Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [234]
The following day Nelson found their new home, the Mount Grant Lodge, fourteen miles south of Hawthorne, Nevada, on the shores of Lake Walker. It was little more than a sprinkling of cabins, but it had running water and electricity, and for the first few days that was all Nelson felt they needed. The problem was Johnny Chase. He was the only single man in the group, and he was, for lack of a better word, lovesick. He pined for his girlfriend, a San Francisco newsstand clerk named Sally Backman, and nagged Nelson to let her join them in the desert. Everyone was against it. Nelson didn’t trust new faces and said so, loudly.
Chase would not be dissuaded. One night he drove into San Francisco and arranged to see Backman. Negri picked her up at her newsstand by the Sausalito Ferry and drove her to a beach where Chase was waiting. They stayed that night in a hotel on Mission Street. In the quiet of their room, Chase explained he was traveling with someone who was “hot”; if Backman came with him, he couldn’t guarantee her safety. She asked for time to think about it. Chase returned to the desert. Two weeks passed.
The longer they remained in Nevada, the more Chase missed Backman. Finally, tired of his friend’s carping, Nelson relented. On Thursday, August 16, Chase got in his car and drove to San Francisco to get his girl. It was the worst decision Baby Face Nelson ever made.
On Wednesday, August 15, Ed Guinane, the San Francisco SAC, took a call from an Oakland detective who said he had a tip on Nelson. Guinane drove across the bay to hear it.dv The detective’s wife was Louis Parente’s niece. The previous night Parente told the detective that Nelson had been at his inn three weeks before.
The next morning, Guinane convened a conference of FBI agents and detectives from the Oakland and San Francisco police departments. After briefings the group proceeded to the El Verano Inn to interview Louis Parente. Parente and his manager told them everything they knew. They identified Fatso Negri—the first time the FBI learned of him—and described Chase and the Perkins family. They also described Nelson’s Hudson, though they hadn’t noted the license plate number.
By Friday afternoon, Ed Guinane was dictating a memo to Hoover, laying out details of Nelson’s stay in Napa County. The Teletype crossed Hoover’s desk the next morning. “Take up with Cowley & I suggest he send by plane 4 or 5 agents familiar with Nelson to San Francisco,” Hoover scrawled on it. Five men from the Dillinger Squad boarded a flight to San Francisco that night.dw
Working with the San Francisco and Sausalito police, the new men quickly hit pay dirt. An informant reported that Chase had a girlfriend named Sally Backman. She had disappeared.4
On Saturday, August 18, the day the new FBI agents arrived in San Francisco, Chase drove up to the cabins on Walker Lake with Fatso Negri and Sally Backman. The desert heat was approaching one hundred degrees as Chase introduced Backman to everyone, giving only first names: Jack and Grace and their little boy, Jackie, and Helen, a quiet girl in a gingham house dress. Backman took an immediate dislike to the slender, cocky blond Chase introduced as “Jimmy,” and Nelson made no effort to hide his distaste for her: he made snide comments about how everyone should work hard to ensure that Backman was “comfortable.” The lodge’s owner, John Benedict, noticed the friction between the two. He found Nelson “surly” but liked the others. When Benedict remarked that Backman seemed ill at ease, Chase told him she was a “city girl” unaccustomed to desert camping.5
The gang occupied three cabins, the Nelsons in one, the Perkins family in another, Chase and Backman in the third. Negri slept on a cot in the open air. They were the camp’s only guests. Days they spent in idle pursuits. The women swam. Nelson slept for long periods. Sometimes he and Chase fished, though they rarely caught anything. Nelson, typically attired in faded tan corduroys