Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [217]
Zarkovich was a legend in the Harbor. “A fastidious, immaculate peacock,” as a latter-day Indiana columnist termed him, Zarkovich cruised the streets of East Chicago in a felt fedora and suits so sharp he earned the nickname “The Sheik.”2 A loyal soldier in a police force whose primary duty was keeping the peace in East Chicago’s gambling halls and whorehouses—he was named chief of detectives in 1926—Zarkovich was indicted for corruption three times during the 1920s and was convicted once, of violating Prohibition laws, in 1929. Half of East Chicago’s power structure was convicted in the same case, so it was no surprise when “Zark” returned to the force; if anything, his conviction cemented his ties to the Lake County power structure. By the early 1930s, in fact, Zarkovich knew everyone who mattered in northwest Indiana politics and many who didn’t, from William Murray, Dillinger’s trial judge at Crown Point, to Louis Piquett’s investigator, Art O’Leary. O’Leary had known Zarkovich for years.
Ana Campanas came to know Martin Zarkovich in her earliest days in East Chicago. According to Mrs. Zarkovich’s divorce papers, filed in 1920, she apparently knew the detective a bit too well; Mrs. Zarkovich named Ana in her complaint, charging she had “overly friendly” relations with her husband. Zarkovich remained Ana’s protector after she opened her first brothel in neighboring Gary in 1921. By 1923 she was doing so well she rented an entire hotel, the forty-six-room Kostur. It was by all accounts a riotous place, hosting so many gun- and knife-fights that police dubbed it “The Bucket of Blood.” Ana, doing business as “Katie Brown,” became known as “Kostur House Katie.”
Zarkovich’s ties to the Lake County establishment helped Ana weather a half-dozen prostitution arrests. She was convicted on two occasions, but both were pardoned by the Indiana governor. Her luck finally ran out in 1932 when, after yet another conviction, the new reform governor, Paul McNutt, refused her request for a pardon. The “Bucket of Blood” closed down and Ana, ominously, was referred to federal immigration authorities for deportation.
Defeated, she withdrew to Chicago, where she had been commuting since at least 1928, following her marriage to a fellow Romanian immigrant named Alexander Suciu, who Anglicized his last name to Sage. Now Ana Sage, she had enough money saved to buy an apartment building in Chicago’s Uptown section, which may or may not have functioned as a brothel. When the Sages separated in 1933, the building was sold, and Ana, after shuffling through a series of apartments, washed up in the one on North Halsted in late June 1934, a part-time madame whose long-running deportation proceedings weighed on her mind.
One of her friends was Polly Hamilton, a girl from North Dakota who had moved to Gary during the 1920s, marrying and divorcing a local cop while working for Sage in some capacity at the Kostur Hotel. Hamilton’s role at Sage’s apartment on North Halsted is similarly unclear. Virtually every account of the Dillinger affair describes her as a waitress. But more than once, FBI records refer to Hamilton as a prostitute, suggesting that Sage was using her apartment as a call house, and Hamilton was moonlighting as a whore; Dillinger, in fact, may have met her while procuring her services. Sage later admitted to the FBI she let prostitutes use the spare rooms of her various apartments, and had done so as late as that June. FBI documents suggest Hamilton kept a separate residence in a Chicago hotel, but from at least July 1 on, she lived with Ana Sage. The apartment’s third occupant was Sage’s twenty-three-year-old unemployed son, Steve.
How did Dillinger come to meet Ana Sage? Though there is no concrete evidence to back it up, the most plausible explanation is that they were introduced by Martin Zarkovich, who knew both Sage and Dillinger’s intermediary, Art O’Leary. There is considerable