Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [212]
As a result, Piquett and Art O’Leary were able to continue tending to Dillinger’s needs right under the FBI’s noses. The two visited Probasco’s house every few days. Piquett was brimming with schemes to cash in on Dillinger’s notoriety. He offered a reporter for the Chicago American an interview with Dillinger for $50,000; the paper declined. Piquett and the paper also discussed the possibility of the American handling Dillinger’s surrender. Dillinger was game for anything short of surrender, even an autobiography; Piquett said he would bring in a tape recorder so Dillinger could record his memories.
Dillinger was most excited by the idea of a movie. Piquett proposed that they purchase cameras and recording equipment and have Dillinger and Van Meter filmed lecturing on the evils of crime.
“I’ll give out a message to the youth of America!” Van Meter enthused.
“No, that’s not the idea, Van,” Dillinger said. “We just want to tell them that crime does not pay.”
“Well,” Van Meter said, “you tell them that crime does not pay, and I’ll give my talk to the youth of America.”26
When he wasn’t discussing these and other pipe dreams, Dillinger spent much of his time in Probasco’s living room reading newspapers. Van Meter, who wasn’t a reader, spent hours hunched over the police band of Probasco’s radio, avidly relaying items he heard to Dillinger. They chuckled over the stream of bogus sightings the FBI and Chicago police were forced to pursue. There were reports Dillinger had been seen in Kentucky, in Wisconsin, even hiding in the Ozark Mountains with Pretty Boy Floyd. For the most part, Dillinger just laughed. He only lost his temper when the radio carried the spurious news that the attorney general had issued orders that he be shot on sight.
When O’Leary came by the house that night, Dillinger handed him a slip of paper. On it he had scribbled the home addresses of Melvin Purvis and Agent Harold Reinecke, who had earned Dillinger’s ire after newspaperreports that he had browbeat Billie Frechette while she was in FBI custody. “I want you to check up on these addresses and see that they’re right,” Dillinger said. O’Leary went to Piquett. Harboring was one thing, murder another. Piquett confronted Dillinger the next day. “Just what are you planning to do, Johnnie?” he asked.
“They’re out to kill me, aren’t they?” Dillinger said. “Why should I sit around and wait for it? We’re going to be parked outside their houses one of these nights and get them before they get us.”
“Don’t you realize what a stunt like this would mean?” Piquett said. “They’d call out the army and place the town under martial law, and hang me from a lamppost.”
Piquett won the argument, but in it lay the seeds of a rift between the two men. It widened when Dillinger and Van Meter playfully warned Piquett they were planning to rob “all the banks” in his Wisconsin hometown. Piquett didn’t get the joke. Losing his temper, he swore—as he did over the idea of assassinating Purvis—that if Dillinger went forward, “you and I will be through.”27
Nor was Piquett too excited about Dillinger’s forays into the streets of Chicago. He was going out almost every night now, days as well. He took in another Cubs game or two, revisited the World’s Fair, and apparently began regular trips to a North Side whorehouse. No one seemed to notice him. Dillinger further disguised his appearance by dying his hair black, growing a mustache, and buying a pair of gold-rim wire spectacles. After the dark weeks spent in the red panel truck, his confidence was growing. Van Meter, who had rented Mickey Conforti a