Public Enemies (52 page)

“Police! Stop!” Rorer yelled, then fired.

A burst of machine-gun fire answered from the window. Bullets zinged through the trees. In the light of the muzzle flash Rorer could see two men at the window. Agent Melvin fired three blasts from his shotgun. A moment later Rorer looked up; the men at the window were gone. He was certain they had been forced back inside the lodge.

Back in the driveway the firing had stopped. Purvis and Clegg began shouting for the men inside the damaged Chevrolet to come out with their hands up. The driver’s door opened. “Hold your fire!” someone yelled. Before anyone could react a man jumped out of the car and sprinted into the woods on the right, where a half-dozen FBI men were running toward the lake. Several had already passed behind the lodge’s wood-frame garage and stumbled into a barbed-wire fence, from which they were attempting to extricate themselves in the darkness.

Agent Harold H. Reinecke was right behind these men, running toward the lake, when the man fleeing the car nearly crashed into him. “Halt!” Reinecke yelled. But the man turned and ran. “Halt!” Reinecke yelled again. When the man kept running, Reinecke raised his shotgun and fired twice, missing. As the man disappeared into the darkness, he fired one more blast, missing once more.

As Agent Reinecke chased the unidentified man in the woods, a second man emerged from the car, slowly, swaying, and slumped to the ground, obviously wounded. “Hands up!” Clegg shouted.

“Identify yourself!” Purvis shouted.

The man on the ground groaned.

“John,” he said.

 

 

“Hands up! Hands up!”

Purvis and Clegg shouted at the fallen man to come toward them. He ignored them. It was dark; at a distance of fifty feet, Purvis couldn’t see the man’s features clearly. He called for Agent Sam Hardy to run back and bring the third FBI car up the driveway, so they could shine headlights on the man. Hardy scrambled back to the car, but the keys were missing. The driver, Agent Arthur McLawhon, was out in the woods on the right. Hardy shouted for him to bring the keys. Precious minutes were lost until McLawhon finally appeared and handed over the keys. Hardy drove the car up the driveway.

When the headlights reached him everyone could see the fallen “John” wasn’t Dillinger. He was elderly, heavyset. Purvis shouted for him to come forward and surrender. The man seemed to oblige, rising to his feet. But then he staggered backward, fell heavily on his rump, took a flask out of his pocket, and took a deep swig. Purvis yelled for everyone to hold their fire.

The lodge was still. FBI men had taken up stations in the woods to the left and right, where they could see the beach at the back of the inn. Word was relayed from both positions: no one had gotten through. The elderly man stood, staggered onto the porch, and disappeared into the lodge. As Purvis and Clegg watched, unsure what to do, they could see the man inside, weaving past the windows.

Purvis was still trying to decide his next move when the headlights of a car swung into the driveway behind them. It drove right up behind the parked FBI cars. The two agents standing with Purvis, Carter Baum and Sam Hardy, called for the driver to identify himself. Suddenly the car leaped backward, rocketing down the driveway toward Highway 51. Baum opened fire with his submachine gun. Purvis ran after the car, firing at the tires and hitting the radiator. The car sped out of the driveway and disappeared into the darkness.

Purvis realized they were in a precarious position. Agents were spraying bullets at anything that moved, not having any idea who they were shooting at. Worried that one of his own men might be shot, Purvis called out for every agent on the grounds to shout out his identity and his position. As he did, Agent Hardy ran up. He said he could still see the headlights of the retreating car moving slowly out on the road behind them. Purvis told Hardy and two other agents to creep back through the woods to try and take it by surprise.

The three agents reached the end of Little Bohemia’s driveway at about the same time as the car. Again they called for the occupants to get out and identify themselves. Again the car sped away. All three men opened fire. There was a loud pop, a tire exploding. As the car disappeared down the highway, this time for good, they heard it running on one rim. There was no way to stop the car. In the rush to reach the lodge, no one had thought to arrange roadblocks. The local sheriff had no idea the FBI was even in his jurisdiction.

Back in the driveway, Inspector Rorer materialized from the left and discussed with Purvis and Clegg what to do. They had now fired on at least five different cars and people, and no one had a clue who a single one of their targets actually was. And now there was a sixth. By this point everyone could see a man sitting in the wounded Chevrolet coupe, its motor still running. Music could be heard; the car radio. Purvis called to the man in the car. He wasn’t moving.

