Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [97]
“You’re so smart,” James snapped. “Find it yourself.” A moment later Clyde did, and he drove the coupe off into the Texas night.
All that autumn Hoover fended off attempts from Midwestern lawmen and editors to draw the FBI into pursuing the Dillinger and Barrow gangs. His position only hardened in mid-November when the Bureau was dealt devastating blows on back-to-back days in the War on Crime’s two major cases, the Hamm kidnapping and the Kansas City Massacre.
The Hamm trial began in St. Paul on November 17. The case against the Chicago mob boss Roger Touhy and his gangmates was weak, and prosecutors knew it. Almost all the eyewitnesses were unsure of their identifications, and the defendants’ alibis proved unbreakable. Hamm himself, who remained shaken by his experience, couldn’t identify any of his kidnappers and seemed reluctant to testify. Pop Nathan told an aide he was “disgusted with Hamm’s attitude” and “was suspicious of the entire matter, believing that Hamm had been dealing with the gangster element in distributing his beer.”4 The federal prosecutor, Joe Keenan, closed the door to Hoover’s office before bluntly telling the director, “We have no case.”5 And they didn’t. After a weeklong trial, Touhy and his codefendants were acquitted of all charges.ay Editorialists decried the verdict, saying it would only encourage kidnappers. Hoover was apoplectic.
News in the massacre case went from bad to worse. Verne Miller had vanished, though in the wake of his Halloween escape, agents had learned much about his travels. A search of the car Miller abandoned in Chicago turned up a pair of riding breeches sold by a shop at the luxurious Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. A check of hotel records indicated Miller had registered on August 13 as a doctor from Maplewood, New Jersey, then moved on to the Greystone Inn in Roaring Gap, North Carolina. His golfing partners complained to agents that Miller was a poor sport, quitting one game at the Greenbrier after a bad shot.
Miller had posed as a traveling optician, as indicated by a bag of eyeglasses, frames, lenses, and business cards found in his car. These items led agents to the Mason Optical Service in Newark, New Jersey, whose owner told agents he’d supplied the equipment to a man named Irwin Silvers. Newark police recognized Dr. Silvers as the brother of a gangster named Al Silvers, a member of the Longy Zwillman Mob that dominated the New Jersey underworld. Agents brought in Irwin Silvers on November 15; the doctor admitted buying the equipment for his brother but denied knowing Verne Miller. “This bird certainly is a liar,” Hoover scrawled on a memo the next morning.
Arrest orders were issued for Al Silvers, and the good news came fast: Silvers was found the next day in Connecticut. The bad news was, he was dead. Silvers’s nude body had been found in a field near the town of Somers, with a clothesline wrapped around his neck, his face a bloody mess, apparently thanks to a hammer. The next day an informant for the New York City police reported that Silvers had been killed by Zwillman’s gang for giving Miller unauthorized aid, thus bringing heat onto the gang’s operations. Seventy years later, the killing remains unsolved.
In fact, the FBI had been hearing rumors for months that the underworld wanted the Miller manhunt, with its attendant raids and political pressure, to end quickly. Now it appeared the Bureau was in a race with underworld bosses to get Miller. If the syndicate got to Miller first, Hoover realized, the massacre case might never be solved. Which is why, on the afternoon of November 28, eight days after Silvers’s body was discovered, four FBI men found themselves sitting in a midtown Manhattan lawyer’s office, interviewing Lepke Buchalter.
What the agents expected from the suave head of Murder, Inc., isn’t clear. In the event, Buchalter