Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [141]
Carroll remained in the car, cradling a rifle. Nelson, wearing a charcoal cap, black leather gloves, and a camel-hair overcoat, trotted up the sidewalk beside the bank, taking a position at the head of its rear alley. Dillinger, wearing a gray fedora, matching overcoat, and a striped muffler, lingered outside the front door as the others—Van Meter, Hamilton, and Eddie Green—hustled inside the bank.
The two-story lobby was filled with customers, about two dozen of them, standing in short lines in front of the teller cages; the trio’s first challenge was to get their attention. This was achieved in short order when one of the men raised a submachine gun and fired a deafening volley into the ceiling. Bits of plaster fell like rain as all three men began yelling, “Hands up! Hands up! Everybody on the floor!” The effect was akin to three wild-eyed berserkers storming a prayer meeting. Forty years later it was the sheer manic intensity of the gang’s orders that stuck in the mind of the guard perched above them in the steel cage, Tom Walters. “I swear they were all doped up or something,” he remembered in a 1973 interview. “Their faces were purple and their eyes were blazing. They never stopped screaming. I had never seen anything like it.”10
Tellers looked up, startled. A few employees ducked into closets and beneath desks. “Down! Down!” Eddie Green screamed. “Everybody on the floor!” One of the adrenalized robbers, apparently Van Meter, strode toward the bank’s president, Willis Bagley, who sat at his desk near the front door, talking to a customer. Bagley, dumbfounded to see a man stalking toward him carrying a Thompson submachine gun, had the presence of mind to duck into his office and slam the door.
Van Meter thrust his submachine gun forward, preventing the door from closing. Bagley threw his weight into the door as Van Meter, after a moment of struggle, pulled the gun free. Stepping back, he fired a burst of bullets through the door. Women screamed. Bagley, a bullet creasing his chest, dived for cover as Van Meter gave up and began storming through the lobby, ordering everyone onto the floor.
As he did, Tom Walters, the thirty-three-year-old guard sitting on a chair in the steel cage above the front door, recovered from his initial shock and jammed an eight-inch canister into his tear-gas gun. He aimed it through a gun slit in the bulletproof glass and fired at Eddie Green, directly below him. The canister struck Green in the back and fell to the floor amid a tangle of prone customers. A man on the floor kicked the spewing canister away. It skidded toward another man, who kicked it back. “It was funny,” a teller named Emmett Ryan recalled in 1982. “But it wasn’t funny at the time.”11
Standing in the middle of the lobby, a dense cloud of tear gas rising around him, Green swore and glanced up at Walters, who was struggling to clear his gas gun. The gun was jammed and nothing he could do would clear it. Green collared a bank executive named R. L. Stephenson, thrust him forward as a shield, and opened fire on Walters. The bulletproof glass cracked and splintered, and a bullet ricocheted through the gun slit, searing a bloody line across the guard’s chin and right ear. Furious, Green demanded to know how he could access the cage. “Get that son of a bitch with the tear gas!” Green yelled at Hamilton, who was already scooping money off the counters.
Hamilton looked up and saw Walters crouching on his chair, struggling with the tear-gas gun even as he grabbed a Winchester rifle. For several moments they engaged in a face-off: Hamilton could see it was no use firing at bulletproof glass, and Walters couldn’t fire his gun without endangering the innocent. “Hamilton called me every obscenity in the book, and dared me to shoot,” Walters recalled. “But I couldn’t because I would’ve plugged half the people in the lobby.”
Billowing clouds of tear gas were filling the lobby, and more was coming. From