Public Enemies (32 page)

All evening Ma was a woman transformed, smiling and laughing and paying attention to the gang’s girlfriends. “Now you come over any time you want!” she told Delores Delaney at evening’s end. “Why don’t we go downtown and go shopping together?” As they drove home, Delaney and Karpis tried to fathom the change in Ma’s demeanor.

“What the hell got into her?” Karpis asked.

“That old lady,” Delaney said. “She’s lonesome.”

In Daytona Beach the Dillinger Gang threw a rousing party. It was the only time members of the gang ever recalled seeing Dillinger drunk. As the last minutes of 1933 ticked away, he stepped out onto a balcony with Mary Kinder, swinging his submachine gun. He motioned toward the moon. “Think I can hit it?” he asked. As the clock struck midnight and church-bells pealed across the town, Dillinger pointed his gun into the air and fired a deafening volley of bullets out over the Atlantic.

As scattered as they were that night, in San Francisco and Chicago and Florida, virtually all the members of all the gangs had at least one thing in common: it was the last New Year’s Eve celebration of their lives.

 

 

In the opening days of 1934, the Dillinger Gang, Bonnie and Clyde, and the Barkers all began to mobilize for major operations. Karpis and the Barkers got to work first, driving from Chicago to St. Paul on January 2 and converging on an apartment Fred Barker had rented. They had seven men for the kidnapping of Edward Bremer: Karpis, the Barker brothers, Shotgun George Ziegler, Dock’s old friends Bill Weaver and Volney Davis, and the new man from Tulsa, Harry Campbell.

All that week Karpis and Fred Barker tailed Bremer. The obvious time to take him was in the morning when the young bank president dropped his nine-year-old daughter off at the Summit School on Goodrich Avenue. He would be alone, and the streets near the school were quiet. Ever the worrier, Karpis fretted about the cars they would use. St. Paul was frigid in January. The temperature plunged to ten below zero each night. They purchased two new Buicks, and Karpis had them outfitted with radios, extra-strength heaters, and frost shields. The last thing they needed was a getaway car seizing up in the subzero cold.

Each night, Karpis and Barker gathered the gang to review the day’s progress in Bill Weaver’s second-floor apartment at the Kensington, a brick apartment building on Portland Avenue. Their planning was in the final stages on Friday, January 12, when the two returned to Weaver’s apartment after nightfall. They parked beside the building, then stopped. Down an alley, they watched as a man hopped onto a box to peer into a window in the building next door. When the man saw them, he dropped to the ground and disappeared around a corner.

Karpis and Barker exchanged glances: it looked like a cop, probably checking the wrong building. “This is bad,” Dock Barker agreed when they briefed the group upstairs. “I’m gonna walk out and see what’s going on.” Dock returned after several minutes. “I see a guy standing on the corner down there,” he said, “and it don’t look right, him standing on the corner without an overcoat in this kind of weather.” They debated what to do. Finally Karpis said he would check with Harry Sawyer at the Green Lantern. If they were under surveillance, Sawyer could call his police contacts and find out.

They decided to leave the building in pairs. Dock went out first, to reconnoiter. He returned a few minutes later, worried. “There’s a goddamn car with two policemen parked in the alley,” Dock said.

“Oh Christ, this is bad,” said Karpis.

They decided to send Dock down to retrieve the cars and park them in front. When he returned this time, he said the policemen had ignored them. They appeared to be watching the adjacent building. “Let’s go,” someone said. Outside everyone hustled into the waiting cars. There were no cops in sight. They drove to Fred’s apartment without incident. But Fred wasn’t satisfied. He had to know if the plan was blown, and he couldn’t wait for Sawyer; if they were being watched, they could all be in Chicago by sunrise. Fred decided to return to Weaver’s building.

“Well if we do this,” Karpis said, “you’d better take some equipment over there. Don’t just go with a pistol.”

Barker stepped to the closet and brought out a submachine gun with two 50-shot drums. He and Karpis returned outside, where they slipped into Dock’s Chevy. Fred drove, Karpis beside him, the tommy across his lap. By the time they reached Weaver’s building, it was past midnight. “Should I go down the alley?” Barker asked.

“Yeah, go on down the alley,” Karpis said.

