Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [338]
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Nelson never learned how close he had come to being discovered at Wally Hot Springs. On three separate occasions during his stay there, a sheriff from nearby Gardnerville had visited the camp, each time asking about a Hudson. They escaped notice only because the camp cook, Ethel Tyler, thought Nelson’s car was a Plymouth.
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William C. “Bill” Ryan was the first of three brothers who served as FBI agents. His son was also an agent. A member of the Bureau basketball team that won the 1931-32 government-league championship, Bill Ryan had been at Little Bohemia and the Biograph. He served in the Bureau from 1932 to 1958. He died in 1967 at the age of sixty.
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At the moment Hollis died, his wife, Genevieve, and their young son were waiting in the lobby of the Bankers Building, taking a moment from a downtown shopping trip to surprise him at the end of his workday. An agent saw her and called her upstairs, where Doris Rogers watched one of the agents break the news to her.
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The caller’s identity was never confirmed. It may have been Nelson’s sister; his wife, Helen; John Chase; or another family member.
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Born in 1894, Loyde E. Kingman served in the FBI from 1927 to 1953. A popular mentor to many agents, known as “King” inside the Bureau, Kingman died in 1978.
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Burdette, Gladys Sawyer, and Paula Harmon had all been released after giving detailed statements. The Bureau inexplicably failed to keep them under regular surveillance, allowing Burdette and Sawyer to reunite with their men. Never the most stable of the Barker women, Paula Harmon had returned to Texas, where her family had her committed to an asylum.
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John R. Welles was the scion of a wealthy family who owned a mill in the northeast Pennsylvania village of Wyalusing. He was a George Washington Law graduate who resigned from the FBI in 1939 to join the family business. In later years Welles was active in the FBI agents’ alumni association. He died in May 1981 at the age of eighty-three.
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Rudolph A. “Rudy” Alt served in the Bureau from 1926 to 1952. He died in 1977 at the age of ninety-four.
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Some argued against it, saying it unnecessarily glorified the Bureau. “I do not believe it would be wise for Bureau officials to attempt to protest against the appellation ‘G-men,’” Pop Nathan wrote Hoover on May 21, 1935. “Neither do I think it would be wise for the Bureau to approve it. I believe it would be futile to attempt any campaign against this term. As a matter of fact, I can think of much worse terms that might be applied to us. In other words, if, as would appear probable, that is to be the verdict of destiny, I do not think we should struggle against it.” As usual, Nathan carried the day.
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The arrest of Volney Davis was Melvin Purvis’s last.
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Richetti was formally charged only with the killing of one of the two murdered Kansas City policemen, Frank Hermanson.
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Kansas City journalism professor Robert Unger investigated the case for a decade; it was only after his prodding that the FBI released massacre case files. In his 1997 book, The Union Station Massacre, Unger reaches no conclusion about who was with Miller that morning but says it probably wasn’t Floyd.
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This made Campbell a bigamist, among other things. He had an estranged wife and daughter living in Texas. The FBI was watching them closely.
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Sam Coker was born in Nowata, Oklahoma, in 1895. Convicted of bank robbery in 1924, he drew a sentence in the McAlester penitentiary, where he became friends with Dock Barker and Volney Davis. Paroled in the spring of 1931, he took a message from Dock to his brother Fred in Tulsa and thereupon joined Fred and Karpis in their first burglaries after their release