Two of Matt Leach’s men were visiting Sergeant Howe’s office when Huntington arrived to relay the news. They immediately phoned Leach in Indianapolis, who within minutes initiated an angry series of phone calls with Howe and Huntington. Leach demanded that Dillinger be taken that night: they might never have a second chance. But Huntington, like his snitch, was eager to capture the whole gang, and Sergeant Howe backed his play. The two men reluctantly acceded to Leach’s demands to bring his two men along that night.

  At 7:15, Howe, Huntington, and Leach’s men sat in a darkened car and watched as Dillinger arrived at Dr. Eye’s office in an Essex Terraplane sedan. A man and a woman, probably Pete Pierpont and Mary Kinder, remained in the car while Dillinger ran inside. Fifteen minutes later he came out and drove off. The officers let him go.

  The next morning a cold front blew in, driving temperatures down to 15 degrees. When McGinnis checked in with Huntington, he told him that Dillinger had a follow-up appointment at Dr. Eye’s office that night. McGinnis urged that this time officers trail Dillinger to wherever he was living, where no doubt they could find the whole gang. By late afternoon, Sergeant Howe was again refereeing a vigorous debate over what to do. Huntington agreed with his informant: he wanted Dillinger followed. Leach, who had driven up from Indianapolis, wanted him captured, or dead. The day was ultimately carried by an officer who walked into Howe’s office that day from Lima, Ohio. He argued that Dillinger should be taken out to avenge the death of Sheriff Sarber.

  By seven that night three squads of Chicago police had gathered on a side street two blocks from Dr. Eye’s office. Leach was there, stamping his feet to stay warm, as were Huntington and Howe. Because Dillinger was wanted in Indiana, the squads had been placed under Leach’s supervision. A little after seven, Huntington and a Chicago cop crept forward to watch Dr. Eye’s office. At 7:25 Dillinger drove up in the Essex. Billie sat beside him. As the two men watched, Dillinger hustled into the building, leaving Billie in the car.

  Huntington trotted back to where the others were waiting and briefed them. Everything was set. The men piled into four cars and cruised to their positions. Three of the cars eased to the curb on Keller, a quiet street, facing Dillinger’s car. A fourth car, driven by a Chicago detective named Howard Harder, parked across Irving Park Boulevard, fifty yards behind the waiting Essex. They had Dillinger in a box. Leach had taken aside one of his men, Art Keller, and told him he had no interest in capturing Dillinger alive. He wanted Keller to shoot him. (It is a measure of how far civil rights have advanced in the intervening seventy years that both men enthusiastically related this story for years afterward.)

  Minutes ticked by. Men shivered inside the unheated squad cars. Everyone saw Dillinger when he emerged onto the sidewalk, steam curling from his mouth. Dillinger glanced at the parked cars. Several, he noticed, were pointed the wrong way. He opened the driver’s-side car door, slid behind the wheel, and told Billie to hang on. Before anyone could react, Dillinger threw the Essex into reverse, tires squealing as he backed the car directly into the thick of Irving Park Boulevard traffic.

  Across the street, Detective Harder hollered for his driver to ram Dillinger’s car, but in his haste the car’s engine flooded. Dillinger threw the Essex into first and it shot forward, heading east on Irving Park, narrowly avoiding an onrushing car. Behind Dillinger only one of his pursuers, a car driven by a Chicago detective named John Artery, managed to give chase. Sitting beside Artery was Art Keller, the officer with orders to kill Dillinger. Artery pushed the accelerator to the floor and in seconds the officers’ car pulled abreast of Dillinger’s fleeing Essex. “Get down!” Dillinger shouted to Billie, who scrunched into the floorboards.

  Keller leaned out a window and opened fire, emptying a .38 and then a shotgun into Dillinger’s car. Dillinger screeched right onto Elston Avenue. Keller’s car stayed with him. In the years to come those involved would inflate the ensuing chase to a multimile, half-hour marathon. In fact, the chase was relatively short, lasting maybe a mile. Keller leaned out the window, repeatedly firing into the Essex, but no one was hit. At one point, Dillinger swung a sharp right off Elston, then swerved into a dead-end street. Behind him Detective Artery didn’t react in time. He raced by the street even as Dillinger reversed the Essex, rocketed in the opposite direction, and made his escape. “That bird sure can drive,” Keller breathed.

