Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [109]
From Hillsboro, Clyde, worried that his old haunts in Dallas would be watched, drove the group south, to Houston. They made it back to Dallas three nights later, on January 20, meeting their families outside the city. There was much to tell—and much to plan. For the first time in seven months, Clyde Barrow had the makings of a gang.
The man who headed the Texas prison system, Lee Simmons, was a lean, curt fifty-year-old, a member of the same generation of no-nonsense Lone Star lawmen as his FBI friend Gus Jones. He was at the state prison in Huntsville, forty miles south of Eastham, when he received a call about the raid at nine that morning. By ten he was at the farm. Two guards had been wounded in the escape, one of them, Major M. H. Crowson, seriously. The shooting had all been done by the fleeing inmates, but Simmons knew Clyde Barrow had done this. His instinct was confirmed the next day when one of the opportunistic escapees was recaptured.
That night, after a day spent briefing reporters and orchestrating roadblocks, Simmons visited Major Crowson at the Huntsville hospital. He’d taken a bullet through the stomach and wasn’t expected to live. “Mr. Simmons, don’t think hard of me,” Crowson whispered. “I know I didn’t carry out your instructions. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t bother about it,” Simmons said. “Those fellows had their day. We’ll have ours. I promise you I won’t let them get away with it.” Crowson died the next day, and Lee Simmons swore an oath. No matter what it took, he would have Clyde Barrow brought in, dead or alive. He stewed on the matter for several days. The more he thought about it, the more he was certain he knew the man who could do it.
St. Paul, Minnesota Wednesday, January 17
The morning after Clyde Barrow’s Eastham raid, the temperature hung near zero in St. Paul as Edward Bremer drove away from his mansion on North Mississippi River Boulevard, his daughter beside him in his black Lincoln sedan. A slender man of great wealth, Bremer had been born into the Twin Cities’ first family. His father, Adolph, had married the daughter of a German brewer named Jacob Schmidt in 1896 and had taken over management of the Jacob Schmidt Brewing Company after his father-in-law’s death. A friend and financial supporter of President Roosevelt, Adolph Bremer had weathered Prohibition by producing soft drinks and “near beer,” and by diversifying into financial investments. Edward ran the family’s largest bank, the Commercial State Bank at Washington and Sixth.
But the Bremers were not the Chamber of Commerce men they appeared, as the FBI would learn. Their interests, like William Hamm’s, were intertwined with those of St. Paul’s underworld. The family brewery supplied “near beer” to many of St. Paul’s gangland gathering places, including Harry Sawyer’s tavern. In fact, according to an affidavit Sawyer’s wife, Gladys, later gave the FBI, the Bremers secretly sold real beer to Sawyer’s tavern from 1926 to 1932, which Sawyer bootlegged throughout Minnesota. Gladys Sawyer said the relationship went one step further; she claimed the Bremers actually owned the Green Lantern.
What the Bremers did to anger the underworld is unknown, but they did something. Edward Bremer’s bank handled Harry Sawyer’s finances as well as those of other St. Paul bootleggers, and according to FBI reports, Bremer had helped Sawyer fence stolen bonds, including, it was alleged, bonds Harvey Bailey stole from the Denver Mint in 1922. No doubt the dispute between Sawyer and Edward Bremer was financial. But Bremer’s thorny personality may also have been a factor. As an FBI memo noted, “Bremer is very much disliked not only by his family but generally; he has an uncontrollable