Public Enemies (70 page)

It was a dead end. Van Meter stopped and turned to find the officers behind him. The first blast from Brown’s sawed-off shotgun knocked Van Meter two feet in the air, slamming his body into the brick wall of a garage. He struggled to stand, but all four men opened fire, riddling his body with fifty bullets. Homer Van Meter, who always said he didn’t want to die in some filthy alley, did just that.

When the news reached Washington an hour later, Hoover was incensed. “The Director is very upset over the fact that that thing could take place in St. Paul without our knowing about it,” a St. Paul agent noted the next day. No one mentioned the obvious: the local police were excluding the FBI just as it had famously excluded the Chicago police from Dillinger’s death. “I think our St. Paul office has shown utter lack of aggressiveness,” Hoover scribbled on a memo.

Picked up several days later, Mickey Conforti told the FBI Van Meter had been carrying $6,000. The St. Paul police reported finding only $923. If Tom Brown took Van Meter’s $5,077, there was an eerie symmetry at work: when Alvin Karpis and the Barker brothers read of Brown’s involvement the next day, they unanimously decided to keep his $5,000 share of the Bremer ransom. The next day Homer Van Meter’s body was taken to his hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana. No one but an undertaker and a handful of reporters awaited its arrival. He was buried without event in Fort Wayne’s Lindenwood Cemetery.

 

 

The morning after Van Meter’s death, Baby Face Nelson sent Fatso Negri into town for newspapers. Like the Barkers, Nelson was stunned to read of Tom Brown’s involvement. “The son of a bitch,” Nelson said. “He’s the fella that we paid a thousand dollars.”
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Nelson announced they were leaving for Chicago. They packed the trailer with five-gallon cans of gasoline and oil; Nelson wanted to travel without stopping at service stations. They left a pile of cleaned trout for the cabins’ owners, then drove across Nevada to Colorado and on into Kansas. Nelson allowed the group to sleep in auto camps, but was careful never to approach one before eleven at night.

Negri and the Perkins family rode in Negri’s Plymouth, while Johnny Chase and Sally Backman sat in the backseat of Nelson’s car. Packed into the tight confines of the Hudson, the simmering tensions between Backman and Nelson burst into the open. Nelson was a wild driver, the Hudson fishtailing across the dirt roads, and Backman asked him to slow down. He ignored her, starting in with comments about her “being scared” and asking if she was “comfortable.” In time Nelson became even more aggressive, telling Chase in front of Backman that he should leave her, that she would tire of him in six months and go home.

According to a story Negri told a detective magazine in 1941, the ill will between Nelson and Backman came to a head at a roadside stop somewhere in Nebraska. Helen had made lunch on their camp stove and was cleaning up when Nelson snapped at Backman, “Why don’t you get in there and help cook and clean up?”

“You go straight to hell!” Backman said. Negri described what he called “an electric shock” that passed through the rest of the group when they realized someone had openly challenged Nelson, something no one else, not even Dillinger, had ever done.

According to Negri, Nelson stared at Backman, then walked off. They drove that afternoon in silence, stopping after nightfall outside another Nebraska town. Everyone but Nelson decided to drive in to a restaurant; according to Negri, Nelson asked him to stay behind. When they were alone, Nelson said, “I’m going to hit Sally.”
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Negri was struck by Nelson’s choice of words. “It was the deadliest word Nelson could use against Sally,” he recalled seven years later. “There was something about that word ‘hit’ when Nelson used it that struck me as the worst word any human being could utter against another. It was as cold as he was.”

“What for?” Negri asked.

“She knows too much. I’m afraid of her . . . She looks queer to me.” Nelson studied Negri’s reaction.

“Jimmy, this is an awful tough spot,” Negri said. “You know, Johnny would object. He’s nuts about her.” The gang, Negri suggested, would split apart. Chase knew too much to be an enemy.

Nelson thought a moment. “Well, if I hit her, I’ll hit Johnny too,” he said.

Negri was flabbergasted. “Jimmy, you wouldn’t kill a swell guy like Johnny over a girl, would you?” he asked. “She and Johnny are going together now, but that won’t last long. You and Johnny have been together a long time. He’s the loyalest guy on earth. You can’t find another [like him].” Negri went on, repeating himself for emphasis.

“Well,” Nelson said, “I’ll talk to Johnny about it.”

When the others returned later that night, it was clear Chase had told Backman to make amends. She took Nelson a tray of food. “Here, Jimmy, is some swell food for you,” she said.

