This was the state of the army of raw young agents Hoover commanded in his mission to give the White House victories in its two lead cases in the War on Crime. The two investigations quickly became intertwined. On Thursday, June 22, five days after the massacre, Agent Gus Jones received a call from the St. Paul office. Agents there had searched the house Fred Barker had rented, suspecting it was linked to the Hamm kidnapping. They had no idea who lived there, but fingerprints taken from beer bottles at the house turned out to be Frank Nash’s. Hoover’s men scratched their heads: Was Nash somehow mixed up in the Hamm kidnapping?j

  The same morning, the Kansas City office finally received Deafy Farmer’s telephone records. What they discovered changed the course of the investigation: A series of calls had been placed to an address, 6612 Edgevale, in Kansas City. Agents found the house empty. Agent Dwight Brantley, accompanied by the landlord and a Kansas City policeman, supervised the search.k In a desk drawer they found a pile of papers, mostly telephone and electric bills made out to the Vincent Moore family. In the cellar Brantley discovered empty beer bottles, as well as a two-gallon milk can filled with roofing nails.

  An FBI fingerprint expert arrived to dust the house, and within hours the identification was made: Vincent Moore was in fact Verne Miller, as several agents familiar with Frank Nash had begun to suspect. A week later, on July 6, the Kansas City newspapers broke the story, naming Miller and two local hoodlums as the massacre gunmen. For the FBI, Miller became the most wanted man in the country.

  Within days agents began to reel in people. Deafy Farmer and his wife were arrested on July 7 when they inexplicably returned to Joplin. Agents tracked Frances Nash to a relative’s home in Illinois and took her into custody. After several days of questioning, all three broke down and told everything: the flight from Hot Springs, the phone calls to Miller. But none could answer the questions the FBI needed answered most: Where was Miller now? And who were his partners?

  Gus Jones put together a list of likely gunmen. It included Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, Alvin Karpis, and the Barker brothers. But Jones remained convinced Miller’s confederates were the men Nash had broken out of the Kansas prison: Harvey Bailey, the Oklahoma bandit Wilbur Underhill, and their fellow escapees. Bailey knew it, too, and went to extraordinary lengths to proclaim his innocence. One morning Jones opened a letter and was stunned to see it was from Bailey and his comrades. The letter claimed that Bailey and the others could not have carried out the massacre for the simple reason that they had robbed a bank at Black Rock, Arkansas, that same morning. We the undersigned are the perpetrators of the robbery, Bailey wrote. He affixed a collection of the gang’s fingerprints to bolster their case.

  Seated in the FBI’s Kansas City office, Jones was still studying the letter on Thursday morning, July 20, when word came of a massive firefight on the edge of town the night before.

  It was Bonnie and Clyde.

  Platte City, Missouri Tuesday, July 18

  That night around ten o’clock the Barrow Gang cruised into a tourist court just north of Kansas City, outside the town of Platte City, Missouri. They had fled Fort Smith three weeks earlier after Buck and W.D. got into a wild shoot-out following a grocery store robbery in Fayetteville, Arkansas. After a vain attempt to find Pretty Boy Floyd—they did manage to find his brother Bradley—they had spent much of the time holed up in a motel at Great Bend, Kansas. Their only crime of note had been a raid on a National Guard armory at Enid, Oklahoma, where they made off with five Browning automatic rifles, a half-dozen Colt .45 automatics, and ten thousand bullets. There were so many guns in the backseat, Clyde joked, it was hard to find a place to sit.

  By most accounts, the gang had left Great Bend the day before, July 17, camping that night in a field in southern Kansas. On Tuesday morning a farmer found bloody bandages at their abandoned campground and phoned the Kansas State Police. Knowing of Bonnie’s injuries, the police broadcast a multistate alert, urging sheriffs to be on the watch for unusual purchases of medical supplies. That night, after robbing three filling stations at Fort Dodge, Clyde passed the outskirts of Kansas City and arrived at a highway junction in Platte City. The two red-brick cabins the gang checked into stood alone behind a bar, the Red Crown Tavern. Blanche and Buck went in for lunch the next day but left when they spotted the local sheriff, a man named Holt Coffey. That afternoon Blanche drove into town and bought hypodermic syringes and atropine sulfate from a druggist. The druggist thought her purchase odd and telephoned Sheriff Coffey, who remembered the police alert.

