Public Enemies (40 page)

Nelson glanced at Van Meter. “Well, look,” he said, “you know we got a guy, a pretty good lawyer in Chicago, and he’s got a real good connection over in Indiana and they can get a gun brought in to Dillinger. But he wanted to know what we were going to do and how we were going to do it, and they wanted five thousand dollars to do the damn thing. We were thinking maybe we could just do this ourselves.”

Karpis sighed. “You mean to say you had me come all the way up here to talk about this goddamn thing?” Nelson apologized. Attempting to placate Karpis, he asked whether anyone in the Barker Gang would join them in the robberies they planned. Karpis begged off; he liked Nelson, but considered him too unstable to work with. “Well, we’d like some guys that could go on that damn thing,” Nelson said.

He turned to Barker.

“Can you go on it, Dock?”

“Yeah, I could,” Dock said. “Why? How many guys do you need?”

“Two,” Nelson said.

“What do you think about Bill Weaver?” Barker asked Karpis.

“Hell yeah, he’d go on it,” Karpis said.

“When are you guys gonna go?” Dock asked.

“Well first,” Nelson said, “we think we can get Dillinger out of there and hell, we got all the arrangements made in Chicago that if he beats that jail, we’ll have him up in St. Paul inside ten hours, and we’d go ahead and take this damn bank in South Dakota.”

“It’s liable to get pretty hot here,” Karpis said. Everyone knew the FBI was flooding agents into St. Paul for the Bremer case. Van Meter spoke up. “We thought so too, but hell, I go down around the Green Lantern there, at Sawyer’s joint, and nobody bothers me.”

Afterward they walked out into the chilly night air. “You know, if I’d have listened to you,” Nelson told Karpis, “I wouldn’t be mixed up in this damn thing.”

Karpis laughed. “It seemed to me like you told me once in Reno that if you could get ten thousand dollars, you was going back out to Reno. What happened? You got more than that on your first caper.”

“Yeah,” Nelson said with a grin, “but when I got that I wanted twenty. And when I got twenty, I wanted forty. You know how these damn things are.”
^bn

Back in Chicago the next day, Karpis mentioned the brewing rescue attempt to Fred Barker. “Geez, I hope they have better luck than we had with Bailey,” Barker said.

“I don’t know,” said Karpis. “I’ve got a feeling that Dillinger’ll get killed there in that jail. I don’t think he’s gonna make it, but they’re goddamn sure gonna try.”

 

A hard rain pelted the streets of Crown Point that morning, sluicing down the gutters on Joliet Street behind the jail. It was a chilling dawn, raw and gusty, low gray clouds skidding south off Lake Michigan. Sam Cahoon, a sixty-four-year-old janitor, trotted through the dim light into the jail a few minutes after eight. He shook the rain from his overcoat and waved hello to a guard. His first duty was to clean the criminal cell block, where Dillinger was held. Cahoon passed through the receiving room and trudged up the seventy-two-foot corridor that ran the length of the jail, ending at the barred door to the cell block.

After gathering his mops, Cahoon hollered for a guard named Win Bryant to let the prisoners out of their cells so he could clean. Together the two men opened a metal box on the corridor wall and threw the lever that opened the cells, allowing Dillinger and his fourteen fellow prisoners to roam the corridor behind the barred cell-block door. A few minutes later, after doing some other chores, Cahoon returned, and, with Bryant looking on, pulled the lever to open the barred door, letting in two trustees, who carried a box of toilet paper, soap, and Dutch cleanser.

Cahoon had just stepped into the cell block when Dillinger sprang forward and thrust what appeared to be a gun into his stomach. He turned Cahoon around and faced Bryant, poking the gun into Cahoon’s back. “Come on, Sam, we’re going places,” Dillinger said. “You’re gonna be good, aren’t you?”

Cahoon, flummoxed, said something like “I’m always good.”

A hulking black prisoner, Herbert Youngblood, materialized at Dillinger’s side, holding a toilet plunger menacingly over his head; he was the only inmate Dillinger had been able to lure into helping him. “You got a gun?” Youngblood asked Bryant. The guard shook his head no. It was jail policy; no one carried guns near the cell block.

Dillinger motioned toward an open cell. “Come on, boys,” he said. “Get in there.” Bryant and the two trustees filed in. When Dillinger shut the door, Cahoon stepped toward the cell. “No, I got use for you,” Dillinger said. “You’re gonna get me outta here.”

