Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [90]
They saw surprisingly little of the others—Russell Clark and Charles Makley and John Hamilton—but when the boys were tired they would have everyone over to play poker, the men chomping on handfuls of peanuts and exchanging war stories about their years behind bars.14 For a bunch of murderous ex-cons, they were an amiable lot, with few disagreements between them. “They were all friends,” Opal Long was to recall. “They were like a lot of old graduates getting together, only their school was prison and the things they had to talk about were not football games and parties, but the way they ‘snitched’ on jail keepers and the weeks they spent in ‘the black hole’ on bread and water. Those were the things that kept them together at a time when they would have been a lot safer to split up and go their own ways. They stuck together because they were afraid of strangers.”15
The one exception was Dillinger’s obvious dislike of the gang’s sixth member, Ed Shouse, a slick character Dillinger thought was trying to seduce Billie. The others noticed the sarcastic comments Dillinger aimed Shouse’s way, but it was the discovery that Shouse wanted to rob a bank on his own that led to his exile. Mary Kinder overheard him trying to get John Hamilton to join him. “You ain’t gonna do a damn thing,” Mary snapped. “This has always been a friendly bunch and you ain’t gonna take no two or three and go rob a bank.”16
The other members of the gang voted to banish Shouse that same night, and the next morning, when he arrived at Dillinger’s apartment, they each threw a roll of bills on the couch before him. “There’s your money,” Dillinger spat. “Now get your ass out.”17
The gang was wary of making new contacts in Chicago—Dillinger, like Alvin Karpis, was worried that police might bring heat on the Syndicate and anger Frank Nitti. The few people they did see tended to belong to an extensive network of Indiana State Prison alumni that flourished in the city. The ex-cons bunked in crowded apartments, dirty flophouses, or with girlfriends, and were always up for a quick buck. It was through this motley group, well monitored by the Chicago police, that word of Dillinger’s presence in the city filtered back to the growing pack of lawmen and private eyes who were hunting him.
Into this network one of the insurance investigators, Forrest Huntington, managed to insert a paid snitch, a former Michigan City acquaintance of Dillinger’s named Art McGinnis. In Chicago, McGinnis spread the word he was working as a fence eager to buy stolen bonds; Dillinger and Pierpont already had a middleman trying to move bonds from the Greencastle and St. Mary’s banks. Each week McGinnis passed a trove of rumors to Huntington, few of which could be verified. There were stories that Dillinger was trying to buy mortars at an army depot, casing banks in Indianapolis, looking to rob the Federal Reserve. Matt Leach squabbled with Huntington over McGinnis, whom he sought to control. Huntington balked. He considered Leach publicity-hungry and blamed him for the bungled attempts to capture Dillinger that August.
“I have tried to work with Captain Leach and confided information to him two months ago that, had it been handled properly, would have resulted in the arrest of John Dillinger,” Huntington wrote his superiors. “[But] Leach, by his indiscreet methods of sensationalizing criminal information to the press, by his domineering attitude toward city and county officers and by other irrational and erratic acts, has antagonized the majority of police officials of the state and they will not cooperate with him.”18
Huntington’s supervision of McGinnis was further complicated by the Chicago police, who placed the informant under surveillance as part of its own