Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [216]
Van Meter was sitting on a couch, recovering nicely. “I saved your life, didn’t I?” Probasco asked him. “Why, I was up all night picking hairs out of that wound.”
A little later Cassidy arrived. As Probasco and Van Meter cursed him, he cleaned the wound and rebandaged it. Dillinger regaled the group with the story of the wild shoot-out, dwelling on the story of the Jewish jeweler who had brazenly fired on Nelson. “You know, Johnnie,” Van Meter said at one point. “We’ll have to go back to South Bend in the next few days and take care of that little Jew.”
“Sure we will, Van,” Dillinger said, laughing. “Sure we will.”
15
THE WOMAN IN ORANGE
July 1 to July 27, 1934
By the weekend of the South Bend robbery, Dillinger had already made up his mind to leave Jimmy Probasco’s house. Probasco was a quarrelsome drunk, and Dillinger worried he might let something slip. According to one source, he and Van Meter overheard a telephone conversation in which Probasco had a heated argument with someone, telling him at one point, “I don’t care if you bring the cops. Go ahead and see what happens when they get here.” Dillinger was not amused. The final straw came on Wednesday, July 4, when he and Van Meter returned to the house and found Piquett and Probasco drinking heavily. Once the two left, the two outlaws packed their things, threw them in Van Meter’s car, and never came back.1
That same day, July 4, Dillinger moved into an apartment at 2420 North Halsted Street, in a German-immigrant neighborhood on the North Side.dj Three other people lived in the apartment, two of them women, and in their shadowy relationships—with each other, with Dillinger, and with an Indiana police detective—lay the seeds of Dillinger’s demise. One of the women was Dillinger’s new girlfriend Polly Hamilton, a twenty-six-year-old divorcée who waitressed at the S&S Café on Wilson Avenue. The other was Ana Sage, a squat forty-two-year-old Romanian immigrant whose principal means of support since arriving in America in 1908 had been running a series of brothels.
Precisely how Dillinger came to know Hamilton and Sage has never been explained. For decades the accepted version of events, as advanced by Hamilton in a newspaper article after Dillinger’s death, was that she met Dillinger at a Chicago nightclub called the Barrel of Fun, where he introduced himself as a Chicago Board of Trade clerk named Jimmy Lawrence. In fact, it’s far more likely that Dillinger met Hamilton through the dowdy Ana Sage, who for years had been a prominent member of the northwest Indiana underworld, a milieu Dillinger knew well. They had at least two mutual friends.
The madame who would go down in criminal lore as “the woman in red” was born Ana Campanas in 1892, in the village of Komlos, Romania, outside the Black Sea port of Costanza. At seventeen she married a man named Mike Chiolek. They emigrated to Chicago, had a son named Steve, and separated in 1917, when Ana was twenty-five. Abandoned with an eight-year-old son, she moved into the Romanian-immigrant community in Indiana Harbor, the lakeside warren of row houses and tumbledown bars that was East Chicago’s toughest neighborhood. There she worked as a prostitute and a waitress, eventually landing at the Harbor Bay Inn, where the menu included prostitutes for two dollars a tumble.
When her boss drew a six-month sentence for running afoul of state liquor laws, Ana ran the place herself. She was good at it. Five-feet-seven and a stout 165 pounds, with a thick Eastern European accent, Ana was an imposing presence. With intermittent help from her boss, she turned the inn into Indiana Harbor’s preeminent den of inequity. She kept order by cozying up to East Chicago policemen. By all accounts her closest benefactor was