“He’s fine, Mr. Dillinger,” O’Leary said.

  The elder Dillinger walked out to his barn. After a moment he returned with a package wrapped in newspaper. Inside, O’Leary found $3,000; it was the money Dillinger had given his father after the Fostoria robbery. “If you see Johnnie when you get back,” Hubert told O’Leary, “mention to him that Art McGinnis is at the filling station with me.”21 O’Leary promised he would.

  There is no indication in FBI files that agents watching the Dillinger home noted O’Leary’s visit; if they had, they might have followed him back to Jimmy Probasco’s house in Chicago that night. Art McGinnis, however, had his suspicions. The next day, Earl Connelley called Washington to report “that some private individual endeavoring to locate Dillinger has represented himself as a Government Officer, in contacting John Dillinger’s half-brother, Hubert. Mr. Connelley states that he has an informant advising that an unknown person took Hubert away for several hours yesterday and talked to him.”22 The FBI never learned the person’s identity; presumably, this was O’Leary.

  When he returned to Chicago that night, O’Leary found Dillinger at Probasco’s house, pacing from room to room in a foul mood. They had heard the news on the radio, he said. It was Tommy Carroll.

  Waterloo, Iowa Thursday, June 7

  Carroll and his girlfriend Jean Delaney had taken a trip through Iowa, intending to end up at Delaney’s parents’ home in St. Paul. After spending the night outside Cedar Rapids, they were cruising through the town of Waterloo when they had car trouble and stopped at a filling station to have the car serviced. Afterward, about lunchtime, a Waterloo police detective named Emil Steffen took a call from the station’s mechanic, who said he had just worked on a bronze Hudson and had seen a rifle and a collection of license plates beneath a floor mat. He said the driver looked like a “tough customer.”

  Detective Steffen grabbed another officer, P. E. Walker, and went cruising the streets of Waterloo, looking for the car. They couldn’t find it, and after an hour or so returned to the police station downtown. There, parked across the street, they saw the car. They pulled up beside it and waited. After a bit they saw a young man and a pretty blonde approach the car. As the detectives watched, Carroll opened the passenger door of the Hudson, allowing Delaney to slide in. Then he walked around to the driver’s-side door.

  The detectives stepped out of their car. “Hey!” Officer Walker said. “Just a minute there. Who are you?”

  “Who are you?” Carroll said.

  “Police officers,” Walker said.

  Carroll took a step backward and reached beneath his coat. Thinking he was going for a gun, Walker charged. Just as Carroll drew his pistol, Walker swung his fist and smashed him in the nose. Carroll fell onto his rear, by the curb. In an instant he was up, the gun in his right hand. He ran onto the sidewalk. Detective Steffen drew his revolver and fired. From a distance of about fifteen feet, his bullet struck Carroll beneath the left armpit. Delaney screamed.

  Dropping his gun, Carroll stumbled away from the sidewalk, into an alley. Detective Steffen set his feet and fired three times; two of the bullets struck home. Carroll fell on his side in the alley.

  Steffen ran up. Standing over the fallen man, he demanded to know his name. “Tommy Carroll,” he rasped. Carroll refused to answer any more questions. “I got seven hundred dollars on me,” he said. “Be sure the little girl gets it. She doesn’t know what it’s all about.”

  They placed Jean Delaney under arrest and took Carroll to the hospital. Two agents from the St. Paul office made it to the hospital that afternoon. Doctors said Carroll didn’t have long. The agents stood over his hospital bed and fired questions at him for forty-five minutes, but it was no use. Tommy Carroll died at 6:55 that evening.23

  Closeted at Jimmy Probasco’s house, Dillinger and Van Meter had sharply different reactions to their friend’s passing. Van Meter swore he would never die like that, gunned down in some filthy alley, and the rest of his career he did his best to stay out of public view.

  Not Dillinger. Once his wrappings were removed, he wanted nothing more than to taste life. The day after Carroll’s death, Friday, June 8, Dillinger decided to attend a Chicago Cubs baseball game at Wrigley Field. Piquett went with him, and later said he saw John Stege of the Chicago police’s Dillinger Squad there as well. “Fuzz,”24 Piquett whispered to Dillinger outside the ballpark. “Big fuzz.”