  Dillinger and Billie abandoned the bullet-riddled Essex on the North Side and took a cab to Russell Clark’s apartment, where the gang was holding an impromptu party, dancing to the tunes on a radio. Mary Kinder heard someone pounding on the door, opened it, and was surprised when Dillinger and Billie tumbled in. Dillinger was convinced it was a syndicate assassination attempt; not till the next morning’s papers were they certain their pursuers had been police.

  Front-page stories of the shoot-out introduced Dillinger to thousands of Chicagoans. The Tribune, writing that Dillinger’s “prowess in crime has been compared to the James boys and Harvey Bailey,”19 passed on a breathless account of how police had traded shots with a machine gunner firing from an “unseen portal” within Dillinger’s car. In fact, Dillinger had never fired a shot; he was too busy driving. Several of the city’s six papers drew comparisons to Verne Miller’s escape sixteen days before.

  While everyone had an idea who had betrayed them, Dillinger and Pierpont were certain it was Art McGinnis. They wasted no time clearing out of the Clarendon Avenue apartment, moving across town to Russell Clark’s. The Chicago police were right behind them; detectives raided the Clarendon flat the next day. Coincidentally, Dillinger’s old partner, Harry Copeland, whose heavy drinking made him a liability, was arrested the following night, after he had the stellar idea of pulling a gun on a woman with whom he was arguing outside a North Side bar. In his absence Pat Cherrington began sleeping with John Hamilton. Her sister Opal Long was already occupying Russell Clark’s bed.

  Dillinger did not let police pressure disrupt his schedule. Gang members had been trying to pass stolen bonds through a fence in Milwaukee and had spotted an attractive bank en route, the American Bank and Trust Company, in the small lakeside city of Racine. That weekend, the gang rented an apartment in Milwaukee and cruised Racine’s downtown streets, studying the bank and scoping out escape routes. The money was beginning to run low, and Dillinger was brimming with expensive dreams, from buying and learning to fly an airplane to taking a long Florida vacation. They planned to hit the bank on Monday.

  7

  AMBUSHES

  November 20 to December 31, 1933

  Racine, Wisconsin Monday, November 20 2:30 P.M.

  The numbing cold front had moved on, but as the five gang members cruised toward the American Bank and Trust Company, a cool wind was still blowing off Lake Michigan behind the bank. Russell Clark did the driving, dropping the others on downtown corners before parking in a lot behind the bank.av It was a mistake: the bank didn’t have a back door. Worse, the gang either didn’t notice or didn’t care that the Racine Police Department was only three blocks away.

  Pete Pierpont, wearing a gray overcoat and matching fedora, was first into the lobby. He unfurled a Red Cross poster and without a word taped it up in the bank’s front window, obscuring the view of the teller cages from the outside. Dillinger, Makley, and Hamilton walked in a moment later. At the cages the head teller, Harold Graham, was counting a stack of bills. He had just pulled a NEXT WINDOW, PLEASE sign in front of his window when he heard someone say, “Stick ’em up!”

  Graham kept his head lowered and ignored the order, thinking someone was joking.

  “Stick ’em up!” Makley repeated.

  Graham still didn’t look up. “Next window, please,” he said, with what one imagines was a touch of attitude.

  Without a word, Makley raised his pistol and shot him. The bullet went through Graham’s right arm and lodged in his hip. He fell backward, stunned and bleeding. Somehow Graham kept his senses enough to press the alarm button. Outside, the alarm began ringing loudly, echoing up and down Main Street. Dillinger turned his head. Out on the sidewalks, passersby did the same. Two more alarms rang at police headquarters. Dillinger and Pierpont strode past the teller cages, ordering the eight or nine employees there to lie on the floor. Dillinger frog-marched the bank’s president, Grover Weyland, to open the vault, then hustled inside and began shoveling stacks of bills into a sack. Pierpont kept an eye on the front door. Among the frightened tellers and customers who watched him that day, all described the handsome, forceful Pierpont as the clear leader of the robbers.