  The druggist told Sheriff Coffey that Blanche had mentioned that she was staying at the Red Crown tourist court, and with a quick call Sheriff Coffey confirmed that two couples were staying there. Alerted by state-police circulars, he was convinced he was dealing with the Barrow Gang. The sheriff contacted the Missouri Highway Patrol, which sent reinforcements from Kansas City, including an armored car. They decided to strike that night: By evening Sheriff Coffey had gathered thirteen deputies and troopers for the raid. Convening at the Red Crown at midnight, the group had Thompson submachine guns, metal shields, tear gas, and riot guns.

  Around one A.M. they moved in, taking positions in front of the two darkened cabins, which were linked by a small garage. Two state troopers climbed to the top of the tavern and trained their guns on the cabin doors. The armored car quietly coasted to a stop in front of the cabins themselves, blocking any exit from the garage. When the car was in position, Sheriff Coffey crept toward the cabin on the left, the one occupied by Buck and Blanche. He banged on the door.

  “Yes?” Blanche answered. She was washing some of Bonnie’s things in a sink. “Who is it?”

  “I need to talk to the boys,” Sheriff Coffey answered.

  “Just a minute,” Blanche said. “Let us get dressed.”

  Clyde was lying in bed beside Bonnie in the adjoining cabin when he heard the exchange. He rose and grabbed his Browning. “That’s the law,” he whispered to W.D. “Get the car started.”

  W.D. slipped into the garage as Clyde stepped to the front door. Opening it a few inches, he saw the armored car blocking their escape. He ran to join W.D. in the garage and jumped up on the rear fender of their Ford, peeking through a high window in the door. There, barely ten feet away, standing on the front porch of the leftmost cabin, stood Sheriff Coffey. Clyde raised his Browning and fired through the window. A bullet grazed the sheriff’s neck and he fell, then gathered himself and ran for the tavern.

  All the officers opened fire, their bullets chewing up the cabins’ brick facades and shattering windows. Clyde dashed back through his cabin like a madman, firing the Browning through the windows. Everywhere officers scattered; inside the tavern, a crowd of the curious dived beneath the tables. Reloading, Clyde stepped to the front door, kicked it open, and fired an entire clip into the armored car, the bullets pinging up and down its sides. One struck the driver, a deputy named George Highfill, in the knees. A second hit the horn, which began blaring steadily. Highfill panicked and threw the armored car into reverse, backing away from the garage.

  As bullets whizzed through the cabins, Buck and Blanche found themselves trapped; there was no entrance to the garage from their cabin. They decided to run for it. Hoisting a mattress in front of them, they walked out their front door and began to step toward the garage.5 The mattress was too bulky, however, and they dropped it. Buck had taken only a step or two when he stumbled, his automatic rifle firing wildly as he fell; a .45 caliber bullet struck him flush in the left temple, boring a hole through his skull and exiting out his forehead. Blanche screamed for Clyde to open the garage door as she helped Buck to his feet; he was alive.

  Braving the hail of bullets, Clyde opened the doors and helped the couple inside. They shoved Buck into the Ford, where he joined Bonnie, who had limped in unaided. Clyde jumped into the car and backed out of the garage into the storm of gunfire. A bullet fragment struck Blanche in the forehead; a glass shard struck her in the left eye.

  “Oh my God!” she screamed. “I’m blinded!”

  Standing on the running board, W.D. opened up with one of the Brownings as Clyde ran the gauntlet of gunfire, bullets hitting the car from all directions. The Ford barreled through the yard, vaulting over a ditch before hitting the highway. Behind it, the deputies and highway patrolmen raced for telephones to arrange pursuit. Three had suffered minor bullet wounds. As the gang drove north, Blanche begged Clyde to stop the car to minister to Buck, who was dying. “No,” Clyde said. “We ain’t stoppin’. Shut up about it.”

  After a whirlwind trip to the World’s Fair, John Dillinger had returned to Indianapolis on July 7, intent on quickening the pace of his crime spree. For the first time he explained his plans for a prison breakout to his teenage partner William Shaw. Together the two men bought Dillinger his first car, a maroon 1928 Chevrolet sports coupe. Dillinger didn’t know how to drive, so Shaw taught him.

  Impatient for a major score, Dillinger began casing a downtown bank Shaw had mentioned, the Massachusetts Avenue State Bank. While he did, Shaw disappeared. A few days later, Dillinger received a message Shaw had decamped to Muncie, fifty miles east, after learning police were looking for him in connection with a robbery pulled while Dillinger was still in prison.

