Public Enemies (64 page)

At the sound of gunshots, people on the sidewalks turned their heads. It sounded like firecrackers. Out in the intersection, Officer Wagner heard it, too. He strode toward the bank, his traffic whistle dangling from one hand. Van Meter saw him coming. He raised his rifle and fired. His bullet hit Wagner flush in the chest. The policeman staggered backward, slumping to the pavement even as he grabbed at his holstered pistol. He would be dead in half an hour.

Panic broke out. Everywhere, people were running and screaming. A few doors down Wayne Street, a jeweler named Harry Berg emerged onto the sidewalk carrying a pistol. Spying Nelson holding a submachine gun on the corner, he opened fire. His first bullet hit Nelson square in the chest; Nelson’s career might have ended there if not for the bulletproof vest he wore. Stunned, Nelson turned and fired a burst that sent Berg scurrying back into his store. Most of his bullets raked a parked car, shattering the windshield and wounding the man inside. Another man was struck in the stomach by a ricochet. He staggered into the jewelry store and collapsed, badly wounded.

Nelson swung the gun menacingly as people ran for cover. Just then a seventeen-year-old boy named Joseph Pawlowski ran across the intersection and leaped onto Nelson’s back. The two grappled for a moment before Nelson swung his gun butt into Pawlowski’s temple, stunning him. The teenager fell to the sidewalk, then ran off.

Alone and vulnerable outside the bank, Van Meter stepped into the Nisley Shoes store and ordered a half-dozen people out onto the sidewalk, where he lined them up before him as a human shield. Three traffic cops, hearing the shots, hustled up Wayne Street and saw the group, their hands in the air. Van Meter fired, sending the cops running for cover behind parked cars.

Just then Dillinger and his unidentified partner emerged from the bank, carrying cloth sacks containing more than $28,000 in cash. With them were three hostages, including the bank president, Delos Cohen. From across the intersection the patrolmen opened fire. Cohen fell, hit in the ankle. Another hostage, a cashier, was hit in the leg.

“I’m shot!” he yelped.

“Keep going,” Dillinger said, shoving him forward.

As Dillinger, Van Meter, and the fat man herded the hostages toward the getaway car, a furious gun battle broke out. Shielded by parked cars, the three patrolmen fired again and again. Standing beside the waiting Hudson, Nelson swung his submachine gun, firing wildly, bullets striking store windows and the State Theatre’s marquee.

Suddenly Van Meter fell. Dillinger turned and saw blood gushing from his head. Abandoning the two hostages, he grabbed Van Meter beneath the armpits and dragged him into the Hudson. The car was riddled with bullets, and more struck it as it sped away.
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A half-dozen policemen claimed to have chased the car as it fled west out of South Bend. It was later found abandoned outside the town of Gibsland.

Van Meter was bleeding badly when the gang returned to their rendezvous point at the white schoolhouse that afternoon. Fatso Negri was called, and when he arrived he found Van Meter lying on the ground, covered with blood. As Negri later described the scene to the FBI, “Van Meter is lying down, he is in agony and I think he is dying.” Negri wanted to get a doctor, but Nelson said no. Someone suggested they “yaffle,” or kidnap, a doctor. Dillinger and Nelson got into a heated argument. Eventually, Dillinger decided to take Van Meter back to Jimmy Probasco’s. They could get a doctor there.

Dillinger drove the bleeding Van Meter back into Chicago, pulling up behind Probasco’s house after nightfall. Probasco tried to reach the anesthetist, Harold Cassidy, but couldn’t. In the doctor’s absence, Probasco bandaged Van Meter’s wound. The next evening O’Leary and Piquett came by. They found Probasco stalking the apartment, cursing. “Where’s that damn Cassidy?” Probasco said. “I called him a dozen times yesterday to come over, and the son of a bitch never showed up. If we had to rely on him, Van Meter would be dead now. It’s just lucky I happen to be a pretty good doctor. Here, show them your head.”

Van Meter was sitting on a couch, recovering nicely. “I saved your life, didn’t I?” Probasco asked him. “Why, I was up all night picking hairs out of that wound.”

A little later Cassidy arrived. As Probasco and Van Meter cursed him, he cleaned the wound and rebandaged it. Dillinger regaled the group with the story of the wild shoot-out, dwelling on the story of the Jewish jeweler who had brazenly fired on Nelson. “You know, Johnnie,” Van Meter said at one point. “We’ll have to go back to South Bend in the next few days and take care of that little Jew.”

“Sure we will, Van,” Dillinger said, laughing. “Sure we will.”

