Public Enemies (31 page)

“Why . . . Jimmy Burnell!” Negri exclaimed, using Nelson’s old alias. “Where’d you pop from?”

Nelson grinned. “Oh, I just blew in from the east,” he said. “Say, you’re getting fatter by the day.” He turned to a girl standing at his side. “This is my wife, Helen,” he said.

“Glad to know you,” Negri said, extending his hand.

They went in and Nelson briefed Negri on his new gang and its exploits. After scrambling away from his Indiana lake house a step ahead of Frank Nitti’s enforcers in September, Nelson had relocated to St. Paul. The August robbery with Eddie Bentz in Grand Haven, Michigan, had convinced Nelson he was ready to lead his own gang, and he easily recruited from the Green Lantern’s pool of talent. One recruit was Homer Van Meter, the string-bean loner who had befriended Dillinger in prison.
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Another was Tommy Carroll, who had joined the Grand Haven bank job that August. A handsome, five-foot-ten-inch tough guy with a flattened nose, Carroll was a drinker, a flirt, and a lady’s man who loved the St. Paul nightclubs; he had a wife, a steady girlfriend, and was already romancing a new girl named Jean Delaney, the older sister of Alvin Karpis’s teenage lover Delores Delaney.

The trio’s first target had been the First National Bank in Brainerd, two hours north of St. Paul. In October, after hiring two local thugs as muscle, Nelson and his men moved into cabins at the Sebago Resort, thirteen miles north of Brainerd. They spent ten days cruising the streets of Brainerd, filingin and out of the bank on ruse errands, learning the names of every employee they could. Nelson even hired a guide to show him around, ostensibly to scout real estate.
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The night before they struck, Nelson cut the bank’s phone lines.

On Monday, October 23, they made their move. When a janitor arrived to enter a basement door at 5:55 A.M., he felt a pistol in his back. One of the robbers told him to open the door. The janitor said he had no key. “Like hell you don’t,” the robber snapped. “You’ve been opening the door for the last ten days.”

When the janitor opened the door, Carroll waved his hand and two men with submachine guns hustled up. One was Nelson. The three men took up positions in the lobby, while Van Meter, dressed in hunting clothes and carrying a submachine gun in a bushel basket, stood outside. As employees arrived for work, they were ordered to lie on the floor. Nelson grabbed one, a seventeen-year-old clerk named Zane Smith, struck him in the jaw, and dragged him into a side room. He asked Smith how much money was in the vault. When Smith pled ignorance, Nelson threatened to put burning cigarettes in his ear “to get better answers.”

A cashier finally opened the vault. After ransacking it and emptying the cash drawers, the gang herded the hostages into the men’s room, threatening to shoot the first one who stuck his head out. Nelson was the last to leave, backing out the front door. As he stepped onto the sidewalk, he raised his submachine gun and shot out the glass in the front door. Bystanders saw him shoot the gun into the sidewalk next, bullets ricocheting wildly. As the gang jumped into a car and drove off, Nelson stuck his gun out a window and fired indiscriminately, peppering the YMCA with bullets.
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No one was hurt.

It was a good haul, $32,000, more than $6,000 a man. Everyone returned to St. Paul, where they were living three weeks later when police raided Carroll’s apartment. Though Carroll escaped after a struggle, Nelson ordered everyone out of town. Leaving his baby girl with his mother in Chicago, he took Helen and his four-year-old son, Ronald, and drove south to San Antonio, where they registered at the Johnson Courts Tourist Camp on South Presa Street on November 22.
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The other gang members arrived soon thereafter, and everyone settled in for an extended vacation. Nelson spent much of his time hanging around a neighborhood garage and in the basement workshop of a downtown gunsmith. The others lolled around whorehouses and bars.

The trouble began two weeks later, when the madam of the whorehouse that Carroll and a gang member named Chuck Fisher were frequenting saw a submachine gun in their car. On December 9 she called a local detective, saying she suspected they were “high-powered Northern gangsters.” The detective passed the tip to the San Antonio SAC, Gus Jones. No one realized who the two men were; even if they had, the name “Baby Face Nelson” meant nothing to anyone. The manager of Fisher’s apartment building was a friend, so Jones drove over and looked over the room. He found nothing out of the ordinary.

