Public Enemies (77 page)

“Get out, you son of a bitch,” he said. Floyd scrambled out of the car and behind the corn crib.

Officer Montgomery was the first man out of the East Liverpool patrol car as it entered the Conkles’ yard. Purvis’s car pulled up behind it, and the four agents scrambled out. “There he is!” one of the cops shouted. “Behind the corn crib!”

Everyone drew their guns. The corn crib was elevated about twelve inches off the ground; they could see Floyd’s feet as he scurried from one side to the other, obviously unsure what to do. “Floyd, come to the road!” Purvis shouted. “If you don’t we will shoot!”

Floyd left the shelter of the corn crib and darted across an open space, toward the Conkle’s garage. “Look out, he’s gonna run!” one of the policemen yelled.

“Halt!” Purvis shouted. Shouts of “Halt! Stop!” came from all directions. Floyd kept running. Behind the garage he raced into an open field. At the far end of the field, maybe two hundred yards away, was a stand of woods. Floyd ran for it, zigzagging across the open field.

“Let him have it!” Purvis shouted.

Gunshots rang out. The Bureau men had pistols and shotguns and a Thompson gun. Their bullets splintered Mrs. Conkle’s apple tree; leaves and limbs rained down into the yard. Floyd kept running through the field, looking back over his right shoulder, then his left. More shots rang out. Several officers fired where they stood, others ran after Floyd into the field. As he neared the crest of a rise, Floyd’s right arm flew up and he fell forward, landing heavily on his left side in the grass.

Three of the East Liverpool policemen were the first to reach him. As they did, Floyd swung his arm around to defend himself, his .45 caliber pistol poised to fire. Officer Chester Smith grabbed Floyd’s wrist and wrenched the gun from his hand as a second officer fell onto Floyd and pinned him to the ground. Floyd reached for a second pistol in his waistband, but the third officer, Herman Roth, took it first.
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“Lay still! Lay still!” one of the men yelled as Floyd finally ceased struggling.

The East Liverpool police chief, Hugh McDermott, ran up.

“How bad are you hurt?” he asked.

“I’m done for,” Floyd rasped. “You’ve hit me twice.” He was right: A .45 slug had hit below the left shoulder blade and lodged in his chest. Another bullet had struck his right side and come to rest below his heart. His lungs, ribs, and heart had all been damaged.

“What’s your name?” Officer Montgomery asked. By then Purvis and the other FBI men had run up.

“Murphy,” Floyd said. “Where’s Eddie?” He was using Richetti’s alias.

“Eddie who?” Montgomery asked.

“Where’s Eddie?”

“I don’t know,” Montgomery said.

“Oh hell,” Floyd said.

“What’s your name?” Montgomery asked again.

“Murphy!” Floyd said. He spat the word.

“Your name’s Floyd!” Purvis said.

Floyd just stared.

“Is your name not Charles ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd?” Purvis repeated.

Floyd’s mouth twisted into a half smile.

“Yeah, I’m Floyd,” he said.

Purvis trotted back to his car to call a doctor and notify Washington of Floyd’s capture; there was no phone at the Conkle farm, so Purvis took an agent and drove back to a store in the town of Clarkson. When Purvis left, Agent Sam McKee hunched down beside Floyd and began questioning him. He asked if Floyd had been involved in the Union Station Massacre. “To hell with Union Station,” Floyd said.

“You’re dying,” McKee said.

“I know I’m through,” Floyd said. He was weakening fast.

“Then do the decent thing and tell me what you know about the massacre at Union Station,” McKee said.

Floyd said nothing.

“Is it not true that you, Adam Richetti, and Verne Miller did the shooting at Union Station?”

Floyd’s eyes flashed. “I ain’t tellin’ you nothin’, you son of a bitch,” he said. A moment later Floyd seemed to lapse into a state of semiconsciousness. McKee gave up the questioning. Floyd’s condition deteriorated quickly. In minutes he seemed to be near death.

