Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [72]
Inside, they settled into a rear booth. Kaplan arrived after fifteen minutes, plunking down a whiskey bottle. He started to speak, then hesitated, glancing at Geralene. “She’s a nice little girl,” Kelly said, taking out a roll of bills. “She’s all right.”
By coincidence, at a bit after nine, just when the Kellys were en route to the Michigan Tavern, Melvin Purvis suddenly remembered Pop Nathan’s call. But instead of dispatching his men to the tavern itself, Purvis sent two agents to the downtown post office to find the postman who delivered the tavern’s mail. After being told that the postman was walking his route, the agents drove to the tavern’s neighborhood, arriving around quarter past ten, while the Kellys were sitting in their booth. The agents found the postman, who said he knew nothing about any Special Delivery letters sent to or from the Michigan Tavern. Rather than check the tavern itself, the agents returned to the Bankers Building.18
As they did, the Kellys emerged from the tavern. They took a taxi to a Cicero garage and picked up their new car. By noon they were gone. Not until an hour later did Purvis realize his mistake. At 2:00 he sent men to stake out the Michigan Tavern and kept them there through the weekend. Weeks afterward, when Hoover realized what had happened, he scrawled on a memo: “This was a miserable piece of work.”
Dayton, Ohio Friday, September 22 1:05 A.M. (Eastern Time)
Just hours before the Kellys’ narrow escape from the FBI in Chicago, John Dillinger arrived back in Dayton, hoping to rekindle his romance with Mary Longnaker. As it happened, that very afternoon the two detectives watching Longnaker’s boardinghouse had given up the surveillance and returned to their desks.
Longnaker’s landlady telephoned police when Dillinger showed up.
“He’s here,” she told the night sergeant, W. J. Aldredge.
“Who’s here?” Aldredge asked.
“John Dillinger, you dumb flatfoot!”
Within an hour police had the boardinghouse surrounded. Sergeant Aldredge and the two detectives, Russell Pfauhl and Charlie Gross, met the landlady at the backdoor. Dillinger, she whispered, was upstairs, in Longnaker’s room. Pfauhl, cradling a shotgun, and Gross, armed with a submachine gun, crept up the carpeted stairs. At the top, they knocked on Longnaker’s door. A moment later Longnaker opened it. Detective Gross stepped into the room, followed by Pfauhl. Dillinger, wearing an undershirt and gray suit pants, was standing in the living room, holding a sheaf of photographs he had taken at the World’s Fair.
“Stick ’em up, John,” Gross said. “We’re police officers.”
Dillinger slowly raised his hands, the photos fluttering to the floor. For a split second his hands wavered.
“Don’t, John,” Pfauhl said, leveling the submachine gun. “I’ll kill you.”19
Downtown Chicago 12:15 A.M. (Central Time)
A little after midnight, at almost the same moment Dayton detectives arrested Dillinger and escorted him in handcuffs to the city jail, Alvin Karpis and the Barker brothers sat in a darkened Hudson sedan on Jackson Street in Chicago’s financial district. The car sat in the shadow of the Bankers Building, nineteen floors below Melvin Purvis’s window, but Karpis’s attention was drawn to the Federal Reserve Building, a block ahead through the gloom. As he watched, two men emerged onto the sidewalk, one of them wheeling a hand truck stacked with bulging sacks. Two armed guards followed them.
“Okay,” someone said.
Karpis eased the Hudson ahead as he pushed a button on the dashboard. From behind the car a dense cloud of black smoke poured, forming a smokescreen intended to block oncoming traffic; Karpis had ordered the smoke machine installed because he was worried about the heavy flow of tourists driving west from the World’s Fair at the lakefront. Karpis had also had bulletproof glass installed in the driver’s side window and the entire car lined in armor plate.
A moment