They eased down the alley, deep in shadow. The patrol car was gone. Reaching the far end, they turned into the street. The neighborhood was chockablock with brick apartment buildings, the streets lined with darkened cars. As they turned the corner, a set of headlights flashed behind them, a parked car coming to life. As Barker watched in the rearview, the car pulled out.

Karpis turned in his seat.

“They’re following us,” he said.

“Yeah,” Barker said. “I can see.”

They turned a corner, then another, driving slowly. The car stayed with them. Karpis peered backward, trying to make out the car’s occupants. There were two. In silhouette Karpis could just make out the driver’s peaked hat: a patrolman in uniform. “Them guys look like cops all right,” Karpis said. “What the hell are we gonna do?”

“Only one thing we can do,” Barker said. “That’s stop ’em.”

They eased around another corner, threading their way through the lines of parked cars in the narrow streets.

“How do you want to do it?” Karpis asked.

“I’m gonna pull around a corner real fast and stop, and you jump out with that machine gun and if they come around, start shooting.”

Butterflies danced in Karpis’s stomach as they approached the next corner. They surged around it and stopped. Karpis stepped out into the frigid night air, holding the submachine gun. Barker jumped out the other door, pointing his .45. When the car behind them turned the corner, both men opened fire. The night exploded: Karpis fired from the hip, emptying the entire fifty-shot drum into the car. Barker fired the pistol. The car shook as bullets ripped into it. When they had emptied their guns, both men peered at the car. They couldn’t see anyone sitting upright. They jumped back in their Chevy and drove off. Back at Fred’s apartment they turned on the radio, waiting for the news. They sat up all night waiting, listening. Not till dawn, when Dock ran out to fetch a newspaper, did they discover they had just machine-gunned a uniformed Northwest Airlines employee.

The man in the car turned out be a radio operator named Roy McCord, and he was following Barker and Karpis because he thought they were peeping toms. When McCord returned home from work that evening, his wife had told him of a prowler, presumably the man Karpis and Barker had seen earlier. McCord, still dressed in his aviator’s uniform and peaked cap, left his apartment with a friend to check out the report, spotted Barker’s car, and ended up in a hospital with three bullet wounds. He survived. The other man was unhurt.

All that day the gang debated whether to abort the Bremer job. In the end, they decided to put it off two days, till Wednesday, January 17. In the interim, both Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde struck.

After three weeks in the Florida sun, Dillinger headed back to the Midwest with John Hamilton. The others planned to extend their vacation by driving cross-country to Tucson, Arizona. Dillinger said he wanted to pick up Billie Frechette; he promised to meet the others in Tucson. While in Chicago, he would try to cash bonds the gang had been unable to pass. Hamilton hoped to reunite with Pat Cherrington.

According to Cherrington, who later told her story to the FBI, Dillinger and Hamilton left Florida on Sunday, January 14. Hamilton sent her a telegram that afternoon from Savannah, asking her to meet him in a Chicago hotel.
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Driving through the night, Dillinger reached Chicago the next morning. That same day, probably low on cash and unable to move the stolen bonds, he decided to rob a bank. It was an impetuous decision. Some would credit it to Dillinger’s growing belief in his own invulnerability, others to restlessness, a yearning to return to the limelight; he hadn’t robbed a bank in two months.

Whatever the case, that day Dillinger performed like a hungry actor on a brightly lit stage. The bank he selected was in East Chicago, the corrupt mill town where he had spent time the previous summer. There is evidence Dillinger knew certain members of the East Chicago police department, and some have suggested his decision to hit the First National Bank that day was a prearranged affair. If so, somebody forgot to tell the rest of the East Chicago police.

At 2:45 Dillinger and Hamilton stepped out of a car double-parked outside the bank. They left a driver in the car; his identity has never been established. Inside the marble lobby, Dillinger pulled a submachine gun out of what several eyewitnesses thought was a trombone case. “This is a stickup!” he shouted, startling the dozen or so customers in the bank. “Put up your hands everybody!”

A bank vice president named Walter Spencer pressed a silent-alarm button beneath his desk; a block away, it rang at police headquarters. As the customers raised their hands and lined up against a wall, one forgot his cash on a counter. “You go ahead and take your money,” Dillinger said. “We don’t want your money. Just the bank’s.”
²

Hamilton stood by, apparently unsure what to do.

