Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [111]
The meeting was businesslike; Adolph Bremer was not the kind of man who panicked easily. He took Walter Magee to look for his son’s car, and they found it after a half-hour’s search. The front seat was streaked with blood, and Magee told Bremer not to approach. Magee had the car taken to a car wash, where the blood was removed—along with any fingerprints the gang might have left. Other members of the family, meanwhile, arranged for the “Alice” advertisement to run in the Tribune.
Night had fallen when Karpis drove up to the safe house in Bensenville, the same house where William Hamm had been kept seven months before. One of Ziegler’s pals was waiting in the kitchen. They guided Bremer into a bedroom and sat him facing a boarded window.
They guarded him in shifts. Around eleven Karpis stuck his head in the kitchen, where Ziegler’s friend, Harold Alderton, was listening to the radio. “Heard anything yet?” Karpis asked.
“Oh Christ, yeah,” Alderton said. “This thing is going to be hot as hell.”
“What do you mean?”
“They think this guy’s dead. They found his car and it’s full of blood, and according to the radio, they think he’s been killed.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Karpis said. “This is going to be real bad.”
St. Paul, Minnesota Saturday, January 20
For two days members of the Bremer family paced Adolph Bremer’s stone mansion across from the Schmidt Brewery, waiting anxiously for news from the kidnappers. The “Alice” ad had run Thursday morning; there had been no response. News of the kidnapping had leaked to the newspapers, and Thursday night Bremer had given a statement to reporters, promising the kidnappers that his family had no plans to cooperate in any police investigations. “We want to get Eddie back home safe,” he said. FBI agents were posted at both Bremer homes.
Werner Hanni, the St. Paul SAC, tapped eighteen separate phone lines at the brewery and the Bremer homes. Hanni was so busy, in fact, he forgot to keep headquarters updated despite Hoover’s repeated admonishments. “It appears that it is necessary for me to rely upon the press for information concerning important cases being investigated by the Division under my supervision,” Hoover wrote Hanni after reading in the Washington Post of the blood found in Bremer’s car. “With such explicit, definite and repeated instructions it is difficult for me to understand why you neglected, in a case of such significance as the present one, to fully advise me.” Hoover’s anger, stoked by pressure from the White House, grew through the weekend when Hanni failed to forward some paperwork. “Phone and tell him I want these at once and to stop quibbling and procrastinating,” Hoover scrawled on one memo.
The family was deluged with phone calls and letters, many of them supportive, others from cranks. A postcard received that Friday stated that Edward Bremer had been killed and buried near the town of Anoka, Minnesota. Then, around six Saturday morning, H. T. Nippert, the Bremer family doctor, was in bed at his St. Paul home when he heard a crash downstairs. Thinking it was a fallen dish, he went back to sleep. An hour later, while he was shaving, his phone rang. “Go to the vestibule,” said a voice. “See what you can find.”
Downstairs Nippert discovered a bottle that had been thrown through his plate-glass front door. Beneath the door was an envelope containing three letters. One, written by Edward Bremer, directed him to take the other two to Adolph Bremer. Dr. Nippert drove to the Bremer mansion and disappeared with Bremer into the library. Neither man said a word to the FBI agent standing in the foyer, Edward Notesteen. Notesteen asked what was going on. He was told Adolph Bremer had suffered a mild heart attack. But ninety minutes later, when the elder Bremer emerged from the library, he seemed in perfect health.
Notesteen