Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [84]
They drove up into the Hollywood hills, trying to find Clark Gable’s house. Once or twice Karpis got lost, and after a while he noticed a patrol car behind him. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he mumbled. “We’re gonna get stopped if we don’t.”
Spooked, Karpis checked out of the hotel and drove straight back to Reno, taking the direct route, across Death Valley. Rejoining the gang, they fell back into its routines, hanging around the casinos, playing keno, talking about Hawaiian vacations they would never take, debating whether to rob a bank outside of San Francisco. The only excitement came when the new man, Harry Campbell, shoved a pistol into his pocket and it went off, nearly blowing off his testicles. Everyone agreed it was time to head back to Chicago.7
Leaves were beginning to fall across the Midwest, and the mystery of the Kansas City Massacre was no closer to being solved. On September 13, Missouri prosecutors had indicted a dozen figures in the case, but it was a half-hearted gesture, a compromise between federal lawyers who wanted murder indictments and local prosecutors who found scant evidence for any case at all. The known conspirators—Deafy Farmer and company—were charged along with a half-dozen possible assassins—Pretty Boy Floyd, Harvey Bailey and Bailey’s gang—but only for obstruction of justice. The Bureau’s theory remained that Verne Miller had carried out the massacre with Bailey and the Kansas escapees; Bailey, of course, strenuously denied any involvement as he was packed off to Leavenworth following his conviction in the Urschel kidnapping.
Hoover’s men couldn’t shake Bailey’s alibi. After three months, they hadn’t uncovered any evidence placing him or his men at Union Station. Their best witness, Samuel Link, who placed Bailey at the scene, had been discredited after a friend told agents that “Link makes very wild statements at times and claims that he was with Teddy Roosevelt in South America and has personally met all the crown heads of Europe.”8 Worse, bullets from Bailey’s guns didn’t match those at the scene. Almost every time a Midwestern bank was robbed, bullets were sent to a Kansas City lab. It checked rounds fired by Bonnie and Clyde at Platte City, by Baby Face Nelson at Grand Haven, but found no matches.
With the case against Bailey’s gang tenuous at best, agents focused on finding the remaining conspirators. Dick Galatas, the Hot Springs gambler, had vanished. Members of Bailey’s gang were robbing banks all across Oklahoma; one, Big Bob Brady, was shot and captured in New Mexico in early October, but one of the massacre survivors, Reed Vetterli, returned dejected from his hospital room, unable to identify him. Most important, there were still no leads on Verne Miller or his girlfriend, Vi Mathias. In St. Paul, Chicago, and Kansas City, agents returned to the files to check leads pushed aside that summer.
Three weeks later, the break came in Chicago. Agents there remembered a months-old tip that a nightclub waitress named Bobbie Moore was Vi Mathias’s best friend. Melvin Purvis had placed Moore under surveillance for a time that summer but had dropped her once agents began chasing Mathias all over the East Coast. Inexplicably, it took weeks before anyone suggested they recheck Bobbie Moore. Her last known address was the Sherone Apartments on Sheridan Road. When the building’s manager was summoned to the FBI office on Friday, October 26, she identified not only Moore’s photograph but that of Vi Mathias as well. Verne Miller’s girlfriend, or a woman who looked strikingly like her, had moved into the building in late August.
In late 1933, the FBI was still only a shadow of the professional crime-fighting organization it was to become. The capture of Machine Gun Kelly was anomalous. Hoover’s College Boys were long on energy but short on experience, and it showed: suspects like Vi Mathias were found, then lost; tantalizing leads went ignored in file cabinets; most of the men were still learning how to use a pistol.
In retrospect, Melvin Purvis’s Chicago