Public Enemies (23 page)

As they did, the Kellys emerged from the tavern. They took a taxi to a Cicero garage and picked up their new car. By noon they were gone. Not until an hour later did Purvis realize his mistake. At 2:00 he sent men to stake out the Michigan Tavern and kept them there through the weekend. Weeks afterward, when Hoover realized what had happened, he scrawled on a memo: “This was a miserable piece of work.”

Just hours before the Kellys’ narrow escape from the FBI in Chicago, John Dillinger arrived back in Dayton, hoping to rekindle his romance with Mary Longnaker. As it happened, that very afternoon the two detectives watching Longnaker’s boardinghouse had given up the surveillance and returned to their desks.

Longnaker’s landlady telephoned police when Dillinger showed up.

“He’s here,” she told the night sergeant, W. J. Aldredge.

“Who’s here?” Aldredge asked.

“John Dillinger, you dumb flatfoot!”

Within an hour police had the boardinghouse surrounded. Sergeant Aldredge and the two detectives, Russell Pfauhl and Charlie Gross, met the landlady at the backdoor. Dillinger, she whispered, was upstairs, in Longnaker’s room. Pfauhl, cradling a shotgun, and Gross, armed with a submachine gun, crept up the carpeted stairs. At the top, they knocked on Longnaker’s door. A moment later Longnaker opened it. Detective Gross stepped into the room, followed by Pfauhl. Dillinger, wearing an undershirt and gray suit pants, was standing in the living room, holding a sheaf of photographs he had taken at the World’s Fair.

“Stick ’em up, John,” Gross said. “We’re police officers.”

Dillinger slowly raised his hands, the photos fluttering to the floor. For a split second his hands wavered.

“Don’t, John,” Pfauhl said, leveling the submachine gun. “I’ll kill you.”
¹⁹

A little after midnight, at almost the same moment Dayton detectives arrested Dillinger and escorted him in handcuffs to the city jail, Alvin Karpis and the Barker brothers sat in a darkened Hudson sedan on Jackson Street in Chicago’s financial district. The car sat in the shadow of the Bankers Building, nineteen floors below Melvin Purvis’s window, but Karpis’s attention was drawn to the Federal Reserve Building, a block ahead through the gloom. As he watched, two men emerged onto the sidewalk, one of them wheeling a hand truck stacked with bulging sacks. Two armed guards followed them.

“Okay,” someone said.

Karpis eased the Hudson ahead as he pushed a button on the dashboard. From behind the car a dense cloud of black smoke poured, forming a smokescreen intended to block oncoming traffic; Karpis had ordered the smoke machine installed because he was worried about the heavy flow of tourists driving west from the World’s Fair at the lakefront. Karpis had also had bulletproof glass installed in the driver’s side window and the entire car lined in armor plate.

A moment later, the Hudson pulled to the curb beside the Federal Reserve couriers and their guards. Fred Barker and George Ziegler, handkerchiefs drawn over their faces, leaped out and trained submachine guns on the messengers, who handed over the five bulky bags on their dolly. The two were back in the car in less than a minute. Karpis pulled away, following the git he had drawn; Ziegler’s sidekick, the tall, tubercular Bryan Bolton, sat beside him with a Thompson on his lap. Two blocks west he swerved right on Franklin, sped north two blocks, then veered left onto Adams, heading west. The Hudson shot down Adams and soared across the Chicago River bridge.

At Halsted, Karpis turned north—straight into an oncoming Ford coupe. The two cars collided violently, sending the gang’s Hudson crashing into a telephone pole at the northwest corner of the intersection. As it happened, two uniformed Chicago policemen were standing on the southwest corner, walking toward their beats. One, Maurice Fitzgerald, forty-six, ran across Halsted to the wrecked Ford coupe, where inside several women could be heard screaming.

The second policeman, Miles Cunningham, a thirty-five-year-old father of two, stepped toward the Hudson. Dock Barker, a .38 in his right hand, emerged from the car, whose front end was caved in. “Cops!” he yelled. Bryan Bolton raised his submachine gun and fired a burst directly into Officer Cunningham, who crumpled, dead. Dock cried out; one of Bolton’s ricochets struck his right pinky finger, knocking the diamond out of a new ring. As Karpis and the others piled out of the Hudson and commandeered a passerby’s car, Bolton turned and began firing at Officer Fitzgerald, who took cover behind a traffic sign.