“Who tipped you I was here?” he asked in a lucid moment. Several times he tried to rise. The East Liverpool men held him down. Floyd was fading fast. “Fuck you,” he said at one point. At 4:25 he said, “I’m going,” and died.
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Floyd’s body was brought into the Sturgis Funeral Home in Wellsville, which was soon mobbed with reporters and curious townspeople. Much to Hoover’s dismay, more reporters were drawn to Purvis than the body. He was mobbed when he showed up at the funeral home, where Hoover reached him about five-thirty, an hour after the shooting. “Purvis advised that he had his picture taken, that he had been receiving inquiries from newspapers, whereupon I instructed him to tell the newspapers [all] statements would have to come from Washington,” Hoover wrote in a memo. Purvis promised he would say nothing, saying “he did not want to face anything like he did before.”
¹⁷

All evening, even as friends and reporters phoned in congratulations, Purvis remained uppermost in Hoover’s mind. Around nine Purvis and Sam Cowley, who had arrived from Chicago, telephoned Hoover to report that they expected to take custody of Richetti within an hour; when Purvis stepped away from the phone, Hoover told Cowley that he wanted Purvis out of Wellsville immediately. Purvis is “to leave tonight and the curtain pulled down on the publicity there,” Hoover wrote an aide. He repeated himself for effect. “I again stated [to Cowley] that I wanted Mr. Purvis and the men to get out of there tonight because if they stay over, there will be a lot of motion pictures and the like,” Hoover wrote.

But Purvis couldn’t help himself. After three months in Hoover’s doghouse he was once again a star, and when reporters asked what happened, he told them. The next morning’s newspapers uniformly portrayed Purvis—“the man who got Dillinger”—as the FBI hero who had now brought down his second major public enemy. PURVIS’ STORY OF U.S. TRAP, read the
Chicago American
headline. “Melvin Purvis, youthful attorney who turned sleuth, marked another notch on his gun [today],” wrote the
Chicago Tribune.
“[A] normally mild-mannered southerner, who ‘sees red’ when dealing with criminals, Purvis today became the most dangerous nemesis of the desperado [element].”

In Washington, Hoover fumed. He wanted accolades to flow to the Bureau, not Purvis; if any one man was responsible for bringing in Floyd and Dillinger, he felt, it was Sam Cowley, whom the newspapers continued to portray as Purvis’s second-in-command. Two nights later a headquarters supervisor named Bob Newby reached Purvis at his home in Chicago and told him to stay away from the office; in fact, Newby told Purvis to tell no one he even was in the city. Purvis, who had taken a victory lap through official Washington after Dillinger’s death, asked if he could come east; Newby said he saw no reason to. What remained of the relationship between Hoover and Purvis was damaged beyond repair.
¹⁸

With Dillinger and Floyd dead, Sam Cowley focused on Baby Face Nelson. His files were thick with new intelligence: the work on Nelson outshone anything achieved during the Dillinger and Floyd manhunts. That the two earlier cases had been resolved at all was seen by cynics as dumb luck, the FBI capitalizing on an opportunistic snitch and a car wreck. Cowley was determined that Nelson’s capture would be different. The Nelson files were an indication of how sharply the FBI’s professionalism had risen in mere months; the Purvis-era embarrassments of Roger Touhy, Verne Miller, and Little Bohemia were fast receding into memory. War conditions honed many organizations into fighting shape, and the FBI was no exception.

Under Cowley’s direction, agents had rounded up almost every contact from Nelson’s early days, interviewed his partners in the 1930 crime spree, and staked out the homes of his and Helen’s siblings. Several family members were quietly cooperating with the FBI, including Nelson’s brother-in-law, Robert Fitzsimmons, whose wife had taken in the Nelsons’ son Ronald. On October 9, Fitzsimmons had called to tell Cowley his family was leaving to visit relatives in Bremerton, Washington. It took a week for the family to drive cross-country. Two of Cowley’s men followed the entire way.

Cowley’s best hope of finding Nelson was still John Chase’s girlfriend, Sally Backman, who remained in custody in San Francisco. Cowley was transfixed by a vague story she told of visiting a town in Wisconsin where Nelson said he planned to spend the winter. In San Francisco agents spent several days poring over maps with Backman, trying to identify the town, but it was no use. No matter how she tried, Backman couldn’t seem to remember its name.

