These men were to form the heart of a new and improved Dillinger Squad. The new hires were sent to Washington for a month of training. The day they finished, Clarence Hurt wrote a friend that he and his partner Jerry Campbell were the only men in the class who weren’t lawyers.6 That was the point; all the new men understood they were brought in not to capture the likes of Dillinger, but in all likelihood to kill them. “They hired me as a hired gun, no question about it; they were getting too many accountants and lawyers killed,” D. A. “Jelly” Bryce, an Oklahoma City detective hired later that year, told friends, according to Bryce biographer Ron Owens.

  But importing gunmen alone wouldn’t find Dillinger, Hoover realized. The problem was leadership. The problem was Purvis. In later years Purvis’s fall from Hoover’s favor would be attributed to jealousy. Hoover, a generation of writers concluded, couldn’t abide the attention his subordinate drew from the nation’s press as he pursued Dillinger. While this may have been true, the roots of Purvis’s demise lay less in his thirst for publicity than in his own yearlong series of blunders. Arresting the wrong suspects in the Hamm kidnapping and “forgetting” orders to capture Machine Gun Kelly were bad enough. Hoover stuck with his beloved “Little Mel” through it all, even defending his performance at Little Bohemia. But there was no denying Purvis’s ineptitude in the Dillinger hunt. Suspects were found then lost. His informants were hopeless. He raided the wrong apartments. He built no bridges to the Chicago police while annoying other departments. He’d had his car stolen from in front of his house.

  Hoover’s doubts were mounting when Purvis was handed the best bait the Bureau had been served in months. On May 26 a federal judge in Wisconsin granted the Little Bohemia women—Helen Gillis, Jean Delaney, and Mickey Conforti—probation. Before being released, the three women were questioned at the Bankers Building. Purvis assigned a half-dozen men to shadow them. Conforti went to her foster parents’ home, while Gillis and Delaney went to the apartment of Nelson’s sister, Juliette Fitzsimmons, on South Marshfield Avenue. All three women settled into quiet routines. They knew they were being watched.

  Purvis searched for a way to make his agents less noticeable. There was a gas station across from the Fitzsimmons home, and he pressed the owner to let an agent work there. On Tuesday, May 29, three days after Helen’s release, Purvis called on the man, and was stunned when he mentioned he had seen Nelson visiting his wife the day before. Nelson had circled the block four times, apparently looking for surveillance, then walked right up to the building and gone inside.7

  This was too much for Hoover. He fired off an ominously worded letter to Purvis. “I am becoming quite concerned over some of these developments in the Chicago district,” Hoover wrote Purvis. “We have had too many instances where surveillances have not been properly conducted, and where persons under surveillance have been able to avoid the same . . . I cannot continue to tolerate action of investigators that permits leads to remain uncovered, or at least improperly covered. It is imperative that you exercise the proper supervision over the handling of this case.”8

  Purvis’s position deteriorated further that same day when a Chicago newspaper reported that Eddie Green’s widow had arrived in the city and was talking with the FBI. When a Hoover aide questioned Purvis about the leak, Purvis said the reporter had probably “concocted” it. “It’s strange they should concoct the truth,” Hoover scrawled on a memo.9 Hoover had just sent a terse wire to Purvis requesting an explanation when a rash of articles the next morning quoted Purvis saying he thought Dillinger was dead. Once again Hoover demanded an explanation. Once again Purvis insisted it was all a product of reporters’ imaginations. “I would not have made such a statement to the effect that John Dillinger is dead because, primarily, I do not believe that he is dead,” Purvis wrote Hoover.10

  For Hoover the turning point came the next night, Thursday, May 31, the same day Dillinger had his facial bandages removed across town. The agents watching Helen Gillis were staying in an apartment across the street. Purvis had put Ed Hollis in charge. It was a problematic stakeout from the outset, as “[Helen] is quite aware that she is being followed at all times,” Purvis wrote Hoover. Still, he assured him, “This matter is receiving my closest attention.”11

  What was needed, Purvis decided, was someone who could gain Helen’s trust. His choice for the assignment was a poor one, a Michigan City parolee named George Nelson. A convicted swindler, Nelson claimed he had known Dillinger in prison; he further claimed Baby Face Nelson had “stolen” his name. Purvis agreed to pay Nelson $20 a day. That Thursday night he dispatched him to the building on Marshfield Avenue.

