Public Enemies (74 page)

Because Mathias would be isolated and alone, Cowley wrote headquarters, “there will be no attorneys or any other person present at the time she is released, and . . . she [can be] taken by Agents of the Division and held incommunicado in some apartment where she can be thoroughly questioned concerning the massacre case.” In effect, she was to be kidnapped. Given enough time, Cowley was confident he could break Vi Mathias. “Mr. Cowley pointed out that the success obtained at the Chicago office in questioning the women has been the result of holding them indefinitely and breaking down their mental resistance and obtaining from them, piece by piece, the story of their activities,” an aide wrote Hoover.
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Cowley’s plan was approved. When Mathias was released that Tuesday evening, three Chicago agents took her into custody. They drove to Detroit, where they had rented an apartment for the interrogation. The agents started in on her immediately. But Vi Mathias, while alone and unsure of her legal status, was a tough woman. She admitted knowing the Barkers and a dozen other criminals, but as the week wore on she refused to answer questions about the Kansas City Massacre.

For fifteen months Dick Galatas, the Hot Springs bookie who had taken Frank Nash’s wife Frances to Joplin on the eve of the massacre, had proven as elusive as Pretty Boy Floyd. Theorizing that Galatas was the true mastermind behind the killings, Hoover’s men had tracked down tips on his whereabouts from St. Louis, where he had gambling friends, to Los Angeles, where he owned some land outside the city. They had questioned and shadowed his relatives, an aunt and uncle in upstate New York, a brother in Chicago, still other family members in California. At one point, in an effort to eavesdrop on his college-age stepson, they had inserted an undercover agent into a University of Alabama fraternity house. For their efforts they had absolutely nothing to show. Galatas and his wife, Elizabeth, had vanished.

That Saturday morning, David Magee, the New Orleans SAC, took a call from the New Orleans U.S. Attorney, Rene Viosca. Viosca asked him to come to his office in the Federal Building; he had a citizen with a tip that Galatas was hiding in the city. At Viosca’s office, Magee was introduced to a man whom FBI files identify only as Confidential Informant Number One. The man said he had seen a photograph of Galatas in the September 15 issue of
Liberty Magazine,
which advertised a $1,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. Galatas, the man said, was a dead ringer for Edwin W. Lee, the southeastern distributor for a paint company, Liquid Celophane Corporation. Lee’s office was in the Stern Building downtown. He stayed there until 2:00 most Saturdays.
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Agent Magee telephoned Washington and asked whether they should place Lee under surveillance. No, he was told. If Lee was really Galatas, they should arrest him immediately. At 1:00 Magee took two men and drove to the Stern Building, just across Canal Street from the French Quarter. Leaving one man in the car, Magee and a second agent proceeded to Room 503, the offices of Liquid Celophane. Three salesmen shouldered by Magee as he entered; they were heading out to lunch. A woman greeted them. Magee recognized her as Elizabeth Galatas. Without identifying himself, he asked for Mr. Lee. The woman showed him into an adjoining office. A man was hunched on the floor painting a sample board. He glanced up at the agents, then turned back to his painting.

“Are you Richard Tallman Galatas?” one of the agents asked. They drew their guns.

Galatas looked up. He gave the agents a long, appraising glance. “I knew this was coming,” he said. “But I never in the world would have surrendered.” Then he turned and continued painting.

 

 

Dick Galatas and his wife were taken to the Bureau office, then, on orders from Washington, held incommunicado in Agent Magee’s apartment. Like Vi Mathias, no court or attorney was notified of their detention. Hoover broke the news to Cowley. “I stated [to Cowley] that I intend to have Galatas held by our Division until we are able to obtain some information,” Hoover wrote an aide. “[W]e know he is the key man and he may clear up many doubts in our minds and may confirm some of the information already in our possession.”
²
In a call to Dwight Brantley, the Oklahoma City SAC, Hoover said, “[I]n my estimation, this is the solution of the Kansas City Massacre case.”
³

By the time of his arrest, Galatas was a broken man. Handcuffed to a chair at Agent Magee’s apartment, he answered questions in a listless monotone, freely admitting his role in the massacre conspiracy. At one point, when asked why he did it, Galatas sighed.

