Public Enemies (37 page)

At nightfall they threw a handkerchief over Bremer’s head and led him to the Buick they had parked in the alley. Karpis drove, Dock Barker beside him in the front seat, Bremer pushed down on the rear floorboards. In central Wisconsin they found a gasoline cache Fred Barker had laid. Karpis held the funnel while Dock poured the contents of the first can into the Buick’s tank. In the darkness his hand slipped and the ice-cold gas splashed inside his glove. “Jesus Christ, don’t you know you got me half froze?” Karpis said, shaking his hand.

“Well, I got it on my gloves, too,” Dock said.

Dock took one of his gloves off while he poured the second can. “Goddamn, you ought to keep your gloves on,” Karpis said.

“I got gasoline in one of ’em.”

“That don’t make no difference, goddamnit, you might leave some prints or something.”

“Well, nobody’ll find the cans anyway. Even if they did, they wouldn’t know we used ’em.” Karpis was too cold to argue.

They drove through the night to Rochester, Minnesota, pulling up behind a downtown building about eight o’clock. Dock pushed some bills into Bremer’s fist, guided him out of the car, and told him to count to fifteen before taking off his blindfold. Shivering, Bremer began to count. “We haven’t left,” he heard a voice say. “Start again.”

On the drive back to Chicago, Dock was almost giddy. “I guess you’re going to take Delores now with your end of the money and go to Florida, ain’t you?” Dock kidded Karpis, who remained glum.

“You know something, Dock?” Karpis replied. “We’re a long way from spending any of that money.”

The last of the well-wishers left the Bremer mansion around midnight. In the darkness Adolph Bremer walked across the street to the brewery to do some work. Agent S. L. Fortenberry was sitting on the side porch when he heard a tapping sound at the outside door. Fortenberry opened it, and Edward Bremer staggered inside, ashen and shaking.

Agent Fortenberry ran across the street and retrieved Adolph Bremer from the brewery. Back at the mansion, there were hugs and smiles and tears. Agent Fortenberry asked “for the privilege” of calling Pop Nathan to break the news. Edward insisted he couldn’t. He had promised the kidnappers nothing would appear in the morning papers. Both Bremers prevailed upon Fortenberry to wait until dawn to notify the Bureau. Reluctantly he agreed. Edward Bremer downed two fast glasses of beer before the words came spilling out. When he finished, Agent Fortenberry asked if he could identify any of his captors. “I know it sounds unreasonable,” Bremer said, “but they kept me for twenty-two days and I never got a look at one of them.”

Bremer repeatedly told his father “they could not have anything to do with prosecution,” as Agent Fortenberry later reported in a memo. The kidnappers had threatened his wife and child. Finally, around three, sleepy and exhausted, Edward Bremer went to bed. The moment he disappeared upstairs, Fortenberry went for the phone.

Friday morning Nathan telephoned Edward Bremer’s doctor, who agreed that Bremer could be interviewed, but only for a half hour, at 2:00. After notifying Washington, Nathan headed to Adolph Bremer’s mansion, where he found a family meeting under way in the kitchen. Adolph Bremer asked Nathan what he thought about Edward’s insistence that he couldn’t identify the kidnappers. Nathan termed it “bunk and worthless from a standpoint of investigative aid.” Adolph urged Nathan to “go easy” on his son. He was fragile. He would be better in a few days. Nathan said he didn’t have a few days. Every day they lost, the evidence was growing colder.

At two Nathan saw Edward Bremer. He found him frightened and deeply ambivalent about cooperating with authorities. “The police are okay,” Bremer said, “but I have no use for federal agents.” Nathan asked what he meant; Bremer waved him off, saying he was just joking. Now it was Nathan’s turn to get irritated. He told Bremer it was obvious he wasn’t telling everything he knew. Bremer bridled. He insisted he couldn’t identify any of his captors, saying he “didn’t see a darned soul.” Afterward Nathan returned downtown, incensed. He was convinced Edward Bremer was hiding something.

