Public Enemies (69 page)

That was the last questioning of Hamilton the FBI ever did. Both she and Sage were released after their stay in Detroit. Hamilton vanished, hiding out with her parents in South Dakota. On Cowley’s urging, Sage fled to Los Angeles, where in October Cowley visited her and handed over her share of the Dillinger reward money, $5,000.

Rather than delve further into the conspiracy that Matt Leach alleged, the Bureau began asking questions about Leach himself. Earl Connelley nosed for dirt around Indianapolis, and in mid-August notified Cowley that Leach had been paying “considerable attention” to a lady—not his wife—who was staying at the Spink Arms hotel.
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Leach was not intimidated. “We want to get to the bottom of this whole mess,” he told the
Chicago Tribune.
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He never would.

 

 

They buried John Dillinger in the sprawling Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, amid a sudden summer rainstorm and a symphony of heavenly thunderclaps. His father had brought the body back from Chicago, the hearse trailed by a line of cars packed with reporters. A crowd of five thousand people pressed against a high stone fence beside the gravesight. John Dillinger, Sr., stood by solemnly as his son’s coffin was lowered into the ground. The rain that ran in rivulets down his face looked like tears. Later that day he returned to his empty farmhouse. The reporters returned to their offices. The show was over.

 

 

Baby Face Nelson refused to panic, but he needed to get out of Chicago. The night after Dillinger’s death he met his friend Jack Perkins in a North Side restaurant and asked him to come west with him and bring his wife and three-year-old son, Jackie. The group would look less suspicious with a child along, Nelson explained, and he couldn’t bring his own; he assumed the FBI was watching them. Perkins agreed.

Two days later, Nelson’s little band left Chicago in two cars, driving west across Iowa. Sleeping at out-of-the-way tourist camps, they reached Reno two nights later. Skirting the city, Nelson drove to the Cal-Neva Lodge, rousting a gambler friend, Tex Hall. Nelson wanted a place to hide. “Can’t do it, Jimmy,” Hall said. “You’re too hot.”

Irritated, Nelson moved on, looking for refuge in his old Bay Area haunts. The two cars crossed into California separately on the theory that two cars with Illinois plates might arouse suspicion at the border agricultural checkpoint. The next morning everyone rendezvoused at a sprawling country inn, the Parente Hotel, in the wine-country town of El Verano outside Sonoma. The inn was owned by Louis Parente, a cousin of the bootlegger who had employed Nelson in Sausalito. Nelson wasn’t sure whether to trust Parente, but Negri, whose familiarity with the northern California underworld now made him Nelson’s de facto guide, assured him Parente was “all right.”

Parente was outside the hotel that morning when Nelson drove up, wearing white flannel slacks and a straw boater. “Hello, Louis,” Nelson said. “How’s the chance to get rooms in the hotel?” Parente just stared. “Don’t you remember me?” Nelson asked. “I used to work for your cousin.” Parente pointed Nelson to the front desk, where Nelson muttered that Parente had given him “the cold shoulder.” The manager, Gus Zappas, assigned Nelson rooms on the first floor.

“Don’t you remember me?” Nelson asked Zappas.

“You’re Jimmy,” Zappas said.

“Haven’t I changed a lot?” Nelson asked.

“Not very much,” Zappas said.

After lunch Nelson sent Perkins to the post office to see whether their wanted posters were displayed; to his relief, they weren’t. He sent Negri into San Francisco to fetch his old bootlegging foreman, Soap Mareno. Mareno reluctantly agreed to drive up to El Verano, arriving around midnight. During a walk around the darkened hotel grounds, Nelson asked whether Mareno could arrange a hideout for the gang, preferably an isolated ranch. After an hour Mareno returned to San Francisco, leaving Nelson bitterly disappointed. “Can you believe that?” he told Negri. “Soap won’t do a thing for me.”

Any hopes Nelson had of hiding at the inn were dashed the next day after lunch. As they were leaving the dining room, someone yelled, “Hey, Fatso!” Negri turned and saw David Dillon, an officer with the San Francisco Police, eating with his wife. Negri stepped over to chat. “Who was that?” Nelson demanded when Negri returned. Negri explained that Dillon was a friend; he wouldn’t say anything. Nelson was irate. He walked straight to the front desk and checked out.
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Nelson lingered in the wine country while trying to coax a hiding place out of old friends. The next night, after dinner in the town of Agua Caliente, he had the first of two meetings with Louis “Bones” Tambini, a bootlegger up from San Francisco; Tambini also said Nelson was “too hot” to hide. That night the Nelsons camped in a field, while Negri went to a hotel in Napa. Homesick, he walked to a pool hall and called his mother.

