Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [334]
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As they did, Purvis managed to locate the first of the Little Bohemia refugees. It was Pat Cherrington. After fleeing Little Bohemia, Cherrington and Harry Sawyer’s bartender, Pat Reilly, had returned to St. Paul, where after a week in hiding Cherrington boarded a train to Chicago, sending a telegram to her sister-in-law to meet her at the station. The FBI, who had the sister-in-law under surveillance, intercepted the telegram that Monday; agents boarded Cherrington’s train at a stop in Janesville, Wisconsin, and followed her to Chicago and then to Detroit. After a monthlong stakeout that produced no leads on Dillinger or anyone else, Cherrington would finally be arrested in late May. She drew a one-year sentence in a federal women’s prison.
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Despite eyewitnesses who positively identified Van Meter, historians have traditionally dismissed Fostoria as just another of the many unconfirmed robberies credited to Dillinger. Town residents long insisted it was Dillinger that day, though as the local historian Paul Krupp wrote in 1981, “[T]here is no sound evidence that Dillinger himself came to town.” In fact, FBI files confirm it was Dillinger: the license plates of the Fostoria getaway car matched those of a car he would use in his next robbery, in June.
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Though he avoided lingering in the city itself—he still feared Frank Nitti’s wrath—Nelson had a network of Chicago contacts Dillinger didn’t. He needed them. After stumbling into Louis Cernocky’s bar after his flight from Little Bohemia, Nelson had reached out to one of them, a veteran fence named Jimmy Murray, who owned a South Chicago roadhouse called the Rain-Bo Inn. Murray was the man who had masterminded the Newton Brothers’s famed train robbery at Roundout, Illinois, in 1924; after a stretch in the Atlanta federal prison, he had returned to Chicago and resumed business. The FBI would later establish that Murray had handled stolen bonds for both the Nelson and Dillinger gangs that autumn. After Little Bohemia, Murray allowed Nelson to stay in a cottage he owned in Wauconda, northwest of the city, where Nelson would spend most of the month of May. There he eventually reunited with Carroll and his California gofer, Johnny Chase.
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Purvis missed another opportunity by failing to broadcast an alert on the red panel truck Dillinger was driving. The Russes gave the Bureau a complete description of the vehicle, everything but the license number.
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FBI agents wouldn’t learn the stranger’s actual identity until several months later, when Hancock told a reporter of the incident.
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While the number of FBI agents on the Dillinger case fluctuated, about thirty-eight were devoted full time that spring, twenty-two in Chicago, sixteen in Indiana under Earl Connelley.
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That morning in Memphis, Clyde mailed a letter to the Dallas sheriff, Smoot Schmid. It was about Raymond Hamilton. Hamilton had been captured that Wednesday following the robbery of a bank in Lewisville, north of Dallas. Carted back to the Dallas County Jail, he freely sparred with reporters, answering questions about his break with Bonnie and Clyde. Though he stopped short of criticizing Clyde, the interviews angered Clyde nonetheless, as had a letter Hamilton had written to his lawyer denying involvement in the killing of Constable Cal Campbell; the lawyer had given it to reporters. The reply Clyde mailed from Memphis mentioned both the Lancaster robbery and the subsequent argument over division of the loot, excoriated Mary O’Dare and, oddly, accused Hamilton of being “too yellow to fight” during the Reeds Spring shoot-out in February.
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This suggests that Sheriff Jordan had no contact with Frank Hamer before early March. Some versions suggest Hamer spoke with Jordan as early as February.
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In testimony during Henry Methvin’s 1936 murder trial,