  If Dillinger worried about being seen, he rarely showed it. By all accounts, he appeared intoxicated by his ability to circulate among the crowds without being recognized. Later, some would attribute this to his “new face,” others to his burgeoning ego. By that weekend Dillinger was feeling well enough to visit a Chicago nightclub, and he may have visited a whorehouse. By the following Monday, June 11, he had met a pretty waitress named Polly Hamilton and was thinking of seeing more of her.dd “That reminds me of Marie,” Van Meter remarked, mentioning his former girlfriend, Mickey Conforti, whom he hadn’t seen since abandoning her at Little Bohemia two months earlier.25

  By Wednesday morning, June 13, Van Meter was feeling chipper enough to go in search of his old flame. He rose early, put on his best dark suit and white shoes, then added his latest bit of disguise, a set of delicate pince-nez eyeglasses, attached by a long black ribbon to his vest. Thus attired, he walked outside and slid behind the wheel of his maroon Ford sedan. Reuniting with Mickey Conforti, he knew, was a calculated risk. The FBI had been watching her for weeks.

  The death of Tommy Carroll gave Hoover’s men their first new batch of clues in weeks. None came from Jean Delaney; the morning after Carroll’s death, agents questioned her till 4:15 A.M., but she said little of use. Even the persuasive Hugh Clegg got nothing out of her. She was sentenced to a year and a day and shipped to the federal women’s prison in West Virginia.

  The clues were in Carroll’s luggage, a black leather Gladstone bag. Two of the dead man’s dress shirts were still in wrappers from a laundry in suburban Niles Center.de When the owner was shown a photo of Carroll, she identified him as one of her customers; he’d only been in a few times. Shown photos of other Dillinger and Barker Gang members, she identified Baby Face Nelson as Carroll’s friend, “Mr. Cody,” a “nice young man” who had been bringing in his laundry since early May. Once, she remembered, when he arrived to pick up a load of shirts that wasn’t yet ready, he snapped his fingers and remarked that he had driven fifty miles to pick it up.

  Despite some progress, Cowley still had a lot to learn. His worst mistake was taking his men off Mickey Conforti. Conforti knew she was being watched; Cowley thought it a waste of time to keep her under surveillance when she was unlikely to contact Van Meter. He was wrong. On the night of June 14 his office received a call from Conforti’s foster mother. Conforti had disappeared.

  Cowley could kick himself. Van Meter had simply approached one of Conforti’s girlfriends, sending her to Conforti’s house with the message he wanted to reunite. She had thrown some things in an overnight bag, met him on a corner, and vanished. Two weeks to the day after Purvis had let Baby Face Nelson retrieve his wife—the debacle that prompted Cowley’s reassignment—Cowley had done the same thing. The last known link to the Dillinger Gang had slipped from his hands.

  Losing Mickey Conforti was bad enough. But Cowley’s most inexplicable oversight in those sultry days of June was his failure to put a tail on Louis Piquett. Cowley’s men had investigated Piquett’s background, dredging up bits of dirt on his involvement in various stock swindles. They had interviewed his former secretary Esther Anderson, the woman who turned Dillinger away after his Crown Point escape; Anderson wasn’t asked about that day’s events and she didn’t volunteer anything. Through it all, Piquett was allowed to roam free.df

  As a result, Piquett and Art O’Leary were able to continue tending to Dillinger’s needs right under the FBI’s noses. The two visited Probasco’s house every few days. Piquett was brimming with schemes to cash in on Dillinger’s notoriety. He offered a reporter for the Chicago American an interview with Dillinger for $50,000; the paper declined. Piquett and the paper also discussed the possibility of the American handling Dillinger’s surrender. Dillinger was game for anything short of surrender, even an autobiography; Piquett said he would bring in a tape recorder so Dillinger could record his memories.

  Dillinger was most excited by the idea of a movie. Piquett proposed that they purchase cameras and recording equipment and have Dillinger and Van Meter filmed lecturing on the evils of crime.

  “I’ll give out a message to the youth of America!” Van Meter enthused.

  “No, that’s not the idea, Van,” Dillinger said. “We just want to tell them that crime does not pay.”

