Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [172]
This changed everything. They returned to the airport. Purvis turned to see Henry Voss running toward him, yelling, “Mr. Purvis! Mr. Purvis!” When Voss explained the change in Dillinger’s plans, Purvis and Clegg decided to move immediately. By then the cars were ready, and Purvis persuaded a seventeen-year-old boy to lend them his coupe, giving them five in all. At 7:15 the FBI caravan headed toward Little Bohemia.
As the lights of Rhinelander winked out behind them, the roads turned bad. They were unpaved, muddy from the spring thaw and riddled with potholes. The FBI cars bumped and slid north until one, then another, careened into a ditch. There was no time to push them out. Quickly the eight agents in these cars grabbed their guns and climbed onto the running boards of the remaining three. As temperatures dropped into the thirties, numbing their hands and faces, they struggled to hold on. Purvis kept an eye on his wristwatch. It was going to be close.
The FBI cars rumbled into the driveway of Henry Voss’s sprawling Birchwood Lodge, a mile down Route 51 from Little Bohemia, just before nine. Inside, Voss discovered Nan Wanatka and her daughter; they had sneaked out in anticipation of the raid. She said Dillinger was still at the lodge, or had been a half hour earlier, and urged Clegg to move fast; the gang was leaving any minute. Clegg decided to head to Little Bohemia and devise a plan of attack once they surveyed the ground. He told the men to extinguish their cigarettes and check their guns.
Minutes later the FBI caravan, headlights off, inched through the darkness up Route 51, passing several well-lit homes, until it reached the mouth of Little Bohemia’s two-hundred-yard driveway. The confidence level among the men could not have been high. No one dwelled on the fact the FBI had never attempted a raid of this scale, that agents hadn’t been trained for massed gunfights, that few in the raiding party had ever fired a gun in anger. Everyone knew the FBI’s abysmal record in gunfights. Three times in the preceding six months agents had managed to engage armed outlaws: The fiasco leading to Verne Miller’s escape in Chicago at Halloween; Dillinger’s escape in St. Paul; and the ambush of Wilbur Underhill. Only the latter produced an arrest, and only after Underhill had escaped from a house the FBI had surrounded. Nor, as the cars swung into the driveway, did anyone need to be reminded it was the fourth time in twenty-three days agents had been within a baseball’s toss of Dillinger without capturing him.
It was pitch dark as the three cars turned up the muddy driveway into the tunnel of tall pines. There was no moon. The only sound was the wind, whistling through the branches above. Patches of snow and dirty ice lay amid fallen leaves and underbrush. Ahead, the back porch of Little Bohemia was bathed in the light of a single bulb. It glinted off the rear fenders of a row of parked cars. For several moments Purvis, riding in the second car, thought conditions were perfect. If Dillinger was still in the lodge, they had achieved complete surprise. While still well back in the trees, Clegg stopped the lead car and stepped out into the driveway. Purvis stopped behind him.
Then, just as agents opened their car doors, dogs began barking. No one had mentioned anything about dogs. As he stepped into the driveway, Purvis glanced at the lodge and saw four or five men appear on the porch. As he watched, three of the men hustled into a Chevrolet coupe. His heart sank. This was the worst way a raid could begin: dogs barking, an alarm raised, gang members hustling for a getaway car.
In the years since that frigid night in Wisconsin, those involved have gone to great lengths to explain their actions. John Toland, who interviewed several agents who were at Little Bohemia, wrote in 1963 that Clegg “mapped out an attack” that afternoon