A day or two later one of the Chicago men appeared at the White Front. With him was Frank Nash, whom Galatas had met but barely knew. Galatas suspected Nash was the brains behind his would-be kidnappers. Frightened, he briefed his friend Dutch Akers, the Hot Springs chief of detectives, and suggested they find a way to turn Nash into federal authorities. It was Akers, Galatas assumed, who had called the FBI.ed Once Nash was arrested, Galatas explained, he feared “the mob” would suspect him of having set Nash up. He went out of his way to help Frances Nash, Galatas insisted, in order to avoid any such suspicion.5

  An interesting tale, but it got the FBI no closer to Pretty Boy Floyd. Hoover ordered in reinforcements. On Monday, September 24, Agent R. G. Harvey in New York was dispatched to New Orleans. One of Hoover’s assistants, Ed Tamm, told Harvey to “go to work” on Galatas, because “he is yellow and, of course, there is a way to deal with people like that.”6 Tamm made it clear to Harvey that he would need to get rough with Galatas. “What we want,” Tamm told Hoover on September 24, “is a good vigorous physical interview.”7 To assist Harvey, Tamm called the St. Louis office and said “we need a substantially built agent in New Orleans for a few days.”8

  Agent Harvey arrived in New Orleans on Tuesday; that night he and two other agents went to work on Dick Galatas. “Subject Galatas was brought to the office after dark and was kept there until shortly before daylight,” Harvey wrote Hoover the next morning. “The interrogation was continuous and vigorous.”9

  In a motion his lawyer filed two months later to suppress Galatas’s statements, Galatas laid out what a “vigorous physical interview” with the FBI entailed. In daylight hours he was kept manacled to a chair in Agent Magee’s apartment. He was given little or no food. He was not allowed to lie down, much less sleep. At night he was taken to the Bureau office. First he was given warnings: “You are going to tell us what we want to know . . . You haven’t any rights and you are not going to have counsel until we finish with you . . . We are going to get the story one way or another.” Then came the threats. “I ought to kill you now . . . You could easily be found dead on the street and all we would have to say is you tried to run.”

  Several days later, after he was flown to Chicago and chained inside the Bureau’s nineteenth-floor offices, Galatas said the threats became more vivid: “I’ll use the necessary tactics to get what I want . . . If you are found dead in the streets, the same as others were found, no one would ever make inquiries and they will think gangsters killed you.” At one point, Galatas was escorted to an open window. “You are a long way up,” an agent told him, “and you won’t bounce when you hit bottom.” Finally, Galatas said, the threats turned to beatings. Agents struck him in the face with their fists until he bled. His hair was pulled. He was beaten at the base of his neck until unconscious. He was beaten with rubber hoses and kicked in the ribs. Finally an agent standing outside the door entered and said, “That’s enough.”

  No one paid much attention to Galatas’s claims when they were eventually aired at his trial. But Galatas was telling the truth. According to Melvin Purvis’s secretary, Doris Rogers, agents in the Chicago office were rarely physical with prisoners during the early months of the War on Crime. But as the pressure on them increased during mid-1934, Rogers says, the agents began beating certain prisoners in the nineteenth-floor conference room. “They had heard about the ‘third degree’ and tried to use it without knowing how,” she wrote in a 1935 article for the Chicago Tribune. “Their attempts were stupid and useless. They picked the wrong men to hit and got little information for their pain. These instances were isolated and few. The older and wiser heads in the organization quickly brought the men who had tried it, victims of misdirected enthusiasm, back into line.”10

  What the FBI got for its “vigorous physical interview” was a stream of increasingly detailed statements from both Galatas and his wife—none of which shed any light on what role Pretty Boy Floyd played in the massacre. In Detroit, meanwhile, Vi Mathias’s reaction to the FBI’s tactics proved far different. After eleven days closeted in an apartment where she was berated by a revolving roster of agents, she was brought to Chicago on September 30 to give a statement. In it, she confirmed virtually every detail of the story “Jimmy Needles” LaCapra had told the FBI. She identified photos of Floyd and Richetti as men Miller had brought to their house after the massacre. She said Floyd had some sort of wound in his left shoulder, and had left with Richetti within hours of arriving. She said she never saw either man again.

