Public Enemies (33 page)

Dillinger, meanwhile, after splitting the $20,000 in proceeds with Hamilton, picked up Billie. They stayed in Chicago just long enough to visit a divorce attorney; as soon as Billie could end her marriage, she and Dillinger planned to wed. Afterward they drove south to St. Louis, where Dillinger wanted to visit a large auto show. There they bought a new V-8 Ford, checked into a downtown hotel, and spent an evening dancing in its roof garden. Then they struck out west on Route 66, looking forward to a vacation in the Arizona sunshine.

The morning after Dillinger’s East Chicago raid, a black Ford coupe bumped along rutted dirt roads through pine woods lining the Trinity River bottoms in a remote corner of East Texas. A thick fog rose from the river, making driving difficult. Behind the wheel sat Clyde Barrow, Bonnie beside him. In back sat a cadaverous forty-eight-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy Mullins. The car crossed a thin wooden bridge and came to a stop. Clyde got out, tucking a Browning automatic rifle beneath his arm. Mullins did the same. Leaving Bonnie in the car, they walked into the woods, disappearing into the mist.

For six months Bonnie and Clyde had been alone, living out of their car on handouts from family and friends. Now that Bonnie’s leg had healed, Clyde wanted to get back to work. For that he needed a partner. Yet the couple’s notoriety had grown to the point where Clyde was unable to approach anyone he didn’t know. The only man he felt he could trust, his old partner Raymond Hamilton, was now being held at the Eastham Prison Farm. That morning Clyde planned to bust him out.

It wasn’t Clyde’s idea; it was Hamilton’s. In early January, Hamilton had promised $1,000 to the unreliable Mullins, an eight-time loser about to be paroled, if he would find Clyde and arrange with him to smuggle guns into the prison farm. After his release, Mullins headed to Dallas and found Raymond’s brother Floyd. Floyd Hamilton was part of Bonnie and Clyde’s support network, ferrying food and other items to the couple every few nights outside the city. He took Mullins to see Clyde, at a roadside clearing outside Irving, ten miles west of Dallas.

Mullins recognized Clyde from prison. Bonnie’s appearance surprised him. She was dirty and appeared to weigh no more than eighty pounds. Her leg remained bandaged. She limped. Sitting in his car in the darkness, Clyde listened to Mullins’s plan. The appeal of working alongside Raymond Hamilton was strong; with Hamilton as his partner he could be a bank robber instead of a beggar. But Clyde didn’t trust Mullins. The Hamilton brothers wanted the guns smuggled in Sunday night. Fearing a trap, Clyde said they would do it Saturday night. He told Floyd Hamilton to stay with Mullins every minute until they left.

The next evening, after buying a pistol at a pawnshop, Hamilton and Mullins met Bonnie and Clyde on a highway east of Dallas. At sunset they drove south toward Madisonville, then turned onto the cat roads, hoping to find one that would lead them to the spot where the guns were to be planted. Around one-thirty A.M., they came to the edge of the prison farm. Mullins took the pistol, two clips of ammunition and one of Clyde’s .45s, wrapped them in an inner tube, and crept toward the prison buildings. About a hundred yards from Hamilton’s dormitory, Mullins slid the package beneath a culvert.

They were back in Dallas by dawn. Sunday was visitors’ day at Eastham, and Floyd Hamilton drove down to tell Raymond the guns were in place. Clyde and Bonnie, meanwhile, returned to the edges of the prison farm. It took several hours, but they found the field where Hamilton’s work group was clearing brush that week. They took several more hours mapping their escape. It was raining and the roads were muddy. Twice they were forced to cut through fields, closing gates behind them.

The escape was set for that Tuesday morning. At dawn, after leaving Bonnie in the car, Clyde and Mullins pushed through underbrush to the edge of the field, squatted behind a bush and waited. An hour later they were still waiting. If Hamilton’s escape was delayed, they had promised to be in place three straight mornings. They were about to leave when out of the fog they heard two shotgun blasts.