“Come on,” Dillinger told him. “Get the dough.”
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Hamilton hustled behind the teller cages and began clearing stacks of cash off the counters into a leather satchel. Just then a police officer named Hobart Wilgus appeared at the front door, apparently unaware of the robbery in progress.

Dillinger saw him. “Cop outside,” he said to Hamilton, who hesitated. “Take your time,” Dillinger admonished. “We’re in no hurry.” When Wilgus entered, Dillinger stepped forward and disarmed him. He emptied the cartridges from the officer’s gun and tossed it back to him. He noticed Wilgus eyeing his submachine gun. “Oh, don’t be afraid of this,” Dillinger said. “I’m not even sure it’ll shoot.”

As Hamilton worked the cages, Dillinger saw men in suits hurry toward the bank: plainclothes detectives, answering the alarm. Hamilton saw them, too. Dillinger, playing to his audience, seemed eager to display his insouciance. “Don’t let those coppers worry you,” he told Hamilton. “Take your time and be sure you get all the dough. We’ll take care of them birds on the outside when we get there.”

A few moments later Hamilton was finished. Dillinger waved his submachine gun at Walter Spencer, the vice president. “Come on out here with me, Mr. President,” he said. Spencer asked if he could grab his coat. Dillinger shook his head. “You’re not going very far,” he said. He then grabbed Officer Wilgus by the arm. “You go first,” Dillinger said. “They might as well shoot you as me. We love you guys anyway.”
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As he had at Racine two months before, Dillinger shoved the hostages ahead of him as a human shield. This time, however, he wasn’t facing a curious crowd. Arrayed outside, behind parked cars and in storefronts on both sides of the front door, were seven East Chicago policemen. As he edged onto the sidewalk, Dillinger hunched behind Officer Wilgus; Hamilton kept an arm around Walter Spencer.

For a long moment, as the four-man scrum scuttled across the sidewalk toward the waiting getaway car, no one spoke. Dillinger locked eyes with at least one of the officers, several of whom stood no more than twenty feet away. They were just steps away from the car, and for a fleeting second it appeared Dillinger could brazen it out. Then one of the officers, a forty-three-year-old detective named Patrick O’Malley, shouted, “Wilgus!” Officer Wilgus turned, giving O’Malley a clear shot at Dillinger. O’Malley fired his pistol four times, at least one of the bullets striking Dillinger’s bulletproof vest.

Dillinger appeared stunned. For the first time in his career, he appeared to lose his temper. “Get over!” he snapped to Wilgus, shoving him aside. “I’ll get that son of a bitch.”
⁵
He raised his submachine gun and fired a burst directly into Detective O’Malley. The policeman, a father of three little girls, fell dead on the sidewalk, eight bullet holes across his chest.

As O’Malley crumpled, the six remaining officers opened fire. The sidewalk erupted in gunshots. Dillinger and Hamilton dashed for the getaway car, jumping between a line of parked cars. Hamilton didn’t make it. He was struck by several bullets, one passing through his bulletproof vest, and fell to the ground. Dillinger stopped and helped him into the car, grabbing the money satchel as well. Miraculously the two managed to dive into the car’s open door without further injury. As bullets pounded the getaway car, the driver careened off down Chicago Avenue, eluding police pursuit. In minutes they were gone.

Eyewitnesses made the identification, and the evening newspapers made it official: John Dillinger, the man who many in Indiana cheered for fighting greedy bankers, was now a murderer. For the rest of his life the killing clearly weighed on Dillinger’s mind. He would repeatedly deny shooting Detective O’Malley, to lawyers, lawmen, and friends. More than once, he volunteered this to complete strangers. His denials probably had less to do with the prospect of a murder conviction than with his own sense of self and his public image. At the heart of his appeal, Dillinger knew, was his joshing Robin Hood spirit, the sense people had that he was a regular guy making the best of hard times. Dillinger didn’t want to be the bad guy. He wanted to be someone people like his sister Audrey and her family could cheer.

After murdering Detective O’Malley, Dillinger drove the badly wounded Hamilton to the hotel where Pat Cherrington was staying. Together they spent most of the evening locating a doctor to treat Hamilton’s wounds. One bullet had hit him in the stomach, at least one more in the left shoulder. For the next few weeks Hamilton remained in a Chicago apartment with Cherrington nursing him back to health.