Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [231]
Behind closed doors, Cowley told Sage to call Polly Hamilton, whom the Bureau had been unable to locate. By 2:00 A.M. both women were secreted safely on the nineteenth floor. They were questioned all night. Hamilton steadfastly denied ever knowing “Jimmy Lawrence” was Dillinger, though this flatly contradicted Sage. Still, Cowley accepted her story. “He is positive she knows no more than the informant,” Hoover wrote in a memo after talking to Cowley the next day. “Mr. Cowley believes that she is telling the truth.”22
They decided to get both women out of Chicago. Wednesday morning, three days after the shooting, Cowley had a pair of agents drive Sage back to her apartment. Inside they encountered a crowd of reporters, ushered in by the helpful Chicago police. After Sage packed a suitcase, tossing a few choice epithets at reporters as she did, agents drove her and Hamilton to Detroit. They spent the next several days in a hotel.
While Cowley dealt with the women, his men began rounding up those who had helped Dillinger. The first was Wilhelm Loeser. Once the FBI confirmed that Dillinger had undergone cosmetic surgery, Cowley had no doubt who had performed it. Agents arrived on Loeser’s doorstep Tuesday morning. When no one answered the bell, a half-dozen men broke down the side door. Barging up the stairs, they heard a man’s voice ask, “Who’s there?” A moment later Loeser, shirtless, appeared on the landing. He was taken to the Bankers Building.
Downtown, Loeser told them everything. Charles Winstead led a raid on Jimmy Probasco’s house the next evening. By midnight Probasco was locked inside a conference room at the Bankers Building. When they searched Probasco’s house, agents found what was later described as a suicide note. Cowley ordered Probasco watched all that night. At 9:00 Thursday morning, a twenty-five-year-old rookie agent named Max Chaffetz took Probasco to be fingerprinted, then returned Probasco to the conference room. A few minutes later Chaffetz returned to find the room empty. A chair was propped beneath the window. Chaffetz stepped to the window and looked down. There, in the alley nineteen floors below, lay the splattered remains of Jimmy Probasco.du “Mr. Cowley [called and] stated that Probasco had just jumped out of a window at the Chicago office, which is on the 19th floor,” Hoover wrote in a memo that morning at 10:30. “I remarked that this was extreme carelessness.”23
Probasco’s demise led to rumors that he had been pushed from the window, or perhaps fallen while being dangled by interrogating agents. A crestfallen Cowley recommended to Hoover that both he and Chaffetz be suspended for two weeks. Hoover chose to suspend only Chaffetz. Given that Boss McLaughlin, who had passed the Bremer ransom money, had complained to reporters that agents had dangled him from a nineteenthfloorwindow, both Cowley and Hoover were concerned about bad publicity. For the most part the Chicago press ignored the story.
Louis Piquett, Art O’Leary, and Harold Cassidy were all rounded up in the following weeks. By that point, Cowley was deeply involved in the pursuits of Baby Face Nelson, Homer Van Meter, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the Barker Gang. The Dillinger case, however, was not quite closed.
As the FBI’s own reports make clear, the story of Dillinger’s betrayal told by Ana Sage and Polly Hamilton, though accepted by two generations of historians, made as little sense in 1934 as it does today. The two women told completely contradictory stories, and it was only a matter of time before someone questioned their veracity.
That Friday, July 27, someone did. It was Matt Leach. Leach came to the Bankers Building and met with Cowley behind closed doors. There was already tension between the FBI and the Indiana State Police, and the ill will only grew after this meeting.
Leach told Cowley he had an informant who said that Martin Zarkovich had sheltered Dillinger in East Chicago for at