Public Enemies (84 page)

Just after midnight Karpis and Campbell drove up to the Dan-mor Hotel on Kentucky Avenue, three blocks from the boardwalk. They had driven all day, bypassing the major cities, and were dead tired. The night clerk, Daniel Young, noticed they smelled of liquor. Young assigned them to Room 403, just across from where Delores and Burdette waited in Room 400; the women had taken a train and arrived the previous day. Upstairs Karpis tipped the bellhop a quarter and told him to run out and buy them a pint of whiskey.

The next morning at 8:45 Karpis walked out into the streets. He wandered near the boardwalk for fifteen minutes, glancing around warily. Back in the lobby, he slipped the bellhop a twenty-dollar bill and asked him to fetch some shaving cream and Listerine. Karpis had arranged for a doctor to attend to Delaney, and at 11:30 Dr. Carl Surran, who happened to be the official surgeon of the Atlantic City Police Department, examined Delaney in a downstairs room. She was due any day.

Karpis invited the manager, William Morley, to his room, offered him a shot of rye, and inquired about renting a furnished home or apartment in the area; Morley promised to look into it. Around lunchtime Karpis, escorted by the hotel’s handyman, walked up to Sloteroff’s, a men’s store on Arctic Avenue, and bought winter clothes, a black box-shouldered overcoat and two suits, a banker’s gray single-breasted model and a double-breasted oxford, both of which needed to be altered. Karpis took the overcoat, arranged to pick up the suits at five, then went with the handyman to a veterinarian’s office, where he waited while the vet explained why the handyman’s dog had just died.

Outside, Karpis noticed a man and woman in their forties he had seen earlier. He thought he was being followed. All that afternoon Karpis, Campbell, and their girlfriends meandered through stores buying winter clothes, dresses, and slips for the women, and a second overcoat for Karpis, which he paid for with a bill he peeled from a roll of fifties. Campbell also thought they were being followed. Karpis arranged to have the car oiled. They would leave the next morning.

The maid thought it strange that her employers at the house on 85th Street, the Greens, had disappeared. Ever since the pregnant Mrs. Green had bolted from the house with her luggage Wednesday afternoon, she hadn’t heard a word. The maid had stayed alone in the house two nights, then returned to her parents’. Saturday she found the house still empty. Unsure what to do, she phoned the landlady, Grace Thomas. Mrs. Thomas said she suspected the Greens wouldn’t be coming back. In fact, she thought they might be connected to the shoot-out at Lake Weir. Mrs. Thomas picked up the phone and called the Miami Police Department.

On Saturday afternoon two detectives arrived to see Mrs. Thomas. They interviewed her, then spoke with the maid. The description of the Greens matched that of Alvin Karpis and Delores Delaney. Inside the rented house the detectives found dozens of papers left behind when the Greens left. Among the papers was a description of the black two-door Buick the Greens had purchased at the Ungar Buick Company. The detectives passed the information to the FBI’s Miami office.

Just after nightfall the news was relayed to Earl Connelley, who had remained in Ocala, cleaning up loose ends. After checking with Washington, Connelley ordered a description of the car broadcast to police departments up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

At 2:30 that morning an urgent message spit out of the Teletype machine at the Atlantic City Police Department: INFORMATION WANTED BY FLORIDA POLICE ON A SERIOUS CRIMINAL CHARGE WHITE MAN FIVE FOOT TEN DARK COMPLEXION DARK HAIR DARK EYES VERY SLENDER BUILD ACCOMPANIED BY WOMAN WHO WILL BECOME MOTHER IN FEW DAYS DRIVING NINETEEN THIRTY FIVE BUICK SEDAN D5306 . . . HE IS ARMED WITH 45 CALIBRE AUTOMATIC AND RIFLE REPORTED TO BE DANGEROUS USE EXTREME CAUTION IN APPREHENSION.

At 3:25 Officer Elias Saab was walking his beat near the Atlantic City boardwalk when he checked in from a phone box and was notified of the alert. He strolled into the Coast Garage on Kentucky Avenue and walked through, glancing at license numbers. To his amazement he found the Buick mentioned in the Teletype. He called his captain, who dispatched three detectives to the garage. The attendant told the men the car belonged to someone staying at the Dan-mor Hotel.