Without a word Nelson kicked the tray out of her hand. Food and dishes fell to the ground. Chase stepped forward, startled.

“What’s the argument?” he asked.

“I don’t want nothing off that bum,” Nelson said, meaning Backman.

“I don’t talk to your wife that way,” Chase said.

According to Negri, who was known to inflate his stories, Chase and Nelson each drew guns. Nobody moved. Finally Helen reached a hand toward Nelson, as if to mediate. “Get away from here,” Nelson snapped. “We’ll settle this.” For several long moments the two men stood facing each other, guns drawn. And then it passed. They lowered their guns, walked off into the darkness, and talked. The next day Backman and Chase rode across Iowa in Negri’s car.

That night, Wednesday, August 29, the group crossed the Mississippi River, stopping at East Burlington, Illinois; the Perkins family was anxious to get home and drove on to Chicago, taking Negri with them. For the next three days Nelson wandered Chicago’s western suburbs, stopping at road-houses to look up old friends, gauging the “heat” and sending out feelers to trusted contacts.

On Sunday afternoon, September 2, a hard rain was falling when Nelson pulled up in front of Hobart Hermanson’s tavern in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin; Nelson had spent several weeks that spring living in a cottage at Hermanson’s Lake Como Lodge, and wanted to do so again that autumn. Chase ran inside, returning a minute later to say they could probably find Hermanson or his handyman, Eddie Duffy, at Hermanson’s home outside town. They drove through the rain to Hermanson’s house. Duffy was home and welcomed them. Helen walked to the icebox and took out enough chicken for everyone. Nelson seemed relieved.

The tension between Nelson and Sally Backman remained, however, and Backman finally told Chase she couldn’t take it anymore. If he stayed with Nelson, she was going back to San Francisco. Chase talked it over with Nelson, and the two couples decided to split up. That night, Tuesday, September 4, Nelson dropped Chase and Backman on a corner in Elgin, Illinois. For three days the two young lovers slept till noon; at night they took the train into Chicago to dance. On the fourth day Nelson dropped by, handed Chase $3,500 in cash, and told how to reach him via a coded classified advertisement in the Reno paper. Chase promised Backman he would never work with Nelson again.

 

 

Despite the hysteria over Dillinger that summer, the Bureau continued its efforts to solve the mystery of the Kansas City Massacre. In March the belated identification of Adam Richetti’s fingerprint on a beer bottle found in Verne Miller’s basement had redirected the hunt for answers toward Pretty Boy Floyd. Sightings came in from every corner of the country: Montana, New Mexico, Miami, New York, New Orleans. Floyd’s estranged wife, Ruby, was touring off and on with a vaudeville show,
Crime Doesn’t Pay.
Agents bugged her hotel rooms but could find no evidence she was in touch with her husband.

Then, on May 16, Dwight Brantley, the Oklahoma City SAC, took a phone call from a seventy-six-year-old attorney in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, named A. W. Comstock. Comstock told Brantley he had been contacted by Floyd, who had asked him to negotiate a surrender. He said Floyd was broke and badly wounded, having been shot in the back by parties unknown. Comstock sought two assurances, that Floyd would not be killed and that he would receive medical treatment.
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The Bureau agreed. Hoover called and arranged to have prison hospitals at Leavenworth, Kansas, and Springfield, Missouri, ready to accept Floyd’s surrender.
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Talks with Comstock went on for one week, then two, as he sought information about reward monies and state charges Floyd faced in Ohio. Hoover grew impatient. “[T]his matter must be pressed, and pressed vigorously,” Hoover wrote Cowley on May 31. “This matter has now dragged along for several weeks, and we don’t seem to be any nearer toward the getting hold of Floyd than we were when the original negotiations were entered into.”
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Brantley stayed in contact with Comstock for two more weeks but eventually came to believe the attorney’s only contact had been Ruby Floyd, not her husband. Comstock “impresses me as being silly, inane and bordering on senility,” Brantley wrote Hoover on June 15. “[I]t is my best judgment that it is a waste of time, effort and money to deal with him further.”
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An ensuing set of negotiations, this time with a flamboyant Texas minister named J. Frank Norris, at first seemed a little more promising. Norris, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Fort Worth, was a fire-breathing radio preacher with a past—tried and acquitted of murder at one point, accused of burning his own church at another. Ruby Floyd was one of his listeners, and on Father’s Day, June 17, she arranged to have her son, Jackie, baptized at his church. The ceremony was broadcast before an audience of five thousand on Norris’s radio show; a four-minute film of the baptism was incorporated into Ruby’s vaudeville show, which was booked at Fort Worth’s Palace Theatre. Agents shadowed Ruby and her entourage throughout her ten-day stay in Fort Worth.

