Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [236]
When the news reached Washington an hour later, Hoover was incensed. “The Director is very upset over the fact that that thing could take place in St. Paul without our knowing about it,” a St. Paul agent noted the next day. No one mentioned the obvious: the local police were excluding the FBI just as it had famously excluded the Chicago police from Dillinger’s death. “I think our St. Paul office has shown utter lack of aggressiveness,” Hoover scribbled on a memo.
Picked up several days later, Mickey Conforti told the FBI Van Meter had been carrying $6,000. The St. Paul police reported finding only $923. If Tom Brown took Van Meter’s $5,077, there was an eerie symmetry at work: when Alvin Karpis and the Barker brothers read of Brown’s involvement the next day, they unanimously decided to keep his $5,000 share of the Bremer ransom. The next day Homer Van Meter’s body was taken to his hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana. No one but an undertaker and a handful of reporters awaited its arrival. He was buried without event in Fort Wayne’s Lindenwood Cemetery.
The morning after Van Meter’s death, Baby Face Nelson sent Fatso Negri into town for newspapers. Like the Barkers, Nelson was stunned to read of Tom Brown’s involvement. “The son of a bitch,” Nelson said. “He’s the fella that we paid a thousand dollars.”6
Nelson announced they were leaving for Chicago. They packed the trailer with five-gallon cans of gasoline and oil; Nelson wanted to travel without stopping at service stations. They left a pile of cleaned trout for the cabins’ owners, then drove across Nevada to Colorado and on into Kansas. Nelson allowed the group to sleep in auto camps, but was careful never to approach one before eleven at night.
Negri and the Perkins family rode in Negri’s Plymouth, while Johnny Chase and Sally Backman sat in the backseat of Nelson’s car. Packed into the tight confines of the Hudson, the simmering tensions between Backman and Nelson burst into the open. Nelson was a wild driver, the Hudson fishtailing across the dirt roads, and Backman asked him to slow down. He ignored her, starting in with comments about her “being scared” and asking if she was “comfortable.” In time Nelson became even more aggressive, telling Chase in front of Backman that he should leave her, that she would tire of him in six months and go home.
According to a story Negri told a detective magazine in 1941, the ill will between Nelson and Backman came to a head at a roadside stop somewhere in Nebraska. Helen had made lunch on their camp stove and was cleaning up when Nelson snapped at Backman, “Why don’t you get in there and help cook and clean up?”
“You go straight to hell!” Backman said. Negri described what he called “an electric shock” that passed through the rest of the group when they realized someone had openly challenged Nelson, something no one else, not even Dillinger, had ever done.
According to Negri, Nelson stared at Backman, then walked off. They drove that afternoon in silence, stopping after nightfall outside another Nebraska town. Everyone but Nelson decided to drive in to a restaurant; according to Negri, Nelson asked him to stay behind. When they were alone, Nelson said, “I’m going to hit Sally.”7
Negri was struck by Nelson’s choice of words. “It was the deadliest word Nelson could use against Sally,” he recalled seven years later. “There was something about that word ‘hit’ when Nelson used it that struck me as the worst word any human being could utter against another. It was as cold as he was.”
“What for?” Negri asked.
“She knows too much. I’m afraid of her . . . She looks queer to me.” Nelson studied Negri’s reaction.
“Jimmy, this is an awful tough spot,” Negri said. “You know, Johnny would object. He’s nuts about her.” The gang,