  It was all Hoover needed. On October 10 he stepped before a crowd of reporters and announced the capture of Dick Galatas. He also revealed the Bureau’s theory of the case, naming Verne Miller, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Adam Richetti as the massacre assassins. The next day the headlines were large and bold in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri, where Floyd was well known, smaller in Eastern cities, where Floyd was typically introduced to readers as “a Southwestern outlaw.” It is an indication of Floyd’s posthumous notoriety; during his day he was hardly a household name. His fame paled before Dillinger’s.

  In a nondescript boarding house in a poor section of Buffalo, New York, a man known locally as George Sanders read the stories with a frown. Neighbors had noticed Mr. Sanders pacing his room for much of the previous year. Putting down the newspaper, the man turned to his girlfriend and sighed. “You wanna go home?” said Pretty Boy Floyd.

  While the FBI turned up the heat on Floyd, Baby Face Nelson was camped in the Nevada desert, passing his days tinkering with cars and taking pot-shots at jackrabbits. After parting with John Chase outside Chicago, Nelson had taken his wife, Helen, and Fatso Negri and driven back to Reno. For a week they crisscrossed Nevada, searching for a tourist camp where they could hide. Nothing appealed to Nelson; the nicer places had too many people, the more isolated ones didn’t have electricity or running water. One day Nelson’s Hudson hit a bump going about eighty, damaging the car, so on the evening of September 21 they crept into Reno in search of a mechanic they knew named Frank Cochran.

  They slid the Hudson into the garage behind Cochran’s home and transferred the guns and luggage into an aging Buick sedan he lent them; Cochran even installed a siren in the car at Nelson’s request. Nelson’s group returned to its nomadic existence, cruising the back roads of Nevada as far south as Las Vegas. Sleeping in the open, they returned to Reno a week later. Searching for Nelson’s Hudson, they drove downtown and spotted it parked outside a movie theater. Nelson was apoplectic; the FBI might spot the car. When Cochran emerged from the theater, they returned to his house and switched their things back to the Hudson, paying Cochran $250 before driving off.

  Finally, on October 1, Nelson found a place to live, a tourist camp at Wally Hot Springs, Nevada, fifteen miles south of Carson City. Helen rented a two-room cottage; she and Nelson slept in one room, Negri the other. Every morning Nelson sent Negri into town to fetch food and newspapers. They were looking for John Chase’s message in the personals section of the Reno Evening Gazette. On Thursday, October 11, Nelson saw the ad. Chase had returned. The FBI knew it, too.

  All that September, Ed Guinane, the San Francisco SAC, built an intricate superstructure atop Nelson’s contacts in California. There were taps in place on the phones of Fatso Negri’s mother and Johnny Chase’s brothers, and extensions at Tobe Williams’s gangland hospital in Vallejo.ee Wanted posters were distributed up and down the California-Nevada border. Guinane felt certain Nelson was still in the area. He had been seen in Vallejo on September 26, by a man who had sold him a car the year before, and in a Reno tavern on September 29.

  Guinane’s best lead was Johnny Chase’s missing girlfriend, Sally Backman. Agents had searched her apartment and questioned her family; everyone said it was unlike her to simply disappear. At some point, Guinane wagered, she would return to Sausalito. He was right. The Bureau’s first major break came on Saturday, October 6, when Manuel Menotti, Sausalito’s police chief, spotted Backman on the street. He took her into custody and called Guinane, who hurried to begin debriefing her that afternoon.

  It was slow going. For days Backman refused to say anything about her travels with Nelson. Then Guinane decided to use her love for Chase against her. If Chase stayed with Nelson, Guinane said, he would almost certainly be killed. Chase’s only chance to live, he insisted, was to leave Nelson.Backman asked for a promise that FBI agents wouldn’t kill Chase when he was arrested. Guinane said they would do everything they could to bring Chase in unharmed.

  It worked. By Monday, October 8, Backman was installed in a room at the Shaw Hotel in San Francisco, pouring out her story. After parting with Nelson outside Chicago, she said, Chase had taken her to New York City, where they checked into the St. Andrews Hotel at the corner of Broadway and 72nd Street as “Mr. and Mrs. John Madison.” For three weeks they melted into the crowds of Manhattan, two young lovers spending their days ogling Radio City Music Hall and the new Empire State Building. Their only scare came a few days after arriving when Chase walked into a barbershop and a man yelled, “Johnny Chase!”