Afterward Norris telephoned the Dallas SAC, Frank Blake, and offered to negotiate Floyd’s surrender. Hoover, skeptical after the Comstock episode, took a hard line. “I told Mr. Blake I felt we would have to take the attitude that we will agree not to kill Floyd” if he surrenders, Hoover wrote in a memo June 23. “I suggested, in this connection, that [Blake] make it clear that orders are out to kill Floyd on sight, and if he doesn’t surrender in short time, he will no doubt be killed by our men.”
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The same day, Hoover ordered Pop Nathan to concentrate exclusively on Floyd’s capture. “I think the time has come . . . when we should definitely concentrate upon the handling of this case,” Hoover wrote Nathan, adding in a separate memo, “we are going to kill him if we catch him.”
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Ruby’s run at the Palace Theatre ended on June 27 and she returned to Oklahoma. But the Reverend Norris would not give up. He pleaded with Pop Nathan to let him take an agent to Oklahoma to meet with Floyd’s mother. To the surprise of almost everyone at the Bureau, Norris was as good as his word, and on July 10 an agent accompanied the reverend to a meeting with Mrs. Floyd and Pretty Boy’s siblings. The scene devolved into a gripe session, with his family insisting Floyd had been hounded by police into a life of crime. Still, it represented the first time in nearly a year of investigation the Bureau was able to assemble the names and addresses of Floyd’s immediate relatives.

They were getting nowhere. Though agents combed the towns of eastern Oklahoma and northern Arkansas for months, there hadn’t been a confirmed sighting of Floyd since the previous summer. By July, four months after identifying Richetti’s fingerprint and a year after the massacre itself, the Bureau had a tentative theory of the case—that Floyd and Richetti had somehow teamed with Verne Miller—but other than a single fingerprint, they had no evidence to back it up. They talked to dozens of informants who claimed to know Miller or Floyd, but none produced anything suggesting the two outlaws knew each other.

The mystery of the massacre began to unravel only on July 10, when the Kansas City Mob boss Johnny Lazia was shot down as he stepped from his car outside the Park Central Hotel. The killing initially meant nothing to the FBI, which had no jurisdiction. Not until August 6, when a Kansas City newspaper reported that a hospitalized gangster named Jack Griffin had been one of Lazia’s assassins, did the Bureau stir. The Kansas City office had been looking for Griffin, suspecting—inaccurately—that he was a member of the Barker Gang. For the moment the Bureau had no clue that Griffin might be linked to the massacre.

Two agents visited Griffin in the hospital. He was suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, the result of a botched attempt on his life. He refused to answer questions, but suggested the agents return a few days later, when he might have something to say. The agents waited seventeen days. When they returned to interview Griffin on August 23, he had disappeared. No one seemed to know where he had gone. For the moment, no one really cared. Griffin was just another yegg.

Then one of the bullets used to kill Lazia, sent for tests to a Kansas City ballistics laboratory, was found to match bullets fired at the massacre. With a start, the Kansas City office realized Jack Griffin might hold the key to the massacre case. The new SAC, Bruce Nathan, shared the news with Kansas City’s chief of detectives, Thomas Higgins. It was then, on August 24, six weeks after Lazia’s assassination, that Higgins told the Bureau what everyone in the Kansas City underworld already knew: Griffin and three of his pals had killed Lazia in a gambling dispute. Lazia’s men had been hunting them ever since. If the FBI thought Griffin and his men could solve the massacre case, they needed to find them before the Mob did.

Once again, the Bureau found itself in a race with the syndicate. Belatedly, the Kansas City office mobilized. They first tried to find Griffin. A little digging turned up the disquieting fact that he had been discharged from the hospital into the care of a notorious Kansas City detective named Jeff Rayan. Rayan was considered to be a mob enforcer; Griffin hadn’t been seen since. All three of Griffin’s partners, a St. Louis racketeer named Al O’Brien, a Kansas City nightclub owner named Nugent LaPlumma, and a skinny drug addict named Michael LaCapra, known as “Jimmy Needles,” had disappeared.