  At police headquarters, officers weren’t exactly scrambling to join the action. The bank had suffered a series of false alarms, and Officer Chester Boyard figured this was one more. He grabbed two men, strolled to a squad car, and drove to the bank. A few minutes later, Boyard was first out of the car in front of the bank. The moment he entered the lobby, he heard a voice yell, “Stick ’em up.” Before he could react, one of the robbers—later identified as Russell Clark—leveled a submachine gun at him and took his pistol. Sergeant Wilbur Hansen was next through the door, his submachine gun pointed toward the floor. From the back of the bank Pierpont shouted, “Get that cop with the machine gun!”1

  Makley, who was covering the lobby, turned and fired. A bullet grazed Officer Hansen’s right hand and scorched a flesh wound in his side. He pitched forward, stunned. A woman fainted, slithering to the floor like a shrugged-off overcoat. A vase of flowers crashed down. Makley stepped over and tried to wrench Officer Boyard’s pistol from its holster. It wouldn’t come free. He took a moment to unbutton the holster and take the gun. Outside, the third officer ran for help.

  Gunsmoke was rising inside the lobby. Outside, a crowd was beginning to form. The manager of Goldberg’s Shoe Store, four doors north of the bank, jogged down to investigate. Officer Boyard made eye contact through the front door and vigorously shook his head. The man then stepped onto a window ledge and peered into the bank. Makley saw him and fired a burst from a submachine gun, sending the man scrambling for cover and glass crashing out into Main Street.

  Dillinger was finishing inside the vault. He glanced out a back window. It was a long drop to the parking lot below. “We’ll have to shoot our way out the front!” he yelled. He waved his gun at Grover Weyland and three woman tellers hiding under a counter, beckoning them to come forward. When Weyland tarried, Pierpont slapped him, sending his eyeglasses skidding across the floor. Weyland glared. “If you didn’t have that gun in your hand, you wouldn’t have that much guts,” he said.2

  At that point another policeman walked into the lobby. “Come right in and join us,” Dillinger quipped.

  “What the hell’s going on?” the man asked.

  Officer Boyard shook his head and the man went quiet.3

  Each of the five robbers selected a hostage or two, and together they headed out the front door. So many people had gathered on the sidewalk, however, that the gang literally had to push their way through the inquisitive crowd. A number of onlookers, noticing Officer Boyard, assumed he had taken the gang members hostage and crowded forward to get a look. “Get back! Get back!” people yelled.

  As the crowd began to part, two detectives burst around a corner twenty yards away.

  “Mack!” Pierpont cried.

  Makley turned and fired a burst from his submachine gun. The detectives took cover in the Wylie Hat Shop.

  The crowd lingered on the sidewalk even as the scrum of gang members and their hostages inched east toward the lakefront and their waiting car. Several hostages melted into the crowd. At least one passerby found himself briefly taken hostage. It was chaos. As the gang reached the parking lot, Pierpont again spied the two detectives peering down an alley to the south. “There’s that fellow with the gun again,” Pierpont snapped to Makley. “Get him!”

  Makley loosed a volley down the alley, and the detectives dived into the rear entrance of the Liberal Clothing store, showers of dust and asphalt erupting at their heels. When they reached the car, Dillinger slid behind the wheel. “C’mon, Mr. President, you’re going with us,” Pierpont said to Weyland. He turned to a teller named Anna Patzke and said, “And you in the red dress.” The two hostages took positions on the running board beside Dillinger. Officer Boyard stood opposite them.

  Dillinger sped away, the car whizzing past two running police officers. Weyland waved his arms as they passed, indicating they should not shoot. With Hamilton reading the git, Dillinger drove west across town, running two red lights before sagging into a traffic jam. They told Boyard to beat it and pulled the two remaining hostages inside the car, not wanting to attract attention.

  The traffic jam cleared after a moment, and within minutes they were driving on dirt roads into the yellowing fields of the Wisconsin countryside. They stopped to change license plates, then again to fill up at a gasoline cache they had left. When Mrs. Patzke said she was cold, Pierpont lent her his coat. He gave Weyland his hat. Tensions ebbed. Dillinger’s mood, in fact, turned buoyant. They kept to the cat roads, passing several farms. At one point they passed an old man on a tractor. “Hi, Joe,” Dillinger hollered with a wave.

  Finally they pulled into a glade and tied the hostages to a tree. Pierpont plucked his hat off the bank president’s head, and with that they were off.

  The gang was back in Milwaukee by day’s end. Mary Kinder was waiting when they walked in, Dillinger kidding Pierpont about lending Mrs. Patzke his new coat. The take came to roughly $5,000 each.