  It turned out to be an old bootlegging pal of Chase’s named Arthur “Fat” Pratt, who had left the Bay Area to join his family’s jewelry business in Helena, Montana. Pratt and his girlfriend, who were also on vacation, joined Chase and Backman for a trip to Coney Island, a few dinners, and a Mae West movie, Belle of the Nineties.

  In quiet moments Backman begged Chase to leave Nelson permanently, and Chase seemed to be swayed. A simple man, he talked of buying a gas station somewhere and settling down, and Backman believed him. They couldn’t stay in New York forever. In bed at night, they discussed whether it was safe for Backman to return to Sausalito. Chase told her the FBI would pick her up for questioning. She promised she wouldn’t talk. He told her how to reach him, via a personal ad in the San Francisco Examiner.ef Once she returned to Sausalito and got her things in order, Chase promised, she could return to him and they would go straight. On September 30, Chase put her on a bus to the Newark airport. Back in San Francisco, she flitted between friends’ apartments for five days before Chief Menotti arrested her.

  Backman’s story represented a trove of new leads. In New York, agents descended on the St. Andrews Hotel, where they identified a car Chase had purchased as an Airflow DeSoto sedan. Teletypes listing the car’s license plate number were sent to FBI offices and police stations across the West. Just as promising was the discovery that Chase had mailed a parcel to an Arthur Pratt in Helena, Montana. This information was relayed to the FBI’s Butte office on Tuesday, October 9, which called the sheriff’s department in Helena and asked it to check hotels for a man using the name “John Madison.” Hours later came word from Helena: Chase, aka Madison, had left the city just that morning.

  After picking up a package of money he had mailed to Pratt for safe-keeping, Chase drove south to Nevada, reaching Reno that afternoon, just as the FBI learned he had been in Montana. Chase left his car at Frank Cochran’s garage on Virginia Avenue, asked for some minor repairs, then walked downtown and checked into the El Cortez Hotel, again using the name “John Madison.” The FBI was right behind him. Reno police found Chase’s car at Cochran’s garage the next day, Wednesday, October 10. That night, Agent Guinane and a group of agents arrived in Reno. The next morning they interviewed Cochran, who said a man had brought the car into his garage for repairs on Tuesday. “I don’t know him,” Cochran lied. “I presume he is a tourist.”

  Guinane set a trap. “I’m going to need several armed men in the garage,” he told Cochran. “Chase will be back for the machine and we will grab him.” Guinane had brought along the Sausalito police chief, Manuel Menotti, who had known Chase for years. “Your duty, Chief,” Guinane told Menotti, “is to walk up to Chase when he comes into the garage. You talk to him and I believe you can get him away from Nelson. We’ll make Chase put the finger on Nelson.”

  Though the agents didn’t know it, their plan was stillborn. That morning, even as Guinane arrayed his agents around the garage, Chase walked out of his hotel to stretch his legs. He decided to stroll by Cochran’s garage to check on his car. A block from the garage, Chase noticed two men in suits, talking. He suspected they were plainclothes policemen or FBI agents. Slowing to eavesdrop, he heard the words “federal agents” and “car.”11

  Keeping his head, Chase walked to the offices of the Reno Evening Gazette, where he placed an ad in the personals section. The next day Nelson saw it. That night he took Helen and Fatso Negri and drove by Frank Cochran’s house to find Chase. Cochran’s car was in the driveway, a prearranged signal that Cochran was “hot.” Helen pleaded with Nelson to leave. Instead Nelson drove out into the desert and stopped the car. “C’mon, let’s put on our vests,” he told Negri. Negri protested: hadn’t he seen the car in the driveway?

  “To hell with the signal,” Nelson snapped. “You put on that bulletproof vest and go up to the front door.”

  They drove back into Reno and Nelson parked down the street from Cochran’s house. Approaching the house was a risk Nelson was fully prepared for Negri to take. “Go ring that front door bell and ask Frank where Johnny is,” he repeated.

  Negri was afraid. “Jimmy, it’s slaughter for me to go across this street and ring that bell,” Negri said. “The G-men are there, and they’d just riddle me. I can’t do [it].”

