Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [328]
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An unidentified Michigan City inmate later told the FBI that the gang initially hid at a Syndicate-operated hangout called the Steuben Club. According to this source, Dillinger was greeted personally at the club by Frank Nitti, who gave the gang free run of a gun room nicknamed “The Arsenal.” This would seem unlikely, especially given the gang’s subsequent armaments raid in Peru, Indiana, several days later.
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In the lone major operation where his men had been prepared to fire their weapons, things had gone even worse. It happened in August, when the syndicate-connected con man Jake Factor reported someone was trying to extort him. A meeting was arranged with the extortionists at a 22nd Street park, and Purvis, commanding an army of two hundred Chicago cops and FBI agents—the largest such strike force in memory, the Chicago American reported—prepared to move in when they appeared. When the extortionists arrived, the police moved. In the confusion, their quarry managed to get away. The American dubbed it “a huge fiasco.”
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Seventy years later, Doris Rogers (now, in 2004, Doris Lockerman) is the only denizen of the nineteenth floor who remains alive, an alert, gregarious ninety-four-year-old living in Atlanta.
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Purvis brought Smith, known as “D.O.,” to Chicago from Oklahoma City to be his number two, or ASAC. A popular mentor to many young agents during his distinguished FBI career, Smith had been married the week before the Sherone Apartments stakeout; he had been introduced to his wife by Frank Smith, the agent who survived the Kansas City Massacre. A native of Fort Smith, Arkansas, D. O. Smith served in the FBI from 1928 to 1958. In later years he taught in the Fort Smith schools. He died in January 1977 at the age of seventy-nine.
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Edward N. Notesteen, a graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School, served in the FBI from 1930 to 1956. He died in San Diego in 1970 at the age of seventy-one.
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Allen Lockerman married Purvis’s secretary, Doris Rogers. He retired from the FBI in the mid-1930s and went on to a career as a successful attorney in Atlanta.
Julius H. Rice was in the third year of a distinguished forty-one-year FBI career. In later years Rice emerged as a favorite of Hoover’s; they called each other by their first names. Born in 1904, Rice was another George Washington graduate, joining the Bureau in 1931. He was based in Portland, Oregon, from 1946 until his retirement in 1972. He died there in 1975, at the age of seventy.
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The FBI’s subsequent review of Miller’s escape, written by Assistant Director Vincent W. Hughes, was scathing. Hughes found that “the plan to take Miller was far from perfect and the execution of the plan even more to be criticized.” Among the “vital errors” Hughes cited: The lack of a single supervising agent and the absence of cars in position to give pursuit. Hughes suggested that Miller’s apartment should have been raided, a rare if indirect criticism of Hoover, who had ordered the agents to hold off. Miller’s escape underscored the FBI’s lack of experience in fundamental law-enforcement techniques.
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FBI agents in Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati actually did do some poking around on the Dillinger case that autumn, writing a half-dozen reports and attending a conference or two. But, by and large, the Bureau ignored the case, just as Hoover wished.
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According to some stories it was a ringworm infection.
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The gang’s exact lineup at Racine has long been in dispute. Witnesses uniformly counted five robbers that day. A man named Leslie Homer later confessed and was convicted of taking part. If so, that means one