 

 

That Friday morning, while Pop Nathan grappled with Edward Bremer, Louis Piquett took center stage at Dillinger’s arraignment in Crown Point. It was another packed courtroom, the walls lined with deputies holding submachine guns, reporters scribbling, flashbulbs popping. In the crowd were two of the Arizona cops who arrested Dillinger. Both said they were mulling movie and vaudeville offers, but were holding out for more money.
⁴

The moment Judge Murray quieted the crowd, Piquett was on his feet. “Your Honor!” Piquett thundered. “Are we to have a hearing in accord with the spirit of the laws of this state and of this nation, or are we to witness merely a mockery of the name of justice? Is the state to be permitted to continue inciting an atmosphere of prejudice and hatred? The very air reeks with the bloody rancor of intolerant malice. The clanging of shackles brings to our minds the dungeons of the czars, not the flag-bedecked liberty of an American courtroom. I request the court to direct that those shackles be removed.”

It was vintage Piquett, melodramatic and bellicose. The prosecutor, Robert Estill, was no match. “This is a very dangerous man, Your Honor,” he said.

“Remove the handcuffs from the prisoner,” Judge Murray said.

Piquett was just warming up. “Thank you,” he said. “May I also point out that this is a civil court, and not a military court-martial. Could anything be more prejudiced than machine guns pressed into the defendant’s back, and an army of guards cluttering up the room? May the court direct that all guns be removed from the courtroom?”

Sheriff Holley’s nephew, a deputy named Carroll Holley, rose. “I’m responsible for the safe-guarding of the prisoner,” he said.

“Who are you?” Piquett demanded. “Are you a lawyer? What right have you to address this court?”

Judge Murray ordered the guns removed. Piquett then launched into an argument for more time, saying he would need four months to prepare Dillinger’s defense. Estill said it should only take ten days. “To go on trial in ten days would be a legal lynching of this poor lad!” Piquett shouted. “There is a law against lynching in this state!”

“There is a law against murder, too,” Estill shot back.

“Then why don’t you observe it?” Piquett asked. “Why don’t you [just] stand Dillinger against a wall and shoot him down? There’s no need to throw away the state’s money on this kind of mockery . . . Your Honor, even Christ had a fairer trial than this!”

Estill was about to shout something back when Judge Murray told both attorneys to calm down. Piquett apologized to the court and motioned to Estill. “Bob and I respect each other,” he said.

“He’ll be putting his arm around you soon,” Murray quipped. Laughter rippled through the courtroom. After more desultory argument, the judge gave Piquett a month: Dillinger’s trial would begin on March 12. Estill pouted. “Your Honor,” he said, “why don’t you let Mr. Piquett take Dillinger home with him, and bring him back on the day of the trial? You’ve given him everything else he has asked for.”

Dillinger sat through it all wearing his trademark grin. As the handcuffs were reapplied for his return to the jail, he leaned over to Piquett and whispered, “Atta boy, counsel.”
⁵

 

 

The agent Hoover selected to supervise the Bremer case was William Rorer, the handsome World War I veteran who had arrested Machine Gun Kelly. Rorer, now promoted to inspector, arrived in St. Paul on Saturday, February 10, the day after Dillinger’s hearing. After reading over reports that day, he interviewed Bremer at his home on Sunday.

They got off to a bad start. The two men repaired to the sunporch, where Rorer emphasized it would be necessary for Bremer to tell him everything he knew. Again Bremer bridled, saying he had already told Pop Nathan everything. Rorer said it was obvious he hadn’t. “Who said I haven’t told the truth?” Bremer demanded.
⁶
In that case, he went on, he wouldn’t say anything at all. Rorer reminded him of the duty he owed the government and the American people.

“To hell with duty,” Bremer said.

The meeting broke up when the young bank president stormed from the room in tears. In Washington, Hoover had no sympathy for Bremer. He was ready to take dramatic action. For several days he had considered issuing a statement criticizing Bremer for failing to cooperate with the Bureau. Nathan asked him to hold off, but Hoover sent a draft to Cummings anyway. Beginning with a lecture on a victim’s duty to help capture his kidnappers, it noted that “in spite of the cooperation of the Special Agents of this Department’s Bureau of Investigation in restraining their activities to permit the safe return of Mr. Bremer, his cooperation has not yet been of a type that should be expected . . . Neither temerity, nor fear, nor indifference will excuse the lack of full, wholesome, wholehearted effort and cooperation.”

