Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [119]
The half hour Dillinger spent joshing with reporters in the Crown Point jail set the tone for all the press coverage of his coming exploits: Dillinger the accidental yegg, the misunderstood farm boy, the loyal friend who had robbed banks only to help his pals. Dillinger seemed to understand how well he was doing that night and cannily played it for sympathy. “I am not a bad fellow, ladies and gentlemen,” he said as deputies finally led him away. “I was just an unfortunate boy who started wrong.” The Tribune noted the next morning, “something like a tear glistened in one eye as [the] interviewers left.” It was the performance of a lifetime.
For seven days the Bremer family paced the hallways of the family mansion, waiting for word from the kidnappers. By Saturday, February 3, they were desperate. Several feared Edward was dead.
That morning the FBI’s Pop Nathan received a summons to the Lowry Hotel suite of Adolph Bremer’s New York bankers. The two bankers told Nathan the family was preparing to make one final appeal to the kidnappers. The catalyst was not just a concern for Edward’s life, but pressure from the newspapers. Several reporters told of disquieting rumors that might find their way into print. One rumor was that Edward Bremer’s bank was failing; it was suggested that he faked the kidnapping to extort money from his father to save it. Another concerned a supposed swindle of a man named Wunderlich, who had for some reason blamed Edward Bremer for his losses and kidnapped him.
The two bankers showed Nathan a letter Adolph Bremer planned to read to the press. Nathan objected only to a line that promised that the family wouldn’t cooperate with the FBI. “I told them that the Division would never tolerate any such situation,” Nathan wrote Hoover.2 The bankers ignored him.
Sunday afternoon Adolph Bremer walked out his front door and handed the statement to reporters. In it he candidly warned the kidnappers not to attempt to contact the family directly, since their phones were tapped. Instead he suggested they try some new intermediary; the Bremer family would then deliver the ransom.
“[I]f the following suggestions are carried out I will have no interest in any activity after my son is returned,” Bremer said. “If I have not heard from Edward within three days and three nights, I shall understand that you do not wish to deal with me and I will feel I am released from any obligations as contained in this note.”
In Washington, Adolph Bremer’s appeal enraged Hoover. At the safe house in the Chicago suburb of Bensenville, it cheered the gang. Fred Barker ordered Edward Bremer to write two more notes to his father and a pair of intermediaries he had suggested. “If we get the money this time, good,” Barker told Karpis afterward. “If we don’t we’d better forget it and that guy’s had it.”
The next evening, Monday, February 5, the game was renewed. Around seven-thirty Lillian Dickman, a cashier at Edward Bremer’s bank, was sitting in her parents’ home on Cortland Street in St. Paul when she heard a knock at her backdoor. On the doorstep was a man.
“Are you Lillian Dickman?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
He handed her two envelopes. Dickman hurried to Adolph Bremer’s mansion and handed them to him. In one was another handwritten appeal from Edward for his father to pay the ransom.bf “Now please do just as the boys instruct you to & don’t waste any time. The sooner the better,” Bremer wrote. “Pa I’m relying on you this is most unbearable. Its just a living hell. I’m trying the best that’s in me to fight it through so I can see you . . . again.”
There was also a typewritten letter from the kidnappers. It promised they would make one last attempt to receive the ransom. Instructions were to follow. An hour after the notes