  “Go ahead,” Nelson urged. “I’ll stay here, and if I see anybody, I’ll let ’em have it. I’ll have good aim from here.”

  Negri was sweating now. “I know, Jimmy, but that’s murder for me,” he said. “They’ve probably got us spotted now. Have a heart, Jimmy. I wouldn’t do [this] to you.”

  Nelson wouldn’t be deterred. “Go ahead, Fatso; it’s all right,” he said. “I can plug ’em first.”

  “Well, let’s both go,” Negri said.

  Nelson lost his temper. “No! Go ahead!” he said. “I’ll protect you.”

  Negri got out of the car, trotted to Cochran’s front porch and rang the bell. Cochran opened the door, but only a few inches. “Get away from here,” he hissed. “Didn’t I tell you what that car meant? Get away from this door.”

  “Where is Johnny Chase?” Negri asked.

  “He’s walking down the highway,” Cochran said before closing the door. “Get away from here!”12

  Negri hustled back to the car without incident; the FBI, which had no idea Cochran was secretly helping Nelson, wasn’t watching the house. Nelson drove out toward the town of Sparks, looking for Chase. After a while a red sedan passed them; inside was Cochran, along with Chase. Nelson yelled, “Follow us,” and led Cochran into the desert.

  They parked in the sagebrush. Jackrabbits scampered about in the cool evening air. Cochran told Nelson about the FBI trap at his garage. “To hell with them G-men!” Nelson snapped. “I’m going back to the garage and fill them with lead. I’ll get Johnny’s car for him!”

  Cochran pleaded with Nelson not to do anything rash. “I know how to handle one of these tommies,” Nelson said. “I won’t splatter up your garage too much!” Chase interceded, saying they had nothing to gain from killing FBI men. Nelson calmed down when Cochran promised to furnish him the license plate numbers of FBI cars. If he couldn’t shoot the agents in Cochran’s garage, he would get them someplace else.

  On the drive back to Wally Hot Springs, Chase told Nelson all about his trip to New York. “The heat’s everywhere,” he said. “It’s in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Reno, and all spots in between. In New York I contacted some of the boys in various rackets, and they all gave me the cold shoulder, in a polite way, but firmly.”

  “Aw, those yellow racketeers back East,” Nelson snapped. “The G-men can’t bluff us. All we need right now is a little time for one or two more good jobs, like the Milwaukee train. And then we can beat it over to Europe and take it easy.” Negri recognized the familiar refrain: One more job, always one more job, and then retirement.

  All that night Nelson, Chase, and Negri kept watch in shifts, anticipating an FBI raid that never came. As they stood out in the desert night, cradling their submachine guns, Sam Cowley arrived at the Reno airport, having just handed the $5,000 Dillinger reward to Ana Sage in Los Angeles the day before. All that next day, Friday, October 12, Cowley joined agents staking out Frank Cochran’s garage. Cowley was discouraged by Cochran’s failure to identify the photographs of either Chase or Nelson. In a phone call to Washington that afternoon, he reported “the situation does not look any too hopeful.”13

  That night Cochran met Nelson in the desert outside Reno. He handed over the license plate numbers of several FBI cars and even furnished Nelson the address of the apartment house where several agents were staying. Nelson was all for driving into town and murdering every FBI agent he could find, but Chase calmed him down.

  Neither Baby Face Nelson nor Sam Cowley ever learned how close they came to facing off that day. Cowley left Reno the next morning for Salt Lake City before moving on to Montana, where agents were questioning Chase’s friend, Arthur Pratt. No one knew it at the time, but the day Cowley would finally confront Nelson was coming, and sooner than anyone expected.

  October 20

  When night fell, Pretty Boy Floyd, Adam Richetti, and their long-suffering girlfriends, sisters named Juanita and Beulah Baird, left Buffalo. In darkness they drove through Pennsylvania and crossed into Ohio, then turned south. Richetti had relatives in Dillonvale, across from Wheeling, West Virginia, and they may have been heading there. Floyd drove past Youngstown and around three A.M. reached the Ohio River at East Liverpool, where he turned onto Highway 7, the two-lane blacktop that ran along the west side of the Ohio. Rain was falling as fog rolled off the river, and just before the city limits of Wellsville, four miles below East Liverpool, Floyd lost control of the car on the wet pavement and skidded into a telephone pole.