Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [142]
The man turned. It was Nelson. “Are you telling me, lady?”
By now, everyone inside the bank was coughing. The gas was so thick it was difficult to see. As Green and Van Meter prowled the aisles, ordering people onto the floor, Hamilton turned his attention from the bank guard to the assistant cashier, a slender fifty-nine-year-old named Harry Fisher. Hamilton, a white cloth bag filled with money from the teller cages in one hand, pressed a pistol into Fisher’s back and shoved him toward the vault. Though frightened, Fisher was uncomfortably aware that more than $200,000 in cash sat in the vault.
“All the way back [to the vault], I kept wondering how I could keep from giving him all that money,” Fisher remembered in an interview in 1942.12 “I must have walked too slowly to suit him for he gave me a boot in the tailbone to hurry me along.”
When they reached the barred door leading to the vault, Fisher got an idea. Fishing a key from his pocket, he opened the door, then shoved a bag of pennies against it as a doorstop. When Hamilton snatched up the bag, the door shut behind him, just as Fisher had intended to do himself. There was now a barred door between the two men: Hamilton kept his gun trained on Fisher through it. Fisher then stepped to the vault door, which was unlocked. Hamilton didn’t know that, however, and Fisher spun the combination, locking it. Wiping tears from his eyes, Fisher turned to Hamilton and said, “I don’t know whether I can see to work the combination.”13 “You’d better open it goddamn quick,” Hamilton snapped.
Fisher took his time opening the vault as Hamilton wiped tears from his face. Finally swinging the giant door back onto its hinges, he stepped back to the barred door where Hamilton stood. “Now this door is locked,” Fisher lied, nodding toward the door separating the two men, “and I can’t open it.”
Hamilton told him to shove the money through the bars. Determined to proceed as slowly as possible, Fisher walked into the vault, grabbed an armload of bags containing one-dollar bills, and plodded back to the barred door, sliding them one by one into Hamilton’s arms. When he was done, he plodded back into the vault and grabbed more bags of ones. “If you don’t hurry up,” Hamilton said, “I’m gonna shoot you.”
As Harry Fisher cannily slowed the robbery to a crawl, a huge crowd was gathering outside the bank. People streamed from stores and homes all around the town square, drawn by the sound of gunfire. For a few minutes it was a congenial affair, some of the people actually laughing and giggling. A few, spying H. C. Kunkleman’s tripod-mounted camera, thought some kind of movie was being shot. “Hey, there, Hank!” someone yelled, spotting a friend in the crowd .14
Dillinger was standing on the sidewalk by the front door, smiling faintly as he kept the crowd at bay, when Van Meter pushed ten hostages out to join him. The two lined the group in front of the bank, a row of human shields. Dillinger then ducked back into the bank to see what was taking so much time. “Gimme three more minutes!” Hamilton hollered.
Dillinger corralled another group of six or seven people and herded them toward the front door. After East Chicago, he was taking no chances. “Stand close to me,” Lydia Crosby, a bank stenographer, heard him say. “Come up, get around me.” Outside, Dillinger lined up these people with the others. More than fifteen bank employees and customers were now standing on the sidewalk in front of the bank, hands held above their heads. Van Meter strode into a shoe store and forced a half-dozen shoppers out onto the sidewalk to join them.
Then, from their right,