Public Enemies (24 page)

Rorer and another agent boarded an army plane at Birmingham’s Roberts Field at 3:20 A.M. and touched down at the Memphis airport two hours later, at 5:30. There they were met by the Bureau’s resident agent at Memphis and a half-dozen policemen he had rounded up. The group drove to the foot of East Raynor Street, where uniformed cops were already waiting. East Raynor was a quiet street lined with matching brick bungalows, just off busy Speedway Avenue on the city’s south side. The house at 1408, six houses up from Speedway, was dark. Rorer wasted no time with unnecessary reconnaissance. In the predawn darkness he sent two Memphis detectives creeping up either side of the house. Then he and a detective named William Raney drew their guns and stepped onto the front porch.

No sound came from inside the house. Rorer tried the screen door. It opened. Glancing at Detective Raney, he tried the front door itself. It too opened. Quietly Rorer stepped into the house. In the dim light he could see he was in a cluttered living room. On a divan lay a copy of
Master Detective
magazine; it was opened to an article entitled “My Blood Curdling Ride with Death.” Detective Raney stepped in behind Rorer. To their right was an open bedroom door. On a bed lay two men in their underwear, asleep. Neither, they could see, was Kelly.

Rorer crept down a hallway toward the back of the house, where he could see a screened-in porch; the floor was strewn with empty bottles of Old Log Cabin bourbon. To his right he saw a second bedroom door. Stepping to it, he looked inside and saw a woman in green silk pajamas asleep on a bed. It was Kathryn. Detective Raney, meanwhile, stepped into the front bedroom where the two sleeping men lay. As he did, Kelly, having heard footfalls, stepped from the rear bedroom through a hallway toward the front bedroom. Detective Raney saw his shadow on the wall. He raised his shotgun. A moment later Kelly stepped into the room and came face-to-face with Raney’s two loaded barrels.

Kelly, wearing only underwear, his bright yellow hair rumpled by sleep, was holding his .45.

“Drop that gun,” Raney said.

“I been waiting all night for you,” Kelly said with a smile.

“Well,” said Raney, “here we are.”

Kelly slowly placed his pistol on a sewing machine, then raised his hands. It was over.
^aj
Within minutes the other lawmen poured into the house, handcuffing Kelly, the garage attendant, and the second sleeping man, an unsuspecting friend. Before handcuffing Kathryn, Rorer gave her fifteen minutes to get dressed. She emerged wearing a smart black dress with monkey-fur epaulets and orange buttons and walked curtly to the waiting cars. She told one of the agents she was waiting for a young man to return from Texas with her furs and her Pekinese dogs and asked him to please make sure these things were taken care of.

Kelly went quietly. At police headquarters he was taken to a sergeant’s desk. “What’s your name?” the sergeant asked.

“George R. Kelly.”

“What’s your age and where do you live?”

“I am thirty-seven years of age and I live everywhere.”

By noon, as word spread of the arrests, more than three hundred people crowded in and around the jail to catch a glimpse of the Kellys. Policemen were forced into the street to direct traffic. Thrown into a cell, Kelly brightened as he renewed acquaintances with a dozen Memphis policemen he knew from high school or previous arrests. “Bill! Hey! Gari!” he shouted as officers filed by to see him. Before long Kelly was joshing with everyone. “Lend me that machine gun, will ya?” he asked one FBI agent. To Rorer he quipped: “You ought to start a hamburger stand outside the jail and make some money with this crowd.”

Held in another part of the jail, Kathryn wasted no time betraying Kelly. “I’m not guilty and I can prove it,” she told the reporters who clustered around her cell. “And afterward I’ll be rid of him and that bunch.” Kathryn portrayed herself as an innocent wife who lived in fear of her murderous husband. “I was going back to Oklahoma City tomorrow to give myself up,” she insisted. “Kelly told me he would kill me if I did, but I was going anyway.”

But if Kathryn thought she could talk her way free, she was sadly mistaken. She and Kelly were taken aboard an army airplane the following week to Oklahoma City, where in October they stood trial. Like Albert Bates, Harvey Bailey, and the Shannons, both received life sentences.
^ak
Kathryn ended up at the federal women’s prison in Milan, Michigan, where for several years she acted as an FBI informant in an effort to reduce her sentence. Kelly, Bates, and Bailey were all shipped to Leavenworth, and then, when it opened the following year, to Alcatraz.