Rorer was elected to reconnoiter the car. As Purvis covered him, Rorer dropped to his hands and knees and crawled to the Chevrolet. In the front seat he found a young man, his head drooped forward, his right chest and shoulder covered with blood. Rorer felt for a pulse; there was none. He reached over and switched off the radio and the motor, then slipped his hand into the man’s coat pocket and took his wallet. He returned to where Clegg and Purvis were standing and reported, as he later put it, “that the man was young and dead.”

Rorer opened the dead man’s wallet and lifted out his driver’s license. It was then that the three FBI supervisors learned that the man they had just killed was a thirty-five-year-old worker at a nearby federal work camp named Eugene Boisneau.

 

 

They waited. Other than the wounded “John,” whom they could still see staggering inside the lodge, there was no sign of life in the building. Even though they had apparently killed an innocent man, Purvis tried to put it from his mind. Dillinger and his gang were trapped inside the lodge; eventually they would have to make a break for it. For the moment, Purvis and Clegg decided against storming the place. There weren’t enough bulletproof vests, and they had no tear-gas guns at all. Purvis had inexplicably failed to bring Chicago’s. Clegg’s were being brought by Werner Hanni and the other St. Paul agents, who were still en route. The minutes ticked by. All around the lodge, agents hunched behind trees, blowing on their hands for warmth.

An hour passed. Then, around eleven o’clock, a new set of headlights appeared in the driveway. It was an ambulance from the federal work camp, Camp Mercer. Purvis was surprised. No one had called for it. The camp doctor, a man named S. X. Roberts, stepped out of the ambulance and told Purvis he had received a call that a worker named John Morris had been wounded. Purvis realized Morris must be the “John” who had retreated into the lodge. This was getting worse by the minute.

When the ambulance drove up, another man emerged from the woods. His name was John Hoffman; he was a gas station attendant. Hoffman had been the third man in the Chevrolet coupe, the one Agent Reinecke had shot at in the woods. He had a gunshot wound in his right arm and glass cuts all over his face. Together Hoffman and Dr. Roberts called for John Morris to come out of the lodge. A moment later he did so. To Purvis’s surprise, Morris was followed by three men, who walked out with their hands up. It was Emil Wanatka, his bartender, and the busboy. Wanatka said Dillinger and his men were still inside the lodge, hiding in an upstairs bedroom on the left side of the building.

Word passed through the agents in the trees: they had the Dillinger Gang trapped. That was the good news. In whispers the bad news passed from man to man, that someone, apparently a civilian, had been killed in the Chevrolet. No one took the news harder than Carter Baum, the handsome twenty-nine-year-old who had fired the fatal shots. Baum was sitting in one of the FBI cars, brooding and trying to keep warm. An agent named Ken McIntire sat with him. “I think there’s a man in that car,” McIntire said at one point, “and I think he is dead.”

“Certainly he is,” Baum said. “I killed him.” McIntire tried to assuage Baum’s guilt. Several agents had fired at the car, McIntire said. It was dark. He couldn’t be certain he had killed the man. He should forget about it. But Baum couldn’t forget. He had killed an innocent man. Touching the submachine gun in his lap, Baum said, “I can never shoot this gun again.”
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Outside, Purvis and Clegg continued debating whether to storm the lodge. Again they decided to wait for Werner Hanni and the tear-gas equipment: with the building surrounded, Dillinger wasn’t going anywhere. Purvis collared Agent Jay Newman and told him to take one of the FBI cars and drive to Birchwood Lodge, phone the Rhinelander airport, and leave a message for Hanni to hurry forward the moment he arrived. Newman, a Mormon laypreacher, noticed Carter Baum’s plight and asked to take him along. Maybe they could talk. Purvis agreed.

Newman drove Baum to Birchwood Lodge, where he phoned an agent left at Rhinelander and relayed the message. When Newman finished his call, the operator told him he had just heard something about a Packard being stolen in town, in Manitowish. Newman, worried that a member of Dillinger’s gang might be escaping, took Agent Baum and drove back past Little Bohemia and on into the town, where they spotted a constable named Carl C. Christiansen. Christiansen jumped in the car and accompanied them back to Birchwood Lodge, hoping to assemble a posse.

