Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [77]
The story of Kelly’s arrest would become one of Hoover’s favorites, one he told and retold for forty years. According to Hoover’s version of events, as advanced in numerous FBI-approved books, magazine articles, and B-movies, Kelly had pleaded with arresting agents, “Don’t shoot, G-men!” It was the first time FBI agents had heard the term. When agents asked what he meant, Kelly explained that G-man was short for “Government man.” This story, debunked as early as a 1946 article in Harper’s, is almost certainly untrue. Hundreds of articles written in the weeks afterward make no mention of it. Years later Kelly himself told his son he’d never used the term. It first surfaced in a series of FBI-sponsored feature stories the journalist Rex Collier wrote nine months later, in July 1934, prompting some to suggest the term “G-man” sprang not from the mouth of Machine Gun Kelly but from the fertile minds of Hoover’s publicity men.
Research for this book, however, indicates that the term actually did originate with Kelly’s arrest, though it didn’t happen quite the way Hoover told it. In a single, long-forgotten telephone interview Agent Rorer gave to a Chicago American reporter hours after Kelly’s capture, Rorer said it was Kathryn who uttered the historic words. As Rorer told the American reporter, at the moment she was arrested, “Kelly’s wife cried like a baby. She put her arms around [Kelly] and said: ‘Honey, I guess it’s all up for us. The ‘g’ men won’t ever give us a break. I’ve been living in dread of this.’”24
And so a nickname was born.
Dayton, Ohio
That Tuesday morning, as steel bars clanged shut behind the Kellys in Memphis, John Dillinger sat in a cell of his own in Dayton, Ohio. For four days sheriffs and deputies from across eastern Indiana and western Ohio had paraded through the jail, showing Dillinger to more than a dozen people who had witnessed bank robberies that summer. He was identified as a participant in robberies at New Carlisle and Bluffton, Ohio, and Indianapolis and Dalesville, Indiana. The Indiana detective Matt Leach had been the first to arrive, just hours after Dillinger’s arrest Friday morning. He interviewed Dillinger in his cell, asking about several different bank robberies. All he got for his effort was a grin. “What are you talking about?” Dillinger asked.
That Tuesday, however, there was only one topic of conversation at the jail, and it wasn’t bank robberies. The news was splattered all over the papers. The night before, ten convicts, including all of Dillinger’s old pals, had escaped from the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City. Matt Leach was convinced they were coming for Dillinger.
6
THE STREETS OF CHICAGO
October 12 to November 20, 1933
Of all the criminals of our present era whose activities have been brought so forcibly to the eye of the public, there is probably no one whose career so graphically illustrates the inadequacies of our systems as does that of John Dillinger.
—MELVIN PURVIS
Lima, Ohio Thursday, October 12
John Dillinger sat at a table in a jail bullpen, playing pinochle with three other prisoners. Armed officers had brought him to Lima, a crossroads town in northwestern Ohio, to stand trial for an unremarkable robbery he pulled in nearby Bluffton that August. It wasn’t an imposing jail, just a stone-block wing at the rear of Sheriff Jess Sarber’s house on the town square; the Allen County Courthouse loomed across an alley. Sheriff Sarber was a roundish, kindly sort, a former used-car salesman who turned to law enforcement when the Depression forced him out of business. His wife was a fine cook, serving the prisoners meals of pork chops, ribs, and mashed potatoes.
This wasn’t how Dillinger thought it would end. He hadn’t robbed banks long enough for Pretty Boy Floyd’s brand of fatalism to set in. In fact, Dillinger