Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [252]
Agent Harvey arrived in New Orleans on Tuesday; that night he and two other agents went to work on Dick Galatas. “Subject Galatas was brought to the office after dark and was kept there until shortly before daylight,” Harvey wrote Hoover the next morning. “The interrogation was continuous and vigorous.”9
In a motion his lawyer filed two months later to suppress Galatas’s statements, Galatas laid out what a “vigorous physical interview” with the FBI entailed. In daylight hours he was kept manacled to a chair in Agent Magee’s apartment. He was given little or no food. He was not allowed to lie down, much less sleep. At night he was taken to the Bureau office. First he was given warnings: “You are going to tell us what we want to know . . . You haven’t any rights and you are not going to have counsel until we finish with you . . . We are going to get the story one way or another.” Then came the threats. “I ought to kill you now . . . You could easily be found dead on the street and all we would have to say is you tried to run.”
Several days later, after he was flown to Chicago and chained inside the Bureau’s nineteenth-floor offices, Galatas said the threats became more vivid: “I’ll use the necessary tactics to get what I want . . . If you are found dead in the streets, the same as others were found, no one would ever make inquiries and they will think gangsters killed you.” At one point, Galatas was escorted to an open window. “You are a long way up,” an agent told him, “and you won’t bounce when you hit bottom.” Finally, Galatas said, the threats turned to beatings. Agents struck him in the face with their fists until he bled. His hair was pulled. He was beaten at the base of his neck until unconscious. He was beaten with rubber hoses and kicked in the ribs. Finally an agent standing outside the door entered and said, “That’s enough.”
No one paid much attention to Galatas’s claims when they were eventually aired at his trial. But Galatas was telling the truth. According to Melvin Purvis’s secretary, Doris Rogers, agents in the Chicago office were rarely physical with prisoners during the early months of the War on Crime. But as the pressure on them increased during mid-1934, Rogers says, the agents began beating certain prisoners in the nineteenth-floor conference room. “They had heard about the ‘third degree’ and tried to use it without knowing how,” she wrote in a 1935 article for the Chicago Tribune. “Their attempts were stupid and useless. They picked the wrong men to hit and got little information for their pain. These instances were isolated and few. The older and wiser heads in the organization quickly brought the men who had tried it, victims of misdirected enthusiasm, back into line.”10
What the FBI got for its “vigorous physical interview” was a stream of increasingly detailed statements from both Galatas and his wife—none of which shed any light on what role Pretty Boy Floyd played in the massacre. In Detroit, meanwhile, Vi Mathias’s reaction to the FBI’s tactics proved far different. After eleven days closeted in an apartment where she was berated by a revolving roster of agents, she was brought to Chicago on September 30 to give a statement. In it, she confirmed virtually every detail of the story “Jimmy Needles” LaCapra had told the FBI. She identified photos of Floyd and Richetti as men Miller had brought to their house after the massacre. She said Floyd had some sort of wound in his left shoulder, and had left with Richetti within hours of arriving. She said she never saw either man again.
It was all Hoover needed. On October 10 he stepped before a crowd of reporters and announced the capture of Dick Galatas. He also revealed the Bureau’s theory of the case, naming Verne Miller, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Adam Richetti as the massacre assassins. The next day the headlines were large and bold in Oklahoma, Kansas,