Machine Gun Kelly was the first nationally known fugitive the FBI had ever captured, and his arrest marked a turning point in the Bureau’s history. It furthered the notion that there existed a realm of larger-than-life supervillains loose in the land, popularized the idea that the nation was actually at war with these criminals, and catapulted the Bureau into the public consciousness as the nation’s proxy in that war. The Kansas City Massacre, by contrast, though front-page news across the country, had never seized the public’s imagination in the same way.

The story of Kelly’s arrest would become one of Hoover’s favorites, one he told and retold for forty years. According to Hoover’s version of events, as advanced in numerous FBI-approved books, magazine articles, and B-movies, Kelly had pleaded with arresting agents, “Don’t shoot, G-men!” It was the first time FBI agents had heard the term. When agents asked what he meant, Kelly explained that G-man was short for “Government man.” This story, debunked as early as a 1946 article in
Harper’s,
is almost certainly untrue. Hundreds of articles written in the weeks afterward make no mention of it. Years later Kelly himself told his son he’d never used the term. It first surfaced in a series of FBI-sponsored feature stories the journalist Rex Collier wrote nine months later, in July 1934, prompting some to suggest the term “G-man” sprang not from the mouth of Machine Gun Kelly but from the fertile minds of Hoover’s publicity men.

Research for this book, however, indicates that the term actually
did
originate with Kelly’s arrest, though it didn’t happen quite the way Hoover told it. In a single, long-forgotten telephone interview Agent Rorer gave to a
Chicago American
reporter hours after Kelly’s capture, Rorer said it was Kathryn who uttered the historic words. As Rorer told the
American
reporter, at the moment she was arrested, “Kelly’s wife cried like a baby. She put her arms around [Kelly] and said: ‘Honey, I guess it’s all up for us. The ‘g’ men won’t ever give us a break. I’ve been living in dread of this.’”
²⁴

And so a nickname was born.

That Tuesday morning, as steel bars clanged shut behind the Kellys in Memphis, John Dillinger sat in a cell of his own in Dayton, Ohio. For four days sheriffs and deputies from across eastern Indiana and western Ohio had paraded through the jail, showing Dillinger to more than a dozen people who had witnessed bank robberies that summer. He was identified as a participant in robberies at New Carlisle and Bluffton, Ohio, and Indianapolis and Dalesville, Indiana. The Indiana detective Matt Leach had been the first to arrive, just hours after Dillinger’s arrest Friday morning. He interviewed Dillinger in his cell, asking about several different bank robberies. All he got for his effort was a grin. “What are you talking about?” Dillinger asked.

That Tuesday, however, there was only one topic of conversation at the jail, and it wasn’t bank robberies. The news was splattered all over the papers. The night before, ten convicts, including all of Dillinger’s old pals, had escaped from the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City. Matt Leach was convinced they were coming for Dillinger.

 

Of all the criminals of our present era whose activities have been brought so forcibly to the eye of the public, there is probably no one whose career so graphically illustrates the inadequacies of our systems as does that of John Dillinger.

—MELVIN PURVIS

John Dillinger sat at a table in a jail bullpen, playing pinochle with three other prisoners. Armed officers had brought him to Lima, a crossroads town in northwestern Ohio, to stand trial for an unremarkable robbery he pulled in nearby Bluffton that August. It wasn’t an imposing jail, just a stone-block wing at the rear of Sheriff Jess Sarber’s house on the town square; the Allen County Courthouse loomed across an alley. Sheriff Sarber was a roundish, kindly sort, a former used-car salesman who turned to law enforcement when the Depression forced him out of business. His wife was a fine cook, serving the prisoners meals of pork chops, ribs, and mashed potatoes.

This wasn’t how Dillinger thought it would end. He hadn’t robbed banks long enough for Pretty Boy Floyd’s brand of fatalism to set in. In fact, Dillinger remained almost relentlessly cheerful. It was what people remembered for years afterward—the courtesy, the easy wink, the whiff of manly joie de vivre
.
The times he grew depressed were usually when he thought about his family. He was thirty years old, but he still valued the approval of his father and sister. If he was going to be an outlaw, he wanted to be the type of outlaw people admired. He wanted to support his family during hard times. Above all, as the son of a remote man who never paid much attention to him, Dillinger craved respect.