“Because I was crazy,” he said.
⁴

He had been running ever since. St. Louis. Reno. Sacramento. Los Angeles. Finally, New Orleans. Galatas swore he had no idea who Verne Miller’s partners were. What he told the agents instead, though no one in the FBI especially cared, was the genesis of the events that led to the massacre, and thus indirectly to Hoover’s War on Crime.

It started after he purchased the White Front Cigar Store that spring, Galatas said. He took bets in the back, and it was common knowledge that he kept the proceeds at his home. For that reason, Galatas said, he was in constant fear of being kidnapped. That May two muscular men from Chicago paid him a visit and asked if he would help persuade city officials to let them distribute Blue Ribbon Beer in the town. Galatas demurred; he didn’t like the pair’s looks. A couple of nights later the men returned and strongly suggested Galatas accompany them to the Eastman Hotel. Galatas went along, but became frightened when he saw the men were carrying guns. When they stepped into the hotel elevator Galatas slipped out just as the doors closed, ran back to the White Front and hid. He thought the men wanted to kidnap him.

A day or two later one of the Chicago men appeared at the White Front. With him was Frank Nash, whom Galatas had met but barely knew. Galatas suspected Nash was the brains behind his would-be kidnappers. Frightened, he briefed his friend Dutch Akers, the Hot Springs chief of detectives, and suggested they find a way to turn Nash into federal authorities. It was Akers, Galatas assumed, who had called the FBI.
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Once Nash was arrested, Galatas explained, he feared “the mob” would suspect him of having set Nash up. He went out of his way to help Frances Nash, Galatas insisted, in order to avoid any such suspicion.
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An interesting tale, but it got the FBI no closer to Pretty Boy Floyd. Hoover ordered in reinforcements. On Monday, September 24, Agent R. G. Harvey in New York was dispatched to New Orleans. One of Hoover’s assistants, Ed Tamm, told Harvey to “go to work” on Galatas, because “he is yellow and, of course, there is a way to deal with people like that.”
⁶
Tamm made it clear to Harvey that he would need to get rough with Galatas. “What we want,” Tamm told Hoover on September 24, “is a good vigorous physical interview.”
⁷
To assist Harvey, Tamm called the St. Louis office and said “we need a substantially built agent in New Orleans for a few days.”
⁸

Agent Harvey arrived in New Orleans on Tuesday; that night he and two other agents went to work on Dick Galatas. “Subject Galatas was brought to the office after dark and was kept there until shortly before daylight,” Harvey wrote Hoover the next morning. “The interrogation was continuous and vigorous.”
⁹

In a motion his lawyer filed two months later to suppress Galatas’s statements, Galatas laid out what a “vigorous physical interview” with the FBI entailed. In daylight hours he was kept manacled to a chair in Agent Magee’s apartment. He was given little or no food. He was not allowed to lie down, much less sleep. At night he was taken to the Bureau office. First he was given warnings: “You are going to tell us what we want to know . . . You haven’t any rights and you are not going to have counsel until we finish with you . . . We are going to get the story one way or another.” Then came the threats. “I ought to kill you now . . . You could easily be found dead on the street and all we would have to say is you tried to run.”

Several days later, after he was flown to Chicago and chained inside the Bureau’s nineteenth-floor offices, Galatas said the threats became more vivid: “I’ll use the necessary tactics to get what I want . . . If you are found dead in the streets, the same as others were found, no one would ever make inquiries and they will think gangsters killed you.” At one point, Galatas was escorted to an open window. “You are a long way up,” an agent told him, “and you won’t bounce when you hit bottom.” Finally, Galatas said, the threats turned to beatings. Agents struck him in the face with their fists until he bled. His hair was pulled. He was beaten at the base of his neck until unconscious. He was beaten with rubber hoses and kicked in the ribs. Finally an agent standing outside the door entered and said, “That’s enough.”

