Public Enemies (79 page)

Traffic was backing up. A crowd was forming. Gallagher flagged down a car and loaded Hollis inside, directing the driver to Barrington Central Hospital. Hollis died en route; Gallagher lifted a rosary from the agent’s pocket and called a priest.
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A few minutes later an ambulance arrived and took Cowley to a hospital in the town of Elgin.

Agents Ryan and McDade were still lying in a field further down Highway 12. They knew nothing of what had transpired; when Ryan ran to a pay phone and called Purvis with the news at 4:15, he reported only his own actions. Five minutes later Purvis was on the phone briefing Hoover when the police chief in the nearby town of Stamford called with news that Hollis was dead and Cowley had been shot.

Purvis left immediately for the hospital in Elgin. He arrived as Cowley was being rolled into surgery. Cowley asked a doctor whether he was going to die. Then he saw Purvis. Whatever tensions remained between the two men vanished for a few moments. “Hello, Melvin, I am glad you are here,” Cowley whispered.

“Rest quiet and you will be all right,” Purvis said.

“Do you have doubt about that?” Cowley asked.

“No,” Purvis said.

“I emptied my gun at them,” Cowley said.

“Who were they?”

“Nelson and Chase.”

 

 

Nelson was dying; even Helen could see it. He was bleeding from seventeen separate gunshot wounds. Five were in his stomach and side, two in his chest, and five in each of his legs where Hollis’s shotgun had done the damage; the worst injury was a wound to the left of his navel where one of Cowley’s .45 caliber slugs had struck and traveled sideways through his lower abdomen. Blood gushed from the wound, soaking Nelson’s gray slacks and trickling onto the seat.

From Highway 12 Chase turned east onto Highway 22, a two-lane blacktop that wound through dense woods into Chicago’s northern suburbs. They turned south when they hit Waukegan Road, where by one account they stopped at the Techny monastery. Nelson, who remained lucid throughout the drive, was looking for his old friend Father Coughlin. After driving south into the suburb of Wilmette, they found his sister’s house at 1115 Mohawk. The house, which stills stands, was a large two-story brick home with a tree-ringed rear driveway.

According to Father Coughlin, he was sitting in his sister’s home about four-forty-five when the back doorbell rang. A maid answered and called for him. It was Helen. She said “Jimmy” had been shot and needed help. Father Coughlin shrugged into his overcoat, threw on a hat, and followed her to the garage, where Chase had parked. Inside the garage Chase was supporting Nelson, who leaned against the car.

Coughlin said they couldn’t stay; his sister was due home from her bridge game at any moment. “He’s dying,” Helen pled. “He’s got to go someplace where he can lie down.” Coughlin said he would take them someplace safe; they could follow him in his car. “You wouldn’t fool with us, would you Father?” Chase asked.

Coughlin helped load Nelson into the front seat. Nelson could barely speak. He whispered in the priest’s ear, “Hello.”

Father Coughlin drove his car, and Chase followed. The priest later told agents he didn’t know where he would go. It didn’t matter. After following Coughlin for several minutes, Nelson suspected treachery. “Lose him; I think he’s wrong,” Nelson said. “Turn around and go the other way.” When Father Coughlin lost sight of Nelson’s car, he drove back to his sister’s and called the FBI office at 6:15. Agents were at his home within the hour.

On Hoover’s go-ahead, FBI agents began raiding all of Nelson’s gangland contacts that night. Three hustled into Cernocky’s roadhouse at Fox River Grove. Agent Ryan led two squads of Chicago police in raids on Clarey Lieder’s garage and home, taking Lieder into custody. Two more agents, accompanied by four squads of Chicago police, stormed into Jimmie Murray’s home, his parents’ home, and the Rain-Bo Inn; there was no sign of Murray. They also raided the home of Nelson’s sister on South Marshfield Avenue. Another group of ten agents descended on Murray’s cottage in the town of Wauconda. There was no sign of Nelson.

As the raids progressed that night, Cowley was wheeled out of surgery. Doctors said his condition “was, of course, serious, but that he had a chance to pull through if peritonitis did not set in,” Hoover told Cowley’s brother Joe.
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In fact, Hoover confided to an aide, the doctors gave Cowley a 1-in-25 chance of making it through the night .
²⁵

Characteristically, even as Cowley lay dying, Hoover was preoccupied with publicity. It was Purvis—again. Hoover couldn’t understand it; it was as if reporters were a drug Purvis couldn’t kick. He had remained at the hospital and actually given an interview to a
Chicago American
reporter as they watched the unconscious Cowley in a hospital bed, his wife, Lavon, and her two little boys beside him.