  Dillinger drove to Muncie on Friday, July 14, and found Shaw and a group of friends lying around an apartment on South Council Street. The apartment’s other occupant was a hard-drinking ex-con named Harry Copeland, a dim bulb Dillinger would use on a number of later bank jobs. That afternoon they took Copeland and drove ten miles west to the farm town of Dalesville, whose bank Dillinger had scouted; they agreed to rob it on Monday.

  For some reason, probably because they were low on cash, they decided to rob a Muncie roadhouse, the Bide-a-Wee Tavern, that same night. A few minutes after midnight, Dillinger and a partner walked in, guns drawn, handkerchiefs over their faces, and within minutes backed out of the bar with about $70. On the way out the front door, Dillinger encountered a couple coming in. With a grin he pinched the woman’s bottom; when her male friend objected, Dillinger slugged him.6

  Robbing the tavern turned out to be a mistake. The next morning, a Saturday, Dillinger and Copeland had just left the boardinghouse to move Dillinger’s car into the rear garage when they heard someone yell, “Hands up!” It was a pair of Muncie detectives, backed by two patrolmen, who had guns trained on Shaw and the others in an alley behind the house. The detectives, following up on the previous night’s robbery, had easily traced Copeland’s car, a green sedan with yellow-wire wheels.7 Dillinger encountered the officers as he turned his new Chevrolet into the alley. Without a word he threw the car into reverse and backed away. The policemen never saw him. Shaw and the others were taken to the Muncie jail, where they named their accomplice as “Dan Dillinger,” a name that meant nothing to detectives.l

  Dillinger, shrugging off the arrests of his confederates, went forward with plans to rob the bank in nearby Dalesville. A twenty-two-year-old teller, Margaret Good, was alone in the bank when Dillinger, wearing gray summer slacks and a straw boater, strolled in at 12:45. He asked for the bank president. When Miss Good said he wasn’t in, Dillinger smiled and slid a pistol through the teller cage. “Well, this is a stickup,” he said. “Get me the money, honey.”8

  Miss Good, who had been robbed twice in the preceding two years, pointed at the open vault and raised her hands. As Harry Copeland stood by, cradling a pistol, Dillinger leaped over a low railing leading to the vault area. Copeland corralled a trio of customers who arrived as Dillinger scooped up an estimated $3, 500 in cash and a grouping of diamond rings inside the vault. When he was finished, Dillinger led Miss Good and the customers into the vault, shut the door, and strolled out to the getaway car, a green Chevrolet sedan. The two men were in and out of the bank in less than ten minutes.9

  It was a smooth and easy job, and he had done it on his own. Dillinger’s confidence was growing.

  After a month, the pursuit of William Hamm’s kidnappers had gone nowhere. Agents in St. Paul had interviewed any number of underworld characters but hadn’t yet uncovered any clue that the job had been masterminded by Alvin Karpis and the Barker brothers, who had settled into lakeside cottages around Chicago for the summer. Ma Barker remained in her Chicago apartment, immersed in her jigsaw puzzles.

  Then, on Wednesday, July 19, a call came into the FBI’s Chicago office. A secretary passed it to the SAC, a boyish twenty-nine-year-old South Carolinian named Melvin Purvis who was destined to become a pivotal figure in the War on Crime. Unhappy as an attorney in his hometown, Purvis had enrolled at the Bureau in 1926 and swiftly moved up the ranks. At five-feet-seven, with delicate facial bones and a high, reedy voice, he could pass for a teenager. He was Hoover’s favorite SAC. Their correspondence strikes a far more familiar tone than the director’s letters to other agents. Hoover’s notes began “Dear Mel” and were signed “J.E.H.” or “Jayee.” Purvis addressed Hoover as “Mr. Hoover” until Hoover admonished him to “stop using mister.” One of Hoover’s favorite themes was Purvis’s attractiveness to women. At one point, he told Purvis that should he come to Washington for a costume ball, an FBI secretary would escort him “in a cellophane gown.” Hoover ribbed Purvis that a newspaper’s description of him made him sound suited for Hollywood: “I don’t see how the movies could miss a ‘slender, blond-haired, brown-eyed gentleman.’ All power to the Clark Gable of the service.”10

  “We all suspected Melvin was Hoover’s favorite—we thought he was Daddy’s boy early on,” Purvis’s secretary Doris Rogers remembers. “He obviously was someone Hoover thought was very polished, a kind of ornament, but very bright and ready for the job.”m