  From their position across the street, Hollis and the other agents watched as George Nelson drove up. As he did, Helen and Jean Delaney emerged from the building. Nelson approached the women, saying he was a messenger sent by Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson. Neither woman knew him, however, and both would later say they assumed he was an FBI plant. Helen and Delaney then walked around a corner, where Helen disappeared into a movie theater. Nelson followed.

  Rather than tail the women themselves, Hollis and his men decided to wait, assuming they would return shortly. When there was no sign of them after fifteen minutes, the agents scrambled down to the street and jogged around the corner. There they saw Nelson sitting in his car. To their surprise, Nelson recognized them and came over to talk. He said Helen was in the theater and assured them he had the situation in hand. He didn’t. Hollis and his men returned to their apartment and waited for the women to return. At dawn they were still waiting.12db

  The women were gone. Purvis passed the bad news to Hoover in a phone call Saturday morning, June 2. Later that day Hoover took aside one of his top aides, an agent named Sam Cowley. It was time to make some changes, he said. Cowley, who had spent the last year riding a desk at FBI headquarters, was being sent to Chicago to assume command of the Dillinger case.

  Samuel P. Cowley, who would emerge as the unlikely star in the third act of Hoover’s War on Crime, was everything Melvin Purvis was not: sad-eyed, quiet, stern, jowly, clerkish, the very face of the faceless Washington bureaucrat. Cowley came from a prominent Mormon family in Utah. His father, Mathias, was one of the international church’s twelve governing apostles until forced to resign in 1903, when Cowley was four. The problem was Mathias’s devotion to polygamy, which the church had outlawed. Growing up, young Sam Cowley belonged to one of four separate families Mathias created with four separate wives.

  After graduating from high school in 1916, Cowley served as a Mormon missionary in Hawaii; he spoke fluent Hawaiian. Returning home in 1920 he attended Utah Agricultural College, played on the football team, and in the summers worked as a salesman peddling knit goods across Nebraska and the Dakotas. He wanted to be a lawyer, but at the time Utah had no law school. He was accepted instead at Hoover’s alma mater, George Washington University, in 1925.

  On graduating in 1929, Cowley wanted to practice law in Utah, but couldn’t find a job. As a stopgap he applied to the FBI, telling his family he would return west when the economy improved. He was accepted as a special agent. He was twenty-nine. In the next three years Cowley was shuffled through FBI offices in Detroit, Chicago, Butte, Salt Lake City, and finally Los Angeles, where he met and married a Utah girl, Lavon Chipman. He was a solid, industrious investigator, nothing special, distinguishing himself mostly in clerical duties; he peppered Washington with suggestions to improve the Bureau’s filing system.

  Impressed, Hoover transferred him to headquarters in October 1932, putting him on the new kidnap desk. At five-feet-nine and 170 pounds, with an oatmeal complexion and baggy suits, Cowley was often underestimated. “This employee is frankly rather umimpressive in certain personal characteristics, which is accentuated by his thoughtlessness or carelessness in the selection of his tailor,” a reviewing officer wrote of Cowley in early 1934. Still, the reviewer went on, he “has acquired considerable poise and self-confidence . . . This employee has a habit of consistently doing things right.”

  Bland but hardworking, Cowley was at his desk early in the morning, late at night, Sundays and holidays. He was a memo-writing machine, capable of condensing a towering stack of files into a single crisp page; he was so deskbound, in fact, he never bothered to qualify on the Bureau’s new pistol range. Vincent Hughes, the director of investigations, noticed Cowley’s appetite for work and made him his assistant in late 1933. This drew Cowley into the thick of the War on Crime. He spent hours each day on the phone with the field offices, relaying their tips, leads, needs, and concerns to Hoover.