Unlike Baby Face Nelson and other Depression-era criminals, Dillinger was not a product of poverty or neglect. He was born in a middle-class Indianapolis neighborhood on June 22, 1903, the son of a drab, stoic grocer, John Wilson Dillinger, and his wife, Mollie, who died following a seizure when John was four. The Dillingers were well off. John Dillinger, Sr., owned his own store, ferried bags of groceries around their neighborhood, and put away enough money to invest in real estate, buying four houses. By all accounts the elder Dillinger worked long hours and showed little interest in his son. In his father’s absence, Dillinger, like Clyde Barrow, was raised by his older sister. Audrey Dillinger, a red-haired girl thirteen years older than John, married in 1906, but she and her husband lived with her father for several years, until the elder Dillinger remarried in 1912.

Like Machine Gun Kelly, Dillinger resented his new stepmother, a feeling that appears to have deepened as she and his father began having children of their own. These emotions manifested themselves in a streak of adolescent rebelliousness, though on reflection, his friends and teachers saw nothing that caused real concern. At Public School 38, Dillinger was a boisterous, joshing kid but a dreadful student. His D’s and F’s sparked increasingly angry arguments with his father.

By the sixth grade, Dillinger was the nominal head of a group of rowdy boys who called themselves the Dirty Dozen Gang. Their idea of mischief was snatching watermelons from a farmer’s field or stealing buckets of coal they sold to neighbors. At one point, Dillinger was arrested for a coal theft but got off with a lecture from the judge. His father was less forgiving. According to John Toland, who interviewed several of Dillinger’s boyhood friends in the early 1960s, the elder Dillinger chained his son to his grocery wagon for a time in an effort to rein him in. A firm hand only stoked Dillinger’s rebelliousness. One friend told Toland that Dillinger embarked on a series of petty crimes as a teenager, stealing whiskey and terrorizing another boy with a buzz saw. None led to more trouble with the law.
¹

At sixteen Dillinger quit school and worked various jobs around Indianapolis. A year later, in March 1920, his family moved to a farm outside Mooresville, fifteen miles southwest of the city. They soon moved to a larger spread, sixty acres on Highway 267, north of town. Mooresville was a sleepy little burg, and it bored the teenage Dillinger to tears. Avoiding farmwork, he spent his days hunting squirrels or handling second base on a sandlot baseball team, his nights shooting billiards at the Idle Hour poolroom or similar haunts in Martinsville, fifteen miles south. Like Pretty Boy Floyd, he met and befriended older men at the pool halls, hard men he strove to emulate.

Dillinger spent several years passing time in his hometown, throwing dice, shooting pool, hunting, living off his father’s hard work and the occasional odd job. In 1923 he turned twenty, and he hadn’t the slightest idea what to do with his life. Like Floyd, Dillinger considered joining the armed forces. Dillinger, however, actually signed up, with the navy. When his basic training ended on October 4, 1923, he was assigned the job of fireman third class on the U.S.S.
Utah,
a battleship anchored in Boston Harbor. Like Clyde Barrow, Dillinger grew homesick in Massachusetts. Three weeks after joining the
Utah,
he briefly went AWOL. He was courtmartialed, given ten days solitary, and docked pay. Once out of the brig, he went AWOL again; after a second court-martial, Dillinger fled for good. He was listed as a deserter. For the first time, a price was put on his head: $50.

By the following spring he was back in Mooresville, telling his family he had received a medical discharge due to hay fever. Dillinger then decided to give marriage a try, wedding a sixteen-year-old named Beryl Hovious. They lived at her family’s farm for a time, then took an apartment in Martinsville, but domestic life did nothing to settle Dillinger. He had no job, no focus, and no future. He went back to his old routines, hanging around pool halls.

The night that changed Dillinger’s life forever came on a Saturday—September 6, 1924. He had gone out drinking with one of his pool hall pals, a thirty-one-year-old ex-con named Ed Singleton. Fueled by stupidity and alcohol, they decided to mug an elderly Mooresville grocer named Frank Morgan, a friend of Dillinger’s family; Dillinger had been told Morgan carried cash home after work. Morgan was walking home that night when Dillinger stepped out of an alley by the Mooresville Christian Church and struck him over the head with a large bolt wrapped in a handkerchief. When Morgan fell and began shouting for help, Dillinger pulled a pistol. It went off. Dillinger ran. Singleton, waiting in a car nearby, drove off, abandoning him.