Furiously the gang began transferring items into the commandeered car. As they drove south, Karpis noticed the gas tank was nearly empty. At Ash-land Avenue they jumped out and stopped a second car, once again ordering its occupants out and transferring the bags and the guns. They drove in silence to a garage on the southwest side, shut the doors behind them, and emptied out the five money bags. It was then they learned that they had just stolen fifty pounds of mail.

The Barkers were furious. “Who the hell set this thing up?” Dock snapped, studying his bleeding finger. Ziegler looked sheepish as Dock turned on Bolton. “For Christ sake, you might have shot my whole hand off!” Fred Barker stepped in. “These things’ll happen,” he said. “There’s no need of arguing about this. The big thing is, did anybody leave their damn fingerprints in that damn Hudson? That’s more important than anything right now.”

The shoot-out in the heart of downtown Chicago was front-page news across the country. The next morning, at his South Side apartment, Karpis spread the Chicago papers across his kitchen table. Around ten Fred joined him. At first glance they were stunned by headlines of the massive manhunt launched by police and the FBI: 10,000 HUNT FOR POLICE KILLER GANG, blared the
Chicago American.
On closer reading Karpis realized things weren’t so bad. Detectives had found several guns in the abandoned Hudson, but apparently no fingerprints. The police, in fact, were saying they believed the robbers to be some combination of Machine Gun Kelly, Verne Miller, and Pretty Boy Floyd.

“I don’t know what the hell to tell you,” Karpis said. “This thing is going to turn out real bad, or it may turn out good, but I’ll tell you one thing right now. You go get your mother outta that building, don’t wait a goddamn minute. There’s too many people knowing now where you live and your mother lives.”

Fred made a face. He didn’t relish the idea of confronting his mother. “If you want, I’ll go with you,” Karpis said. “I know how you are. You’ll want to put it off.”

They found Ma a new apartment on South Shore Drive and arranged to have it furnished. That afternoon, as police raided underworld joints across the city, Karpis and Fred stood in a furniture-rental store, pointing out pieces they wanted for Ma’s new place. Afterward they moved her in. Only then did Ma realize Fred wouldn’t be living with her. For the first time since leaving Oklahoma, she would be alone. To Karpis, she suddenly looked very old and very small.

Later Karpis and Barker walked down to their cars. Fred was clearly irritated at Ziegler for botching the Federal Reserve job.

“Tell that son of a bitch maybe he can find another caper as good as the one that we just went on,” he said.

“Hell, you can’t blame the guy,” Karpis said. “I’m sure he didn’t go on it for kicks. He thought we were going to get money the same as I did. In fact, I already had planned on going to Australia if we had got anything like what we were supposed to have got.”

Barker looked at him. “Australia?” he said.

“Hell yeah,” Karpis said. “You don’t think if I’d have got a lot of money that I wouldn’t get the hell out of this country? This country’s going to be pretty hot. That damn thing in Kansas City where Verne killed all them cops and Frank Nash? This thing is going to wind up being the worst thing that ever happened to guys like us. In another year or so, the government will probably be taking over the banks to stop bank robbery, so you’d better just figure now that we ain’t got too much damn longer to make a lot of money and get away.”
²⁰

Barker made a face; he hated when Karpis got big-picture on him. But he was right. The police were drawing closer. That weekend Chicago detectives traced the gang’s getaway car to the mob mechanic who had serviced Machine Gun Kelly. The mechanic’s detention, in turn, led to the arrest of a syndicate money launderer named Gus Winkler, a man both Kelly and Karpis had done business with. Both were handed over to the FBI. Monday morning Melvin Purvis stepped in front of reporters and announced—inexplicably—that the bullets that killed Officer Cunningham had been fired from the same gun used in the Kansas City Massacre. He speculated that a pair of octagonal glasses Gus Winkler wore might be connected to a pair of glasses Kelly was known to wear.

“There is a possibility that Kelly and Winkler are associated together,” Purvis intoned, “and that they may have had the same idea about octagon glasses, which are used by the extremely sedate type of person. Or they may even have interchanged glasses.”
²¹

Once again others were being blamed for the Barker Gang’s crimes. But it was the heat that police were bringing to bear on the Syndicate that worried Karpis most. Chastened by his meeting with Frank Nitti, he reflected that it might be time the gang left Chicago.

 

 

That Friday night, as Karpis prepared for an urgent vacation, Machine Gun Kelly arrived in Memphis with Kathryn and twelve-year-old Geralene Arnold after a daylong drive from Chicago. Kelly headed straight to the garage attendant’s bungalow on East Raynor Street where he had hidden before; the attendant, a small man whose left side was paralyzed, waved the Kellys in without a question.