  His work was so impressive that when Hughes dropped dead in January 1934—overwork, some said—Cowley inherited his job. His workload mushroomed, to the detriment of his young family. When his wife gave birth to their second son that March, Cowley couldn’t make it to the hospital; he was so busy, in fact, he couldn’t find time to name the boy. Lavon joked that if he didn’t come up with a name soon she would name the child “Junior.”13 By May, as Hoover was souring on Purvis, Cowley had emerged as one of the director’s most trusted aides; hundreds of calls from SACs in the Bremer and Dillinger cases passed through his typewriter on the way to the director’s desk.

  No announcement about Cowley’s appointment to supervise Purvis was made, publicly or privately, which would lead to years of confusion over Cowley’s role; in the months to come, newspaper accounts would repeatedly refer to him as “Purvis’s chief assistant.” At least initially, Purvis was told that Cowley’s assignment to Chicago was a kind of inspection tour, a chance for Hoover’s main aide to assess the organization Purvis had built to apprehend Dillinger.

  But the truth was obvious to everyone the moment Cowley arrived in Chicago. “No one said anything, but we all knew,” Doris Rogers remembers. “It was on the office grapevine, you know, just whispering and glances. ‘Cowley is coming.’ You just nodded. We knew what that meant. You knew it without being told.”

  Cowley wasted no time taking charge. After a morning flight from Washington on Sunday, June 3, he was at the Bankers Building by noon. When he reached the nineteenth floor Purvis wasn’t there, so he busied himself debriefing the agents responsible for losing Helen Gillis. It was shoddy work, and Cowley said so. When Purvis arrived he tried to defend his men, but Cowley decreed the surveillance a failure. Of the fourteen agents assigned to the Dillinger case, four were watching Nelson’s sister’s home. Cowley immediately designated three for reassignment.

  From all appearances, Purvis accepted his demotion without comment. But from the tone of their memoranda it’s clear there was little warmth between the two; in his 1936 book, American Agent, Purvis tellingly fails to mention either Cowley or his own demotion.dc “You could see the strain on their faces,” Doris Rogers recalls. “I felt sorry for Cowley. He was just doing his job. He was as ill at ease as Purvis. When you looked at Cowley, and you looked at Purvis, we all knew the fix was in. There was a sense Melvin had been betrayed. We all felt betrayed, defeated. You could see it by the way [Purvis] walked, by the way he wore his hat. A little hunched, a little bit shoulders. We all felt under siege. The enemy was moving in. The friends we had [in Washington] had all turned to enemies.”

  On the nineteenth floor, morale sagged. It wasn’t just that Purvis’s men were exhausted, that their loyalty to Washington was shaken. The nature of their jobs had changed. Few sought a career in law enforcement. For most the FBI was to be a temporary job, a postcollege adventure, something to do till the Depression ended and real jobs beckoned. They hadn’t signed up to be killed. Doris Rogers was dating several of the agents, and many confided their doubts to her.

  “When the feeling came that Purvis was being undermined, every agent in the office would have resigned if he could,” she remembers. “It wasn’t just loyalty to Melvin. By that time the agents were all tired, worn out. They wished they were home jerking sodas in a drugstore. They would have done anything to get out. They were being thrown into situations where they could get killed. None of them asked for that. It wouldn’t get them a Medal of Honor. It would only get them dead. They knew that. This was not their goal in life. The sense was, ‘What are we doing in this dreadful job?’”

  Tension hung thick that Sunday afternoon as Cowley and Purvis drove to Fort Wayne to assess Purvis’s second major surveillance, at the Audrey Russ home. It, too, had degenerated into a fiasco. The three agents had actually moved from the Russ home to a hotel twelve miles away because the combative Mrs. Russ was expecting houseguests; she had graciously consented to telephone if Dillinger appeared. After an all-night debriefing, Cowley ordered the agents back to Chicago. He and Purvis returned to the Bankers Building at 5:15 A.M.14

  Cowley, whose capacity for work appeared boundless, spent Monday reviewing the rest of Purvis’s apparatus, quizzing him on the efficacy of informants and getting up to speed on the Bremer case, on which six agents were working full-time. That night he drove to Indianapolis, where the next morning he toured the Mooresville area with Earl Connelley; Connelley had sixteen agents on the ground around Indianapolis, watching the Dillinger farmhouse and other family homes, two more men in Dayton and another in Columbus, Ohio. Cowley was skeptical Connelley’s stakeouts could accomplish anything. “[Cowley] remarked that they have had the covers there for a month or six weeks,” Hoover wrote in a memo that night, “and it is hardly believable that it is not known, and it is likewise hardly believable that [Dillinger is] going to contact [them] when they know this.”15

