Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [124]
Bremer’s change in attitude coincided with the discovery of a trove of evidence. The afternoon after his release, agents had taken Walter Magee and retraced the route he had taken to deliver the ransom money. On Highway 55 south of Zumbrota, Magee pointed out the rise where he had seen the red lights. Scrambling up the grassy embankment, agents found three heavy brass lamps and a swinging lantern; all were then wrapped in cellophane and sent to Washington for analysis.
Agent Sam McKee, meanwhile, drove to Portage, Wisconsin, where the sheriff was holding what he considered a suspicious set of gasoline cans. There were four five-gallon jugs and a funnel. The sheriff took McKee out to see a farmer named Reuben Grossman, who had found them. Grossman said he had first seen the cans the night Bremer was released, lying on the side of a dirt road just off Route 16. The next morning they were still there, so he picked them up and returned them to his garage. It crossed his mind they might be connected to the Bremer case, Grossman said, so he called the sheriff. McKee took the cans and the funnel and sent them to Washington. Within days they had the word. A single fingerprint had been identified, on one of the gas cans.
It belonged to Dock Barker.
Kansas City, Missouri Monday, February 12
While the FBI scrambled to learn about the Barkers, the Kansas City Massacre investigation was going nowhere. Hoover harangued the Kansas City and Oklahoma City offices to keep him informed of their efforts. “I have been particularly embarrassed by your failure to keep this office advised concerning developments in the Floyd case,” Hoover wrote to the new Oklahoma City SAC, Dwight Brantley. “I receive more information from private parties in New York City concerning the handling of this matter in Oklahoma than I do from you.”bh
Two agents were still working the case full-time, and their contrasting theories led to friction. A new man, A. E. “Gyp” Farland, was debriefing inmates at Leavenworth who knew the Barkers. He argued in a January 29 memo to Hoover that the Bureau “has been wrong as to the identity of those who assisted Verne Miller in the Kansas City Massacre.” Farland argued that Fred Barker and Alvin Karpis were almost certainly Miller’s partners. Other agents disagreed.
Hoover read the memo in anger. Farland’s theory looked half-baked, and it underscored the meandering nature of the investigation. Hugh Clegg followed up. “I telephoned Acting Agent in Charge M. C. Spear at Kansas City,” Clegg wrote Hoover that afternoon, “and told him [you] were very much displeased with the reported lack of vigor in this investigation of the Kansas City Massacre case; that it appeared that they had let this case fall by the wayside and it was being handled intermittently by any one of a number of agents and it was not being pursued vigorously toward a logical conclusion.”
Spear briefed Clegg on the office’s contrasting theories of the case. “I informed Spear that the various theories they might develop had no bearing on the case,” Clegg told Hoover, “that it was not the policy of agents of the division to get into disputes over theories; that we were seeking the facts, whatever they might be, and that he should not tolerate any friction in the office.”
Hoover erupted. “This must stop at once,” he scrawled on Clegg’s memo. “See that a sharp letter is sent K.C. re such bickering. It must stop at once.”
At Hoover’s instruction, a single new agent, Harold Anderson, was ordered to review the massacre file from top to bottom.bi The files themselves, which filled two four-drawer cabinets, were a mess. It took ten days for Anderson to get them organized. But what he discovered when he did was startling. In one drawer he found a sheaf of fingerprint photos taken from Verne Miller’s house. The prints, lifted from beer bottles in Miller’s basement,