Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [253]
In a nondescript boarding house in a poor section of Buffalo, New York, a man known locally as George Sanders read the stories with a frown. Neighbors had noticed Mr. Sanders pacing his room for much of the previous year. Putting down the newspaper, the man turned to his girlfriend and sighed. “You wanna go home?” said Pretty Boy Floyd.
While the FBI turned up the heat on Floyd, Baby Face Nelson was camped in the Nevada desert, passing his days tinkering with cars and taking pot-shots at jackrabbits. After parting with John Chase outside Chicago, Nelson had taken his wife, Helen, and Fatso Negri and driven back to Reno. For a week they crisscrossed Nevada, searching for a tourist camp where they could hide. Nothing appealed to Nelson; the nicer places had too many people, the more isolated ones didn’t have electricity or running water. One day Nelson’s Hudson hit a bump going about eighty, damaging the car, so on the evening of September 21 they crept into Reno in search of a mechanic they knew named Frank Cochran.
They slid the Hudson into the garage behind Cochran’s home and transferred the guns and luggage into an aging Buick sedan he lent them; Cochran even installed a siren in the car at Nelson’s request. Nelson’s group returned to its nomadic existence, cruising the back roads of Nevada as far south as Las Vegas. Sleeping in the open, they returned to Reno a week later. Searching for Nelson’s Hudson, they drove downtown and spotted it parked outside a movie theater. Nelson was apoplectic; the FBI might spot the car. When Cochran emerged from the theater, they returned to his house and switched their things back to the Hudson, paying Cochran $250 before driving off.
Finally, on October 1, Nelson found a place to live, a tourist camp at Wally Hot Springs, Nevada, fifteen miles south of Carson City. Helen rented a two-room cottage; she and Nelson slept in one room, Negri the other. Every morning Nelson sent Negri into town to fetch food and newspapers. They were looking for John Chase’s message in the personals section of the Reno Evening Gazette. On Thursday, October 11, Nelson saw the ad. Chase had returned. The FBI knew it, too.
All that September, Ed Guinane, the San Francisco SAC, built an intricate superstructure atop Nelson’s contacts in California. There were taps in place on the phones of Fatso Negri’s mother and Johnny Chase’s brothers, and extensions at Tobe Williams’s gangland hospital in Vallejo.ee Wanted posters were distributed up and down the California-Nevada border. Guinane felt certain Nelson was still in the area. He had been seen in Vallejo on September 26, by a man who had sold him a car the year before, and in a Reno tavern on September 29.
Guinane’s best lead was Johnny Chase’s missing girlfriend, Sally Backman. Agents had searched her apartment and questioned her family; everyone said it was unlike her to simply disappear. At some point, Guinane wagered, she would return to Sausalito. He was right. The Bureau’s first major break came on Saturday, October 6, when Manuel Menotti, Sausalito’s police chief, spotted Backman on the street. He took her into custody and called Guinane, who hurried to begin debriefing her that afternoon.
It was slow going. For days Backman refused to say anything about her travels with Nelson. Then Guinane decided to use her love for Chase against her. If Chase stayed with Nelson, Guinane said, he would almost certainly be killed. Chase’s only chance to live, he insisted, was to leave Nelson.Backman asked for a promise that FBI agents wouldn’t kill Chase when he was arrested. Guinane said they would do everything they could to bring Chase in unharmed.
It worked. By Monday, October 8, Backman was installed in a room at the Shaw Hotel in San Francisco, pouring out her story. After