  “Well,” Van Meter said, “you tell them that crime does not pay, and I’ll give my talk to the youth of America.”26

  When he wasn’t discussing these and other pipe dreams, Dillinger spent much of his time in Probasco’s living room reading newspapers. Van Meter, who wasn’t a reader, spent hours hunched over the police band of Probasco’s radio, avidly relaying items he heard to Dillinger. They chuckled over the stream of bogus sightings the FBI and Chicago police were forced to pursue. There were reports Dillinger had been seen in Kentucky, in Wisconsin, even hiding in the Ozark Mountains with Pretty Boy Floyd. For the most part, Dillinger just laughed. He only lost his temper when the radio carried the spurious news that the attorney general had issued orders that he be shot on sight.

  When O’Leary came by the house that night, Dillinger handed him a slip of paper. On it he had scribbled the home addresses of Melvin Purvis and Agent Harold Reinecke, who had earned Dillinger’s ire after newspaperreports that he had browbeat Billie Frechette while she was in FBI custody. “I want you to check up on these addresses and see that they’re right,” Dillinger said. O’Leary went to Piquett. Harboring was one thing, murder another. Piquett confronted Dillinger the next day. “Just what are you planning to do, Johnnie?” he asked.

  “They’re out to kill me, aren’t they?” Dillinger said. “Why should I sit around and wait for it? We’re going to be parked outside their houses one of these nights and get them before they get us.”

  “Don’t you realize what a stunt like this would mean?” Piquett said. “They’d call out the army and place the town under martial law, and hang me from a lamppost.”

  Piquett won the argument, but in it lay the seeds of a rift between the two men. It widened when Dillinger and Van Meter playfully warned Piquett they were planning to rob “all the banks” in his Wisconsin hometown. Piquett didn’t get the joke. Losing his temper, he swore—as he did over the idea of assassinating Purvis—that if Dillinger went forward, “you and I will be through.”27

  Nor was Piquett too excited about Dillinger’s forays into the streets of Chicago. He was going out almost every night now, days as well. He took in another Cubs game or two, revisited the World’s Fair, and apparently began regular trips to a North Side whorehouse. No one seemed to notice him. Dillinger further disguised his appearance by dying his hair black, growing a mustache, and buying a pair of gold-rim wire spectacles. After the dark weeks spent in the red panel truck, his confidence was growing. Van Meter, who had rented Mickey Conforti a room on the South Side, thought Dillinger was nuts for cavorting so openly and said so. “You’re going to get it one of these days, running around so much,” he chided.28

  The subject arose again on June 23, when Homer Cummings announced a new $15,000 in rewards for Dillinger’s capture. Nelson warranted only $7,500. “Looks like my price is going up,” Dillinger joked to Van Meter. “Watch Jimmy burn when he finds the government put a cheaper price tag on him than on me. And you, Van, you don’t rate at all.”

  “Nuts to you,” Van Meter said. “You just better watch out that someone doesn’t cash in on that reward.”

  At the Bankers Building, Cowley had agents on half a dozen stakeouts. He asked Washington for more men and got them. Eight agents had been added to the Dillinger Squad that month, bringing the total in Chicago to twenty-two. Still, by Wednesday, June 27, Cowley was no closer to catching Dillinger than when he arrived three weeks before. That day he held a strategy conference at the Bankers Building. Earl Connelley drove up from Indianapolis, Hugh Clegg came down from St. Paul, and a headquarters supervisor named Ed Tamm flew out from Washington.

  They debated every lead and reassessed every stakeout. In Indiana, Connelley’s agents were watching a dozen places, while Connelley himself was keeping in regular touch with the informant Art McGinnis. Tamm argued they should increase the pressure on the Dillinger family. Clegg’s agents were launching raids all around the Twin Cities; that same day they had their first success, picking up Harry Sawyer’s bartender, Pat Reilly, who had been at Little Bohemia. Reilly prompted a flurry of news articles by stating he thought Dillinger was dead. Reporters flocked out to Mooresville to see John Dillinger, Sr., who assured them his son was still very much alive.

  Cowley’s most promising stakeout was back at the Audrey Russ home in Fort Wayne; the Russes were insisting that Van Meter would return any day. Reversing himself, Cowley stationed four men there around the clock, including two of his best new marksmen, the Cowboys Charles Winstead and Clarence Hurt, who passed the days dodging the wrath of the combative Mrs. Russ.29 For the moment, Cowley was satisfied. They had agents working half the towns between Indianapolis and Chicago. Unfortunately, none were in the northern Indiana city of South Bend, which is where Dillinger struck that Saturday.

