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The next morning Connelley sat down in the Cleveland office with one of the inspectors, who reluctantly agreed to let him talk to Hall. Just before noon Connelley phoned Pop Nathan in Washington to break the news. Nathan was palpably unimpressed. His lack of enthusiasm was attributable to the humiliating fact that the Bureau was piggy-backing on the inspectors’ work. “[I]f this goes through,” Nathan told Hoover, “this incident is going to break into the newspapers.”8

The next morning Connelley drove to Youngstown and spent several hours closeted with Hall. Afterward he called Washington to say the frightened steelworker had given them everything, including the location of the house Karpis was renting seven miles south of Hot Springs. Connelley was already arranging a charter flight to Arkansas. With luck, he said, he could be on the ground there by noon the next day. He was obliged to take a group of inspectors along, he admitted, “for the reason that the informant [Hall] is theirs, and it was only through their cooperation that we have the information at all.”9

Connelley’s group didn’t arrive in Little Rock until 4:35 on Sunday afternoon, March 30.fc A reporter caught wind of their arrival. G-MEN HERE ON MYSTERIOUS MISSION, read the next morning’s headline in the Arkansas Gazette. Realizing he had only hours before that news broke, Connelley hurried to Hot Springs at nightfall and found the house Hall had told them of; it stood alone on a wooded hill overlooking the Malvern Road seven miles south of town. Lights blazed inside. Someone was there.

“Examined place designated by informant Clayton Hall and it checks in every way,” Connelley notified Hoover in a coded telegram at 3:05 Sunday morning. “House fully lighted and party apparently there . . . at about daybreak will arrest party at place above indicated.”10

Connelley had fourteen men for the raid, including Clarence Hurt, one of the agents who shot Dillinger; Rufus Coulter, who had traded gunfire with Homer Van Meter in St. Paul; and Loyde Kingman, who had shared an elevator with Karpis in Havana. In the predawn darkness they crept into positions around the house. In Washington, Hoover waited by the phone. He wanted Karpis, but just as important he wanted the FBI and not the postal inspectors to get credit for his capture; he had told Connelley to “spare no expense” to make certain he received the news first so that he could make the announcement. In Little Rock agents phoned Washington every fifteen minutes, just to say they hadn’t heard anything.

By 8:00 Connelley’s men were ready to move in. It was quiet; it appeared they had achieved total surprise. Connelley called for Karpis to come out with his hands up. There was no answer. With a wave of his hand Connelley signaled for the tear-gas guns. Canisters whistled through the air, crashing through windows into the house. As tentacles of gas began to waft through the shattered panes, Connelley again called for Karpis to surrender. He called again, and again, but there was no answer. When the FBI stormed the house, they found it empty.fd

Karpis and Hunter had fled Hot Springs four days earlier, after learning of the inspectors’ presence in town. It was a stupid thing: one of the inspectors had approached a taxi driver who was sweet on Fred Hunter’s girlfriend, Connie Morris, and the man had gotten drunk and lectured Morris that agents were prepared to arrest her. Grace Goldstein warned the men. They were gone within minutes, leaving behind their clothes. After the raid agents marveled at how much weight Karpis had lost. The pants they discovered had a twenty-six-inch waistline.

Karpis drove west into Texas. He dropped a suitcase containing his machine guns at the home of Goldstein’s brother, then headed to Corpus Christi, where he met Hunter and Morris and took rooms in a tourist camp. They spent several days fishing in the gulf, until Karpis picked up a newspaper and read of the Hot Springs raid. Hunter bought a new car, and when he walked into a police station to register