Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [207]
The women were gone. Purvis passed the bad news to Hoover in a phone call Saturday morning, June 2. Later that day Hoover took aside one of his top aides, an agent named Sam Cowley. It was time to make some changes, he said. Cowley, who had spent the last year riding a desk at FBI headquarters, was being sent to Chicago to assume command of the Dillinger case.
Samuel P. Cowley, who would emerge as the unlikely star in the third act of Hoover’s War on Crime, was everything Melvin Purvis was not: sad-eyed, quiet, stern, jowly, clerkish, the very face of the faceless Washington bureaucrat. Cowley came from a prominent Mormon family in Utah. His father, Mathias, was one of the international church’s twelve governing apostles until forced to resign in 1903, when Cowley was four. The problem was Mathias’s devotion to polygamy, which the church had outlawed. Growing up, young Sam Cowley belonged to one of four separate families Mathias created with four separate wives.
After graduating from high school in 1916, Cowley served as a Mormon missionary in Hawaii; he spoke fluent Hawaiian. Returning home in 1920 he attended Utah Agricultural College, played on the football team, and in the summers worked as a salesman peddling knit goods across Nebraska and the Dakotas. He wanted to be a lawyer, but at the time Utah had no law school. He was accepted instead at Hoover’s alma mater, George Washington University, in 1925.
On graduating in 1929, Cowley wanted to practice law in Utah, but couldn’t find a job. As a stopgap he applied to the FBI, telling his family he would return west when the economy improved. He was accepted as a special agent. He was twenty-nine. In the next three years Cowley was shuffled through FBI offices in Detroit, Chicago, Butte, Salt Lake City, and finally Los Angeles, where he met and married a Utah girl, Lavon Chipman. He was a solid, industrious investigator, nothing special, distinguishing himself mostly in clerical duties; he peppered Washington with suggestions to improve the Bureau’s filing system.
Impressed, Hoover transferred him to headquarters in October 1932, putting him on the new kidnap desk. At five-feet-nine and 170 pounds, with an oatmeal complexion and baggy suits, Cowley was often underestimated. “This employee is frankly rather umimpressive in certain personal characteristics, which is accentuated by his thoughtlessness or carelessness in the selection of his tailor,” a reviewing officer wrote of Cowley in early 1934. Still, the reviewer went on, he “has acquired considerable poise and self-confidence . . . This employee has a habit of consistently doing things right.”
Bland but hardworking, Cowley was at his desk early in the morning, late at night, Sundays and holidays. He was a memo-writing machine, capable of condensing a towering stack of files into a single crisp page; he was so deskbound, in fact, he never bothered to qualify on the Bureau’s new pistol range. Vincent Hughes, the director of investigations, noticed Cowley’s appetite for work and made him his assistant in late 1933. This drew Cowley into the thick of the War on Crime. He spent hours each day on the phone with the field offices, relaying their tips, leads, needs, and concerns to Hoover.
His work was so impressive that when Hughes dropped dead in January 1934—overwork, some said—Cowley inherited his job. His workload mushroomed, to the detriment of his young family. When his wife gave birth to their second son that March, Cowley couldn’t make it to the hospital; he was so busy, in fact, he couldn’t find time to name the boy. Lavon joked that if he didn’t come up with a name soon she would name the child “Junior.”13 By May, as Hoover was souring on Purvis, Cowley had emerged as one of the director’s most trusted aides; hundreds of calls from SACs in the Bremer and Dillinger cases passed through his typewriter