Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [69]
While Hoover’s men closed in on Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger received the disappointing news that a set of guns he had thrown over the wall at Michigan City had been found and turned over to the warden. He realized he would need to try again, and for that he needed more money. At noon on Wednesday, September 6, Dillinger and his partner Harry Copeland strolled into the lobby of the State Bank of Massachusetts Avenue in downtown Indianapolis. Without a word, Dillinger, his trademark straw boater tilted jauntily to one side, scrambled atop a seven-foot-high teller cage and trained a pistol on the bank’s assistant manager, Lloyd Reinhart. “This is a stickup,” he said.
Reinhart, deep in conversation on a telephone, kept his head down and ignored the comment, thinking someone was joking.
“Get away from that damn telephone!” Dillinger snapped.
Reinhart looked up into the barrel of Dillinger’s gun and realized this was no joke. Reinhart and another cashier raised their hands, and Dillinger hopped down and began shoving cash from the counters into a white sack. Behind him, Copeland, fidgeting with the handkerchief across his face, kept glancing outside.
“Hurry up!” Copeland urged more than once. Within minutes Dillinger and Copeland scurried from the bank into a waiting getaway car. Later, when they counted the take, it came to more than $24,000—at the time the second costliest bank robbery in state history.
To this day, no one is sure how Dillinger slipped the second batch of guns into the Michigan City prison. One of the inmate plotters later told authorities that the guns were smuggled in a box of thread sent to the prison’s shirt factory. According to another version, Dillinger once again tossed the guns over a prison wall. Whatever happened, the guns finally made it into the hands of Dillinger’s friends.
His mission accomplished, Dillinger was ready for a few days off. He hopped into his new car, a fast Essex Terraplane, and headed to Dayton, to see the girl he had been courting all summer, Mary Longnaker, whose apartment was still being watched by two police officers.
After parting with Luther Arnold, Kathryn Kelly drove Arnold’s wife, Flossie Mae, and their daughter, Geralene, back to her uncle’s ranch in West Texas. It was a risky move: FBI agents had been canvassing the area for weeks. But it was the only place Kathryn knew to look for her wayward husband. When she drove up, Cass Coleman told her he hadn’t seen Kelly in two weeks. Kathryn lingered barely thirty minutes, just long enough to load some cots into the pickup and scribble out a note for Kelly. She told Coleman to write her care of General Delivery, San Antonio, the moment Kelly appeared.
Four nights later, on Saturday, September 9, Kelly finally arrived, having spent ten days lying around Memphis, draining bottles of gin. Worried that Cass Coleman’s ranch was under surveillance, he walked unannounced into a neighbor’s kitchen, startling the neighbor’s wife. His hair alone would have frightened most people. Kelly had dyed it a bright yellow; with the additional ten pounds or so he had gained while a fugitive, he looked like a bloated canary. The neighbor woman, who had heard rumors of Kelly’s real identity, drove straight to Cass Coleman’s and angrily demanded that he take Kelly away. Instead, Coleman sent a telegram to Kathryn: MOTHER BETTER.
Kathryn received the telegram two days later. She took Flossie Mae Arnold to the San Antonio post office and sent her in to get it. “Mother started to open the telegram at first,” Geralene Arnold said later, “but she waited till she got back to the car where Kathryn was, and Kathryn just jerked it right out of her hand and told her it wasn’t hers.” After reading the telegram, Kathryn took Geralene and drove to Coleman’s ranch. She left Flossie Mae behind.
After three