Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [180]
Werner Hanni’s men reached the Koerner house first, a half hour after the shooting. They found the wounded constable, Carl C. Christiansen, sitting up, leaning against the picket fence. An agent named Thomas Dodd took Christiansen’s flashlight and after a minute found Carter Baum lying facedown in a pool of blood, dead.ci No one had come out of the house to check on them; they were all too scared.
As the wounded were ferried to hospitals, Purvis and Clegg remained at Little Bohemia, convinced despite all the evidence that at least some of the gang remained inside the lodge. An hour passed. After midnight they grew so cold they opened the garage and took positions inside. The rest of the agents remained out in the woods, freezing, until the eastern sky began to redden around four. At that point Clegg was told the local sheriff and a group of deputies were down the road and wanted to join them. He called them up. The locals wanted to storm the lodge, but Clegg insisted they fire in gas grenades first.
Even that didn’t go smoothly. There was only a single gas gun, and despite all their efforts, the agents couldn’t get it to fire a grenade through the inn’s window screens; the grenades hit the screens and fell to the ground, hissing. A group of five agents stood behind the garage debating what to do. It was decided that the only way to get a grenade inside the inn was for someone to run up and throw one through the door. If Dillinger was still inside the lodge—and everyone believed he was—it was likely to be a deadly errand. An agent named John T. McLaughlin volunteered to do it. “I am the only single man here,” McLaughlin explained. “It was the bravest act that I saw during those days and to me, John McLaughlin has always been a hero,” another agent, Robert G. Gillespie wrote years later.cj
A little after four o’clock McLaughlin ran forward and lobbed gas grenades into the lodge. One or two of the deputies fired guns as well, until Clegg told them to stop. As the first curls of gas rose inside the house, a woman’s voice yelled out from inside: “We’ll come out if you’ll stop firing.”
“Come out and bring everyone with you, with your hands up,” Purvis shouted. A moment later the gang’s women—Jean Delaney, Helen Gillis, and Mickey Conforti, hugging her bulldog pup—appeared on the porch. Agents rushed into the lodge but found no one inside. On the beach behind the building they discovered footprints leading into the woods. For the first time the enormity of the debacle hit Purvis. As the women were led off he stood and stared, dumbfounded, running the events of the night through his mind, as he would again and again for the rest of his life. Two men were dead, and Dillinger was gone.
13
“AND IT’S DEATH FOR BONNIE AND CLYDE”
April 23 to May 23, 1934
Monday, April 23
It was beginning to snow as the agents trickled into Birchwood Lodge for breakfast that morning. Purvis couldn’t bring himself to eat. In his darkest dreams he’d never conceived of a moment as nightmarish as this: Dillinger was gone, one of his men was dead, and they had killed a civilian. Purvis felt personally responsible.
On the drive to the airport Purvis thought of tendering his resignation. Out on the runway, waiting for the plane back to Chicago, he overheard a group of men cursing him by name for bungling what the press was already calling “The Battle of Little Bohemia.” It got worse when Purvis returned to the Bankers Building that afternoon. A petition had begun circulating in Wisconsin calling for his resignation. URGE PURVIS OUSTER, blared the Chicago American’s evening headline. DEMAND PURVIS QUIT IN DILLINGER FIASCO.
By noon Little Bohemia was a national scandal. In Washington, Hoover stepped before a crowd of reporters and tried to explain what had happened; for the moment, he wasn’t so sure