Wilgus, Hobart

  Williams, Joseph W.

  Williams, Tobe

  Wilson, Jimmy

  Winchell, Walter

  Winkler, Gus

  Winstead, Charles

  Bailey captured by

  in Dillinger ambush

  in Lake Weir shoot-out

  Nelson’s demise and

  Winters, Shelley

  Wollard. A.

  Woodbury, Willie

  Woolverton, Howard

  Worley, Ollie

  Wynn, E. J.

  Yeaman, John

  Young, Daniel

  Youngblood, Joel

  Zappas, Gus

  Zarkovich, Martin

  Zarkovich, Mrs. Martin

  Zetzer, John

  Zieger, William

  Ziegler, “Shotgun George”

  Zwillman, Longy

  a For simplicity’s sake, it will be referred to as “FBI” throughout this book.

  b Nell Barrow said Clyde had later attempted to rob another Missouri bank by himself but failed. The bank had been closed for weeks.

  c Crime historians have long speculated that bribery was behind Dock Barker’s release. According to FBI files, it was. In 1934 an FBI agent interviewed Jack Glynn, a private detective in Leavenworth, Kansas. A local fixer who specialized in securing paroles for federal prisoners, Glynn admitted he had been approached by Freddie’s friend Jess Doyle, who wanted to know how much it would cost to get Dock Barker out of prison. They met at Leavenworth’s National Hotel. Glynn said it would cost between $150 and $300 to get Barker out of prison. Doyle gave him $200 and told him to try. Glynn visited Barker in prison, and on the way out asked a guard the best way to “spring” him. The guard suggested he contact a state senator named Pres Lester. Lester was an old Okie pol; as the senator for McAlester’s district, he had tremendous pull at the prison.

  According to Glynn, Lester said $200 would get Barker paroled. Glynn deposited the money in a McAlester bank, payable to Lester. It worked so well Glynn tried it again a month later to free Dock Barker’s old friend Volney Davis. With a bribe paid to Pres Lester, Davis too was furloughed.

  d Seldom did the worlds of syndicate hit men and rural bank robbers like the Barkers cross, but in Ziegler they did. A rarity among Capone’s gunmen, Ziegler moonlighted as a bank robber, driving out from Chicago to hit banks in rural Illinois and Wisconsin. His claim to fame, however, was the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929, in which he was believed to have been one of the gangsters dressed as policemen who machine-gunned seven associates of gang boss Bugs Moran in a North Side garage. The identities of the shooters have never been proven, but the FBI and Ziegler’s friends believed the story.

  No one knew how Ziegler entered Capone’s orbit. He had been a varsity football player at the University of Illinois and served as a second lieutenant during World War I. But in 1925, while working as a lifeguard on a Chicago beach, he had been arrested for attempting to rape a seven-year-old girl. He jumped bail and soon surfaced as a creative hit man for the Capone mob. Among Ziegler’s inventions, it was said, was a time bomb with leather straps that could be tied to a kidnapping victim; it did wonders for extorting money from the target. Ziegler was known for his unfailing courtesy to strangers. “His character was one of infinite contradictions,” one FBI agent wrote. “Well mannered, always polite, he was capable of generous kindness and conscienceless cruelty.”

  Ziegler’s partner, Bryan Bolton, was a weak link, and everyone except Ziegler knew it. At forty Bolton had worked as a carpenter, a car salesman and a golf pro before emerging as a driver for another of the St. Valentine’s shooters, “Killer” Fred Burke. Bolton too, the FBI later learned, played a role in the massacre. It was Bolton, two sources told the Bureau, who as a lookout that day in 1929 had given Capone’s gunmen the premature go-ahead to begin shooting, a mistake that allowed Bugs Moran himself to escape. Irate, Capone was said to have ordered Bolton’s execution, a fate he avoided only after Ziegler’s intervention. Bolton’s loyalty to Ziegler was unquestioned.

  e For decades St. Paul historians have debated what role, if any, six-foot-three-inch, 280-pound “Big Tom” Brown played in the Hamm kidnapping. There were always rumors, but not until FBI files were opened in the late 1980s would the extent of his involvement become clear. According to FBI files, the forty-four-year-old Brown agreed to keep the gang fully updated on what police were doing. In return he was to receive a full quarter of the $100,000 ransom, a cut three times larger than any of the actual kidnappers. The files even raise the possibility that it was Brown who initiated the scheme.

