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By Root 2075 0

office was worse than most. So far that year, as we have seen, Purvis and his men had solved their first two kidnappings—the William Hamm and Jake Factor cases—and in both it would turn out they had arrested innocent men. In his first attempt to capture a major criminal, Machine Gun Kelly, Purvis had “forgotten” the assignment. an The office that would eventually become the War on Crime’s epicenter occupied the entire nineteenth floor of the Bankers Building in Chicago’s financial district. The entrance was at the end of a hallway lined with chairs; these were usually occupied by reporters from the wire services and the six Chicago newspapers. The reporters passed the hours reading, smoking cigarettes, and pestering Purvis’s twenty-four-year-old secretary, Doris Rogers.ao Purvis had brought Rogers from his previous posting, in Birmingham, Alabama. She was his gatekeeper; no one passed through the swinging gate beside her desk without her say. Purvis’s office door opened behind her.

“Melvin’s office had no glamour at all,” she recalls. “A standard SAC desk, wooden. No pictures or memorabilia. This was not a nest, not some guy’s hangout, with his baby’s pictures. It was very restricted and disciplined.”

Beside Purvis’s office was the door to the nineteenth floor’s inner sanctum, the file room. Nowhere was Hoover’s passion for order more apparent than a Bureau file room. Seven carbon copies were made of every memo, Teletype, and telegram; a single typographical error was grounds for disciplinary action. The files were housed in government-issue gray-metal cabinets. Agents were not allowed in the file room. Only the clerk, Helen Dunkel, or her assistant had access. When an agent wanted a file, he asked one of them.

There was a single spartan conference room, usually used for interrogations. Out to Doris Rogers’s left stretched the pool, sometimes called the bullpen, a vast room lined with nearly one hundred identical wooden desks where the agents sat. Each desktop was the same, just a black telephone and a blotter; personal memorabilia or family pictures were not allowed. Desktops were left spotless at the end of each day; any work was expected to be returned to the file room or taken home. Agents did not type their own reports. They were dictated to the two stenographers, twin sisters surnamed Barber. Only Purvis ate at his desk; crumbs or stains were grounds for disciplinary action. Most of the forty or so agents grabbed sandwiches at a lunch counter in the lobby, which featured a thirty-five-cent special. “I remember Melvin saying, ‘I’ll be so goddamn glad when I get to someplace where they don’t call a ham sandwich a gentleman’s lunch,’” Rogers recalls.

On the surface, the agents were as similar as their desks: dark suits, black socks, shiny black shoes, crisp parts in their oiled hair. They signed in on entry and exit; if an agent was even one minute late for work, Purvis had to explain why to Washington. Two tardies risked a suspension. Many of the men, like Purvis and his number two that autumn, a kindly Arkansan named Douglas O. Smith, were Southerners with state-college degrees.ap A few were married; most shared apartments.

Seven decades later, few of the men she worked with have left lasting impressions on Doris Rogers. One who did was the office boy, an energetic Polish kid from the South Side named Johnny Madala who was forever pestering Purvis to let him do something official. “Johnny was my favorite: laughing, smiling, helpful, unprepossessing, unassuming,” Rogers remembers. “Everyone loved Johnny Madala.”

In an unusual twist, both Madala and Doris Rogers were to be pulled into the hunt for Verne Miller. Purvis was out of town the day the tentative identification of Vi Mathias was made. Madala volunteered to watch her. Posing as a traveling auditor, he moved into her apartment building that weekend. His unit, 211, was tucked into an alcove sixty feet down a carpeted hallway from Mathias’s. The only view of her door was through a shuttered ventilator grate in his kitchenette.

Three days after moving in, Madala