Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [32]
The FBI did receive one break that morning. Down in Joplin, Dick Galatas had already returned to Hot Springs, but the remaining conspirators—Frances Nash, Deafy Farmer and his wife—panicked when they heard news of the massacre on the radio. Frances was dumbstruck. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it,” she kept saying.
The trio did the only thing they could: they ran. By two o’clock all three had disappeared—but not without being noticed. A local woman heard something suspicious over the telephone line—a party line—and reported it to Joplin police, who raided the Farmer home at noon.g They found only a caretaker but telephoned Kansas City nevertheless. Two FBI men jumped in a car and drove to Joplin the next morning, in case someone returned.
By lunchtime, barely five hours after the last gunshot at Union Station, Hoover was mulling who to place in charge of what was clearly the most important investigation in Bureau history.h Reed Vetterli’s men were fresh-faced College Boys; while eager, none was fit to lead a major investigation. Hoover needed the kind of agent he had so few of, a professional investigator with maturity, diplomacy, and street smarts. Ray Caffrey was the third Bureau man ever killed. Hoover decided to bring in the man who had handled the case of the first. He picked up the phone and dialed San Antonio. He was bringing in Gus Jones.i
Jones, the San Antonio SAC since 1921, was the prototype of the dozen or so no-bullshit Cowboys Hoover employed to tutor his College Boys and work major cases. At fifty-one Jones was a creature of the old Texas frontier, stout and moonfaced, with thinning blond hair, wire-frame spectacles, and a fondness for ten-gallon hats. Born in San Angelo in 1882, he came from a family of West Texas lawmen; his father had been killed in a late-nineteenth-century skirmish with Indians. As the El Paso SAC during the World War, Jones spent much of his time trying to head off arms shipments to Pancho Villa and other Mexican revolutionaries. Transferred to San Antonio, he became one of Hoover’s best men.
After talking with Hoover, Jones boarded a flight out of San Antonio and arrived at the Kansas City airport at 2:30 Sunday morning, seventeen hours after the massacre. Downtown, he went into conference with Vetterli and his men, and at 10:00 took two of them to meet with the Kansas City Police Department’s new chief, Eugene Reppert. Reppert, a pawn of the Pendergast machine, was already working to deflect responsibility for the massacre, telling reporters that the Nash arrest had been an FBI operation.
“This is some mess you’ve gotten us into,” Reppert told Jones.1 Jones emphasized that the Bureau was willing to aid the police investigation any way it could, but Reppert said he had no intention of investigating the massacre. “This is a government case and not a police matter,” he said. Afterward Jones said it was the most amazing thing he had ever heard a police chief say; two of his men were dead and he wasn’t investigating. The FBI could only wonder why.
The Bureau was on its own. No one said it aloud, but there were some among Hoover’s men who doubted they could carry off the complex investigation they now faced. The FBI had never attempted anything like it before. Gus Jones wondered what weaponless agents would do if confronted by the well-armed massacre assassins. When Hoover sent a wire demanding that he use every resource to apprehend the gunmen, Jones cabled back: “With what? Peashooters?” Suddenly, the FBI’s unofficial ban on guns was lifted. In Washington one of Hoover’s top men, Clyde