  f Akers was to play a recurring role in the War on Crime. Though the identity of the informant who tipped the FBI to Nash’s appearance in Hot Springs has never been disclosed, the Bureau’s files strongly indicate that it was Akers who later claimed the $500 reward on Nash.

  g The raid was conducted by Joplin’s chief of detectives, Ed Portley, who would later write a series of magazine articles about his pursuit of Bonnie and Clyde in the wake of the murders they committed in Joplin that spring.

  h No one dwelled on the fact that the Bureau had no jurisdiction whatsoever to investigate the massacre. Even though one of its own men had been murdered, it was not yet a federal crime to kill a federal agent. Such a law would not be passed until the following spring.

  i Jones achieved prominence inside the Bureau with his role in the case of the first FBI agent murdered in the line of duty, Ed Shanahan. Shanahan was a tall, slender I agent in Chicago who one evening in October 1925 stepped up to a car blocking his path in a downtown garage and tapped at the driver’s window. Unfortunately for Shanahan, the driver turned out to be a car thief named Martin Durkin. When Shanahan produced his Bureau identification card and asked him to move his car, Durkin brandished a pistol and shot him through the chest.

  Hoover declared Durkin’s apprehension the Bureau’s top priority, and in the ensuing three months, with agents across the country working nights and weekends, Durkin was tracked to New York, then to Los Angeles and San Diego. From California Durkin and his wife drove east across Arizona and New Mexico until a deputy sheriff in Pecos, Texas, spotted a pistol on his front seat. Durkin drove off, but not before the sheriff called the Bureau office in El Paso. A search was launched, and Durkin’s car was found abandoned nearby, at the height of a January blizzard. It was Jones who discovered Durkin had boarded a train to Chicago. Agents arrested him outside of St. Louis.

  j Nash had visited the Barkers in St. Paul a week before the kidnapping, a fact the Bureau would not learn for months.

  k A native of North Carolina, Dwight Brantley served in the FBI from 1924 to 1950. In 1957 he was named Kansas City’s police commissioner. He died in 1967 at the age of sixty-eight.

  l Under questioning William Shaw admitted participating in several Indianapolis robberies. He received a sentence of ten years in a state reformatory for the Bide-a-Wee robbery. Twenty-five years later, Shaw became the principal source for writers researching Dillinger’s early months as a bank robber. He gave extensive interviews to John Toland, Dillinger historian Joseph Pinkston, and a writer named Allanna Nash. In and out of various Midwestern prisons for all but seventeen months of his next forty-four years, Shaw burned to death in a Chicago hotel in 1977 after falling asleep holding a lit cigarette. His body lay unclaimed for a week.

  m Purvis’s son Alston, now a professor at Boston University, speculates that Hoover’s infatuation with his father was romantic in nature. If so, it was unrequited. Purvis was a dedicated lady’s man who would later marry.

  n Another sign of Purvis’s Southern heritage: he called black people “darkies.”

  o Born in 1883, Frank Blake attended Vanderbilt University, where upon graduation he briefly coached the football team. After five years as a rancher, he joined the Bureau in 1919, moving up through the ranks to become the Dallas SAC in 1930. Small and wiry, with a soft Texas drawl, Blake served in the FBI until a heart attack forced his retirement in 1942. He died at his home in suburban Dallas in 1948.

  p As Depression-era ransom notes go, this one was commendably free of melodramatic threats. It included only one: Remember this—if any trickery is attempted you will find the remains of Urschel and instead of joy there will be double grief—for some-one [sic] very near and dear to the Urschel family is under constant surveillance and will likewise suffer for your error.

  q Born in Illinois in 1905, Dwight L. McCormack served in the FBI from 1929 to 1944. In later years he served as a juvenile court judge in Dallas. He died there in 1959.

  r One year later the Majestic would figure prominently in the Lindbergh kidnapping case, when a German-born carpenter named Bruno Richard Hauptmann said he couldn’t possibly have kidnapped the Lindbergh baby because he had been working at the Majestic.

