Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [325]
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Seldom did the worlds of syndicate hit men and rural bank robbers like the Barkers cross, but in Ziegler they did. A rarity among Capone’s gunmen, Ziegler moonlighted as a bank robber, driving out from Chicago to hit banks in rural Illinois and Wisconsin. His claim to fame, however, was the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929, in which he was believed to have been one of the gangsters dressed as policemen who machine-gunned seven associates of gang boss Bugs Moran in a North Side garage. The identities of the shooters have never been proven, but the FBI and Ziegler’s friends believed the story.
No one knew how Ziegler entered Capone’s orbit. He had been a varsity football player at the University of Illinois and served as a second lieutenant during World War I. But in 1925, while working as a lifeguard on a Chicago beach, he had been arrested for attempting to rape a seven-year-old girl. He jumped bail and soon surfaced as a creative hit man for the Capone mob. Among Ziegler’s inventions, it was said, was a time bomb with leather straps that could be tied to a kidnapping victim; it did wonders for extorting money from the target. Ziegler was known for his unfailing courtesy to strangers. “His character was one of infinite contradictions,” one FBI agent wrote. “Well mannered, always polite, he was capable of generous kindness and conscienceless cruelty.”
Ziegler’s partner, Bryan Bolton, was a weak link, and everyone except Ziegler knew it. At forty Bolton had worked as a carpenter, a car salesman and a golf pro before emerging as a driver for another of the St. Valentine’s shooters, “Killer” Fred Burke. Bolton too, the FBI later learned, played a role in the massacre. It was Bolton, two sources told the Bureau, who as a lookout that day in 1929 had given Capone’s gunmen the premature go-ahead to begin shooting, a mistake that allowed Bugs Moran himself to escape. Irate, Capone was said to have ordered Bolton’s execution, a fate he avoided only after Ziegler’s intervention. Bolton’s loyalty to Ziegler was unquestioned.
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For decades St. Paul historians have debated what role, if any, six-foot-three-inch, 280-pound “Big Tom” Brown played in the Hamm kidnapping. There were always rumors, but not until FBI files were opened in the late 1980s would the extent of his involvement become clear. According to FBI files, the forty-four-year-old Brown agreed to keep the gang fully updated on what police were doing. In return he was to receive a full quarter of the $100,000 ransom, a cut three times larger than any of the actual kidnappers. The files even raise the possibility that it was Brown who initiated the scheme.
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Akers was to play a recurring role in the War on Crime. Though the identity of the informant who tipped the FBI to Nash’s appearance in Hot Springs has never been disclosed, the Bureau’s files strongly indicate that it was Akers who later claimed the $500 reward on Nash.
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The raid was conducted by Joplin’s chief of detectives, Ed Portley, who would later write a series of magazine articles about his pursuit of Bonnie and Clyde in the wake of the murders they committed in Joplin that spring.
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No one dwelled on the fact that the Bureau had no jurisdiction whatsoever to investigate the massacre. Even though one of its own men had been murdered, it was not yet a federal crime to kill a federal agent. Such a law would not be passed until the following spring.
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Jones achieved prominence inside the Bureau with his role in the case of the first FBI agent murdered in the line of duty, Ed Shanahan. Shanahan was a tall, slender I agent in Chicago who one evening in October 1925 stepped up to a car blocking his path in a downtown garage and tapped at the driver’s window. Unfortunately for Shanahan, the driver turned out to be a car thief named Martin Durkin. When Shanahan produced his Bureau identification card and asked him to move his car,