Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [290]
Harry Sawyer was next. The FBI had concentrated its search for the mastermind of the Hamm and Bremer kidnappings in New York. They had put Sawyer’s picture in Jewish newspapers, hoping someone of “that race” would turn him in, as an FBI memo put it. In the end, a motorcycle cop arrested Sawyer. He was captured in his car at the seawall in the Gulf Coast town of Pass Christian, Mississippi. He had been running a bar in a poor section of town. Police found his wife in a nearby tourist camp. Sawyer went without a fight, and was extradited to St. Paul for trial. Three months later the FBI tracked the Barker Gang’s last member, Bill Weaver, to a farm in northern Florida. Weaver was arrested when he went to feed his chickens.
Those who survived the War on Crime were paraded through court-rooms all through 1935. In January the Kansas City Massacre conspirators—Deafy Farmer and company—were each convicted in a trial at Kansas City; all received light sentences. The same month twenty-three people, including members of both the Barrow and Parker families, were put on trial in Dallas for harboring Bonnie and Clyde; all but one were convicted and received prison sentences. Three months later Clyde’s one-time partners Raymond Hamilton and Joe Palmer were executed. In March, Delores Delaney and Wynona Burdette received five-year sentences for harboring Alvin Karpis and Harry Campbell.
The Dillinger trials began in Chicago that same month. Johnny Chase received a life sentence for the murders of Sam Cowley and Ed Hollis. Helen Gillis received a one-year sentence for harboring her husband. That summer Louis Piquett received a two-year sentence for harboring; his investigator, Art O’Leary, received a suspended one-year sentence. Another set of trials, for those indicted for harboring Baby Face Nelson, were held in San Francisco. Everyone involved, including the mechanic Frank Cochrane, drew brief sentences. In two trials in St. Paul members of the Barker Gang were convicted of the Bremer kidnapping. Dock Barker, Harry Sawyer, Volney Davis, and Bill Weaver all drew life sentences and were sent to the new federal “super prison” on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.
In June, Pretty Boy Floyd’s sidekick, Adam Richetti, went on trial for the Kansas City Massacre.et From an analysis of the FBI’s own files, the proceedings were a travesty. Each of the agents who survived the massacre—Frank Smith, Reed Vetterli, and Joe Lackey—took the stand and identified Floyd and Verne Miller as the shooters; this despite the fact that all three agents had repeatedly told their superiors they could not identify any of them. Lackey went one step further, identifying Richetti himself. Richetti’s attorneys put up a hapless defense. Richetti was convicted and sentenced to death, and died in the gas chamber at Jefferson City, Missouri, on October 7, 1938.
So who were Verne Miller’s confederates that morning in Kansas City? Historians have debated their identities for seventy years. Many, including Floyd’s biographer, Michael Wallis, have come to the conclusion that Floyd was not involved.eu He almost certainly was. Research for this book identified three people who discussed the massacre with Floyd or Miller before their deaths; two of these witnesses gave detailed, nearly identical statements to the FBI—statements that, tellingly, were not introduced at Richetti’s trial. Nor are they included in the FBI’s massacre files. Instead, they are located in the Barker-Karpis files; the statements were given by Volney Davis and his girlfriend Edna Murray, who spoke with Miller two days after the massacre, when he visited their Chicago apartment. According to Davis and his girlfriend, who had no reason to implicate Pretty Boy Floyd, Miller said his partner that morning was in fact Floyd. According to Miller, Richetti wasn’t with them. He had been too hungover to go.
In the only known occasion where Floyd told what happened at Union Station,