Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [189]
As Hancock and Mr. Dillinger trudged down the road to build the fence, a squadron of FBI cars screeched to a halt beside them. Agents leaped out and surrounded the two men, taking them aside for questioning. Hancock appeared dazed. Once they were out of earshot, he told Connelley it was a mistake. Dillinger wasn’t at the house. That morning Mr. Dillinger had received an anonymous letter from someone in Minnesota, saying Dillinger was safe there. He had given the signal, Hancock insisted, only to tell the FBI about the letter.12
Connelley fumed. The agents climbed back in their cars; the Indianapolis police retreated. By the following day Matt Leach was complaining to reporters that Connelley’s ham-handed raid had ruined any chances of capturing Dillinger in the state of Indiana. Ill will between the FBI and the state police was growing by the hour.
Two days later, on Wednesday, May 2, the car Dillinger had stolen outside St. Paul was found on a North Side street. From the dried blood on the backseat, Purvis could see one of the gang members had been wounded. The evening headlines screamed the news that Dillinger was back in the city, probably recovering from gunshot wounds. Purvis wasn’t so sure. He thought the car might be a plant to dupe agents into concentrating their search in Chicago. For once Purvis was right.
Fostoria, Ohio Thursday, May 3
Sipping coffee from a pair of Thermos jugs, Dillinger, Van Meter, and Tommy Carroll drove east to Toledo, where they stole another car. They were almost out of money. Van Meter said he knew a bank.
People in Fostoria, a rail hub forty miles south of Toledo, considered the town’s banks robbery-proof; so many slow-moving trains crisscrossed the area that police believed they would dissuade any robbers from putting together a getaway map. But Van Meter knew the town from boyhood vacations. He and Dillinger didn’t spend much time canvassing the First National Bank or drawing gits. They just needed money.
At 2:50, as the bank was preparing for its 3:00 close, two men walked in with submachine guns hidden beneath overcoats over their arms. The lobby, though almost empty of customers, presented an immediate challenge; there was a mezzanine above, and two side entrances, one opening directly into the O. C. Harding Jewelry Store, the other leading into a drugstore. While Tommy Carroll waited outside with the car, Van Meter laid his overcoat across a railing and pointed his Thompson at the teller cages. “Stick ’em up!” he shouted.
There was no joy to Dillinger that day, no smiles or courtesies anyone would remember; his days of leaping over teller cages were a vague memory now. His movements were grim and mechanical. As the employees raised their arms, Dillinger stepped through a swinging door and began clearing piles of cash off the counters into sacks. Van Meter gathered the tellers and a few other employees together in a group. Two women began to cry. “Don’t kill me,” one begged Van Meter.
“You be quiet,” Van Meter said, “and I won’t.”13
Neither Dillinger nor Van Meter noticed a teller named Frances Hillyard slip out a door. Hillyard ran to find the police chief, a man named Frank Culp. As Culp ran toward the bank, he got an idea: if he could just get up to the mezzanine, he could take the high ground and drive the robbers away. Bursting into the lobby, he found the mezzanine elevator was on the second floor. Van Meter fired his submachine gun; a single bullet ripped into Culp’s chest and burst a lung. Culp staggered backward into the jewelry store and hollered for more men.14
When Tommy Carroll heard gunfire, he stepped out of the getaway car and began firing wildly. His bullets shattered windows up and down the street, sending citizens ducking for cover. The slow and the unlucky got hit, one man in the leg, another in the foot. Inside the bank, Dillinger