“If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll get Baby Face Nelson—dead or alive,” Purvis whispered to the reporter, Elgar Brown. “Nelson ought to know he hasn’t a chance at eventual escape . . . We aren’t particular whether we get him alive or dead.”
²⁶

Hoover was beside himself. He cast about for anyone to rid him of Purvis. His deputies, Hugh Clegg and Pop Nathan, were delivering speeches in Pittsburgh and Tuscon, respectively, and Hoover ordered both to Chicago. Hoover wanted Purvis out of the hospital and away from any reporters; he told Clegg to “impress upon Mr. Purvis the necessity of staying away from the office and from any public place.”
²⁷
Clegg suggested that Purvis could work in a back room at the FBI office; Hoover refused even that. Within days word would leak to the
American
that Purvis “is incapacitated by overwork and is on sick leave . . . Insiders do not expect him to return to the command of the Chicago office.”
²⁸

As the night wore on, Cowley’s condition worsened. Just after midnight an agent overheard doctors say he wouldn’t make it till dawn. An hour later Purvis, who had returned to the office, called Washington to report “Mr. Cowley is sinking fast and is not expected to live more than two hours.” Purvis returned to the hospital. Cowley died at 2:17 A.M., November 28, the day before Thanksgiving. His wife, Lavon, collapsed in tears. Doctors gave her a sedative.

Five hours later, at 7:30, police in suburban Winnetka found the FBI car Nelson had stolen in a ditch. Then, as FBI agents descended on the area, an anonymous caller phoned the Sadowski Funeral Home in suburban Niles Center (now Skokie), telling the undertaker, Philip Sadowski, he could find a body beside a local cemetery.
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Sadowski passed the tip on to Niles Center police, who passed it to the FBI. Just before noon, police found blood-soaked pants, a shirt, underwear, and socks in a ditch near the cemetery. A half hour later, in another ditch at the corner of Niles and Long Avenues, they found the bullet-riddled nude body of a man wrapped in a blanket. It was Nelson.

 

 

Chase had driven the dying Nelson through the streets of Wilmette, following his mumbled directions. About six-thirty they turned into an alley behind a house on Walnut Street and parked in a covered garage. The home was owned by a man named Ray Henderson, who appears to have been an acquaintance of the fence Jimmy Murray. Chase carried Nelson inside and laid him on a bed. Helen stripped off his clothes and wrapped a towel around his midsection in a vain attempt to staunch the blood. Nelson faded quickly, lapsing in and out of consciousness. His last minutes, like his final gunfight, resembled a scene from one of the gangster movies he loved.

“It’s getting dark, Helen,” he whispered at one point. “Say good-bye to mother.” He recited the names of his brothers and sisters. When he asked her to bid farewell to their children, he began to cry. A few minutes later he said, “It’s getting dark, Helen. I can’t see you anymore.” He died at 7:35 P.M.

The next morning Chase laid Nelson’s body in the ditch, then fled. Helen, frightened and unsure what to do, took refuge with her family, where the FBI took her into custody two days later. She missed Nelson’s funeral. He was laid to rest beside his father, in the suburban Chicago cemetery where his grave remains to this day.

The bloodiest day in the FBI’s brief history was followed by two somber funerals. Herman “Ed” Hollis was buried in his native Des Moines, Sam Cowley in Salt Lake City. Cowley’s body lay in state beneath the capitol rotunda while thousands filed by in silence.

Pop Nathan gave Cowley’s eulogy. “We are bringing [Sam] back [to Utah] a national martyred hero,” Nathan said. “The columns of the press are replete with his exploits, and men, women and children in all parts of the country know him now. He is famous, and justly so. And yet Sam Cowley was one of the simplest men I ever knew. He was greatly simple. He was simply great. His was the simplicity of the saints, seers and heroes of the ages, the simplicity of true worth, of true dignity, of true honor. We, of the Division, are very proud of him. As generations of new agents come into our service they will be told of the life and death of Sam Cowley. He will become a tradition. He will have attained earthly immortality.”

