Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [167]
By that point there were clear signs of tension among the gang members, much of it emanating from Nelson. There is very little concrete information about the gang members’ feelings toward one another. Many of those involved would die within the year, and the FBI didn’t much care how they got along; what little is known comes from asides Pat Cherrington and a handful of others would make months later.
From these comments, it appears Nelson’s problem with Dillinger was equal parts envy and resentment. Nelson felt, with considerable justification, that it was he who had sheltered Dillinger after Crown Point, who invited him along on the Sioux Falls and Mason City raids, who arranged for Cernocky to act as their host. And what did he get for his trouble? Not acclaim: all the newspapers could write about was Dillinger—Dillinger, Dillinger, Dillinger. Nelson considered this the Baby Face Nelson Gang. But to the public he remained unknown.
But envy was only part of it. Both Nelson and his wife Helen felt Dillinger was reckless; Mrs. Steve’s arrest made the papers that Friday, and the Nelsons feared it was only a matter of time before Dillinger brought the FBI down on all of them. It was a high price to pay for doing a man a favor, and Nelson resented it. For his part, Dillinger viewed Nelson as unstable. The only time he spent with him was planning and carrying out robberies. As Cherrington told the FBI months later, “all [the gang] knew Nelson as a vicious character and one who loved blood, and had a great desire to kill anyone who got in his path; . . . none of [them] desired Nelson’s company but it was often necessary to have him in on a job when they had one to perform.”6
For the moment, at least, everyone got along. Cernocky roused the gang early Friday morning, served them breakfast and pushed them out the door around seven. Their timing was fortuitous; a few hours later a group of Chicago cops, unaware of Cernocky’s role as a way station on Dillinger’s underground railroad, dropped by for lunch. The gang drove north through Wisconsin in four cars. Dillinger’s group left first, followed by Van Meter’s. The Nelsons and Carroll brought up the rear.
The trip was uneventful until Nelson passed east of Madison. Driving north on Highway 51 he ran a red light. A car slammed broadside into his driver’s-side door, caving in the Ford’s left side. Everyone involved was lucky. Nelson and his wife were shaken but unhurt, as was the driver of the second car, owned by a local cannery. Better yet, Nelson kept his temper; no one got shot. Best of all, Tommy Carroll was behind him and stood by to help. Worried that police would appear, Nelson got his car started and enticed the other driver to follow him to a garage. There Nelson shoved $83 into the man’s hand and drove off. With Carroll following, Nelson managed to reach the next town north, Portage—where Dock Barker had left his fingerprints on a gas can two months earlier—and left the Ford at a garage. When the manager walked inside for a pencil and paper, he discovered that the polite young man in the brown suede jacket had vanished.7
Van Meter was the first to reach their destination, an isolated area of interconnected lakes and thick pine forests; it was around one o’clock. Just before the village of Manitowish he turned left off the potholed oil-and-gravel Route 51 and drove beneath an imposing cement arch with white letters announcing the little lodge’s name: Little Bohemia.
The pine woods around Manitowish were settled by loggers in the late 1800s, but when logging began to wane in the 1920s, the locals, many of them second-generation French-Canadian and Scandinavian immigrants, turned their attention to tourism. Tiny resorts, no more than clusters of rustic cabins, sprang