Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [239]
Two agents visited Griffin in the hospital. He was suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, the result of a botched attempt on his life. He refused to answer questions, but suggested the agents return a few days later, when he might have something to say. The agents waited seventeen days. When they returned to interview Griffin on August 23, he had disappeared. No one seemed to know where he had gone. For the moment, no one really cared. Griffin was just another yegg.
Then one of the bullets used to kill Lazia, sent for tests to a Kansas City ballistics laboratory, was found to match bullets fired at the massacre. With a start, the Kansas City office realized Jack Griffin might hold the key to the massacre case. The new SAC, Bruce Nathan, shared the news with Kansas City’s chief of detectives, Thomas Higgins. It was then, on August 24, six weeks after Lazia’s assassination, that Higgins told the Bureau what everyone in the Kansas City underworld already knew: Griffin and three of his pals had killed Lazia in a gambling dispute. Lazia’s men had been hunting them ever since. If the FBI thought Griffin and his men could solve the massacre case, they needed to find them before the Mob did.
Once again, the Bureau found itself in a race with the syndicate. Belatedly, the Kansas City office mobilized. They first tried to find Griffin. A little digging turned up the disquieting fact that he had been discharged from the hospital into the care of a notorious Kansas City detective named Jeff Rayan. Rayan was considered to be a mob enforcer; Griffin hadn’t been seen since. All three of Griffin’s partners, a St. Louis racketeer named Al O’Brien, a Kansas City nightclub owner named Nugent LaPlumma, and a skinny drug addict named Michael LaCapra, known as “Jimmy Needles,” had disappeared.
All that week the Kansas City office tracked leads on the four men. On Friday morning, August 31, they managed to pull in Griffin’s girlfriend. Agents had just begun to interview her when the Kansas City Journal Post hit the streets. The newspaper reported that “Jimmy Needles” LaCapra was in custody in Wichita, Kansas, along with three Kansas City gangsters who had tried to kill him.
Two Kansas City agents, Harold Anderson and Walter Trainor, reached Wichita that night. A desk sergeant briefed them. LaCapra had been hiding in his hometown of Argonia, twenty miles southwest of Wichita. The night before, he had been out driving when a black Ford pulled alongside; three men inside opened up with submachine guns. LaCapra ducked, uninjured, and the Ford sped off. LaCapra scrambled to the Wichita police station for safety even as the men who tried to kill him had a traffic accident and were arrested by the Kansas State Highway Patrol. All four men were now sitting in cells.
Anderson and Trainor first tried to talk to LaCapra’s would-be assassins, whose bruised faces gave vivid testament to the interrogation techniques of Kansas lawmen. “Each of these men sat mute throughout the interviews and all they would say was they had just been out for a little friendly ride,” Trainor wrote in his report. “It was evident from the appearance of the three . . . that they had undergone physical punishment, probably at the hands of the Kansas Highway Patrol.”14
Jimmy Needles was another matter. A jittery, emaciated career criminal in his early forties, LaCapra was ecstatic to see the two FBI men approaching his cell. The words came spilling out of him, so fast the two agents at first couldn’t keep his stories straight. “The statements of LaCapra were, of course, very jumbled and rambling and he appeared to be under a very great nervous strain, although he did