The next morning, Negri mentioned the call and Nelson became irate. “Haven’t I told you never to use a telephone or write to anyone that you know?” he demanded. Nelson told Negri to go home to his mother and watch the
Chicago Tribune
classifieds; if they needed him, they would place an ad containing the word “Nondo.”

His old haunts closed to him, Nelson stayed on the move, flitting between tourist camps in towns all across Northern California, in Caspar, Scotia, Eureka, Weaverville, and Sacramento, before heading south, staying in motels outside Salinas and Stockton.
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Nelson saw that too many sets of eyes were seeing them at too many places; they needed a spot to settle down, even if it meant camping.

That’s what it meant. Crossing into Nevada the morning of August 9, Nelson’s band pulled up beside the Fallon Mercantile Store in Fallon, Nevada, east of Reno. Nelson stayed in the car while Perkins and the others shopped. They bought a $5.95 Coleman camping stove, a $5.95 Coleman lantern, an $18 Range Tent, camping utensils, groceries, and a Winchester rifle. Perkins paid for everything from a fat roll of one-dollar bills then, politely declining the owner’s offer to help, used a hand truck to wheel the gear out to the cars, where he piled it onto a trailer they had bought in Reno.
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The following day Nelson found their new home, the Mount Grant Lodge, fourteen miles south of Hawthorne, Nevada, on the shores of Lake Walker. It was little more than a sprinkling of cabins, but it had running water and electricity, and for the first few days that was all Nelson felt they needed. The problem was Johnny Chase. He was the only single man in the group, and he was, for lack of a better word, lovesick. He pined for his girlfriend, a San Francisco newsstand clerk named Sally Backman, and nagged Nelson to let her join them in the desert. Everyone was against it. Nelson didn’t trust new faces and said so, loudly.

Chase would not be dissuaded. One night he drove into San Francisco and arranged to see Backman. Negri picked her up at her newsstand by the Sausalito Ferry and drove her to a beach where Chase was waiting. They stayed that night in a hotel on Mission Street. In the quiet of their room, Chase explained he was traveling with someone who was “hot”; if Backman came with him, he couldn’t guarantee her safety. She asked for time to think about it. Chase returned to the desert. Two weeks passed.

The longer they remained in Nevada, the more Chase missed Backman. Finally, tired of his friend’s carping, Nelson relented. On Thursday, August 16, Chase got in his car and drove to San Francisco to get his girl. It was the worst decision Baby Face Nelson ever made.

 

 

On Wednesday, August 15, Ed Guinane, the San Francisco SAC, took a call from an Oakland detective who said he had a tip on Nelson. Guinane drove across the bay to hear it.
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The detective’s wife was Louis Parente’s niece. The previous night Parente told the detective that Nelson had been at his inn three weeks before.

The next morning, Guinane convened a conference of FBI agents and detectives from the Oakland and San Francisco police departments. After briefings the group proceeded to the El Verano Inn to interview Louis Parente. Parente and his manager told them everything they knew. They identified Fatso Negri—the first time the FBI learned of him—and described Chase and the Perkins family. They also described Nelson’s Hudson, though they hadn’t noted the license plate number.

By Friday afternoon, Ed Guinane was dictating a memo to Hoover, laying out details of Nelson’s stay in Napa County. The Teletype crossed Hoover’s desk the next morning. “Take up with Cowley & I suggest he send by plane 4 or 5 agents familiar with Nelson to San Francisco,” Hoover scrawled on it. Five men from the Dillinger Squad boarded a flight to San Francisco that night.
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Working with the San Francisco and Sausalito police, the new men quickly hit pay dirt. An informant reported that Chase had a girlfriend named Sally Backman. She had disappeared.
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On Saturday, August 18, the day the new FBI agents arrived in San Francisco, Chase drove up to the cabins on Walker Lake with Fatso Negri and Sally Backman. The desert heat was approaching one hundred degrees as Chase introduced Backman to everyone, giving only first names: Jack and Grace and their little boy, Jackie, and Helen, a quiet girl in a gingham house dress. Backman took an immediate dislike to the slender, cocky blond Chase introduced as “Jimmy,” and Nelson made no effort to hide his distaste for her: he made snide comments about how everyone should work hard to ensure that Backman was “comfortable.” The lodge’s owner, John Benedict, noticed the friction between the two. He found Nelson “surly” but liked the others. When Benedict remarked that Backman seemed ill at ease, Chase told him she was a “city girl” unaccustomed to desert camping.
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The gang occupied three cabins, the Nelsons in one, the Perkins family in another, Chase and Backman in the third. Negri slept on a cot in the open air. They were the camp’s only guests. Days they spent in idle pursuits. The women swam. Nelson slept for long periods. Sometimes he and Chase fished, though they rarely caught anything. Nelson, typically attired in faded tan corduroys and a wrinkled open-necked white shirt, liked to shoot rabbits and squirrels with his .22 rifle.