The detectives crossed the street to the Dan-mor and woke the manager, William Morley. Morley stonewalled. The police wouldn’t explain why they wanted to question his new guests, and Morley later said he assumed the matter involved the pregnant girl who wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. He didn’t want to cause a commotion over such a trivial matter. But the police wouldn’t leave. One took a bellboy to headquarters while the others continued questioning Morley.

At dawn Morley’s wife, Elizabeth, who an FBI report dryly noted “does not appear to be gifted with a pretentious amount of intelligence,” stirred from her bed. She came downstairs to see her husband, discussed the situation privately with him and decided to try to defuse the matter. Without telling the detectives, she walked up to Room 403 and tapped softly. Karpis came to the door, wearing only long underwear. She asked him to follow her. The two walked ten feet down to Room 404, a vacant room, and slipped inside.

“The law is downstairs,” Mrs. Morley whispered, “looking for someone from Florida who has gotten a girl in trouble.” If he was guilty, Mrs. Morley went on, he should give himself up. Karpis’s eyes widened. He went to hide under the bed, but Mrs. Morley objected. He opened a closet and found a suit he tried to put on, but Mrs. Morley again objected. She pushed him toward the door, which was ajar.

Just then the door opened. In stepped an Atlantic City cop. Karpis, caught unaware, allowed himself to be pulled into the hallway. “All right, put up your hands,” the officer ordered. Karpis saw two more cops outside his room, where Campbell was sleeping. The cop pointed a pistol at Karpis and demanded to know his name.

Karpis, shivering in his long underwear, mumbled something inaudible. It took a moment to gather his thoughts. “What is all this?” he asked. He raised his voice, hoping Campbell would overhear. “Don’t point those guns at me. I haven’t done anything.”

Mrs. Morley pointedly didn’t tell the policemen Karpis was one of the men they wanted. Instead she stepped between them and announced she would be able to persuade “the men in 403” to surrender quietly. She stepped to the door of Room 403 and knocked. There was no answer. One of the policemen took out a key and began fiddling with the lock. “Come out of there,” he ordered. “Come out with your hands up.”

There was no answer. Karpis stepped forward and volunteered to try. “He’s probably a little hung over,” he said. “We had a party last night and he drank too much. Is that why you’re here? Did we make too much noise?” The policemen said nothing. “Look, I’ll go in there and get the guy out,” Karpis continued. “He’s probably still drunk. He doesn’t realize that you guys are policemen. I’ll get him.”

Karpis stepped to the door. Just then it opened and he ducked inside, closing the door behind him. The detectives began pounding on and kicking the door, demanding that the men inside surrender. Mrs. Morley jumped forward to stop them, saying she didn’t want the door broken. She took out a passkey and inserted it into the lock.

Just then the door was yanked open from inside. Campbell opened up with a .45. The first bullet sawed off the key in Mrs. Morley’s hands, sending the ring of keys jangling to the floor. She dived for cover, as did the detectives. More bullets erupted from the doorway; one pierced the wall of Room 400 and struck Delores Delaney in the right leg. She screamed. The officers later claimed they emptied their guns in the resulting firefight, but only one policeman’s bullet was subsequently found. In fact, the officers ran for their lives.

Karpis took Campbell and grabbed the women, quickly tied a strip of bedsheet around Delaney’s bleeding leg, and raced down the rear staircase to a back alley. Delaney did her best to keep up. In the vestibule Karpis told the girls to wait while they retrieved the car. Barefoot and shivering, they did as they were told.

Karpis and Campbell circled around the side of the hotel, emerging across from the garage. They glanced to their right and saw policemen milling around the hotel entrance. The two men had just stepped off the sidewalk toward the garage when an attendant began shouting, “Hey! Hey! Here they are! Down here!”

Karpis and Campbell ran for the garage. Campbell stopped at the entrance, raised his pistol, and began firing toward the policemen, who scattered. Inside, Karpis searched in vain for his Buick. He couldn’t find it. Instead he hopped into a pea green Pontiac, whose keys dangled from the ignition. Karpis gunned the engine and Campbell jumped into the backseat. Emerging onto Kentucky Avenue, they turned away from the hotel, trying to find the alley where the women were waiting.

Karpis hated this, hated driving through streets he didn’t know and hadn’t mapped. It was careless. The first street he turned into was a dead end at the boardwalk. He looked back and saw policemen running around the corner behind them. They were trapped. Karpis wheeled the car into a 180-degree turn and drove straight at the officers. “We’ll run right through!” he told Campbell. “Get the gun ready!”

