Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [146]
While Billie spent that Friday at the Dillinger home in Indiana, Dillinger drove east to visit Pete Pierpont’s parents in Ohio, where he sat on the front porch and made sure the family had received the money he had sent for his partner’s defense. Afterward he returned to Chicago, where he reunited with Billie. Amazingly, the FBI still hadn’t put the Dillinger or Pierpont homes under surveillance.
While Dillinger crisscrossed Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, Baby Face Nelson headed west to Reno, where within days his homicidal tendencies embroiled him in a mystery it would take the FBI years to solve. Reno’s two crime bosses, Bill Graham and Jim McKay, were in the midst of fighting a federal mail-fraud case involving their support for a gang of con men that flourished in the city. Somehow the two had learned that the government’s star witness against them was to be Roy Fritsch, the controller of a Reno bank Graham and McKay owned.
On Thursday, March 22, a week after the Mason City robbery, Fritsch disappeared after parking his car near his home. An eyewitness later told the FBI he had seen two men hit Fritsch over the head and drag him to a waiting car. The crime has officially never been solved. But according to informants who spoke to the FBI in later years, the culprits were Nelson and his friend John Chase. According to FBI files, Nelson murdered Fritsch and dumped his corpse down a mineshaft. Fritsch’s body has never been found.
Just as it struggled to come to grips with its most ambitious manhunt to date, the FBI discovered something that was to open an entirely new front of the War on Crime. In February the Kansas City office had belatedly forwarded to Washington seventeen latent fingerprints taken from Verne Miller’s home after the Kansas City Massacre. It took weeks for technicians to compare the prints against those of dozens of suspects. But on March 14, the day after Dillinger’s Mason City robbery, they made a jaw-dropping discovery: a print taken from a beer bottle in Miller’s basement matched that of Adam Richetti, Pretty Boy Floyd’s moonshine-swilling sidekick. The conclusion was inescapable: despite widespread doubts about their involvement, Richetti and Floyd really were Miller’s partners in the massacre.
The news triggered a series of thunderbolt memos from Hoover to the Kansas City office, demanding to know how the prints had been overlooked and who was responsible. More important, it prompted a sweeping reassessment of the massacre investigation to date. The supposed involvement of the Barkers was forgotten. The FBI made no public announcement of its discovery, but agents involved in the case now focused all their efforts on finding Floyd and Richetti.
There was just one problem: there hadn’t been a reliable sighting of the two in six months. From all appearances, Floyd had fallen off the face of the earth. An army of over a thousand Oklahoma lawmen and National Guardsmen had swept the Cookson Hills in February, but found no sign of him. The Bureau’s own search for Floyd had been desultory; unless he was involved in the massacre, Floyd was not a federal fugitive. Agents in Kansas City and Oklahoma City collected tips as they came, but did little digging on their own. Kansas City didn’t identify Floyd’s longtime girlfriend Juanita Baird till February.
All that changed on March 14. Suddenly Floyd catapulted into the front ranks of FBI fugitives, joining Dillinger and the Barkers. Responsibility for finding him fell heavily on the Oklahoma City office, whose agents were already straining under the weight of thirty-one separate major cases,