Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [139]
The previous fall, when the governor of Indiana made direct pleas for the FBI’s help following the death of Sheriff Sarber, Hoover had ignored them. When the attorney general asked him to review the situation, Hoover notified the Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati offices to render “all available assistance,” but that help had been limited to a smattering of interviews. Melvin Purvis and other SACs attended a conference or two with local officials, but only to monitor the situation. Hoover showed little interest in anything more.
Nor was Hoover any more eager to chase Dillinger in the hours after his escape from Crown Point. The massacre and Bremer investigations were still unresolved, and drew the daily attention of dozens of agents, fourteen on Bremer in Chicago alone. Purvis drove down to Crown Point to survey the situation that Saturday, but reporters’ calls to the Bureau produced only shrugs. “[Newsmen] inquired as to why we did not know more about [the escape],” an aide memoed Hoover, “and I informed them that Dillinger was not a federal prisoner.”5
But when Dillinger’s escape dominated national newspaper headlines Monday morning, Hoover telephoned Purvis. He did not immediately order Purvis onto the case. Instead, FBI memoranda indicate he attempted to gauge the Bureau’s chances of success if it joined the manhunt. Specifically, Hoover asked Purvis what information his informants could furnish that might lead to Dillinger’s arrest. Purvis’s reply was sobering, as Hoover noted the next day.
“In talking with you last evening,” Hoover wrote Purvis, “I gathered that you had practically no underworld informants or connections with which your office could contact in the event of an emergency arising . . . I am somewhat concerned.”6br
And with good reason. Purvis not only had no informants in place, he was unsure how to proceed with any information he might gather. In fact, his questions to FBI headquarters suggest an investigator badly out of his depth. Purvis thought he might want to tap some telephones, but he was unclear as to the legality of wiretaps in Illinois. He twice called Sam Cowley, the agent who served as the Bureau’s investigative chief, and asked whether he needed to bring Chicago police along to launch a raid. By law he did, Cowley reminded him. Hoover sarcastically suggested Purvis needed a police escort to buoy his confidence. “He must have some brass buttons along,” Hoover scrawled on a memo that Wednesday, “otherwise he would feel lost.”7
Stung by Hoover’s criticism, Purvis hired a confidential informant—a source he had used before, at five dollars a day—and mounted a raid with Chicago police that Tuesday night. They stormed the apartment of a woman named Anne Baker, whom the informant erroneously charged with harboring Dillinger after his escape. The raid was a debacle. No one named Baker was home. Not till the next morning did Purvis learn that he had raided the wrong address.
The onslaught of headlines forced Hoover’s hand. On Wednesday morning, March 7, the day after the Sioux Falls robbery, he sent a wire to all FBI offices, directing SACs to “give preferred and immediate attention” to the Dillinger case. The rationale for the FBI’s entry into the case was ostensibly that Dillinger had stolen a car during his escape and driven it into Illinois, a violation of the federal Dyer Act. It was the thinnest of fig leaves. The fact was, Hoover was forced into the Dillinger case by his own ambitions: if the FBI wasn’t hunting the nation’s most wanted man, what good was it?
With no evidence that Dillinger had left the Chicago area, the impact of Hoover’s directive fell heavily on the overmatched Purvis. Unsure where to begin, Purvis sought guidance from John Stege of the Chicago Police Department’s Dillinger Squad. But Stege, as Purvis wrote Hoover, “has not been particularly