Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [176]
On their return, the three were greeted with a second piece of news. The switchboard operator, a man named Alvin Koerner, who lived between the two lodges, had just phoned, saying there was a suspicious car parked outside his house. Newman decided to investigate. Returning to his car, Newman drove, with Baum beside him and Christiansen at the window. It only took a minute to reach Koerner’s gravel driveway, where they saw the car parked on Route 51.
“Have your guns ready,” Newman said.
As they approached the car, they could see it was empty. Agent Baum jotted down the license number. They turned into the gravel lane leading to Koerner’s house. It was lined by a white picket fence. There was a Ford parked in front. When his headlights swept the car, Newman could see it was filled with people. He pulled up behind it and rolled down his window. “I’m looking for Mr. Koerner,” Newman said.
No answer. Suspicion flickered in Newman’s eyes.
“Who’s in that car?” he asked.
A small young man in a brown suede jacket jumped out of the car’s passenger’s-side door and stepped to Newman’s open window.
“I know you bastards are wearing bulletproof vests,” the man barked, “so I’ll give it to you high and low.”
Baby Face Nelson raised his gun and opened fire.
Not until it was far too late did Purvis and Clegg realize that every assumption they had made that evening was horribly wrong. While the two men remained rooted in the driveway at Little Bohemia, studying the lodge for a glimpse of the gang they believed trapped inside, Dillinger was already gone, and moving fast. So were Van Meter, Hamilton, Carroll, and Nelson. Each had made his escape in the opening minutes of a debacle that would haunt the Bureau for years to come.
As the FBI pieced it together afterward, this is what happened. When the three Bureau cars first entered Little Bohemia’s driveway, all the gang members except Nelson had been upstairs packing. Nelson was out in the cabin beside the lodge’s porch. The only guests left in the barroom were John Hoffman, a twenty-eight-year-old gas station attendant, and two of his friends from the work camp, a fifty-nine-year-old cook named John Morris and thirty-five-year-old Eugene Boisneau. The three had just put on their coats and stepped onto the porch when the FBI cars pulled up.
The bartender and the busboy followed them out to wave good-bye. The Chevrolet was Hoffman’s, and when he turned the ignition, the radio came on. No one saw the FBI cars out in the darkened drive. Hoffman started the car and headed up the driveway, still unable to see the agents, who began shouting for him to stop. Hoffman couldn’t hear them over the car radio. In fact, none of the three men in the car knew what was happening until bullets crashed through the windshield. On the porch behind them, the bartender and the busboy began shouting, “Stop! They’re our customers!” In the din of gunfire, no one heard them.
At the sound of gunshots, Dillinger and the men upstairs grabbed their weapons, opened a second-story rear window, and prepared to jump. As they did, Inspector Rorer and his men rounded the left side of the lodge, saw them, and opened fire. Dillinger fired a burst from his Thompson gun in return. The critical mistake of the evening was Rorer’s. He believed his shots had driven the gang members inside. They hadn’t. When Rorer and his men ducked to avoid the return fire from the roof, Dillinger, Van Meter, Hamilton, and Carroll each jumped from the second-story window onto a ten-foot mound of frozen snow behind the lodge. By the time Rorer looked back, they were gone.
When Rorer glanced toward the lake, he saw no one escaping. But what Rorer couldn’t see was that an eight-foot incline divided the beach from the backyard; Henry Voss hadn’t included this feature on the map he sketched for the agents that afternoon. Dillinger and his men sprinted down a set of wooden steps to the beach, turned right, and ran