Public Enemies (43 page)

Billowing clouds of tear gas were filling the lobby, and more was coming. From a position on the mezzanine, a bank officer named Tom Barclay grabbed a tear-gas candle and tossed it into the lobby. Gas had reached the second floor when the switchboard operator, Margaret Johnson, ran to the railing. Falling to her knees, she crawled to a window and opened it. Looking down, she spied a small man in a camel-hair overcoat standing in the alley. “Hey you!” Johnson called. “Don’t you know the bank is being robbed? Get some help!”

The man turned. It was Nelson. “Are you telling me, lady?”

By now, everyone inside the bank was coughing. The gas was so thick it was difficult to see. As Green and Van Meter prowled the aisles, ordering people onto the floor, Hamilton turned his attention from the bank guard to the assistant cashier, a slender fifty-nine-year-old named Harry Fisher. Hamilton, a white cloth bag filled with money from the teller cages in one hand, pressed a pistol into Fisher’s back and shoved him toward the vault. Though frightened, Fisher was uncomfortably aware that more than $200,000 in cash sat in the vault.

“All the way back [to the vault], I kept wondering how I could keep from giving him all that money,” Fisher remembered in an interview in 1942.
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“I must have walked too slowly to suit him for he gave me a boot in the tailbone to hurry me along.”

When they reached the barred door leading to the vault, Fisher got an idea. Fishing a key from his pocket, he opened the door, then shoved a bag of pennies against it as a doorstop. When Hamilton snatched up the bag, the door shut behind him, just as Fisher had intended to do himself. There was now a barred door between the two men: Hamilton kept his gun trained on Fisher through it. Fisher then stepped to the vault door, which was unlocked. Hamilton didn’t know that, however, and Fisher spun the combination, locking it. Wiping tears from his eyes, Fisher turned to Hamilton and said, “I don’t know whether I can see to work the combination.”
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“You’d better open it goddamn quick,” Hamilton snapped.

Fisher took his time opening the vault as Hamilton wiped tears from his face. Finally swinging the giant door back onto its hinges, he stepped back to the barred door where Hamilton stood. “Now this door is locked,” Fisher lied, nodding toward the door separating the two men, “and I can’t open it.”

Hamilton told him to shove the money through the bars. Determined to proceed as slowly as possible, Fisher walked into the vault, grabbed an armload of bags containing one-dollar bills, and plodded back to the barred door, sliding them one by one into Hamilton’s arms. When he was done, he plodded back into the vault and grabbed more bags of ones. “If you don’t hurry up,” Hamilton said, “I’m gonna shoot you.”

As Harry Fisher cannily slowed the robbery to a crawl, a huge crowd was gathering outside the bank. People streamed from stores and homes all around the town square, drawn by the sound of gunfire. For a few minutes it was a congenial affair, some of the people actually laughing and giggling. A few, spying H. C. Kunkleman’s tripod-mounted camera, thought some kind of movie was being shot. “Hey, there, Hank!” someone yelled, spotting a friend in the crowd .
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Dillinger was standing on the sidewalk by the front door, smiling faintly as he kept the crowd at bay, when Van Meter pushed ten hostages out to join him. The two lined the group in front of the bank, a row of human shields. Dillinger then ducked back into the bank to see what was taking so much time. “Gimme three more minutes!” Hamilton hollered.

Dillinger corralled another group of six or seven people and herded them toward the front door. After East Chicago, he was taking no chances. “Stand close to me,” Lydia Crosby, a bank stenographer, heard him say. “Come up, get around me.” Outside, Dillinger lined up these people with the others. More than fifteen bank employees and customers were now standing on the sidewalk in front of the bank, hands held above their heads. Van Meter strode into a shoe store and forced a half-dozen shoppers out onto the sidewalk to join them.

Then, from their right, came gunshots. It was Nelson, loosing a volley at a reporter from the
Mason City Globe Gazette
who had heard the shots; the reporter dived into the Yelland and Hanes Book Store. A moment later a large Hudson sedan drove by. Nelson yelled, “Get back!” then shot at it, too, the bullets striking the radiator; the car stopped with a loud squeal of brakes, reversed direction, and sped back into the town square, narrowly missing bystanders. A little girl in the crowd began crying hysterically.

