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again, and a few nights later he emerged from a movie to hear newspaper vendors calling out news of Dillinger’s death in Chicago.dx Karpis considered it an assassination. It could just as easily have been him; just a few nights earlier, he and Delores had seen Manhattan Melodrama, the same movie Dillinger watched before his death. A month after that came news of Van Meter’s death in St. Paul. Karpis read of Tom Brown’s involvement and guessed that Van Meter had been betrayed. This was bad. Chicago and Reno were already closed to them. And now St. Paul. “You and I can expect that same goddamn thing from now on,” he told Fred. “No one wants us around.”

The more he stewed, the more antsy Karpis grew. He had been in one place too long. It was time to make a clean break from the rest of the gang. First they had to dispose of the remaining ransom money, about $100,000. In August they finally found someone to move it, a wealthy Detroit hoodlum named Cash McDonald. McDonald said he could fence it through gambling friends in Havana, who would disperse the money via banks in Mexico and Venezuela.

Karpis and Fred Barker received a rude surprise when they went to dig up the money. Water had seeped into the Gladstone bags. The bills were sopping wet. The day McDonald was to arrive for his trip to Cuba, the two spent several furious hours scattering wet bills around Karpis’s bungalow, erecting fans to dry it out. McDonald wasn’t happy when they gave him $100,000 in damp bills, but he took it. They sent Harry Sawyer and Willie Harrison along to keep an eye on him. McDonald promised he would return via Miami in several days.

As he lay on the roof of his car that afternoon, watching the planes overhead, Karpis had already decided to leave Cleveland when McDonald returned with the laundered cash. Sitting in the warm sun, his mind wandering, he became transfixed by a biplane flown by a German fighter ace from the Great War. It was odd to see a German pilot here in Ohio, a onetime American enemy now allowed to fly freely in the skies over a Midwestern city; just sixteen years before, the man had tried to kill American fliers, and they had tried to kill him. Now here he was, as free as the proverbial bird.

The German plane flitted about like a mosquito, zooming low over the trees, then climbing straight up toward the sun. At one point another plane came in so low Karpis sat up to follow. As he watched, the plane plunged directly into the ground. The pilot was killed instantly. Black smoke curled into the sky. Karpis stared. For reasons he didn’t entirely understand, he was overwhelmed with sadness.

Homer Van Meter’s death marked a turning point for the FBI. The Dillinger Gang was finished. As far as Hoover was concerned, what remained of the War on Crime was strictly a mopping-up operation. More than once, he said there was no place left for the “rats” to hide, and in large part he was right. One benefit of Dillingermania was the publicity given the other Public Enemies; their mug shots now scowled regularly from the pages of newspapers from Miami to Seattle.

Hoover had supreme confidence in Sam Cowley. On September 6 the Director formalized Cowley’s position as the Bureau’s wartime field general, handing him unrestricted power to hunt down Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Karpis, and the Barkers; he could go anywhere, mobilize any agent, assume command of any office. “I would like to have these three cases concluded within the next thirty or forty-five days if possible,” Hoover wrote Cowley on September 5.16

Cowley’s elevation came at Melvin Purvis’s expense. Since the Dillinger shooting, Purvis had fallen deeper and deeper into Hoover’s disfavor. Twice Hoover had fired off terse letters when he was unable to reach Purvis by phone. The smallest things set Hoover off; he sent Purvis one letter demanding to know why a delivery of Chicago newspaper articles had been delayed. For the most part, Purvis was removed from all investigative work. As his secretary, Doris Rogers, looked on with sympathy, he spent his days filling out personnel