Dillinger pushed the janitor outside the cell block. Seventy feet down the concrete corridor the warden and a group of guards were sipping their morning coffees in the warden’s office at the front of the jail. It was the only way out. A flight of four steps bisected the corridor, dividing the old jail from the new addition. It put Dillinger just above the group’s line of sight.

“How many doors between me and the outside?” Dillinger asked.

Cahoon thought a moment, then said, “Four.”

Dillinger knew he didn’t have long, maybe minutes, before someone wandered back to the cell block. Quickly he fired questions at Cahoon, demanding the locations of guards, doors, and guns. He produced a pencil and drew a diagram of the jail on a shelf. Cahoon nodded. It was close. Then Dillinger, his gun still in Cahoon’s back, led Youngblood slowly along the corridor, stopping at the head of the steps. Squatting to peer down the hallway, they saw a man cross between rooms. “Who’s that?” Dillinger demanded. His voice was low, cool.

“Ernest Blunk,” Cahoon said. Blunk was a thirty-two-year-old deputy sheriff. “Call him back here,” Dillinger commanded.

Cahoon hollered: “Blunk! Come here a minute.”

When Blunk approached, he looked up the steps and saw Dillinger.

“Get up here, you son of a bitch, or I’ll kill you,” Dillinger said. Blunk froze. He saw a flash of the gun in Dillinger’s hand. “I’ve got it on you,” Dillinger said. “You haven’t got a chance.”

Dillinger led Blunk back to the cell block and shoved him into the cell with the others. The moment Dillinger stepped away, Blunk asked Win Bryant if he had seen the gun. Bryant said it looked like a .45. “They’ll kill the son of a bitch now,” Blunk said.

Dillinger herded Cahoon back to the top of the steps, where he ordered him to call for the jailer, Lew Baker. But Cahoon had had enough. “I’ll be goddamned if I’ll help you get outta here,” he said. “I’m not going any farther. Shoot and be god damned.”

Youngblood stepped forward and raised the toilet plunger, as if to strike the elderly Cahoon.

“None of that,” Dillinger said. “I’ll handle this.”

Dillinger shoved Cahoon back toward the cell block.

“Contrary to what people say,” Dillinger said as they walked, “I’m no killer. But I’m gonna get outta here.”

“They’ll kill you before you get halfway down the hallway.”

“Watch me,” Dillinger said.

In the cell block Dillinger thrust Cahoon into the cell and ordered Ernest Blunk to come out. He shoved Blunk down toward the steps. “I’m gonna make this today,” Dillinger said.

“You can’t,” Blunk said. “They’ll kill you.”

“I have everything to gain and nothing to lose,” Dillinger said. “You can either be a dead hero or a live coward.”

Blunk said he wouldn’t help him escape.

“You have a wife and baby that you love dearly and would like to see again, haven’t you?” Dillinger said.

Blunk gave in. “All right,” he said.

“How many guards are in the office?” Dillinger asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t lie to me, you son of a bitch, or I’ll kill you.”

“I said I don’t know.” Dillinger told him to lower his voice. He took a moment to think. “Well,” Dillinger said, shoving Blunk forward, “let’s see what we can see.”

They reached the top of the steps. Dillinger told Blunk to call for Warden Baker. Blunk hesitated. Dillinger jabbed the gun into his back. “Oh, Lew?” Blunk hollered.

“Just a minute!” Baker shouted back. The warden was still in his office with the guards. A moment later, he stuck his head out into the hallway. “Come on back!” Blunk said.

Baker walked all the way back to the cell block, where he could now see Blunk standing. The moment he entered, Baker felt a gun thrust into his back. Dillinger grabbed a fistful of the warden’s shirt and shoved him into the cell with the others. “Get in there and you won’t get hurt,” Dillinger said, shutting the door behind him.

One by one, Dillinger used Blunk to lure the four guards in Warden Baker’s office back to the cell block, where they were each surprised and pushed into the cell with the others. One, Kenneth “Butch” Houk, reached for Dillinger’s gun, but Dillinger overpowered him and shoved him in the cell. When the last of the four was locked away, Dillinger ran down to the office and grabbed the warden’s two submachine guns. He took one and handed the other to Youngblood. Armed and ready to make his break for freedom, Dillinger couldn’t resist one last bit of showboating. Trotting back to the cell block, he took out the gun he had been using. Warden Baker and the guards stared in amazement. The gun was made of wood. It was a fake.