  What set Purvis apart from the deskrows of stolid young agents in their dark suits and shiny black shoes was an air of Southern privilege. Confident to the point of cockiness, he had an ego, a sense of style and entitlement, and he wasn’t afraid to show it. He wore sharply cut double-breasted suits, puff handkerchiefs, and straw boaters. Where other bachelor agents lived six to an apartment and rode the El to work, Purvis arrived in Chicago with his own horse, which he stabled in Lincoln Park and rode on weekends. He brought a manservant, a black man named President, who chauffeured Purvis through the streets in a sparkling Pierce Arrow, “an old-fashioned but real name-droppy car,” Doris Rogers remembers, “the kind of car that turned heads. That’s the way Melvin was. He was seen as very South Carolina.”n

  That Wednesday, Purvis had been the Chicago SAC for eight months, and as his behavior would show, he hadn’t yet mastered the arcane politics of gangland Chicago. On the phone was the chief investigator of the state prosecutor’s office, a former Chicago cop named Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert. Purvis was working with Gilbert to crack the strange kidnapping of a syndicate con man named Jake “The Barber” Factor. Many in Chicago thought the kidnapping a sham, an effort by Factor to evade extradition to face criminal charges in Great Britain. Purvis believed it was genuine. It was his first major kidnapping case.

  That morning Tubbo Gilbert broke the news that the Factor and Hamm kidnappings had suddenly become intertwined. Two weeks earlier, Gilbert had announced to the press that Jake Factor had probably been kidnapped by an Irish gangster named Roger Touhy, whose suburban bootlegging and gambling empire was an old rival of Al Capone’s. With Capone in a federal prison after his conviction on tax evasion charges, Touhy was locked in a struggle with Capone’s successor, Frank Nitti, to take control of several large Chicago unions.

  Now Gilbert claimed he had evidence that Touhy had kidnapped Hamm, too. Better yet, Gilbert told Purvis, he had just learned that Touhy and three of his gangmates were in custody after a fender bender that morning in Elkhorn, Wisconsin. There are no records of the conversations between Gilbert and Purvis, but by late that afternoon Gilbert had Purvis believing Touhy was responsible for the Hamm kidnapping, too. Purvis made no independent investigation of Touhy. As far as he was concerned, Gilbert’s word was enough for the Bureau.

  Friday morning Gilbert and a pair of Purvis’s men arrived in Elkhorn, and afterward the prisoners were ferried to Chicago, where they were fingerprinted by an FBI man. Touhy was led into Purvis’s office. Purvis told him he was being held for the Hamm kidnapping. “What do you mean a ham, Mr. Purvis? A ham sandwich?” Touhy cracked. “Or did I kidnap a ham steak?”

  The next day, William Hamm and several eyewitnesses to his kidnapping were brought to Chicago to identify Hamm’s kidnappers. Looking through a one-way mirror, Hamm wasn’t at all sure they were his kidnappers and said so to reporters. But one eyewitness, a cab driver named Leo J. Allison, was, and that was all Purvis needed. He emerged from his office to tell reporters that the Bureau had assembled “an ironclad case against Touhy” for the Hamm kidnapping.

  “We have positive identification of all four of the prisoners,” Purvis said. “The government men worked carefully and thoroughly on this case, and we are sure of ourselves.”11 In Washington, Hoover was thrilled. “[T]his is a splendid piece of work, which was consummated only by the untiring and resourceful efforts of the entire Chicago staff,” he wrote Purvis. 12

  It was nothing of the sort. In fact, Purvis was fooled into arresting the wrong men by a corrupt investigator in league with the Chicago Syndicate, a fact that would be confirmed twenty years later by a federal court. Roger Touhy would ultimately be convicted of the false kidnapping of Jake Factor; only after two decades in prison was he able to convince a judge he had been framed. In 1954 Judge John Barnes, in an opinion that led to Touhy’s release, noted that the Illinois state prosecutor’s office, which he found to be dominated by Tubbo Gilbert, had never brought charges against a single member of the syndicate. Judge Barnes found “sinister motives [by] Captain Gilbert and the politico-criminal syndicate for wanting to remove [Touhy] permanently from the scene.” With Purvis as his unwitting ally, the judge found, Gilbert and the FBI “worked in concert to convict Touhy of something.”13