Two days later, on Monday afternoon, December 11, the madam called the San Antonio police with a second tip. One of the gangsters was coming to her house to take a girl horseback riding. Two detectives, H. C. Perrin and Al Hartman, were sitting in a car outside of the whorehouse when a taxi pulled up and Tommy Carroll stepped out and jogged up to the door. A moment later Carroll and the girl returned to the taxi. As the cab eased away from the curb, the detectives followed.

Carroll glanced in the rearview mirror and spotted the tail. Driving down East Commerce Street in the middle of downtown, a half mile from the Alamo, Carroll ordered the driver to stop the car. He jumped out and ran around a corner into an alley. Detective Perrin, armed with a sawed-off shotgun, and Hartman, with his service revolver, leaped from their car onto the sidewalk and raced after him.
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The alley was a dead end. As Perrin ran toward it, Carroll stepped out and shot. His first bullet struck the detective between the eyes; he fell in a heap. His next shots shattered Detective Hartman’s right wrist and elbow. Carroll ran off down the street, shoved his gun at the driver of a pickup truck, jumped inside, and was gone. By that night the Nelson gang was gone, too. The only member who didn’t escape was Chuck Fisher, captured by Gus Jones at his apartment.
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The gang scattered. Van Meter and Carroll returned to St. Paul, while the Nelsons drove west, crossing New Mexico and then Utah before reaching San Francisco a few days before Christmas. It was then that Nelson found Fatso Negri outside the bar on Pacific Street. Over the course of several days, Nelson laid out his plans to a Midwestern bank-robbing blitz the following spring. Negri signed on.

 

 

The Dillinger Gang’s good times ended suddenly on December 14 when a Chicago police detective was sent to investigate a tip that one of the gang’s Auburns was being serviced at a Broadway garage. John Hamilton appeared at the garage that afternoon. Approached by Detective William Shanley, Hamilton panicked, drew his gun, and fired, killing Shanley. Hamilton ran into the street and escaped. The killing of Detective Shanley was front-page news, and two days later it led the Chicago Police Department to form a special forty-man Dillinger squad.

Dillinger decided it was time to take the Florida vacation he had been thinking about. The gang left in a four-car convoy. Dillinger was the first to arrive at Daytona Beach, on December 19, and he and Billie Frechette quickly rented a sprawling two-story beach house with enough rooms for everyone. They spent the next week strolling the beach and fishing, happy to be away from Chicago; it was the first time most of the gang had ever been to an ocean beach. After a few days everyone piled into the cars and took a two-day trip to Miami, where they took in the dog races and a nightclub or two.

A few days after Christmas, having returned to Daytona, Billie decided to leave to visit her family in Wisconsin for the holidays. There have long been reports that her decision followed a fight with Dillinger—thirty years later Mary Kinder claimed Dillinger had blackened one of her eyes—but there is no evidence to back this up. Dillinger stayed behind, saying he would see her after New Year’s.

Of all the skills Hoover’s men were attempting to master that winter, the strategies and tactics of gunplay were by far the most difficult. Marksmanship courses were under way at most offices, but soda bottles and paper targets didn’t return fire. Capturing armed fugitives was a skill the men of the FBI would learn only after funerals.

After the debacle of Verne Miller’s escape at Halloween, the Bureau’s next test of fire came in a cold rain in Shawnee, a small town east of Oklahoma City. That night Ralph Colvin, the Oklahoma City SAC, and a squad of FBI agents and policemen crept through a heavy fog toward the back of a clapboard house where an informant said the outlaw Wilbur Underhill was hiding. Colvin had been nipping at Underhill’s heels for weeks. Unlike Pretty Boy Floyd, who had vanished, Underhill had been spotted robbing banks all across the state. He represented the FBI’s best chance to break the Kansas City Massacre case.

As Colvin approached the back of the house, a dog began to bark. At Colvin’s side was an Oklahoma City detective named Clarence Hurt; Colvin liked Hurt, and would lure him to the FBI within months. The two men hustled through the muddy backyard toward a bedroom window. The blinds were up. Inside, standing in his long underwear, they saw a man. It was Wilbur Underhill. A woman was sitting on a bed beside him.

“Stick ’em up, Wilbur!” Hurt shouted. “It’s the law!”

Underhill froze. He started to raise his arms, then whirled toward the window. Hurt fired a tear-gas canister; it crashed through the window and struck Underhill flush in the chest before falling to the floorboards, hissing. Colvin braced his submachine gun and fired three bursts. Glass shattered. Underhill fell.

