Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [75]
“I came after—” Ramsey started to say.
Coleman cut him off. “I know what you came after,” he said. Since last seeing the Kellys, Coleman had been questioned by FBI agents and mistakenly assumed he was under surveillance; the Dallas office wanted to watch him, but it simply didn’t have enough agents.
“Well, I’m contact man for George and Kathryn Kelly,” Ramsey said. “My name is—”
“I don’t care anything about your name,” Coleman said. He told Ramsey he wanted nothing further to do with the Kellys.
“Will it be safe for me to take her furs with me?” Ramsey asked.
“No, it won’t be safe for you to take anything or bring anything,” Coleman said. “You’ll be arrested before you get [a hundred yards]. This place is covered with laws . . .”
“I’m not hot,” Ramsey said.
“You will be before you get far,” Coleman said. “They will tail you out of here.”22
Ramsey left, badly shaken. He drove north to the town of Gainesville, stopping at noon at the Western Union office, where he sent a telegram to Kelly: HAD SEVERAL TOUGH BREAKS . . . , it read. DEAL FELL THROUGH. TRIED TO GET LATER APPOINTMENT. BEST PROSPECT WAS AFRAID. IMPOSSIBLE. CHANGED HIS MIND. DON’T WANT TO BRING HOME A SAD TALE. CAN GO ON IF ADVISABLE. WIRE INSTRUCTIONS HERE.
By that point Geralene was begging to rejoin her parents. On the drive to Gainesville, Ramsey dropped her off at the train station in Fort Worth and bought her a ticket to Oklahoma City, where her parents remained under the FBI’s care. It was a fateful decision. No sooner had Geralene left Ramsey than she sent a telegram to her father. It read: MEET ME ROCK ISLAND STATION TEN FIFTEEN TONIGHT. GERRY.
The Arnolds were waiting for Geralene when she arrived in Oklahoma City that night. So was the FBI. The little girl told Pop Nathan everything she knew. The Kellys, she said, were staying at a home on East Raynor Street in Memphis.
This time Hoover was determined the Kellys would not escape. Briefed by Pop Nathan, he phoned William Rorer, the thirty-one-year-old SAC in Birmingham, Alabama, and ordered him to Memphis to raid the East Raynor Street home by first light. It was already past midnight in Alabama, and Rorer, a lean, handsome World War I veteran who had joined the Bureau in 1929, realized he could never drive to Memphis by dawn.
An airplane was his only hope. He phoned and woke the man who ran Birmingham’s sole air-charter service, but the man insisted he wasn’t allowed to fly at night. He told Rorer to try the National Guard, which had planes at Birmingham’s Roberts Field. After several more calls Rorer tracked down a National Guard colonel in Montgomery. The colonel said he was pleased to help but had no authority. Rorer called the colonel’s superior, a National Guard general at Fort McPherson, Georgia, and “after considerable persuasion” managed to arrange a plane for the flight to Memphis.23
Rorer and another agent boarded an army plane at Birmingham’s Roberts Field at 3:20 A.M. and touched down at the Memphis airport two hours later, at 5:30. There they were met by the Bureau’s resident agent at Memphis and a half-dozen policemen he had rounded up. The group drove to the foot of East Raynor Street, where uniformed cops were already waiting. East Raynor was a quiet street lined with matching brick bungalows, just off busy Speedway Avenue on the city’s south side. The house at 1408, six houses up from Speedway, was dark. Rorer wasted no time with unnecessary reconnaissance. In the predawn darkness he sent two Memphis detectives creeping up either side of the house. Then he and a detective named William Raney drew their guns and stepped onto the front porch.
No sound came from inside the house. Rorer tried the screen door. It opened. Glancing at Detective Raney, he tried the front door itself. It too opened. Quietly Rorer