Monday morning, when Bremer arrived at the Bureau’s office for further questioning, Rorer read him the statement. It had a dramatic impact. Suddenly Bremer began remembering things. That morning, and in interviews every day that week, his memory sprang vividly to life. The kidnappers let him smoke Chesterfields, he said; no, there was no state stamp on the box. He remembered the wallpaper in the room where he had been held, and the red flower design on the serving dishes. He said he had been driven about eight hours away.

Bremer’s change in attitude coincided with the discovery of a trove of evidence. The afternoon after his release, agents had taken Walter Magee and retraced the route he had taken to deliver the ransom money. On Highway 55 south of Zumbrota, Magee pointed out the rise where he had seen the red lights. Scrambling up the grassy embankment, agents found three heavy brass lamps and a swinging lantern; all were then wrapped in cellophane and sent to Washington for analysis.

Agent Sam McKee, meanwhile, drove to Portage, Wisconsin, where the sheriff was holding what he considered a suspicious set of gasoline cans. There were four five-gallon jugs and a funnel. The sheriff took McKee out to see a farmer named Reuben Grossman, who had found them. Grossman said he had first seen the cans the night Bremer was released, lying on the side of a dirt road just off Route 16. The next morning they were still there, so he picked them up and returned them to his garage. It crossed his mind they might be connected to the Bremer case, Grossman said, so he called the sheriff. McKee took the cans and the funnel and sent them to Washington. Within days they had the word. A single fingerprint had been identified, on one of the gas cans.

It belonged to Dock Barker.

While the FBI scrambled to learn about the Barkers, the Kansas City Massacre investigation was going nowhere. Hoover harangued the Kansas City and Oklahoma City offices to keep him informed of their efforts. “I have been particularly embarrassed by your failure to keep this office advised concerning developments in the Floyd case,” Hoover wrote to the new Oklahoma City SAC, Dwight Brantley. “I receive more information from private parties in New York City concerning the handling of this matter in Oklahoma than I do from you.”
^bh

Two agents were still working the case full-time, and their contrasting theories led to friction. A new man, A. E. “Gyp” Farland, was debriefing inmates at Leavenworth who knew the Barkers. He argued in a January 29 memo to Hoover that the Bureau “has been wrong as to the identity of those who assisted Verne Miller in the Kansas City Massacre.” Farland argued that Fred Barker and Alvin Karpis were almost certainly Miller’s partners. Other agents disagreed.

Hoover read the memo in anger. Farland’s theory looked half-baked, and it underscored the meandering nature of the investigation. Hugh Clegg followed up. “I telephoned Acting Agent in Charge M. C. Spear at Kansas City,” Clegg wrote Hoover that afternoon, “and told him [you] were very much displeased with the reported lack of vigor in this investigation of the Kansas City Massacre case; that it appeared that they had let this case fall by the wayside and it was being handled intermittently by any one of a number of agents and it was not being pursued vigorously toward a logical conclusion.”

Spear briefed Clegg on the office’s contrasting theories of the case. “I informed Spear that the various theories they might develop had no bearing on the case,” Clegg told Hoover, “that it was not the policy of agents of the division to get into disputes over theories; that we were seeking the facts, whatever they might be, and that he should not tolerate any friction in the office.”

Hoover erupted. “This must stop
at once,
” he scrawled on Clegg’s memo. “See that a sharp letter is sent K.C. re such bickering. It must stop
at once.
”

At Hoover’s instruction, a single new agent, Harold Anderson, was ordered to review the massacre file from top to bottom.
^bi
The files themselves, which filled two four-drawer cabinets, were a mess. It took ten days for Anderson to get them organized. But what he discovered when he did was startling. In one drawer he found a sheaf of fingerprint photos taken from Verne Miller’s house. The prints, lifted from beer bottles in Miller’s basement, had been checked against those on file in the Kansas City office but had never been forwarded to Washington, which kept a national file of fingerprints. It was a blunder, and Anderson realized there would be hell to pay.

That Monday morning the fingerprints were forwarded to Washington for examination. Hoover’s wrath was immediate; he demanded to know why the prints had languished in the files for seven months. “It appears,” a Kansas City agent wrote Hoover, “that in the excitement in connection with this investigation at that time shortly after the massacre happened, [the fingerprint file] was overlooked.”