On their return, the three were greeted with a second piece of news. The switchboard operator, a man named Alvin Koerner, who lived between the two lodges, had just phoned, saying there was a suspicious car parked outside his house. Newman decided to investigate. Returning to his car, Newman drove, with Baum beside him and Christiansen at the window. It only took a minute to reach Koerner’s gravel driveway, where they saw the car parked on Route 51.

“Have your guns ready,” Newman said.

As they approached the car, they could see it was empty. Agent Baum jotted down the license number. They turned into the gravel lane leading to Koerner’s house. It was lined by a white picket fence. There was a Ford parked in front. When his headlights swept the car, Newman could see it was filled with people. He pulled up behind it and rolled down his window. “I’m looking for Mr. Koerner,” Newman said.

No answer. Suspicion flickered in Newman’s eyes.

“Who’s in that car?” he asked.

A small young man in a brown suede jacket jumped out of the car’s passenger’s-side door and stepped to Newman’s open window.

“I know you bastards are wearing bulletproof vests,” the man barked, “so I’ll give it to you high and low.”

Baby Face Nelson raised his gun and opened fire.

 

 

Not until it was far too late did Purvis and Clegg realize that every assumption they had made that evening was horribly wrong. While the two men remained rooted in the driveway at Little Bohemia, studying the lodge for a glimpse of the gang they believed trapped inside, Dillinger was already gone, and moving fast. So were Van Meter, Hamilton, Carroll, and Nelson. Each had made his escape in the opening minutes of a debacle that would haunt the Bureau for years to come.

As the FBI pieced it together afterward, this is what happened. When the three Bureau cars first entered Little Bohemia’s driveway, all the gang members except Nelson had been upstairs packing. Nelson was out in the cabin beside the lodge’s porch. The only guests left in the barroom were John Hoffman, a twenty-eight-year-old gas station attendant, and two of his friends from the work camp, a fifty-nine-year-old cook named John Morris and thirty-five-year-old Eugene Boisneau. The three had just put on their coats and stepped onto the porch when the FBI cars pulled up.

The bartender and the busboy followed them out to wave good-bye. The Chevrolet was Hoffman’s, and when he turned the ignition, the radio came on. No one saw the FBI cars out in the darkened drive. Hoffman started the car and headed up the driveway, still unable to see the agents, who began shouting for him to stop. Hoffman couldn’t hear them over the car radio. In fact, none of the three men in the car knew what was happening until bullets crashed through the windshield. On the porch behind them, the bartender and the busboy began shouting, “Stop! They’re our customers!” In the din of gunfire, no one heard them.

At the sound of gunshots, Dillinger and the men upstairs grabbed their weapons, opened a second-story rear window, and prepared to jump. As they did, Inspector Rorer and his men rounded the left side of the lodge, saw them, and opened fire. Dillinger fired a burst from his Thompson gun in return. The critical mistake of the evening was Rorer’s. He believed his shots had driven the gang members inside. They hadn’t. When Rorer and his men ducked to avoid the return fire from the roof, Dillinger, Van Meter, Hamilton, and Carroll each jumped from the second-story window onto a ten-foot mound of frozen snow behind the lodge. By the time Rorer looked back, they were gone.

When Rorer glanced toward the lake, he saw no one escaping. But what Rorer couldn’t see was that an eight-foot incline divided the beach from the backyard; Henry Voss hadn’t included this feature on the map he sketched for the agents that afternoon. Dillinger and his men sprinted down a set of wooden steps to the beach, turned right, and ran along the lake, their escape hidden from sight by the incline. Over on the right, Nelson sprang from the cabin, fired at Purvis, and darted into the woods. By the time FBI agents fought their way through a barbed-wire fence, he too was gone, melting into the darkness.

The car that entered the lodge’s driveway after the initial shooting was driven by the gang’s gofer, Pat Reilly, returning to the lodge with Pat Cherrington. Cherrington had just opened the car door when she heard a voice yell, “Halt!” She replied, “Go to hell,” jumped back into the car, and told Reilly to step on it. When he reached the highway, Reilly lingered a minute, unsure what to do. When shots rang out, he lost control of the car, running it over a tree stump.