No one paid much attention to Galatas’s claims when they were eventually aired at his trial. But Galatas was telling the truth. According to Melvin Purvis’s secretary, Doris Rogers, agents in the Chicago office were rarely physical with prisoners during the early months of the War on Crime. But as the pressure on them increased during mid-1934, Rogers says, the agents began beating certain prisoners in the nineteenth-floor conference room. “They had heard about the ‘third degree’ and tried to use it without knowing how,” she wrote in a 1935 article for the
Chicago Tribune.
“Their attempts were stupid and useless. They picked the wrong men to hit and got little information for their pain. These instances were isolated and few. The older and wiser heads in the organization quickly brought the men who had tried it, victims of misdirected enthusiasm, back into line.”
¹⁰

What the FBI got for its “vigorous physical interview” was a stream of increasingly detailed statements from both Galatas and his wife—none of which shed any light on what role Pretty Boy Floyd played in the massacre. In Detroit, meanwhile, Vi Mathias’s reaction to the FBI’s tactics proved far different. After eleven days closeted in an apartment where she was berated by a revolving roster of agents, she was brought to Chicago on September 30 to give a statement. In it, she confirmed virtually every detail of the story “Jimmy Needles” LaCapra had told the FBI. She identified photos of Floyd and Richetti as men Miller had brought to their house after the massacre. She said Floyd had some sort of wound in his left shoulder, and had left with Richetti within hours of arriving. She said she never saw either man again.

It was all Hoover needed. On October 10 he stepped before a crowd of reporters and announced the capture of Dick Galatas. He also revealed the Bureau’s theory of the case, naming Verne Miller, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Adam Richetti as the massacre assassins. The next day the headlines were large and bold in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri, where Floyd was well known, smaller in Eastern cities, where Floyd was typically introduced to readers as “a Southwestern outlaw.” It is an indication of Floyd’s posthumous notoriety; during his day he was hardly a household name. His fame paled before Dillinger’s.

In a nondescript boarding house in a poor section of Buffalo, New York, a man known locally as George Sanders read the stories with a frown. Neighbors had noticed Mr. Sanders pacing his room for much of the previous year. Putting down the newspaper, the man turned to his girlfriend and sighed. “You wanna go home?” said Pretty Boy Floyd.

 

 

While the FBI turned up the heat on Floyd, Baby Face Nelson was camped in the Nevada desert, passing his days tinkering with cars and taking pot-shots at jackrabbits. After parting with John Chase outside Chicago, Nelson had taken his wife, Helen, and Fatso Negri and driven back to Reno. For a week they crisscrossed Nevada, searching for a tourist camp where they could hide. Nothing appealed to Nelson; the nicer places had too many people, the more isolated ones didn’t have electricity or running water. One day Nelson’s Hudson hit a bump going about eighty, damaging the car, so on the evening of September 21 they crept into Reno in search of a mechanic they knew named Frank Cochran.

They slid the Hudson into the garage behind Cochran’s home and transferred the guns and luggage into an aging Buick sedan he lent them; Cochran even installed a siren in the car at Nelson’s request. Nelson’s group returned to its nomadic existence, cruising the back roads of Nevada as far south as Las Vegas. Sleeping in the open, they returned to Reno a week later. Searching for Nelson’s Hudson, they drove downtown and spotted it parked outside a movie theater. Nelson was apoplectic; the FBI might spot the car. When Cochran emerged from the theater, they returned to his house and switched their things back to the Hudson, paying Cochran $250 before driving off.

Finally, on October 1, Nelson found a place to live, a tourist camp at Wally Hot Springs, Nevada, fifteen miles south of Carson City. Helen rented a two-room cottage; she and Nelson slept in one room, Negri the other. Every morning Nelson sent Negri into town to fetch food and newspapers. They were looking for John Chase’s message in the personals section of the
Reno Evening Gazette.
On Thursday, October 11, Nelson saw the ad. Chase had returned. The FBI knew it, too.

 

 

All that September, Ed Guinane, the San Francisco SAC, built an intricate superstructure atop Nelson’s contacts in California. There were taps in place on the phones of Fatso Negri’s mother and Johnny Chase’s brothers, and extensions at Tobe Williams’s gangland hospital in Vallejo.
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Wanted posters were distributed up and down the California-Nevada border. Guinane felt certain Nelson was still in the area. He had been seen in Vallejo on September 26, by a man who had sold him a car the year before, and in a Reno tavern on September 29.

Guinane’s best lead was Johnny Chase’s missing girlfriend, Sally Backman. Agents had searched her apartment and questioned her family; everyone said it was unlike her to simply disappear. At some point, Guinane wagered, she would return to Sausalito. He was right. The Bureau’s first major break came on Saturday, October 6, when Manuel Menotti, Sausalito’s police chief, spotted Backman on the street. He took her into custody and called Guinane, who hurried to begin debriefing her that afternoon.