Most mornings Negri drove into Fallon or Hawthorne to buy food and newspapers. Nelson avidly scanned the papers or sometimes a copy of
Field & Stream;
he liked the articles on guns. Some evenings everyone but Nelson would drive into Hawthorne for dinner at a restaurant called the Oasis; Helen would bring Nelson back a tray of food. She usually found him sitting in the Hudson listening to news on the car radio. When they ate at camp, Helen handled the cooking and cleaning, consulting handmade recipe cards she carried in a little box.

Backman didn’t help and didn’t offer to, which raised tensions within the group. When she and Chase were alone, she constantly asked when they would leave. Chase said soon; they were “waiting for news.” Backman wasn’t dumb. She demanded to know who “Jimmy” really was. After a day or two of pestering, Chase told her the truth. Backman was startled. She began to nag Chase to leave the group.

Nelson was preparing to head back east. One morning the men took the Hudson into Reno to have it overhauled. Another day Nelson took the trailer into Hawthorne to have a tail light fixed; the last thing he needed was for a patrolman to pull him over. Then, on Thursday night, August 23, Nelson was slouched in the Hudson’s front seat, listening to the radio, when he heard the news. It was Van Meter.

 

 

The night Dillinger was killed, Homer Van Meter took his girlfriend Mickey Conforti and drove to St. Paul, where he hoped to find shelter with Harry Sawyer at the Green Lantern or his partner Jack Peifer at the Hollyhocks Club. But Sawyer had disappeared that spring, and Peifer wanted nothing to do with the FBI agents on Van Meter’s trail. In desperation Van Meter rented a room at a tourist camp outside the town of Walker, Minnesota. Nights he drove into St. Paul, trying to find someone who could hide him someplace safer.

For the next month, Van Meter and Conforti shuttled among tourist cabins in the pines north of St. Paul. The FBI suspected they might be in the area, but could find no one with hard information. “About 75 percent of the gangsters and mobsters of the underworld have scuttled out [of town], had their telephones disconnected and have moved,” Cowley wrote Hoover at one point. “[E]verybody is on the hideout, knowing that they would be brought in for questioning.”

Just who betrayed Van Meter will never be known. According to a story an informant told the FBI five years later, it was probably Jack Peifer. On Thursday morning, August 23, according to this story, Van Meter visited the Hollyhocks, where he met with Peifer, who may or may not have been holding several thousand dollars of cash for him, just as he was still holding money for Fred Barker and Alvin Karpis. The informant told the FBI Peifer waited until Van Meter left before telephoning his old friend Tom Brown, the corrupt detective who had worked with the Barker Gang on the Hamm and Bremer kidnappings. Brown had fallen under intense suspicion in St. Paul and presumably welcomed the idea of bringing in a noted yegg to burnish his image.

At 5:00 that afternoon, a car dropped Van Meter off a car dealership near downtown St. Paul. He wore a blue suit with a matching tie, white oxfords, and a straw boater; apparently he was expecting to meet someone. When he walked out of the dealership’s front door at 5:12, he was confronted instead by Tom Brown, Police Chief Frank Cullen, two detectives, and their guns.

“Stick ’em up!” one of the officers yelled. Van Meter pulled a pistol from his waistband and sprinted across University Avenue, firing two shots over his shoulder; his straw boater teetered on his head and he grabbed it off, holding it in his hand as he ran. Brown and his men fired several shots and then, noticing a woman in their line of fire, ran after him. Dodging oncoming cars, Van Meter dashed down Marion Street, then ducked left into an alley.