 

 

By the weekend of the South Bend robbery, Dillinger had already made up his mind to leave Jimmy Probasco’s house. Probasco was a quarrelsome drunk, and Dillinger worried he might let something slip. According to one source, he and Van Meter overheard a telephone conversation in which Probasco had a heated argument with someone, telling him at one point, “I don’t care if you bring the cops. Go ahead and see what happens when they get here.” Dillinger was not amused. The final straw came on Wednesday, July 4, when he and Van Meter returned to the house and found Piquett and Probasco drinking heavily. Once the two left, the two outlaws packed their things, threw them in Van Meter’s car, and never came back.
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That same day, July 4, Dillinger moved into an apartment at 2420 North Halsted Street, in a German-immigrant neighborhood on the North Side.
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Three other people lived in the apartment, two of them women, and in their shadowy relationships—with each other, with Dillinger, and with an Indiana police detective—lay the seeds of Dillinger’s demise. One of the women was Dillinger’s new girlfriend Polly Hamilton, a twenty-six-year-old divorcée who waitressed at the S&S Café on Wilson Avenue. The other was Ana Sage, a squat forty-two-year-old Romanian immigrant whose principal means of support since arriving in America in 1908 had been running a series of brothels.

Precisely how Dillinger came to know Hamilton and Sage has never been explained. For decades the accepted version of events, as advanced by Hamilton in a newspaper article after Dillinger’s death, was that she met Dillinger at a Chicago nightclub called the Barrel of Fun, where he introduced himself as a Chicago Board of Trade clerk named Jimmy Lawrence. In fact, it’s far more likely that Dillinger met Hamilton through the dowdy Ana Sage, who for years had been a prominent member of the northwest Indiana underworld, a milieu Dillinger knew well. They had at least two mutual friends.

The madame who would go down in criminal lore as “the woman in red” was born Ana Campanas in 1892, in the village of Komlos, Romania, outside the Black Sea port of Costanza. At seventeen she married a man named Mike Chiolek. They emigrated to Chicago, had a son named Steve, and separated in 1917, when Ana was twenty-five. Abandoned with an eight-year-old son, she moved into the Romanian-immigrant community in Indiana Harbor, the lakeside warren of row houses and tumbledown bars that was East Chicago’s toughest neighborhood. There she worked as a prostitute and a waitress, eventually landing at the Harbor Bay Inn, where the menu included prostitutes for two dollars a tumble.

When her boss drew a six-month sentence for running afoul of state liquor laws, Ana ran the place herself. She was good at it. Five-feet-seven and a stout 165 pounds, with a thick Eastern European accent, Ana was an imposing presence. With intermittent help from her boss, she turned the inn into Indiana Harbor’s preeminent den of inequity. She kept order by cozying up to East Chicago policemen. By all accounts her closest benefactor was a flamboyant, and flamboyantly corrupt, detective named Martin Zarkovich—the same Martin Zarkovich to whom, Dillinger hinted, he had paid protection money.

Zarkovich was a legend in the Harbor. “A fastidious, immaculate peacock,” as a latter-day Indiana columnist termed him, Zarkovich cruised the streets of East Chicago in a felt fedora and suits so sharp he earned the nickname “The Sheik.”
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A loyal soldier in a police force whose primary duty was keeping the peace in East Chicago’s gambling halls and whorehouses—he was named chief of detectives in 1926—Zarkovich was indicted for corruption three times during the 1920s and was convicted once, of violating Prohibition laws, in 1929. Half of East Chicago’s power structure was convicted in the same case, so it was no surprise when “Zark” returned to the force; if anything, his conviction cemented his ties to the Lake County power structure. By the early 1930s, in fact, Zarkovich knew everyone who mattered in northwest Indiana politics and many who didn’t, from William Murray, Dillinger’s trial judge at Crown Point, to Louis Piquett’s investigator, Art O’Leary. O’Leary had known Zarkovich for years.

Ana Campanas came to know Martin Zarkovich in her earliest days in East Chicago. According to Mrs. Zarkovich’s divorce papers, filed in 1920, she apparently knew the detective a bit too well; Mrs. Zarkovich named Ana in her complaint, charging she had “overly friendly” relations with her husband. Zarkovich remained Ana’s protector after she opened her first brothel in neighboring Gary in 1921. By 1923 she was doing so well she rented an entire hotel, the forty-six-room Kostur. It was by all accounts a riotous place, hosting so many gun- and knife-fights that police dubbed it “The Bucket of Blood.” Ana, doing business as “Katie Brown,” became known as “Kostur House Katie.”

