Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [190]
They grabbed two employees, a man and a woman, shoving them through the drugstore. Outside, the two were loaded onto the running boards; as the car roared off down Tifflin Street, Van Meter kept a tight grip on the woman’s hand. They sped west out of town, tossing roofing nails in their wake. Outside town they let the hostages go.cp
Back in Fort Wayne, meanwhile, Van Meter’s old friend Audrey Russ was paralyzed with fear that Dillinger would return to his home. He approached his boss at the Western Gas Construction Company, told him everything and asked what to do. His boss had once met the FBI’s resident agent at South Bend, W. J. Devereaux. That Thursday, as Dillinger was busy in Fostoria, he telephoned Devereaux and, withholding his name, described in general terms what had happened. Devereaux thought he recognized the man’s voice. Afterward he phoned Chicago, briefed Purvis, and asked if he should follow up. For the moment Purvis told him to do nothing.
It was an order he would soon come to regret.
Inside the FBI, it took two weeks for the simmering frustrations born at Little Bohemia to come to a boil. While recriminations might be expected in other agencies, the Bureau had no history of internal dissension; throughout the high-pressure manhunts of 1934, the squabbling that ensued in the wake of Little Bohemia was unique.
The unlikely squeaky wheel turned out to be the St. Paul SAC, the mild-tempered Werner Hanni. Hanni had clearly not enjoyed having his office commandeered by Inspector Rorer and Hugh Clegg, and his annoyance turned to outrage in the days after the raid. The final straw had been his encounter on a darkened country road with the fleeing Baby Face Nelson, which had left him deeply shaken. Hanni’s anger came to light when Clegg, sorting through papers on a desk, found a memo from Hanni he had never seen. It was a lightning bolt, addressed but apparently never sent to Hoover. It read in part:
[There] does not appear to exist any good reason whatsoever for Dillinger and his accomplices making a getaway. It was quite evident that the raid was fully staged with a lack of organization, and lack of knowledge and judgment cannot be concealed. The writer himself and those accompanying him to Bohemia proved to be tripped into a regular death trap. No preparation appeared to have been made, in spite of the fact that a chart of the locality had been furnished prior to proceeding there. Had it not been for the fortunate good treatment accorded the motorist who flashed a spotlight right into the writer’s face, four more agents would, undoubtedly, not be here today.
Hanni had a bad word for almost everyone. He criticized Inspector Rorer for failing to help lift Carter Baum’s dead body; Rorer, he said, had complained of a “kink in his back.” Nor did he limit his broadsides to the events at Little Bohemia. He criticized Hugh Clegg, though not by name, for hindering the earlier pursuit of Dillinger by pestering his men with questions about Eddie Green’s death.
If, on the evening of April 3, when every man at the St. Paul office, including the writer, were working their heads off, those in charge of these investigations had undertaken leadership and steps with a view of pursuing an intelligent investigation on red hot leads, instead of questioning the agents, keeping them from working, to determine whether or not the shooting of Green was justified, information could have been obtained that would have made the capture of Dillinger possible.
Everyone involved wrote sharply worded memos disagreeing with Hanni. As Hoover studied these memos, he received a far more worrisome bit of news. The Justice Department prosecutor, Joe Keenan, told him he had heard a reliable story that the agents at Little Bohemia had mutinied against Purvis and Clegg, and actually locked them inside a shed while