Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [101]
On Monday, October 23, they made their move. When a janitor arrived to enter a basement door at 5:55 A.M., he felt a pistol in his back. One of the robbers told him to open the door. The janitor said he had no key. “Like hell you don’t,” the robber snapped. “You’ve been opening the door for the last ten days.”
When the janitor opened the door, Carroll waved his hand and two men with submachine guns hustled up. One was Nelson. The three men took up positions in the lobby, while Van Meter, dressed in hunting clothes and carrying a submachine gun in a bushel basket, stood outside. As employees arrived for work, they were ordered to lie on the floor. Nelson grabbed one, a seventeen-year-old clerk named Zane Smith, struck him in the jaw, and dragged him into a side room. He asked Smith how much money was in the vault. When Smith pled ignorance, Nelson threatened to put burning cigarettes in his ear “to get better answers.”
A cashier finally opened the vault. After ransacking it and emptying the cash drawers, the gang herded the hostages into the men’s room, threatening to shoot the first one who stuck his head out. Nelson was the last to leave, backing out the front door. As he stepped onto the sidewalk, he raised his submachine gun and shot out the glass in the front door. Bystanders saw him shoot the gun into the sidewalk next, bullets ricocheting wildly. As the gang jumped into a car and drove off, Nelson stuck his gun out a window and fired indiscriminately, peppering the YMCA with bullets. 10 No one was hurt.
It was a good haul, $32,000, more than $6,000 a man. Everyone returned to St. Paul, where they were living three weeks later when police raided Carroll’s apartment. Though Carroll escaped after a struggle, Nelson ordered everyone out of town. Leaving his baby girl with his mother in Chicago, he took Helen and his four-year-old son, Ronald, and drove south to San Antonio, where they registered at the Johnson Courts Tourist Camp on South Presa Street on November 22.bb The other gang members arrived soon thereafter, and everyone settled in for an extended vacation. Nelson spent much of his time hanging around a neighborhood garage and in the basement workshop of a downtown gunsmith. The others lolled around whorehouses and bars.
The trouble began two weeks later, when the madam of the whorehouse that Carroll and a gang member named Chuck Fisher were frequenting saw a submachine gun in their car. On December 9 she called a local detective, saying she suspected they were “high-powered Northern gangsters.” The detective passed the tip to the San Antonio SAC, Gus Jones. No one realized who the two men were; even if they had, the name “Baby Face Nelson” meant nothing to anyone. The manager of Fisher’s apartment building was a friend, so Jones drove over and looked over the room. He found nothing out of the ordinary.
Two days later, on Monday afternoon, December 11, the madam called the San Antonio police with a second tip. One of the gangsters was coming to her house to take a girl horseback riding. Two detectives, H. C. Perrin and Al Hartman, were sitting in a car outside of the whorehouse when a taxi pulled up and Tommy Carroll stepped out and jogged up to the door. A moment later Carroll and the girl returned to the taxi. As the cab eased away from the curb, the detectives followed.
Carroll glanced in the rearview mirror and spotted the tail. Driving down East Commerce Street in the middle of downtown, a half mile from the Alamo, Carroll ordered the driver to stop the car. He jumped out and ran around a corner into an alley. Detective Perrin, armed with a sawed-off shotgun, and Hartman, with his service revolver, leaped from their car onto the sidewalk and raced after him.11
The alley was a dead end. As Perrin ran toward it, Carroll stepped out and shot. His first bullet struck the detective