At that moment Karpis spied an alley. As the police opened fire, he swung the steering wheel to the right and the car skidded into the alley. The Pontiac shot down the narrow space between buildings. One exit was blocked by a mail truck. More shots echoed behind them. Karpis tried another exit and emerged onto a side street, then took several more random turns. To his surprise, he found himself in the alley where they had left the women. The women weren’t there.

“Maybe the cops got ’em,” Campbell said. In fact, the girls, cold and frightened, had returned to their rooms, where Delaney got back in bed and Burdette called her a doctor.

“They’ll get us if we hang around here,” Campbell said.

Karpis was torn. But not that torn. He mashed the accelerator, and the Pontiac shot forward. He never saw Delores Delaney again.

 

I made Hoover’s reputation as a fearless lawman. It’s a reputation he doesn’t deserve . . . I made that son of a bitch.

—ALVIN IN KARPIS

 

 

 

Karpis steered the Pontiac toward the Atlantic City causeway, expecting to find a roadblock. Instead he spotted a car full of police parked at the roadside. As they sped by, Campbell aimed the tommy gun. The cops either failed to notice or lost their nerve; they ignored them. Once across the causeway Karpis turned onto a dirt road, then bumped along a set of train tracks until he found a glade where they waited, hungry and cold, till nightfall.

Rain was falling that night when they inched back onto the highway. Spying no roadblocks, they drove west until they reached a gas station at Camden. Karpis thought the attendant recognized them, but the man handed them a road map and said nothing. As the rain changed to snow they crossed into Pennsylvania, where they began looking for a new car. Outside Quakerstown Karpis spotted a Plymouth sedan and began to honk, waving for it to pull over. When the car, driven by a thirty-one-year-old Philadelphia psychiatrist named Horace Hunsicker, coasted to a stop, Karpis got out, pointed his machine gun at the doctor, and slid in back. Campbell got in front and told Hunsicker to drive.

It snowed heavily as the startled Dr. Hunsicker guided the Plymouth west across Pennsylvania. They drove all night and the next day, keeping to slippery back roads, stopping only for gasoline; Hunsicker was too frightened to attempt an escape. Karpis and Campbell said little, keeping their comments to the roads. They crossed into Ohio on a dirt road and at 9:30 that night stopped in the town of Guilford Center, outside Akron, where they led Hunsicker into a vacant Grange Hall and used a pair of pajamas to tie him to a radiator. Hunsicker struggled free twenty minutes later and walked to a farmhouse. Within an hour an alert was broadcast for his stolen car.

The fugitives continued west, passing Toledo, then turned north into Michigan. Outside Monroe, south of Detroit, they stopped at a filling station, and Karpis called their old hangout, Toledo’s Casino Club, where he spoke to a friend named Coolie Monroe. Monroe arrived with a cab driver about two-thirty the next morning. Karpis and Campbell, collars turned up, hats tugged low, tossed their guns into the backseat and abandoned their car, its headlights still on and its engine running; Karpis hoped police would guess he was heading for Canada. They drove to the Casino Club, but the owner, Bert Angus, waved them away. “You’re too hot,” he said.
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Eventually Karpis found their old protector, the vice boss Joe Roscoe, who arranged for them to stay in Edith Barry’s whorehouse on the edge of downtown. The FBI was right behind. Police found the abandoned getaway car that morning at 5:30 and identified it four hours later. Even before the car was found, agents guessed Karpis was heading to his old haunts in Cleveland or Toledo. The Flying Squad was scattered between Chicago and Florida, and Connelley could spare only two men. The Cleveland and Detroit offices didn’t have the manpower or the mission to physically search for Karpis, so they got to work establishing surveillance and phone taps on the Harvard Club in Cleveland, and in Toledo at the Casino Club and Joe Roscoe’s home. Within days an informant confirmed that Karpis had returned to Toledo.

The Detroit SAC, William Larson, begged for more men. Hoover asked for more proof Karpis was in the area. Larson came up with only raw intelligence, nothing concrete. Still, on the night of February 1, Connelley arrived to lead a raid on a cottage owned by Bert Angus. There was no sign of Karpis. In the ensuing days the tone of FBI memoranda suggests Hoover’s enthusiasm for pursuing Karpis had ebbed. After all, he was the last major figure of the War on Crime still at large. He had stumbled onto police in Atlantic City. It was only a matter of time, Hoover wagered, before it happened again.