Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [202]
That night, a little after eleven, two detectives from the East Chicago Police Department, Martin O’Brien and Lloyd Mulvihill, left their station house to check a Dillinger sighting. The two had investigated the East Chicago bank robbery that January and had been working the Dillinger case off and on ever since. Barely a half hour after they left their posts, the two detectives were found dead in their car on a lonely road outside town. They had been shot multiple times in the head and neck, apparently by a machine gun.
Dillinger later told O’Leary what happened. He said the two detectives had spotted the red truck, pulled alongside, and ordered Dillinger to pull over. Van Meter machine-gunned them from the passenger seat, raking the two men with his bullets as they sat in the car.
From Dillinger’s later remarks, it appears the killings were linked to protection money Dillinger was paying members of the East Chicago Police Department; the only cop Dillinger mentioned by name was a detective named Martin Zarkovich. Dillinger claimed at one point that the two detectives had been attempting to “shake him down” for more money. Another time he suggested the two were honest men who had become suspicious of Zarkovich’s relationship with Dillinger. Zarkovich, Dillinger said, had dispatched the two to find the red truck knowing they would be killed.
“Those two police should never have been bumped off,” O’Leary quoted Dillinger saying. “They were just trying to do their job and there’s nothing wrong with that. Their trouble was that they were getting to know too much and Zark was getting antsy. They were sent off to shake down a couple of suspicious characters who were driving around in a red truck. I think Van felt bad about it, too, but there was nothing else that he could do, and Zark knew what was going to happen.”1 Whether or not Martin Zarkovich played a role in the murders, it wasn’t to be his last appearance in the Dillinger drama.
The next morning the Chicago papers carried speculation that Dillinger was responsible. At the Bankers Building, Purvis studied the reports and decided to ignore them; when one of Hoover’s aides called and asked why, Purvis explained that “it would be practically impossible to determine the identity of those doing the killing in that there were no eyewitnesses except those who were killed.”2
Despite the FBI’s lack of interest, the May 24 killings appear to have convinced Dillinger that his nomadic life was no longer safe. That same night he and Van Meter drove into Chicago, where they reestablished contact with Baby Face Nelson and Tommy Carroll. Both were living in a cottage in Wauconda, northwest of Chicago, taking some meals at Louis Cernocky’s tavern in Fox River Grove. Nelson had spent much of May plotting ways to free his wife, Helen, who remained in custody in Madison, Wisconsin; he arranged for a lawyer instead.
Other than Piquett and O’Leary, Dillinger had no one he could trust in Chicago. But Nelson did. That night, after stowing the red truck in a friend’s garage, Nelson drove Dillinger and Van Meter to the Rain-Bo Inn, where he persuaded an old friend, a fence named Jimmy Murray, to shelter them in an attic room. Murray consented, but soon had second thoughts. The next night, Murray told Nelson things weren’t working out. Dillinger had broken his promise to stay hidden and, to Murray’s dismay, had come downstairs and circulated among his patrons, several of whom remarked how much he resembled John Dillinger.
Everyone involved—Nelson, Murray, and Piquett, who was drawn into the situation—realized they needed a place for Dillinger to hide. As it happened, Murray and Piquett had a mutual friend in Jimmy Probasco, a grimy little Italian who worked the fringes of