Nathan was as good as his word. For decades to come, Hoover held up Cowley as the ultimate FBI man, quiet, hardworking, and dedicated. He remains the most senior agent ever killed in the line of duty.

 

That morning a somber group of FBI men began hauling files into a new set of offices in the New York Life Insurance Building, two blocks from the Bankers Building. The situation on the nineteenth floor had grown untenable. Reporters lingered around the clock, pestering Doris Rogers, straining to overhear phone calls and filing stories any time a handful of agents headed for the elevator at once. Before his death, Cowley had been agitating for a new “secret office” where he could finish the War on Crime free of scrutiny. After his funeral he got it.
¹

To replace Cowley, Hoover brought in Earl Connelley, the taciturn Cincinnati SAC who had overseen the Indiana theater of the Dillinger hunt. Connelley found morale in the old Dillinger Squad—now known as the Flying Squad—low. The men were on their last legs. Three were now dead. No one wanted to be next. A few agents were sending out feelers to hometown law firms, hoping for a new, safer job.

That morning Connelley convened a staff meeting to go over leads on the Barkers. Since the gang fled Cleveland in September, there had been no sign of them, but the Cleveland raids had shaken loose a torrent of information on the gang, much of it from the Barker women. Cowley left behind dozens of promising tips. They were close. Connelley could feel it. In late September they had missed capturing Ma Barker by only a week; agents had raided her apartment on South Shore Drive after learning her address from Shotgun George Ziegler’s widow, who had suffered a nervous breakdown and washed up in a Chicago sanatorium.

Just before his death, Cowley’s hottest tip had come in Miami, where on November 16 a car Karpis had registered under an alias in Ohio was suddenly reregistered in Florida. Cowley and three of his best men flew down to investigate. Together they found the car and quickly deduced that the man driving it was not Karpis. His name was Duke Randall. He was a gofer at the El Commodoro, a hotel Miami police characterized as “a joint for racketeers and undesirables.” Cowley decided to keep Randall under surveillance. Three weeks later, two agents were still living in the hotel, waiting and watching.

That same Monday, as Connelley and his men moved into their new offices, an agent named Loyde E. Kingman arrived in Havana.
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In his pocket he carried photos of Willie Harrison, the Barker Gang gofer whose passion for horse racing had spurred Cowley to have his photo posted at every racetrack between New Orleans and Miami. That day Kingman showed Harrison’s photo to officials of the International Racing Association, who agreed to circulate it at the Cuban tracks. The rest of the week Kingman planned to check the expatriate hangouts, Sloppy Joe’s Bar, Donovan’s Bar, the Eden Concert Night Club, the Habana-Madrid Jai Alai Fronton. At the end of the day, Kingman trudged to the Parkview Hotel and took his place in line at the front desk.

A man in front of him lingered, talking with the clerk.

“Excuse me sir,” Kingman finally said. “Would you allow me to register?”

The man turned.

“No,” said Alvin Karpis. “Not at all.”
²

 

 

Karpis had told no one, not even Fred Barker, of his plans to hide in Cuba. After dividing up the ransom money in Chicago that night in September, he had confided only that he could be reached through the El Commodoro in Miami. Karpis and the pregnant Delores Delaney had driven two hundred miles that first night, staying over in a drafty tourist camp in southern Indiana. They reached Birmingham, Alabama, the following evening. They hit the Atlantic Coast just as a tropical storm struck, the high winds jostling their Ford. Just past Fort Pierce the skies cleared. It was a warm night. Karpis allowed himself to relax. Delaney threw her head out the window, luxuriating in the tropical breezes, marveling at the palm trees. Karpis didn’t see the squad car until its lights filled his rearview mirror. He was doing eighty-five.

Karpis pulled over. He watched a trooper in rain gear approach his car. “Are you in a big hurry?” the trooper asked.

“Well, not necessarily,” Karpis said. “I’m trying to get down to Miami.”

“You’re going pretty fast.”

Karpis said he didn’t think Florida had a speed limit yet.

“Well,” the trooper said. “If you’re going too fast, we can get you on a charge of reckless driving. When you’re going eighty-five, ninety miles an hour on a night like this, I’d say it’s kind of reckless. But I can see you’ve got Illinois tags and you’re coming down for a vacation, so I’m not going to spoil it for you.”