Clyde strained to hear. Two shotgun blasts was the guards’ signal for help. A minute passed, then two. Worried, they headed back to the car. Suddenly they heard voices approaching through the mists. “Get something else!” someone yelled. It was Raymond Hamilton.

“What?” Clyde hollered.

He didn’t understand. Assuming Hamilton was being pursued by guards, Clyde raised his Browning and fired into the treetops. Mullins did the same. When the guns were empty, they handed them to Bonnie to reload. A moment later, four men emerged from the fog: Hamilton, a convicted murderer named Joe Palmer, and two prisoners who had run after them. All were breathing hard after running almost a mile.

“Nobody but Raymond and Palmer can get in the car,” Mullins announced. “Everybody else go back.”

“Shut your damn mouth, Mullins,” Clyde snapped. “This is my car. I’m handling this. Three of you can ride back there.” He motioned to the trunk. “Guess four of us can ride up here.”

Within an hour roadblocks were being thrown up across the area. Sticking to the cat roads, Clyde drove north and west through the towns of Centerville, Jewett, Teague, Wortham, and Mexia before reaching Hillsboro, thirty miles north of Waco. At a gas station an old man approached the car. “Did you folks hear what Clyde Barrow pulled this morning?” he asked Clyde. The man rattled on for several minutes before Clyde had to ask him to please pump their gas.

From Hillsboro, Clyde, worried that his old haunts in Dallas would be watched, drove the group south, to Houston. They made it back to Dallas three nights later, on January 20, meeting their families outside the city. There was much to tell—and much to plan. For the first time in seven months, Clyde Barrow had the makings of a gang.

 

 

The man who headed the Texas prison system, Lee Simmons, was a lean, curt fifty-year-old, a member of the same generation of no-nonsense Lone Star lawmen as his FBI friend Gus Jones. He was at the state prison in Huntsville, forty miles south of Eastham, when he received a call about the raid at nine that morning. By ten he was at the farm. Two guards had been wounded in the escape, one of them, Major M. H. Crowson, seriously. The shooting had all been done by the fleeing inmates, but Simmons knew Clyde Barrow had done this. His instinct was confirmed the next day when one of the opportunistic escapees was recaptured.

That night, after a day spent briefing reporters and orchestrating roadblocks, Simmons visited Major Crowson at the Huntsville hospital. He’d taken a bullet through the stomach and wasn’t expected to live. “Mr. Simmons, don’t think hard of me,” Crowson whispered. “I know I didn’t carry out your instructions. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t bother about it,” Simmons said. “Those fellows had their day. We’ll have ours. I promise you I won’t let them get away with it.” Crowson died the next day, and Lee Simmons swore an oath. No matter what it took, he would have Clyde Barrow brought in, dead or alive. He stewed on the matter for several days. The more he thought about it, the more he was certain he knew the man who could do it.

The morning after Clyde Barrow’s Eastham raid, the temperature hung near zero in St. Paul as Edward Bremer drove away from his mansion on North Mississippi River Boulevard, his daughter beside him in his black Lincoln sedan. A slender man of great wealth, Bremer had been born into the Twin Cities’ first family. His father, Adolph, had married the daughter of a German brewer named Jacob Schmidt in 1896 and had taken over management of the Jacob Schmidt Brewing Company after his father-in-law’s death. A friend and financial supporter of President Roosevelt, Adolph Bremer had weathered Prohibition by producing soft drinks and “near beer,” and by diversifying into financial investments. Edward ran the family’s largest bank, the Commercial State Bank at Washington and Sixth.

But the Bremers were not the Chamber of Commerce men they appeared, as the FBI would learn. Their interests, like William Hamm’s, were intertwined with those of St. Paul’s underworld. The family brewery supplied “near beer” to many of St. Paul’s gangland gathering places, including Harry Sawyer’s tavern. In fact, according to an affidavit Sawyer’s wife, Gladys, later gave the FBI, the Bremers secretly sold
real
beer to Sawyer’s tavern from 1926 to 1932, which Sawyer bootlegged throughout Minnesota. Gladys Sawyer said the relationship went one step further; she claimed the Bremers actually
owned
the Green Lantern.