At the sound of shots, the lawmen in front of the house cut loose with a barrage of automatic shotguns, pistols, and submachine guns. The house shook as bullets tore through its wood frame. Colvin and Hurt ducked, then retreated. Officers behind them began firing. Windows shattered. A cloud of tear gas rose and began to fill the house.

Suddenly Underhill emerged from the front door, clad only in his socks and underwear. A trio of agents fired, a rookie named Tyler M. Birch emptying his shotgun.
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Underhill twisted, hit, then leaped off the front porch. He slipped in the muddy front yard and fell. Bullets whizzed everywhere as he rose, then fell again, then rose and staggered into a neighboring yard. Inexplicably, the FBI men kept their guns trained on the house. Underhill disappeared into the fog.

When the firing stopped, there was movement inside the house. Colvin hollered for everyone inside to come out. One of Underhill’s partners crawled out the front door, blinded by gas and bleeding from wounds in his elbow and shoulder. A woman followed him out, screaming, bleeding from two bullet wounds in the stomach. A few minutes later Detective Hurt coaxed Underhill’s wife to come out as well.

Once the three were packed into an ambulance, lawmen fanned out across the town, shining flashlights down alleys and beneath houses in search of Underhill. He was wounded and couldn’t get far. Colvin telephoned the state prison at McAlester, a hundred miles east, and asked for bloodhounds. By sunrise there was still no sign of him.

Then, a little before seven, Shawnee police took a call from the owner of a secondhand furniture store, who said Underhill was in his store on Main Street. Eight Shawnee cops and sheriff’s deputies scrambled to the store. They found Underhill lying in bed in a back room. The sheets were reddened with blood. Underhill himself was a mess. As the officers stood over him, he offered no resistance. A bullet had hit him in the forehead, torn a groove across his hairline, and sheared off his left ear. His abdomen was pockmarked with bullets, including one that exploded through his back.

“I guess you’ve got me,” Underhill croaked.

Stanley Rogers, the Oklahoma City sheriff, stepped forward. “You’re in a pretty bad way, Underhill,” Rogers said.

“Yeah, I’m shot to hell,” Underhill said. “They hit me five times. I counted them as they hit me.”

Underhill was taken to a hospital, where he lapsed in and out of delirium all that day. Agents clustered at his bedside, attempting to question him about the massacre. It was Frank Smith, the old Cowboy who had survived the shooting, who got Underhill to talk. “[Underhill] thought he was dying and under such conditions positively asserted to Agent Frank Smith that neither he nor Harvey Bailey had anything to do with the Kansas City massacre,” an agent wrote Hoover. “This statement, made under such conditions, is believed to be true.”

The next day, Underhill was taken to the prison hospital in McAlester, where he died on January 7. For Hoover, there was no choice but to accept his deathbed denials. After six months the Bureau’s efforts to solve the Kansas City Massacre had come to a dead end.

 

 

The year was over, the new federal “War on Crime” almost six months old. In retrospect, as eventful as it was, 1933 served only as a prelude, a kind of extended training session, for the FBI and the nation. Despite the efforts of Attorney General Homer Cummings to make crime a national issue, to this point it remained a regional phenomenon; while newspapers in Chicago and Kansas City ran blazing front-page headlines over stories of Verne Miller’s Halloween escape, for instance, the news merited barely eight paragraphs on an inside page of the
New York Times.

What was missing was a set of national criminals for Hoover’s national police to fight on a national stage. The year 1934 would produce five such groups. Each would emerge into public view as easily recognized, media-friendly icons: the family of kidnappers, the fugitive lovers, the charismatic escape artist, the psychotic killer, the misunderstood country boy. For each of these groups the holiday season was a moment to relax before the approaching storm.

No one is certain what Bonnie and Clyde did; according to Clyde’s sister Nell, they probably spent Christmas alone at the abandoned house in Grand Prairie. In the Oklahoma hills, Pretty Boy Floyd’s family wondered what he was doing; no one ever found out. Baby Face Nelson spent the holidays in the Bay Area. In her Chicago apartment, the cranky Ma Barker surprised the gang by holding a Christmas dinner. Everyone exchanged presents, swapping handbags and perfume and shiny shaving kits.