Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [205]
Not all the new men arriving in Chicago were Texans. One of the best was thirty-one-year-old Herman Hollis, the resident agent in Tulsa, who has been nosing around the Barker Gang’s old Eastern Oklahoma haunts for months. Hollis, known as “Ed,” was the rare College Boy who could handle a gun; a long-nosed lawyer from Des Moines, he earned a sharp-shooter’s medal with the Thompson submachine gun. Energetic and hardworking, Hollis was rated as one of the FBI’s top investigators.
But Hollis had issues. He had been the Detroit SAC until performance reviews questioned his administrative abilities. He was forever pestering the Bureau to transfer him to California or Arizona; his wife, Genevieve, had “a nervous condition” that doctors said would improve in a warmer climate. A lady’s man, chatty with the stenographers, Hollis was also vain. “He possibly takes an unusual amount of pride in the neatness of his attire,” Hugh Clegg noted in one memo, “particularly when passing mirrors.”5
But Hollis was a capable investigator, good with a gun, and Hoover didn’t have enough men like him. In fact, when Pop Nathan drew up a roster of agents “particularly qualified . . . for work of a dangerous character,” Hollis was one of only eleven names on the list. In desperation Hoover cast his eyes to Southwest police departments. From Dallas he hired the chief of detectives, R. L. “Bob” Jones. From Waco he brought a detective named Buck Buchanan. From Oklahoma City, Hoover lured two members of the department’s pistol team, a thirty-year-old detective named Jerry Campbell and the night police chief, Clarence Hurt, thirty-nine, who had taken part in the Underhill shoot-out; both men were destined for long FBI careers. Hurt’s earlier application to the Bureau had been turned down, Pop Nathan noting he “sees nothing in applicant to indicate the possession of any particularly constructive imagination.” But Hurt was good with a gun, and that was enough.
These men were to form the heart of a new and improved Dillinger Squad. The new hires were sent to Washington for a month of training. The day they finished, Clarence Hurt wrote a friend that he and his partner Jerry Campbell were the only men in the class who weren’t lawyers.6 That was the point; all the new men understood they were brought in not to capture the likes of Dillinger, but in all likelihood to kill them. “They hired me as a hired gun, no question about it; they were getting too many accountants and lawyers killed,” D. A. “Jelly” Bryce, an Oklahoma City detective hired later that year, told friends, according to Bryce biographer Ron Owens.
But importing gunmen alone wouldn’t find Dillinger, Hoover realized. The problem was leadership. The problem was Purvis. In later years Purvis’s fall from Hoover’s favor would be attributed to jealousy. Hoover, a generation of writers concluded, couldn’t abide the attention his subordinate drew from the nation’s press as he pursued Dillinger. While this may have been true, the roots of Purvis’s demise lay less in his thirst for publicity than in his own yearlong series of blunders. Arresting the wrong suspects in the Hamm kidnapping and “forgetting” orders to capture Machine Gun Kelly were bad enough. Hoover stuck with his beloved “Little Mel” through it all, even defending his performance at Little Bohemia. But there was no denying Purvis’s ineptitude in the Dillinger hunt. Suspects were found then lost. His informants were hopeless. He raided the wrong apartments. He built no bridges to the Chicago police while annoying other departments. He’d had his car stolen from in front of his house.
Hoover’s doubts were