What the Bremers did to anger the underworld is unknown, but they did something. Edward Bremer’s bank handled Harry Sawyer’s finances as well as those of other St. Paul bootleggers, and according to FBI reports, Bremer had helped Sawyer fence stolen bonds, including, it was alleged, bonds Harvey Bailey stole from the Denver Mint in 1922. No doubt the dispute between Sawyer and Edward Bremer was financial. But Bremer’s thorny personality may also have been a factor. As an FBI memo noted, “Bremer is very much disliked not only by his family but generally; he has an uncontrollable [
sic
] temper, is very selfish and inconsiderate and has few friends.”

That frosty morning, after years of living in his father’s shadow, Edward Bremer was about to become famous. A minute after dropping his daughter at her school, he pulled up to a stop sign at the corner of Goodrich and Lexington Parkway. As he did, Shotgun George Ziegler pulled his car into the intersection, blocking Bremer’s way. Karpis stopped a second car behind Bremer’s, boxing him in.

Dock Barker and Volney Davis jumped out. Dock opened Bremer’s door and pointed his pistol at the young heir. “Don’t move or I’ll kill you.”

Bremer panicked. He tried to throw the car into gear but Dock cracked him across the forehead with the pistol. Bremer attempted to escape out the passenger door, but Davis opened it first and joined Dock in hammering Bremer with his pistol. Bremer kicked open the door but Davis slammed it shut on his knee. The struggle took only a moment, but by the time Bremer surrendered, blood was streaming from a gash in his scalp. Karpis watched the tussle and fretted. “If a squad car pulls up,” he mumbled, “we’re going to have a hell of a lot of trouble here.”

Finally Dock managed to shove Bremer down onto the front floorboard. Davis attempted to start the car, but nothing happened.

“No monkey business, start the car,” Dock ordered Bremer.

Wiping the blood from his eyes, Bremer leaned up and pushed a button to start the car. As the car eased forward, Dock pushed a pair of goggles over Bremer’s head, its eyes taped so Bremer couldn’t see. No one had noticed the kidnapping; there was no pursuit. The little procession drove several miles into the countryside and pulled over to the side of the road. As he had done with Hamm, George Ziegler thrust two ransom notes forward for Bremer to sign. The young heir complained he was in great pain from the gash on his head and a wrenched knee. Karpis told him it was his own fault for struggling. “Well,” Bremer said, “I got excited.”

While Karpis took Bremer and drove south toward Chicago, Ziegler and Fred Barker took the ransom notes into St. Paul. Two hours after the kidnapping, Walter W. Magee, a contractor and a close friend of the Bremer family, took a phone call from a man who called himself “McKee.” “Hello,” McKee said. “We’ve snatched your friend Ed Bremer. We want two hundred grand.”

“McKee” said Bremer’s car would be found beneath a water tower on Edgecumbe Road. He said Magee would find a note with instructions beneath a staircase outside his office, then hung up. Magee walked outside and found the note. It read:

Magee phoned Bremer’s office, thinking it might be a prank. He wasn’t there. Magee then called the brewery and left a message for Adolph Bremer to meet him at the Ryan Hotel. The St. Paul police chief was notified, and at 11:05 he phoned Werner Hanni, the St. Paul SAC. Hanni walked straight to the hotel and found the Bremers talking with the chief, who had brought along the head of the kidnap squad, Tom Brown, who remained in league with the Barkers. Brown’s presence meant the gang would know every move the police made.

The meeting was businesslike; Adolph Bremer was not the kind of man who panicked easily. He took Walter Magee to look for his son’s car, and they found it after a half-hour’s search. The front seat was streaked with blood, and Magee told Bremer not to approach. Magee had the car taken to a car wash, where the blood was removed—along with any fingerprints the gang might have left. Other members of the family, meanwhile, arranged for the “Alice” advertisement to run in the
Tribune.