“This is how tough your little jail is,” Dillinger announced with a grin. “I did it all with this little wooden pistol.” He tapped the “gun” on the cell bars to make his point.

Dillinger turned to Warden Baker.

“Where are the cars kept?” he asked.

“In the garage. In back.”

“Where are the keys?”

“In the cars.”

The only entrance Dillinger knew to the garage was outside, meaning he would have to creep along the jail’s outer wall to get to the cars. From Sam Cahoon’s description Dillinger knew that a door led outside from the kitchen, which could be reached through the warden’s office. Now armed with the two submachine guns, Dillinger and Youngblood guided Ernest Blunk down to the warden’s office and to the kitchen door. Dillinger glanced at Youngblood. Youngblood nodded. He was ready.

Dillinger shoved Blunk through the kitchen door, surprising two guards and the jail’s chef, William Zieger. Zieger, a combative sort, took one look at Dillinger and his submachine gun and said, “I’ll take that thing away from you and shove it up your ass.”

Blunk blanched. “My God, Bill!” he said. “He means business!”

Zieger surrendered. Blunk stepped forward, and, on Dillinger’s orders, took one of the guards’ pistols and laid it on a table. Dillinger grabbed it. He then opened a closet, took out a raincoat and hat, and walked out the kitchen door into the rain. Behind him came a curious procession, Youngblood training his gun on Blunk, then the chef and the two guards, followed by three more prisoners who wanted to escape. None of the last six men had a gun trained on them.

Dillinger trotted down the side of the red-brick jail until he reached a side door to its garage at the rear. A trustee named John Hudak was hunched over the engine of a 1927 Nash—Sheriff Holley’s car—when he felt something hard shoved into his back. He turned to see Dillinger. “Get in and drive,” Dillinger said.

“I, I don’t have the keys,” Hudak stammered.

“Where are they?” Dillinger asked.

“In the warden’s office, I think.”

Dillinger shoved Blunk toward the car and asked him to check for the keys. Blunk looked inside and said, “No keys.”

“That son of a bitch Baker, he lied to me,” Dillinger said. “I ought to kill him.”

For a moment Dillinger pondered his next move. He needed the car keys. Leaving Youngblood to guard the crowd in the garage, Dillinger led Blunk and Hudak back outside to the kitchen door. Inside, they surprised a National Guardsman and three other men. Blunk took their guns and Dillinger locked them in the receiving room. Hudak, meanwhile, was unable to find the sheriff’s car keys. “I gotta steal a car,” Dillinger said to Blunk. “Where’s the nearest garage?”

By the time Dillinger stalked back outside toward the jail’s garage, Warden Baker and the other hostages had freed themselves from the cells upstairs. Still locked inside the cell block, Baker went to a secret peephole that led into a closet in his residence. He banged on the wall. A moment later his wife’s eyeball appeared at the peephole.

“Irene,” he said. “Has the car left the garage?”

She didn’t understand.

“Call for help,” Baker said. “John Dillinger is out!”

Mrs. Baker wasn’t sure what to do. She picked up the phone, but for some reason the line was dead. She opened a window, spied a passing postman, and shouted “My God! John Dillinger is out!” The postman just stared. At wit’s end, Mrs. Baker hurried out of the apartment and down a flight of interior stairs to the garage. Bursting inside, she found Ernest Blunk standing with a man she didn’t recognize.

“John Dillinger is out!” she exclaimed.

The man stepped toward her. Suddenly she noticed the submachine gun in his hand, the two pistols jammed into his belt, and the two other pistols in his front pockets.

“Oh, no,” she said. “You’re not Dillinger.”

Dillinger smiled and took her by the arm. “Mrs. Baker,” Blunk said, “you do as he tells you and no one will get hurt.”

Dillinger locked the whole crowd, now numbering more than ten people, in a side room and got ready to leave. Shoving Blunk in front of them, they walked out the side door and circled behind the jail and the Criminal Courts Building. Dillinger’s luck held. There were no guardsmen or deputies in back that morning.

Next to the Criminal Courts Building stood a squat brick building, the Main Street Garage. The three men jogged through the rain to its back entrance. Inside, they walked through the garage toward the front. Two mechanics saw them, shrugged, and went back to work.