Zarkovich’s ties to the Lake County establishment helped Ana weather a half-dozen prostitution arrests. She was convicted on two occasions, but both were pardoned by the Indiana governor. Her luck finally ran out in 1932 when, after yet another conviction, the new reform governor, Paul McNutt, refused her request for a pardon. The “Bucket of Blood” closed down and Ana, ominously, was referred to federal immigration authorities for deportation.

Defeated, she withdrew to Chicago, where she had been commuting since at least 1928, following her marriage to a fellow Romanian immigrant named Alexander Suciu, who Anglicized his last name to Sage. Now Ana Sage, she had enough money saved to buy an apartment building in Chicago’s Uptown section, which may or may not have functioned as a brothel. When the Sages separated in 1933, the building was sold, and Ana, after shuffling through a series of apartments, washed up in the one on North Halsted in late June 1934, a part-time madame whose long-running deportation proceedings weighed on her mind.

One of her friends was Polly Hamilton, a girl from North Dakota who had moved to Gary during the 1920s, marrying and divorcing a local cop while working for Sage in some capacity at the Kostur Hotel. Hamilton’s role at Sage’s apartment on North Halsted is similarly unclear. Virtually every account of the Dillinger affair describes her as a waitress. But more than once, FBI records refer to Hamilton as a prostitute, suggesting that Sage was using her apartment as a call house, and Hamilton was moonlighting as a whore; Dillinger, in fact, may have met her while procuring her services. Sage later admitted to the FBI she let prostitutes use the spare rooms of her various apartments, and had done so as late as that June. FBI documents suggest Hamilton kept a separate residence in a Chicago hotel, but from at least July 1 on, she lived with Ana Sage. The apartment’s third occupant was Sage’s twenty-three-year-old unemployed son, Steve.

How did Dillinger come to meet Ana Sage? Though there is no concrete evidence to back it up, the most plausible explanation is that they were introduced by Martin Zarkovich, who knew both Sage and Dillinger’s intermediary, Art O’Leary. There is considerable evidence Zarkovich knew Dillinger as well. In interviews after Dillinger’s death, Zarkovich portrayed himself as a gallant detective obsessed with bringing Dillinger to justice for the murder of his friend, Patrick O’Malley, during the East Chicago bank robbery that January. Zarkovich said he had taken time off his job to pursue Dillinger single-handedly.

That may be. But for months
someone
had been lending aid to Dillinger in East Chicago, securing the shack where he stayed briefly that May, among other things. Dillinger hinted to Art O’Leary that it was Zarkovich, calling him “Zark.” As we have seen, without explicitly stating that Zarkovich had helped him, Dillinger told O’Leary that Zarkovich had been responsible for the May 24 murders of the two East Chicago detectives.
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Yet as intriguing as the links between Dillinger and Zarkovich appear, there is no irrefutable evidence that Zarkovich was the outlaw’s contact in East Chicago, or that he arranged for Dillinger to stay in Ana Sage’s apartment. The FBI, the one entity that could have discerned the truth, never tried. For reasons that will soon be clear, the Bureau had no interest in investigating Zarkovich.

What is certain is that by late June, Dillinger was spending a lot of time with Ana Sage’s girlfriend, Polly Hamilton, who would later insist, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, that she never knew that her new boyfriend “Jimmy Lawrence” was the country’s most-wanted man. Dillinger fell hard for Hamilton, the first woman to take his mind off Billie Frechette. In those warm days of early July, theirs was an endless whirl of Cubs games, amusement parks, and movies by day, dinners and dance clubs by night. Dillinger was polite and flush with cash, though Hamilton thought it strange he always wore the same light-gray suit; Dillinger explained he simply wore the same clothes until he grew tired of them, then threw them out. When she asked about the fresh scars on his face, he said he had been in an automobile accident.

They took taxis everywhere. At Riverview Park, where Dillinger insisted they ride the same roller-coasters again and again, he would scream on the downslopes and kiss her on the curves; he was so adept at the shooting galleries, other customers lined up to watch him. At the Grand Terrace and French Casino nightclubs they were usually among the first on the dance floor; Dillinger liked dancing the carioca, and would ask the orchestra leaders to play him one. When his favorite songs were played—“All I Do Is Dream of You” or “For All We Know”—he would lean in close and sing lightly in Hamilton’s ear. He didn’t drink much, a gin fizz or two, and every night before retiring, he insisted they stop for a hot dog. Dillinger called Hamilton “Contessa” or “Countess” and on her birthday bought her an amethyst ring. She gave him a gold ring with an inscription inside—WITH ALL MY LOVE, POLLY—and a watch with her picture tucked in the back.