and I decided I’d tell them and get the hell out of there because there was going to be trouble out there. I’m the guy. I’m the reason they’re not out there no more.”

Another silence. Nitti stared. “Well, didn’t you tell us you wouldn’t?” White asked.

“I did,” Karpis said, “but I changed my mind on the thing.”

Nitti spoke. “I suppose you have a gun on you,” he said.

“Forty-five,” Karpis said.

Nitti told Karpis to wait outside. Karpis took a seat at the bar. A minute went by, then two. Karpis stared at the clock. Five minutes later, the door to the back room opened. “Come on in, Ray,” White said. Karpis took a seat. He looked in Nitti’s eyes. “We’re gonna give you a pass on this ’cause we know you’re not a racket guy,” he said. “We know Freddie, none of the guys like Frank Nash, Harvey Bailey, or any of you guys, are. There’s only one guy among you that was mixed up in the rackets, and you know as well as I know who that is, that son of a bitch Verne Miller.”

“I didn’t know you guys were hot at him,” Karpis said.

“Everybody’s hot at that bastard,” Nitti replied.

With a final warning never to get mixed up in syndicate business again, Karpis was allowed to leave. He drove home in silence. Delaney was there. She had returned from St. Paul, where she had endured a tonsillectomy and an abortion, then spent five days in a Chicago hospital when the tonsillectomy incisions ruptured. In bed Karpis reached for her. She made a face. “You know, we’re not going to be able to do anything tonight,” Delores said.

“What’s the matter?”

“The doctor says no, not for thirty days after that operation.”

“Jesus Christ,” Karpis said.

They lay in the darkness in each other’s arms, until Delores fell asleep. Karpis wasn’t much for cuddling, but as he watched her there in the dim light, he felt a sense of contentment. Dawn came quickly.

The next day, Karpis drove by to thank George Ziegler, who asked him to take a drive.

“What are you guys going to do now?” Ziegler asked.

“What do you mean?”

“To make money. You guys haven’t been doing anything, have you?”

Karpis didn’t mention the St. Paul robbery, from which they had excluded Ziegler. “Why?” Karpis asked. “What have you got in mind? You don’t need any money right now, do you?”

“Hell yes,” Ziegler said. “I’ve blown what I had on the wheat market. The damn thing took a turn for the bad and here I am, I’m gonna have to make some money.”

“What do you want to do, another kidnapping?”

“No,” said Ziegler. “I got a hell of a good thing.”

Then Shotgun George Ziegler explained: he wanted to hit the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. It sat in the heart of the financial district, adjacent to the Bankers Building, nineteen floors below the Chicago offices of the FBI.

 

 

It was a muggy, damp Labor Day on the Potomac. In the Bureau offices at Vermont and Constitution, Hoover and his men remained focused on Machine Gun Kelly. They had traced the Kellys to Des Moines, but there the trail went cold. Agents were nosing around Kathryn’s old haunts in West Texas and had secured the cooperation of her father, who had allowed agents to search the East Mulkey Street house. But all efforts to determine Kelly’s actual identity had turned up nothing. To the agents who pursued him, Machine Gun Kelly was just a name.

While Hoover’s men scoured the country, the Kellys themselves were in disarray. This was like no other crime they had committed before. This time there were national headlines, and federal agents, from a bureau they had barely heard of, hounding them across state borders, night and day. After fleeing West Texas one step ahead of FBI agents, Kelly drove to Biloxi, Mississippi, checking into the Avilez Hotel on Thursday night, August 24. Three days later he moved to the Avon Hotel on West Beach Boulevard, registering as “J.L. Baker.”

Never the brightest soul, Kelly made the mistake of cashing a handful of American Express Travelers Cheques, and a clerk identified him. Agents from New Orleans scrambled to Biloxi, where word of their arrival leaked to a newspaper. Kelly was standing on a Biloxi street corner on Monday, August 28, when he heard a newsboy cry, “Machine Gun Kelly in town!” He panicked, ran to the bus station, and bought a ticket to Memphis. He had abandoned his luggage, including his clothes and a loaded .45 caliber pistol, at his hotel.

As inexperienced as its agents were, the FBI had learned to watch a fugitive’s old haunts: had Hoover known anything of Kelly’s past, agents might have been waiting for him in Memphis. But they weren’t. Later that day, at a pay phone outside the Memphis bus station, Kelly called his former brother-in-law, an up-and-coming attorney named Langford Ramsey. Ramsey, at the time the youngest lawyer to have passed the Tennessee bar, had no idea the George Barnes he had known eight years earlier was now Machine Gun Kelly, the nation’s most wanted man. Ramsey arranged for him to bunk at the home of a friend, a crippled attendant at a downtown parking garage.