Nelson swung his gun in a menacing circle, watching for police. As he did, several eyewitnesses said, he began laughing. He fired a burst at a row of parked cars, then another at the second story of a hardware store. Several bystanders thought he must be deranged. Just then a man named R. L. James, secretary to the Mason City school board, strolled up the sidewalk beside the bank, unaware of the robbery in progress. “Stop right there!” Nelson yelled, but James, who was hard of hearing, kept walking. Nelson fired, hitting James in the leg. He fell bleeding to the sidewalk. Nelson trotted up to him, snatched up a portfolio James was carrying, and searched it.

“I thought you were a cop, you son of a bitch,” Nelson said.

“I’m not a cop,” James moaned.

Dillinger took a few steps down the sidewalk, toward Nelson. Spotting the wounded James, he said, “Did you have to do that?”
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“I thought he was a cop!” Nelson snapped.

As Dillinger stepped back behind the wall of hostages, an elderly judge named John C. Shipley was peering down from a third-floor window directly above him. In Shipley’s hand was an old revolver he had fished from a desk drawer. Drawing a bead on Dillinger, he pulled the trigger. The bullet struck Dillinger a glancing blow in the right shoulder. Dillinger whirled, staring upward, then raised a pistol and fired several times at the windowsill. Shipley ducked down, unharmed.

As he turned back toward the hostages, Dillinger spied a city patrolman darting through the town square. The officer, James Buchanan, dived behind a large boulder used as a Civil War monument. Dillinger raised his gun and fired, the bullet ricocheting off the boulder. “Come out from behind there and fight like a man!” Dillinger shouted.

“Get away from that crowd and I will!” Buchanan shouted back. He peered around the boulder but held his fire.

Dillinger could see that the situation was getting out of hand. Van Meter stepped back into the lobby, waving away the tear gas, and yelled to Hamilton, “We’re leaving!”

“Give us three more minutes!” Hamilton yelled back. In the vault, Harry Fisher’s pace had gone from slow to glacial. “Gimme the big bills!” Hamilton snapped at Fisher, who ignored him, carefully bringing out one bag of singles after another.

“We’re going!” Van Meter hollered again.

“Just gimme another minute!” Hamilton replied. He was torn. “It’s hell to leave all that money,” Fisher heard him say.
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The bags in Hamilton’s hand contained about $52,000. There was another $200,000 in the vault. Hamilton decided he couldn’t wait. A moment later he turned from the vault door, grabbed a bank employee, and pushed him toward the front. In a minute all six gang members were on the sidewalk outside, surrounded by about twenty-five hostages. Each man shoved a knot of people toward the Buick. They were in a foul mood. When Eddie Green spied a jeweler staring from behind a parked car, he snarled, “Pull in that damn turtleneck! I’ll cut your head off!” He fired a single shot as the jeweler ducked behind the car.

Just then Judge Shipley raised his head to peer out his third-floor window, directly above the gang. Spying Hamilton with the money sack, he fired one final shot. The bullet struck Hamilton in the right shoulder. Hamilton lurched forward, stumbling into the getaway car. The wound was not serious, nor was Dillinger’s.

Five hostages were shoved onto the running boards, two more onto the front fender and several more on the rear fender. “Get up there, you bald-headed son of a bitch, or I’ll drop you,” one of the robbers, apparently Nelson, snapped as an assistant cashier named Ralph Wiley hopped onto the back fender. Several women were shoved into the backseat. In minutes the car windows were jammed with arms and legs. As Tommy Carroll inched the car from the curb, witnesses counted anywhere from twenty to twenty-six people inside and outside the car.

The car crept along at about fifteen miles an hour as it zigzagged through city streets toward the edge of town. At one point, as they passed the Kirk Apartments, a woman named Minnie Piehm hollered, “Let me out! This is where I live.” Amazingly, the car stopped and Miss Piehm trotted off. An assistant cashier was about to follow when one of the gang said, “Get back here, you.”

The situation wasn’t funny to the hostages who remained clinging to the car’s fenders and running boards. “Stop looking at me or I’ll kill you,” one of the gang members said several times. The Buick’s slow pace gave the police chief, E. J. Patton, time to catch up; his was one of two squad cars that managed to pursue the gang. Patton followed at a safe distance as the Buick turned south onto Highway 18 and picked up speed. At one point, as the fleeing car crested a rise, Nelson said to Carroll, “Wait till they come over the hill and then I’ll pop them off.” Sitting in the front seat, Nelson took a rifle and fired several wild shots at Chief Patton’s car.