  Dillinger’s robbery of the Merchants National Bank in South Bend was probably the most chaotic and confusing episode of his career. Among the few things known for sure is that the planning took place at a remote schoolhouse in Nelson’s territory, the northwest Chicago suburbs.dg Several nights that June, Van Meter and Dillinger drove out to the school to meet Nelson, who was usually accompanied by his growing band of acolytes, now including his California pal Johnny Chase; the rotund Bay Area bouncer Fatso Negri; his childhood friend, the racketeer Jack Perkins; and a Chicago mechanic Nelson knew from his racing days named Clarey Lieder. dh Only Negri was to give accounts of these meetings, and his versions changed over the years.di

  To this day, no one is certain exactly who took part in the South Bend robbery. Eyewitnesses variously counted four, five, or six robbers; most versions put the number at five. Dillinger, Van Meter, and Nelson were confirmed participants. Jack Perkins was later tried and acquitted of joining them. It’s possible, if unlikely, that the fourth and fifth robbers that day were Johnny Chase and Fatso Negri.

  The most intriguing theory about the other robbers’ identities has long centered on Pretty Boy Floyd and his sidekick Adam Richetti, whose disappearance had been so complete the FBI had not fielded a confirmed sighting of the pair in a year. One eyewitness firmly identified Floyd as the dark-complexioned “fat man” who worked alongside Dillinger in South Bend that day. Floyd’s involvement was suggested months later by Fatso Negri, who told the FBI he overheard gang members say they would be working with a “big-name Southwestern outlaw.” If it was Floyd, it’s conceivable he contacted Dillinger via Richetti, who served time in Indiana’s Pendleton Reformatory. It’s also possible Negri concocted the story to cover his own involvement.

  Whoever accompanied Dillinger that day, it’s clear that tensions were rising between members of the gang. As usual, Nelson was the irritant. He thought Dillinger and Van Meter were living far too openly, and he repeatedly said so. This led to an angry confrontation at the schoolhouse one night between Nelson and Van Meter, after Nelson discovered Van Meter had reunited with Mickey Conforti, whom Nelson deemed untrustworthy. As Negri put it:Jimmie [Nelson] got into an argument with Van Meter, something about his living with a girl and he said the girl is no good and Van Meter said the girl is good, and Johnnie [Chase] said [to me], “Let’s take a walk,” and I take a walk because I expected [shooting] any minute. And so they settled it and after awhile Johnnie was telling me, he says that Van Meter promised Jimmie that he was going to hit his girl—bump her off . . . The argument got so hot that I could pretty near hear everything . . . [Van Meter] promised Jimmie that he was going to hit that girl and that if he didn’t, I think Jimmy will kill him . . . I thought there was going to be an awful shooting scrap there.30

  The anecdote illustrates Nelson’s renowned volatility and the lengths Dillinger and Van Meter would go to humor him; there’s no suggestion Van Meter ever seriously considered killing Marie Conforti. It was in this emotional climate that the gang debated its next target. According to Negri, they studied several banks in Illinois and Indiana before eventually choosing the bank in South Bend. Van Meter had reconnoitered it that week, wearing his pince-nez. On Friday night, June 29, the gang made final plans at a meeting at the schoolhouse, checking their guns and bulletproof vests. They would need them.

  South Bend, Indiana Saturday, June 30

  It was a hot, bright summer morning when the gang’s car pulled up just past the intersection of Wayne and Michigan Streets in the heart of downtown South Bend at 11:30 A.M. Trolleys rattled up and down Michigan Avenue. The sidewalks were thronged with shoppers. Out in the intersection a twenty-nine-year-old policeman named Howard Wagner was directing traffic. An amateur boxer named Alex Slaby had just parked his car on Wayne Street when a brown Hudson pulled alongside him, double-parking. Slaby watched as four men jumped out. One looked familiar. He wore overalls, a straw boater, and a handkerchief over his right hand. As Slaby stared, trying to place him, Dillinger drew back the handkerchief and thrust a pistol toward him. “You better scram,” Dillinger said.

  Slaby watched, stunned, as Dillinger and two of the others disappeared around the corner, toward the Merchants Bank. With a start, he realized the bank was about to be robbed. Slaby got out of his car, studying the waiting Hudson, whose engine was idling, and began to reach for the keys, which dangled in the ignition.