The next day, Kelly called at the home of his former brother-in-law, Langford Ramsey, and enjoyed a reunion with his two young sons, Bruce and George, Jr. Years later Bruce Barnes remembered his father that day as a smiling, yellow-haired man wearing a charcoal gray suit, a shoulder holster, and pistol. He said he was an FBI agent on a secret mission and gave the boys $20 apiece he peeled from a fat roll of bills.

Kelly and Kathryn began drinking gin with Lang Ramsey that afternoon and continued well into the evening. At some point, Kelly revealed to Ramsey that he was Machine Gun Kelly. For years afterward Ramsey would claim that he thought Kelly was joking. Whatever he believed, Lang Ramsey agreed to do his former brother-in-law a favor, a big one. The Kellys were running low on money; they needed the cash they had buried on Kathryn’s uncle’s ranch in West Texas, but were afraid to retrieve it themselves. Ramsey agreed to get it for them.

The next morning at dawn Ramsey drove west. Beside him on the front seat sat the homesick Geralene Arnold, whom Kathryn had strong-armed into guiding Ramsey to her uncle’s spread. While the Kellys remained at the house on East Raynor Street, Ramsey steered across Arkansas and into Texas, passing Dallas and then Fort Worth. The eastern horizon was reddening when he coasted to a stop at Cass Coleman’s front gate around five Monday morning. Coleman saw them arrive and stepped into the yard.

“I came after—” Ramsey started to say.

Coleman cut him off. “I know what you came after,” he said. Since last seeing the Kellys, Coleman had been questioned by FBI agents and mistakenly assumed he was under surveillance; the Dallas office wanted to watch him, but it simply didn’t have enough agents.

“Well, I’m contact man for George and Kathryn Kelly,” Ramsey said. “My name is—”

“I don’t care anything about your name,” Coleman said. He told Ramsey he wanted nothing further to do with the Kellys.

“Will it be safe for me to take her furs with me?” Ramsey asked.

“No, it won’t be safe for you to take anything or bring anything,” Coleman said. “You’ll be arrested before you get [a hundred yards]. This place is covered with laws . . .”

“I’m not hot,” Ramsey said.

“You will be before you get far,” Coleman said. “They will tail you out of here.”
²²

Ramsey left, badly shaken. He drove north to the town of Gainesville, stopping at noon at the Western Union office, where he sent a telegram to Kelly: HAD SEVERAL TOUGH BREAKS . . . , it read. DEAL FELL THROUGH. TRIED TO GET LATER APPOINTMENT. BEST PROSPECT WAS AFRAID. IMPOSSIBLE. CHANGED HIS MIND. DON’T WANT TO BRING HOME A SAD TALE. CAN GO ON IF ADVISABLE. WIRE INSTRUCTIONS HERE.

By that point Geralene was begging to rejoin her parents. On the drive to Gainesville, Ramsey dropped her off at the train station in Fort Worth and bought her a ticket to Oklahoma City, where her parents remained under the FBI’s care. It was a fateful decision. No sooner had Geralene left Ramsey than she sent a telegram to her father. It read: MEET ME ROCK ISLAND STATION TEN FIFTEEN TONIGHT. GERRY.

The Arnolds were waiting for Geralene when she arrived in Oklahoma City that night. So was the FBI. The little girl told Pop Nathan everything she knew. The Kellys, she said, were staying at a home on East Raynor Street in Memphis.

This time Hoover was determined the Kellys would not escape. Briefed by Pop Nathan, he phoned William Rorer, the thirty-one-year-old SAC in Birmingham, Alabama, and ordered him to Memphis to raid the East Raynor Street home by first light. It was already past midnight in Alabama, and Rorer, a lean, handsome World War I veteran who had joined the Bureau in 1929, realized he could never drive to Memphis by dawn.

An airplane was his only hope. He phoned and woke the man who ran Birmingham’s sole air-charter service, but the man insisted he wasn’t allowed to fly at night. He told Rorer to try the National Guard, which had planes at Birmingham’s Roberts Field. After several more calls Rorer tracked down a National Guard colonel in Montgomery. The colonel said he was pleased to help but had no authority. Rorer called the colonel’s superior, a National Guard general at Fort McPherson, Georgia, and “after considerable persuasion” managed to arrange a plane for the flight to Memphis.
²³