Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [53]
Jones decided to raid the Shannon farm the next day, Friday, August 11. When Urschel demanded to come, Jones reluctantly consented. Everyone rendezvoused Friday afternoon in Denton, north of Dallas. There were fourteen men in all: Jones and three Dallas agents, four detectives from Fort Worth led by Ed Weatherford, four Dallas cops, plus Urschel and an Oklahoma City detective. By the time they reached Decatur, the light was fading. Jones stopped the caravan and gathered the men around him.
“Boys, we’ve got about twenty-six miles to go over slow roads,” Jones said. “We might reach the place before dark, but even if we did I doubt we’d be able to finish the job before it got black.” He dropped to one knee and drew a map of the Shannon Ranch in the dirt. “This is the way the place is laid out,” Jones said. “There is only one road into it, and that’s as plain as the devil. We can’t creep up on the place because it’s so flat you can see an ant a mile off. The only way to get in there is to just bang straight in, and for that we need daylight . . . I’ve done enough shooting in my time not to want to go barging into a strange place where the odds are all on the other side. My judgment is to back off, go down to Fort Worth and get a little sleep, then hit this place right at sunrise.”16
In Oklahoma City that night the SAC, Ralph Colvin, was so confident of success he cabled Hoover, WE CAN’T GO WRONG. EXPECT IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENTS BY NOON SATURDAY.17 In Fort Worth, Jones and his men ate dinner and grabbed a few hours of sleep at the Black-stone Hotel. At 4:00 A.M. they reconvened in the hotel’s parking lot and drove to the town of Rhome, seventeen miles from Decatur, where they waited for ninety minutes to be joined by a local sheriff. When the sheriff hadn’t arrived by six, Jones decided to proceed without him.
On radio station WBAP the new day began with a song by Cecil Gill, the Yodeling Country Boy. As the eastern horizon reddened, the three-car caravan sped north along dirt roads toward Paradise, clouds of dust billowing in its wake. The Shannon house was dark when the lead car skidded to a stop in front. Jones leaped out carrying a submachine gun, with Charles Urschel behind him; amazingly, the agents allowed Urschel to carry a sawed-off shotgun. They ran around the side of the house, where they encountered Boss Shannon pulling on his suspenders.
“What do you think you’re doing here?” Shannon demanded.
“That’s the old man who guarded me!” Urschel blurted out.
As agents trained their guns on Shannon, Jones glimpsed something odd in the rear yard: a makeshift cot atop two sawhorses. Someone was sleeping on the cot. Jones ran toward the figure, machine gun ready. As he approached, he saw it was a man, sleeping in his underwear. A pair of pants and a white shirt lay at the foot of the cot, alongside a Winchester rifle and a Colt .45 pistol. The man wasn’t moving. Jones crept up and looked down on the face. He recognized the features—the wavy hair, the concrete jaw-line—and quietly cursed in surprise.
Jones brought the tommy gun’s barrel down inches from the man’s face until the tip brushed against his nose. The sleeping man’s nose twitched. His eyelashes fluttered, and suddenly Jones was staring into the blinking brown eyes of the man who had mentored Verne Miller, Machine Gun Kelly, Alvin Karpis, and the Barker brothers, the man who had emerged as the primary suspect in the massacre case. It was Harvey Bailey. For several seconds, as they peered at each other in the dim light of dawn, neither spoke. Bailey’s eyes took in the submachine gun, now pointed at his chest. His Colt lay on the ground, inches from his right hand. A Dallas agent, Charles Winstead, was standing to one side.
“Go ahead!” Winstead snapped. “Reach for it!”
Bailey didn’t