Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [304]
Few of the FBI agents who fought the War on Crime ever received any public credit for their work. A number enjoyed long careers in the Bureau before retiring in the 1960s and 1970s. Others left the Bureau as soon as they could, bolting in 1935 and 1936 to join hometown law firms or to become corporate executives. The last surviving member of the Dillinger Squad, the rookie agent Tom McDade, died in 1996.
Frank Smith, who survived the Kansas City Massacre, resigned from the FBI in 1939 to become Oklahoma City’s police chief. He died in 1953. Reed Vetterli, the Kansas City SAC, became Salt Lake City’s police chief. He died in 1949. Despite his statements to the contrary in FBI files, the massacre’s third survivor, Joe Lackey, insisted until his death that he was able to identify Richetti, Floyd, and Miller.
Gus Jones, who led the Urschel investigation, retired from the FBI in 1940. He died in 1963. Bill Rorer, the agent who arrested Machine Gun Kelly and exchanged gunfire with Dillinger at Little Bohemia, left the FBI in 1937. He was CEO of a Georgia dairy until his death in 1967. The agent whose bullets felled Dillinger, Charles Winstead, retired from the FBI in 1943. He died at the age of eighty-two in 1973. His partner, Clarence Hurt, retired in 1955 and was a sheriff in his native Oklahoma for several years. He died in 1975. Jerry Campbell, the FBI marksman who captured Dock Barker, died in Palo Alto in 1991.
Hugh Clegg, the assistant director who nominally headed the agents at Little Bohemia, founded the FBI Academy in 1935. After his retirement, he served as a special assistant to the chancellor at the University of Mississippi, where he was a pivotal figure in the school’s acceptance of its first black student, James Meredith. Likewise, Earl Connelley remained a top FBI administrator for two decades after the War on Crime. He retired in 1956 and died a year later. Pop Nathan, often called “the grand old man of the FBI,” retired from the FBI in 1945. He died in 1963.
After working as a public spokesman for several companies during the 1930s, Melvin Purvis faded from public view. He served as a colonel in World War II, then returned to South Carolina, where for several years he ran a radio station. Hoover never forgave Purvis for his hubris in the wake of the Dillinger and Floyd cases. He repeatedly frustrated Purvis’s attempts to return to the public eye, blocking his chance for a federal judgeship in 1952. Hoover, in fact, did everything possible to destroy his onetime protégé’s legacy; Purvis’s name did not appear once in the Bureau’s 1956 authorized history, The FBI Story.
On February 29, 1960, Purvis was found dead in his study, a single bullet wound to the head. The gun in his hand had been given him by fellow agents upon his retirement. Some called it suicide, others an accident. Hoover made no public comment and sent no note of condolence. “We are honored that you ignored Melvin’s death,” his widow wrote Hoover. “Your jealousy hurt him very much but until the end I think he loved you.” At the time of his death, Melvin Purvis was fifty-six.
For the rest of his life Hoover remained obsessed with the War on Crime era. As the FBI sank into controversies over its handling of civil rights and other cases, his fascination with Dillinger and his peers only grew. “Hoover had a thing about Dillinger,” the FBI assistant director William Sullivan once said. “If he were alive today and you went to see him, he’d tell you about Dillinger. The older he got the more he talked about John Dillinger, Ma Barker, and all those old cases of the thirties. He would talk on and on about this stuff.”2 One senses in Hoover’s reveries a longing for the clear-cut distinctions of good versus evil the War on Crime afforded the FBI. In a way, Dillinger became Hoover’s “Rosebud.”
J. Edgar Hoover died in his sleep on May 1, 1972.
Of those the FBI captured, many became