Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [39]
Dillinger, shrugging off the arrests of his confederates, went forward with plans to rob the bank in nearby Dalesville. A twenty-two-year-old teller, Margaret Good, was alone in the bank when Dillinger, wearing gray summer slacks and a straw boater, strolled in at 12:45. He asked for the bank president. When Miss Good said he wasn’t in, Dillinger smiled and slid a pistol through the teller cage. “Well, this is a stickup,” he said. “Get me the money, honey.”8
Miss Good, who had been robbed twice in the preceding two years, pointed at the open vault and raised her hands. As Harry Copeland stood by, cradling a pistol, Dillinger leaped over a low railing leading to the vault area. Copeland corralled a trio of customers who arrived as Dillinger scooped up an estimated $3, 500 in cash and a grouping of diamond rings inside the vault. When he was finished, Dillinger led Miss Good and the customers into the vault, shut the door, and strolled out to the getaway car, a green Chevrolet sedan. The two men were in and out of the bank in less than ten minutes.9
It was a smooth and easy job, and he had done it on his own. Dillinger’s confidence was growing.
After a month, the pursuit of William Hamm’s kidnappers had gone nowhere. Agents in St. Paul had interviewed any number of underworld characters but hadn’t yet uncovered any clue that the job had been masterminded by Alvin Karpis and the Barker brothers, who had settled into lakeside cottages around Chicago for the summer. Ma Barker remained in her Chicago apartment, immersed in her jigsaw puzzles.
Then, on Wednesday, July 19, a call came into the FBI’s Chicago office. A secretary passed it to the SAC, a boyish twenty-nine-year-old South Carolinian named Melvin Purvis who was destined to become a pivotal figure in the War on Crime. Unhappy as an attorney in his hometown, Purvis had enrolled at the Bureau in 1926 and swiftly moved up the ranks. At five-feet-seven, with delicate facial bones and a high, reedy voice, he could pass for a teenager. He was Hoover’s favorite SAC. Their correspondence strikes a far more familiar tone than the director’s letters to other agents. Hoover’s notes began “Dear Mel” and were signed “J.E.H.” or “Jayee.” Purvis addressed Hoover as “Mr. Hoover” until Hoover admonished him to “stop using mister.” One of Hoover’s favorite themes was Purvis’s attractiveness to women. At one point, he told Purvis that should he come to Washington for a costume ball, an FBI secretary would escort him “in a cellophane gown.” Hoover ribbed Purvis that a newspaper’s description of him made him sound suited for Hollywood: “I don’t see how the movies could miss a ‘slender, blond-haired, brown-eyed gentleman.’ All power to the Clark Gable of the service.”10
“We all suspected Melvin was Hoover’s favorite—we thought he was Daddy’s boy early on,” Purvis’s secretary Doris Rogers remembers. “He obviously was someone Hoover thought was very polished, a kind of ornament, but very bright and ready for the job.”m
What set Purvis apart from the deskrows of stolid young agents in their dark suits and shiny black shoes was an air of Southern privilege. Confident to the point of cockiness, he had an ego, a sense of style and entitlement, and he wasn’t afraid to show it. He wore sharply cut double-breasted suits, puff handkerchiefs, and straw boaters. Where other bachelor agents lived six to an apartment and rode the El to work, Purvis arrived in Chicago with his own horse, which he stabled in Lincoln Park and rode on weekends. He brought a manservant, a black man named President, who chauffeured Purvis through the streets in a sparkling Pierce Arrow, “an old-fashioned but real name-droppy car,” Doris Rogers remembers, “the kind