Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [15]
Floyd’s fame grew after he survived a pair of wild shoot-outs with police in the streets of Tulsa. When Governor Murray appointed a special investigator named Erv Kelley to track him down, Floyd shot Kelley dead in a midnight firefight. But by late 1932, Floyd was growing weary of life on the run. Hiding with relatives, he attempted to “retire” by supervising a ragtag group of bank robbers led by a grimy alcoholic named Adam Richetti. But Richetti’s gang proved hapless, and by the spring of 1933, Floyd had withdrawn from bank robbing altogether, preferring to spend his days baking pies in his cousins’ kitchens. Only when several of his relatives were arrested did Floyd decide to leave Oklahoma for a time. He had arrived at Joe Hudiberg’s farmhouse that Thursday night looking for a car.
As Hudiberg walked toward his house after locking the garage, he heard a noise behind him. Something was bumping against the garage doors. As Hudiberg turned to investigate, his black Pontiac came crashing through the wooden doors. Dumbfounded, he watched as the car roared through his yard and shot onto the road. Hudiberg’s friends ran to their cars and mounted a fruitless pursuit. Far ahead of them, Pretty Boy Floyd turned north, toward Kansas City.
Two mornings after Floyd burst out of an Oklahoma schoolteacher’s garage, a man named Horace Grisso walked through the streets of New Carlisle, Ohio, north of Dayton. Grisso, the bookkeeper at the New Carlisle National Bank, stopped when he got to the bank’s front door and took out his keys and opened it. His footsteps echoed on the marble floor as he crossed to the teller cages. The moment he stepped behind the cages, three men wearing handkerchiefs across their faces rose before him. “All right, buddy, open the safe,” ordered the trio’s twenty-nine-year-old leader, who that morning was robbing his first bank.
His name was John Dillinger, and he had been released from the Indiana State Pen barely three weeks before. Like Floyd, Dillinger was a nobody from nowhere, one more ex-con tossed out into the Depression to make ends meet. He was a small, slender man, five-feet-seven, with close-cropped brown hair, an easygoing wiseacre with a lopsided grin who had served nine long years for the drunken mugging of a grocer in his hometown outside Indianapolis. He had promised his father, a stoic farmer, that he would go straight, but, in fact, he had a secret plan. Dillinger’s only friends were those he made in prison, and that morning he was trying to raise enough money to break them out.
Horace Grisso reached for the drawer where the bank’s combination book lay. Dillinger grabbed his hand, then allowed him to slowly open the drawer. Stepping to the safe door, Grisso fumbled with the lock, unable to open it. He was nervous. “Let me drill ’em,” Dillinger’s teenage partner, William Shaw, said. “He’s stalling.”
Dillinger put up his hand. “Take your time,” he told Grisso.
Just then the front door opened. Dillinger leaped to it and intercepted the bank’s clerk as she entered. “I don’t want to hurt you,” Dillinger told her, directing her to lie on the floor. Dillinger grabbed a smock off of a chair and politely laid it beneath her, then wrapped wire around her hands and feet. By then Grisso had opened the safe, and Shaw and the third man, a teenager named Paul “Lefty” Parker, began lifting out bags of cash. Dillinger remained by the front door, corralling two more employees who entered. “You hadn’t ought to come in the bank so early,” he said with a grin.
Within minutes Dillinger and his accomplices were back in their car, speeding toward Indiana. They counted the money and found it totaled $10,600,