  s Kelly D. Deaderick, a World War I veteran born in Jonesboro, Tennessee, served in the FBI from 1927 to 1951. In later years he was a prosecutor in Yakima, Washington. He died there in 1970 at the age of seventy-one.

  t Two other Lansing escapees, “Big” Bob Brady and Ed Davis, had arrived at the Shannon Ranch the previous night with Bailey but had left after dinner. Had FBI agents staged their raid the previous night, as planned, they might have faced a major shoot-out.

  u For years afterward, Hoover allowed writers chronicling the Urschel case to report that the FBI had apprehended Bates. In fact, as case files make clear, Bates was arrested following an exhaustive investigation by an unlikely source, the American Express Company. Company investigators had been after Bates since he passed traveler’s checks stolen in the Tupelo, Mississippi, robbery in 1932. In the end, his arrest was pure luck. According to an FBI report, an American Express operative was riding a train to Denver from Omaha that Friday, August 11, when he saw Bates aboard the train. The AmEx man alerted Denver police, who made the arrest.

  v According to an excellent 1992 article in Serb World USA magazine, Leach’s real name was Matija Licanin. His family came from the Serbian town of Kordun.

  w Dillinger cased and may have robbed at least one bank in northern Kentucky. He was suspected but never charged with the August 11 robbery of a bank in Gravel Switch, Kentucky.

  x The home still stands, at 2000 Golden Gate Drive, in Long Beach, Indiana.

  y It was probably through the garage owner that Nelson made his first contacts in Roger Touhy’s gang. According to Touhy’s 1959 biography, Nelson worked briefly as a “torpedo” in the labor struggles between the Touhy and Capone outfits; the assignments did not last long, but Nelson’s association with the Touhys would cause him trouble in later years.

  z In a 1953 article for Argosy mgazine, Bentz recalls being introduced to Nelson by an Indiana tavern owner. While possible, he was more likely to have befriended Nelson with the endorsement of a fellow yegg like Karpis.

  aa The establishment was Art’s Army Store at 3318 Michigan Avenue, a retailer of military clothing whose back room was a gathering spot for local hoodlums. Bentz and Nelson were known to have frequented the store in June 1933, as were John Dillinger and Homer Van Meter. Nelson and Dillinger may have met there.

  ab “Cleaning a street” refers to the job of keeping armed citizens and law officers away from a robbery in progress.

  ac Fred Barker and his girlfriend Paula Harmon had spent the summer at a rented house in Long Lake, Illinois.

  ad According to a gang member who was debriefed by the FBI in 1935, the largest share of the Hamm ransom, $25,000, had gone to the corrupt detective Tom Brown. Jack Peifer received $10,000. The six men who actually carried out the kidnapping—Karpis, the Barker brothers, Shotgun George Ziegler, Charles Fitzgerald, and Bryan Bolton—each received $7,800. The gang also gave its old friend Deafy Farmer $2,500 to cover legal expenses for his defense in the Kansas City Massacre case.

  ae Weaver, an Arkansas-born prison pal of Dock Barker’s, had been with Karpis and the Barkers since their first bank robbery in southern Missouri in early 1931. He had a rap sheet dating to 1918 and had been paroled for murdering an Oklahoma policeman. Weaver would work alongside Karpis and Barker for the rest of their careers.

  af The name is a pseudonym; the maid’s actual name is blacked out in FBI files.

  ag This brief conversation, reported verbatim in an October 3, 1933, FBI memo, is curious. It suggests the FBI tapped Sayers’s phone, though approval for such a tap is mentioned nowhere in FBI files. The FBI memo further indicates that Sayers went to Waco in search of Kathryn that day but failed to locate her.

  ah Luther Arnold’s sadsack story about the Oklahoma farm was true, but he pointedly failed to mention his two arrests for passing bad checks in Los Angeles.

  ai Both “Mae” and “Hilda” are pseudonyms; the women’s actual names are blacked out in FBI reports.

  aj Afterward Kelly would claim he had stayed up all night, watching for the possibility of a raid. Given the half-dozen gin bottles in his bedroom, and the ten more empty bottles of Old Log Cabin bourbon on the back porch, that’s unlikely. Whether he slept or not, Kelly had risen early, waiting for the newspaper’s delivery. Around seven he heard a thump on the front porch, the sound of the paper being delivered. He walked out and grabbed it, then returned inside, failing to relock the front door.

