The Kidnap Years: by David Stout (popular books of all time TXT) 📗

and feet. The FBI said it identified the body through dental records as that of Dr. Moran.

Karpis claimed that the identification was wrong, but dental records were and are more reliable than the words of gangsters. So it seems that in death, the doctor rode the wind and currents across Lake Erie from Ohio to Canada, traveling through waters that had been there for eons, passing through stretches where the British fleet had sailed to meet the Americans in the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813. The doctor had come a long way.

And what of poor Harry Sawyer, the owner-host of St. Paul’s Green Lantern hangout? He sensed that the new good-government spirit infecting St. Paul made it dangerous for him. So he left Minnesota and his beloved Green Lantern and moved to Las Vegas. But by April 1934, he still had not been paid for his help in setting up Edward Bremer for the kidnappers. So he wrote to Karpis in Cleveland and arranged to meet him there to get what was coming to him.

Sawyer reportedly hooked up with Karpis and friends in Cleveland that June, and plans were worked out for Sawyer and another gang member to take $100,000 or so of the Bremer ransom money to Miami in September for proper laundering. But here again, overindulgence disrupted plans. While Sawyer was away, his wife, Gladys, went to a hotel bar with some friends. They got so inebriated and vulgar that they were arrested on drunk-and-disorderly charges.

The FBI heard about the incident, but before agents could act, the Barker-Karpis folks decided it was time to leave Cleveland. One gang member flew to Havana to do some more money laundering. Fred Barker and Karpis went to Havana to relax, recuperate, and think.

Meanwhile, in their pursuit of John Dillinger, Purvis and his agents had picked up some good information—or perhaps they were finally acquiring the knack of gathering and sifting intelligence. Dillinger was in Chicago, staying with a woman who knew who he was but who was trusted by the outlaw regardless.

The woman, Anna Sage, was a woman of ill repute and sometime brothel owner who was terrified of being deported to her native Romania. She had one priceless piece of information to offer the federal government in return for being allowed to stay in the United States: she knew Dillinger’s habits, and she could inform Purvis of his movements.

The story has been told a thousand times, but it is still riveting. On the night of Sunday, July 22, 1934, Dillinger took Sage to a movie, Manhattan Melodrama, a gangster flick starring Clark Gable and William Powell that was playing at the Biograph Theater on Chicago’s North Side. Tipped off by Sage, Purvis and fifteen agents waited near the theater for the movie to end.

Purvis and his men waited breathlessly, then saw the moviegoers begin to stream out. Soon, they saw Sage, wearing a red or orange dress. She was walking with a man in gray slacks, a white shirt, and a boater hat. His once rusty-brown hair had been dyed coal black, and his face had been slightly altered, no longer bearing a scar that had adorned one cheek.

But Purvis recognized the man at once. He had spent too many hours staring at the face in wanted pictures, had thought of John Dillinger as he was trying to fall asleep, thought of the humiliations Dillinger had inflicted on the FBI, thought of how he had made his jailers and pursuers look like fools. Thought of the trail of blood and tears he had left across the Midwest.

Dillinger sensed the trap and tried for one last getaway, running into an alley near the theater. The lawmen blazed away. One bullet struck him in the head, another in the chest.

Two other bullets from federal guns hit two bystanders, both women. The women were not seriously wounded. Had one or both of the women died, could Hoover have survived? Could his bureau have survived and grown in influence, or would it have become a bureaucratic backwater?

But yet again, Hoover and his wild-shooting, occasionally trigger-happy agents were lucky. U.S. attorney general Homer Cummings, no fan of the FBI chief, called the news of Dillinger’s slaying “gratifying as well as reassuring.”146 Hoover’s stature and that of his bureau were more secure, in part because his agents had somehow avoided killing any innocent civilians while gunning down their target.*

Not quite a month later, on Thursday, August 23, another Dillinger associate came to the end of his days in St. Paul, Minnesota. Homer Van Meter was confronted by four local cops, including Chief Frank Cullen, at a downtown street corner. Also among the lawmen was Tom Brown, once the city’s mob-friendly police chief but more recently under investigation on charges that he had aided in the kidnapping of William Hamm and Edward Bremer.

The heavily armed cops maintained later that Van Meter ignored their order to stop and ran into a nearby alley, turning around to fire twice at his pursuers with a pistol. Within seconds, Van Meter’s twenty-eight-year-old body was full of bullet holes. But it would have been hard to say that justice had been done. There was speculation that Van Meter had had a falling out with Baby Face Nelson, or Green Lantern proprietor Harry Sawyer and his friend Jack Peifer, who operated the Hollyhocks watering hole in St. Paul, or perhaps all of them. Later, there were rumors that Sawyer had set up Van Meter and that he and the four shooter cops split the money Van Meter had been carrying.

Friends of Van Meter said he should have had some $10,000 on his person, although his corpse yielded about a thousand dollars. In any event, there was nothing ennobling about the dispatch of Homer Van Meter. But then, there had been nothing very noble in how he lived.

Now, Hoover could devote himself to catching—better yet, killing—Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, whom he still blamed, at least officially, for the Union Station