Just beyond the city limits, the Buick stopped. Nelson hopped off, fired a shot or two at Chief Patton’s car, which also stopped, then began tossing out handfuls of roofing tacks. Dillinger watched as several bounced under the Buick. In a serene voice, he said, “You’re getting tacks under our own car.”
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When Nelson jumped back into the car, Carroll once again headed south, driving at about thirty miles an hour. It was still snowing, and several of the hostages outside the car were freezing. One of the tellers, Emmet Ryan, gave a woman his jacket. For some reason, this angered Dillinger, who fired him a cold stare. “The coldest eyes you ever saw,” Ryan remembered years later. “Cold eyes and white skin.”

Ryan again irked Dillinger when the car turned onto a dirt road to release several hostages. Ryan began to leave. Then, realizing how cold another hostage was without a coat, he suggested the other man leave instead. “Who the hell is running this show?” Dillinger asked.

Chief Patton was still behind them. He pulled to the roadside when the car stopped. Nelson fired three shots from his rifle, hitting the squad car but missing Patton. “You phone the law!” Nelson shouted at one of the departing hostages. “Tell ’em if they don’t stop following us we’re gonna kill everyone in the car!”

They proceeded that way for forty-five minutes or so, eventually finding their way back to the sand pit and their second car. Most of the hostages were left there, but two accompanied the gang on the drive north; they were released only when Chief Patton turned back to Mason City. When they were certain they had gotten away cleanly, the gang stopped and bandaged Dillinger’s and Hamilton’s shoulder wounds.

They were back in St. Paul by nightfall. Tired and bleeding, the gang headed for Harry Sawyer’s Green Lantern tavern. Sawyer wasn’t there, but his bartender said he knew what to do. That night a doctor named Nels Mortensen was awakened by the sound of someone ringing the bell at his home on Fairmount Avenue in St. Paul. Thin, gray-haired, and locally prominent, the fifty-year-old Mortensen was president of the state board of health; a friend of Harry Sawyer’s, he had treated Fred Barker for syphilis and performed the tonsillectomy on Alvin Karpis’s girlfriend. Downstairs, he parted the curtains. Two cars were at the curb. Opening the door, he found a group of men he didn’t recognize.

The bartender explained that two of the men had just been injured in a gunfight downtown. Mortensen said he didn’t have his medical bag, but let the men inside anyway. Standing in his foyer, Mortensen tore off Hamilton’s bandages and examined the wound; it wasn’t serious. Dillinger almost fainted when he stripped off his shirt. He stumbled into a chair, and Mortensen got him a glass of water. Dillinger’s wound was deeper but no more serious. Mortensen said the men could visit his office the next morning if they needed further treatment. As they left, the doctor caught a glimpse of a submachine gun beneath Van Meter’s coat. He returned to bed without telling anyone of the incident.
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A month later, when FBI agents learned of it, Hoover decided to make an example of Dr. Mortensen. He received a prison sentence of one year. When Dr. Mortensen died in 1971 at the age of eighty-seven, he was still insisting he had no idea his patient had been John Dillinger.

After seeing Mortensen, the gang divided the money. A rare glimpse at the delicate nature of intragang relations comes from the FBI’s debriefing of Pat Cherrington, who fell into federal hands later that spring. According to Cherrington, Nelson “was very much disliked by all members of the mob . . . [T]hey had a continuous fear when they were around him, and particularly subsequent to a bank robbery; that the usual procedure after a bank robbery, at which time they would all meet to divide the loot, was that they would invariably have Nelson sit in the middle of the room, although he was not aware that they were arranging things in that way, and allow him to count off each one’s share; that all the hoodlums would get around the room as that each one would be facing Nelson, as they expect at any time . . . that Nelson would shoot them and take the entire amount.”
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After dividing the money, the gang began to scatter. Van Meter and his girlfriend Mickey Conforti settled into their apartment on Girard Avenue in St. Paul. Dillinger and Billie had already moved into a new set of rooms on South Lexington Avenue; they had been obliged to vacate their Minneapolis flat after Hamilton’s gun accidentally went off: Dillinger didn’t want to take the chance they had been noticed. In the new apartment Hamilton slept on the couch with Cherrington.