  ak All those involved in harboring Kelly, including Lang Ramsey, drew brief prison sentences.

  al Pierpont was the kind of inmate who seemed at war with the world. His problems began at nineteen, when he tried to steal a car; when the owner intervened, Pierpont drew a gun and fired at him four times, missing. He drew a term in a reformatory, until his mother told the superintendent he had been mentally unstable since he’d been hit on the head with a baseball bat as a boy. He was released to a hospital for the insane, then paroled, then sent to Pendleton for the Kokomo robbery. Pierpont cursed the guards, launched innumerable escape attempts, and drew the respect of other inmates as a result. The superintendent wrote his mother’s lawyer that he was “a mustang and must be curbed.”

  am An unidentified Michigan City inmate later told the FBI that the gang initially hid at a Syndicate-operated hangout called the Steuben Club. According to this source, Dillinger was greeted personally at the club by Frank Nitti, who gave the gang free run of a gun room nicknamed “The Arsenal.” This would seem unlikely, especially given the gang’s subsequent armaments raid in Peru, Indiana, several days later.

  an In the lone major operation where his men had been prepared to fire their weapons, things had gone even worse. It happened in August, when the syndicate-connected con man Jake Factor reported someone was trying to extort him. A meeting was arranged with the extortionists at a 22nd Street park, and Purvis, commanding an army of two hundred Chicago cops and FBI agents—the largest such strike force in memory, the Chicago American reported—prepared to move in when they appeared. When the extortionists arrived, the police moved. In the confusion, their quarry managed to get away. The American dubbed it “a huge fiasco.”

  ao Seventy years later, Doris Rogers (now, in 2004, Doris Lockerman) is the only denizen of the nineteenth floor who remains alive, an alert, gregarious ninety-four-year-old living in Atlanta.

  ap Purvis brought Smith, known as “D.O.,” to Chicago from Oklahoma City to be his number two, or ASAC. A popular mentor to many young agents during his distinguished FBI career, Smith had been married the week before the Sherone Apartments stakeout; he had been introduced to his wife by Frank Smith, the agent who survived the Kansas City Massacre. A native of Fort Smith, Arkansas, D. O. Smith served in the FBI from 1928 to 1958. In later years he taught in the Fort Smith schools. He died in January 1977 at the age of seventy-nine.

  aq Edward N. Notesteen, a graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School, served in the FBI from 1930 to 1956. He died in San Diego in 1970 at the age of seventy-one.

  ar Allen Lockerman married Purvis’s secretary, Doris Rogers. He retired from the FBI in the mid-1930s and went on to a career as a successful attorney in Atlanta.

  Julius H. Rice was in the third year of a distinguished forty-one-year FBI career. In later years Rice emerged as a favorite of Hoover’s; they called each other by their first names. Born in 1904, Rice was another George Washington graduate, joining the Bureau in 1931. He was based in Portland, Oregon, from 1946 until his retirement in 1972. He died there in 1975, at the age of seventy.

  as The FBI’s subsequent review of Miller’s escape, written by Assistant Director Vincent W. Hughes, was scathing. Hughes found that “the plan to take Miller was far from perfect and the execution of the plan even more to be criticized.” Among the “vital errors” Hughes cited: The lack of a single supervising agent and the absence of cars in position to give pursuit. Hughes suggested that Miller’s apartment should have been raided, a rare if indirect criticism of Hoover, who had ordered the agents to hold off. Miller’s escape underscored the FBI’s lack of experience in fundamental law-enforcement techniques.

  at FBI agents in Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati actually did do some poking around on the Dillinger case that autumn, writing a half-dozen reports and attending a conference or two. But, by and large, the Bureau ignored the case, just as Hoover wished.

  au According to some stories it was a ringworm infection.

  av The gang’s exact lineup at Racine has long been in dispute. Witnesses uniformly counted five robbers that day. A man named Leslie Homer later confessed and was convicted of taking part. If so, that means one of the others, probably Russell Clark, did not come along.