  By nightfall, as posses spread across southern Wisconsin in a vain attempt to track the robbers, reporters and police from Milwaukee to Indianapolis descended on Racine. One of Matt Leach’s men was there, and the Dillinger Gang’s responsibility was quickly confirmed. Asked what Dillinger was like, Grover Weyland told reporters the gang had been “genial.” At one point, he said, one of the robbers in the getaway car—later identified as Makley—had cursed, and Dillinger had told him to cut it out, because of the presence of a lady in the car.

  This kind of small courtesy was becoming a Dillinger hallmark. Like most of his peers, Dillinger was an avid reader of his own press clippings, and one suspects this penchant for niceties had less to do with good manners than with an increasing awareness of his own public image. Dillinger knew how the public tended to celebrate daring bank robbers, and he craved its adulation. He got it. Just as Pretty Boy Floyd had aroused populist sentiment in dust-bowl Oklahoma, Dillinger was quickly perceived by many Midwesterners as a force of retribution against moneyed interests who had plunged the nation into a depression. Letters of support began popping up in Indiana newspapers.

  “Why should the law have wanted John Dillinger for bank robbery?” read one. “He wasn’t any worse than bankers and politicians who took the poor people’s money. Dillinger did not rob poor people. He robbed those who became rich by robbing the poor. I am for Johnnie.”

  And this was only the beginning.

  By mid-November there had been no confirmed sighting of Bonnie and Clyde for three months, not since they were seen fleeing the bloody shoot-out at Dexfield Park, Iowa, on July 24. No one knows where they hid, but anecdotal evidence suggests they spent several weeks with cousins of Clyde’s who lived on farms deep in the East Texas pines. Distant Barrow relatives, several of whom were interviewed by a band of schoolchildren for a class project decades later, remembered an incident during this period in which Bonnie attempted to learn how to fire a pistol and nearly shot off one of her toes.

  Wherever Bonnie and Clyde were hiding, only two men were actively pursuing them. A Dallas FBI agent, Charles Winstead, poked around where he could, but the pull of other cases kept him from the chase full-time. In the FBI’s absence the manhunt, such as it was, fell to the Dallas county sheriff, Smoot Schmid, who handed the case to a veteran investigator named Bob Alcorn. That fall Alcorn began working with a young deputy named Ted Hinton; both had met Bonnie during her waitressing days in downtown Dallas, and both knew Clyde and his old west Dallas haunts.

  By October Alcorn and Hinton were reasonably certain Bonnie and Clyde were hiding somewhere in the countryside outside of Dallas. Worried they would be seen, the two law-enforcement agents refrained from systematic surveillance of the Barrow and Parker families. Instead they worked their sources, panning for tips on Clyde’s whereabouts, and spent endless days and nights cruising county roads around the city, parking on hillsides and staring at traffic; on one occasion they thought they saw Clyde’s Ford and gave chase, but the V-8 in question outran their squad car. Realizing they needed a more powerful vehicle, Hinton prevailed upon the Ben Griffin Motor Company to loan him a fast new Cord sedan: if anything could catch Clyde Barrow, the salesman promised, it was the Cord.

  Late one night, on a hillside overlooking Duncanville, Hinton was sitting behind the wheel of the Cord, watching cars pass; there were reports that members of the Barrow family had been seen in the area. Suddenly Alcorn pointed at a passing Ford and barked, “That’s him!” Hinton shoved the car into first. “Get going!” Alcorn snapped. Rolling onto the blacktop, Hinton shoved the car into second gear, but he shoved too hard. The linkage ripped; the car sagged and died.

  The deputies returned the Cord and leased a powerful Cadillac limousine. Driving one night on Loop 12 in far east Dallas, Hinton thought he saw Clyde in a passing Ford. Hinton floored the accelerator, but the Ford was too fast. Within minutes it outdistanced them and disappeared into the night. Back went the limousine. At this point, the two frustrated deputies were ready to try anything. Looking for something that might stop Clyde, they prevailed upon an excavating company to lend them a massive gravel-moving truck. The idea was to trap Clyde. Alcorn would sit in a squad car on a stretch of road where Clyde had been seen. When Alcorn saw him pass, he would flash a signal to Hinton in the gravel truck. Hinton would then drive into the road, blocking it or smashing into the side of Clyde’s Ford.