  Still, Cowley told Hoover he could see no changes worth making. Hoover liked what he heard. For the first time in weeks, he seemed pleased. Two days later he phoned Cowley and, as he wrote in a memo, “advised that I was of the opinion that the [new] situation at Chicago would work out all right, and that I had told Mr. Purvis that until we complete the Dillinger investigation I wanted Mr. Cowley to take complete charge.”16

  While Cowley assumed command, Purvis’s run of bad luck continued. Pete Pierpont’s old girlfriend, Mary Kinder, had gotten engaged, and Connelley had befriended her fiancé; the boy told him Kinder expected to meet Dillinger soon. That Tuesday, Purvis drove down to the town of Mishawaka, where agents had trailed Kinder to a shack where Pierpont’s parents were opening a barbecue stand. Purvis and his men watched the building until midnight when, to their dismay, a convoy of eight police cars drove up. Out spilled a dozen cops in bulletproof vests; rifles raised, they demanded to know who Purvis was. Sheepishly Purvis explained, apologizing for his failure to notify authorities he was in the area. Afterward he trudged to a phone to once again break bad news to Washington. “Mr. Purvis stated that of course the matter is ‘shot’ from our point of view,” an aide wrote Hoover, “and I approved his suggestion that it be turned over to the police to cover. I told him to caution the police, however, to give the matter no publicity.”17

  On the Sunday Sam Cowley arrived in Chicago, Van Meter followed Dillinger into the brave new world of cosmetic surgery. He paid $5,000 for it. Once again Dr. Loeser came to Probasco’s house to perform the procedure, with Harold Cassidy assisting. This time everything went smoothly. Loeser slit open Van Meter’s nose, flattening a bump and removing tissue from the bulb. After cutting down the size of Van Meter’s upper lip, Loeser used acid to remove the “Hope” tattoo on his right forearm. Apparently, no one viewed this as a bad omen.

  Two mornings later Loeser returned and used a hydrochloric acid solution to remove both Van Meter’s and Dillinger’s fingerprints. Dillinger endured the treatment in silence, grimacing, beads of sweat appearing on his forehead. Van Meter cursed loudly, dancing around the room, flapping his hands in an effort to fight the pain. Afterward Baby Face Nelson dropped by, plopping on a living room couch to smirk at his partners’ faces. “So you two decided to go out and buy yourselves a pair of new mugs,” he cracked. “Maybe you needed them.”

  “At least I’ll be able to go out on the street and get around now,” Dillinger said.18

  At one point, Piquett dropped by and told Dillinger he needed cash to pay attorneys who had helped represent Billie Frechette at her trial in St. Paul; as expected, she had drawn a yearlong sentence in a federal women’s prison. Dillinger sent O’Leary to his father for the money. On Wednesday night, June 6, O’Leary checked into the Claypool Hotel in Indianapolis. The next morning he found Hubert Dillinger at his filling station. Hubert cocked his head in the direction of Art McGinnis, the FBI informant who had been loitering around the station for over a month. “Be careful what you say,” Hubert said.

  “What’s that rat doing here?” O’Leary asked.

  “I want him around where I can keep an eye on him.”

  “I have a note from Johnnie for your dad,” O’Leary said.19

  Telling McGinnis that O’Leary was an FBI agent who wanted to see his father, Hubert drove him out to the Dillinger farmhouse in Mooresville. John Dillinger, Sr., met them at the roadside. O’Leary handed him the note. It read in part:Dad:

  I got here all right and find I still have some friends that won’t sell me out. Would like to have stayed longer at the house. I enjoyed seeing your [sic] and the girls so much. I have been over lots of country but home always looks good to me . . . This sure keeps a fellow moving. I will be leaving soon and you will not need worry any more. Tell the girls hello. Hope everybody is well.

  JOHNNIE20

  “How is Johnnie?” Mr. Dillinger asked.