Kathryn, meanwhile, after driving across Texas and Louisiana, arrived in Biloxi to find Kelly gone. Kathryn was beside herself. She was certain Kelly had run off with a woman he knew in Biloxi. Not knowing what else to do, she drove back to Texas, reaching a point south of Temple, where on Saturday night, September 2, she drove up to the house of her longtime maid, Junie.
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Inside, Kathryn slathered her face in cold cream and began to curse her husband. “I don’t know where George is,” she said, “but I’m trying to get in touch with the s.o.b. to get him to surrender so they’ll release me and my mother from that indictment.”
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The next day Kathryn bought a red wig and checked into Waco’s Hilton Hotel, where she spent the day brooding about her mother’s coming trial. She needed to know whether Sam Sayers, the Fort Worth attorney she had hired to represent her mother, had made any progress on her proposal to turn in Kelly. The next morning, Kathryn telephoned Sayers in Fort Worth. “Hello, this is your girlfriend,” Kathryn said.

“Which girlfriend?” Sayers asked.

“Your best girl—the one with the Pekinese dogs. I must see you right away.” She told him where to meet her in Waco.

“I can’t talk to you now,” Sayers said. “You know better than to call me on this phone.” He hung up.
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At wit’s end, Kathryn jumped back in her pickup and drove north toward Fort Worth, unsure how to contact Sayers safely. Just past Hillsboro, at the town of Itasca, she spotted a family of three forlorn hitchhikers outside a filling station. She pulled up beside them. She had an idea.

“Y’all want a ride?” Kathryn asked.

The hitchhikers were Depression refugees, an itinerant Oklahoma farmer named Luther Arnold; his wife, Flossie Mae; and their twelve-year-old daughter, Geralene. They had been thrown off an uncle’s farm outside Ardmore following a bank foreclosure and had been hitchhiking across Texas ever since, living off odd jobs and handouts.
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They eagerly accepted the ride from the red-haired woman in the blue gingham dress.

“What are y’all doing?” Kathryn asked after a bit.

“Just hiking,” Arnold said. “I’m looking for anything that will feed three hungry people.”

Kathryn oozed sympathy. She said she might be able to help. They drove on to the town of Cleburne, where they stopped at a tourist camp for the night. Kathryn paid for everything. The next morning she took Flossie Mae and Geralene into town and bought them housedresses. When they returned to the tourist camp, Kathryn took Luther Arnold aside.

“I like you people, and would like to fix it so you could make a little money,” she said. “Can I trust you?”

“Absolutely,” Arnold said.

“What would you people think if I told you who I am?”

“Go ahead,” Arnold said. “You can trust us.”

“I’m Kathryn Kelly—no doubt you’ve read about me in the papers,” she said. “Mr. Arnold, I am going to place a big trust in you.” She handed him $50 and told him to take the bus to Fort Worth, contact her attorney, Sam Sayers, and find out whether he had struck a deal with government prosecutors.

Arnold agreed. When he reached the lawyer’s office, Sayers said there had been no progress on any deal. When Arnold returned to Cleburne that night, Kathryn began to think. Sayers was a Texas attorney who wouldn’t know the Oklahoma environs where her mother was to be tried. She asked Arnold if he knew an Oklahoma attorney she could hire, and Arnold said he did, a lawyer in Enid. The next morning Kathryn dropped Arnold outside Fort Worth with $300 and a note instructing Sayers to give him a car she had left with him. Arnold was to proceed to Enid, hire the attorney for her mother, then drive south to San Antonio, where Kathryn said she would leave instructions for him at the post office’s General Delivery window.

This time things didn’t go as planned. When Arnold phoned Sayers, the lawyer wasn’t in. Arnold wasn’t disappointed. In fact, he was growing happier by the minute. After a month of tramping across Texas, begging for food and shaving in gas station bathrooms, he was free in a big city, his pockets full of cash. Outside the bus station Arnold asked a Yellow Cab driver where a man could buy a drink. The driver took him to a bar, where Arnold ordered a beer. Afterward Arnold felt even better. He asked the barkeep where he could obtain some female companionship. The barkeep stepped to a telephone, called a number, and in no time a girl showed up. She said her name was Mae.

Arnold and Mae got along so well he bought an entire case of beer. He took it with him back to Mae’s apartment, where the two made themselves at home. After a while Arnold was feeling so good he asked Mae if she had any friends. Before long a girl named Hilda arrived.
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Together Arnold and his two new lady friends and their case of beer enjoyed a long evening.