The day after Floyd was killed, Tuesday, October 23, Cowley had Backman flown to Chicago in hopes that a tour of northern Illinois and Wisconsin might refresh her memory. Charles Winstead took two agents and drove her. They headed northwest out of Chicago on Highway 12, inspecting the Illinois towns of Crystal Lake, Harvard, and Woodstock, then crossed into Wisconsin to examine Delavan and Walworth. At Elkhorn, where Roger Touhy had wrecked his car the year before, Backman thought she recognized a tavern. But when Winstead took her inside, there was a lunch counter where Backman remembered a bar.

Winstead, realizing this could take forever, dropped by to see a deputy sheriff he knew in Elkhorn. Winstead described the town Backman remembered. It had an inn, two small lakes, and an iron bridge. He also described a man named “Eddie” she recalled meeting. Luck was with them: without hesitation the deputy identified the resort town of Lake Geneva, where there was a character named Eddie Duffy who ran errands for the Lake Como Inn—an inn agents had inspected the previous summer after finding one of its pillow cases in Tommy Carroll’s luggage.

Winstead took Backman and drove to Lake Geneva. She immediately recognized the town, pointing out a tavern where she had eaten breakfast, then leading Winstead to a lakeside cottage where they had visited the man named Eddie. As luck would have it, Backman spotted Eddie Duffy on the street an hour later. She was certain the slender twenty-six-year-old was the “Eddie” she had met before.

On Friday, November 2, after putting Backman on a return flight to San Francisco, Winstead returned to Lake Geneva and confronted Duffy in his room at the Gargoyle Hotel. Duffy, described in Winstead’s subsequent report as “very nervous,” claimed he knew nothing about Nelson. He admitted he knew John Chase, but only as a guest at the Lake Como Inn. He insisted the agents talk to the inn’s owner, Hobart Hermanson. Duffy acted as Hermanson’s errand boy, driving a beer truck.

Cowley approached Hermanson directly. On Sunday night, November 4, Hermanson voluntarily appeared at the Chicago office for questioning. Confronted with the possibility of an indictment for harboring Nelson, Hermanson admitted everything, confirming Nelson’s visit to his home as well as the gangster’s plans to return to Lake Geneva for the winter. The next day Cowley, along with Winstead and Agent Ed Hollis, drove to Lake Geneva to inspect Hermanson’s home. Hermanson volunteered to let agents stay in a nearby cottage. Cowley chose Hermanson’s house itself. By the end of the week Winstead and two agents were camped out in a second-floor bedroom. If Nelson returned to Lake Geneva for the winter, they would be waiting.

 

 

 

All that October, Nelson remained in a drafty cabin at Wally Hot Springs, Nevada. By early November he was getting antsy. The nights were growing cold, and there was no heat. Money was running low, and he was increasingly irritable. Nelson rarely left the camp. He knew FBI agents were combing Reno for him, but so far he had no indication they had expanded their search outside the city.
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One night in the desert, the mechanic Frank Cochran mentioned he had seen an FBI car that day.

“It was all dirty and muddy,” he said. “Looks like they been out visiting all the auto camps and traveling all the dirt roads in this part of the state.”

Cochran’s remark was the nudge Nelson needed to return east. They filled the back of the pickup with five-gallon cans of gasoline and covered them with a tarpaulin. In mid-November they left. Nelson drove the Hudson, Fatso Negri the truck. Outside Durango, Colorado, the Hudson’s transmission gave out. They took it to a garage, where a mechanic said parts would have to be ordered. Nelson wanted to abandon the car, but Negri volunteered to stay and bring it to Chicago once it was repaired. Nelson agreed. He took Helen and Chase and drove east in the truck.

Nelson reached the Chicago suburbs several nights later. As always, his hometown held everything he needed and everything he feared. Nelson trusted no more than a handful of men in Chicago; everyone else was a potential stool pigeon. The FBI was only one of his worries. As far as he knew, the Syndicate still wanted him dead. He and Chase prowled the small towns on Chicago’s outskirts, Nelson and Helen sleeping in their car every night, in pastures, behind service stations. They dropped Chase at a hotel each evening, in Morris or Elgin or Palestine, and picked him up the next morning. They drove all day every day, stopping in roadside taverns to make phone calls. Most nights they met Nelson’s friend, the mechanic Clarey Lieder, outside the city. If Nelson had a plan other than a vague idea of eventually escaping to Europe, he told no one. In the short term, he needed men and money. He had mulled Jimmy Murray’s train-robbery scheme for months, and Murray was among the first people Nelson saw upon his return.