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 attempts to find Dillinger. Huntington was obliged to sit down with Lieutenant John Howe, head of the Chicago Police Department’s Secret Squad, and strike a deal: if Howe’s men ignored McGinnis, they could handle any arrests he might arrange. Huntington pressed McGinnis to arrange a face-to-face meeting where Dillinger could be captured.
On Monday morning, November 13, McGinnis called Huntington in a state of excitement. Dillinger had just been at McGinnis’s apartment, McGinnis said, looking to pass eight $1,000 Liberty Loan bonds. They had agreed to meet in a downtown parking lot that afternoon. But there was a catch. McGinnis wanted rewards he had been promised for capturing
all
the gang members, not just Dillinger, and he refused to reveal the parking lot’s address until Huntington promised the Chicago police would
not
arrest Dillinger that day. Huntington telephoned Sergeant Howe, who checked with his superiors, who told him to use his best judgment. Howe told Huntington they would just watch. No arrests.
And so Huntington and Sergeant Howe found themselves in a Loop cafeteria that afternoon when a car driven by a man who looked very much like John Dillinger plucked McGinnis off a nearby corner. Three hours later McGinnis phoned. He had driven around Chicago all afternoon with Dillinger and had dozens of stories to relate. Almost offhandedly, he mentioned that Dillinger was suffering a case of barber’s itch, an inflammation of hair follicles.
au
McGinnis had arranged for him to visit a doctor named Charles Eye, who worked from offices around the corner from McGinnis’s apartment, on Keeler Avenue just below Irving Park Boulevard. Once again McGinnis insisted Huntington refrain from anything that would lead to Dillinger’s arrest.
Two of Matt Leach’s men were visiting Sergeant Howe’s office when Huntington arrived to relay the news. They immediately phoned Leach in Indianapolis, who within minutes initiated an angry series of phone calls with Howe and Huntington. Leach demanded that Dillinger be taken that night: they might never have a second chance. But Huntington, like his snitch, was eager to capture the whole gang, and Sergeant Howe backed his play. The two men reluctantly acceded to Leach’s demands to bring his two men along that night.
At 7:15, Howe, Huntington, and Leach’s men sat in a darkened car and watched as Dillinger arrived at Dr. Eye’s office in an Essex Terraplane sedan. A man and a woman, probably Pete Pierpont and Mary Kinder, remained in the car while Dillinger ran inside. Fifteen minutes later he came out and drove off. The officers let him go.
The next morning a cold front blew in, driving temperatures down to 15 degrees. When McGinnis checked in with Huntington, he told him that Dillinger had a follow-up appointment at Dr. Eye’s office that night. McGinnis urged that this time officers trail Dillinger to wherever he was living, where no doubt they could find the whole gang. By late afternoon, Sergeant Howe was again refereeing a vigorous debate over what to do. Huntington agreed with his informant: he wanted Dillinger followed. Leach, who had driven up from Indianapolis, wanted him captured, or dead. The day was ultimately carried by an officer who walked into Howe’s office that day from Lima, Ohio. He argued that Dillinger should be taken out to avenge the death of Sheriff Sarber.
By seven that night three squads of Chicago police had gathered on a side street two blocks from Dr. Eye’s office. Leach was there, stamping his feet to stay warm, as were Huntington and Howe. Because Dillinger was wanted in Indiana, the squads had been placed under Leach’s supervision. A little after seven, Huntington and a Chicago cop crept forward to watch Dr. Eye’s office. At 7:25 Dillinger drove up in the Essex. Billie sat beside him. As the two men watched, Dillinger hustled into the building, leaving Billie in the car.
Huntington trotted back to where the others were waiting and briefed them. Everything was set. The men piled into four cars and cruised to their positions. Three of the cars eased to the curb on Keller, a quiet street, facing Dillinger’s car. A fourth car, driven by a Chicago detective named Howard Harder, parked across Irving Park Boulevard, fifty yards behind the waiting Essex. They had Dillinger in a box. Leach had taken aside one of his men, Art Keller, and told him he had no interest in capturing Dillinger alive. He wanted Keller to shoot him. (It is a measure of how far civil rights have advanced in the intervening seventy years that both men enthusiastically related this story for years afterward.)
Minutes ticked by. Men shivered inside the unheated squad cars. Everyone saw Dillinger when he emerged onto the sidewalk, steam curling from his mouth. Dillinger glanced at the parked cars. Several, he noticed, were pointed the wrong way. He opened the driver’s-side car door, slid behind the wheel, and told Billie to hang on. Before anyone could react, Dillinger threw the Essex into reverse, tires squealing as he backed the car directly into the thick of Irving Park Boulevard traffic.
Across the street, Detective Harder hollered for his driver to ram Dillinger’s car, but in his haste the car’s engine flooded. Dillinger threw the Essex into first and it shot forward, heading east on Irving Park, narrowly avoiding an onrushing car. Behind Dillinger only one of his pursuers, a car driven by a Chicago detective named John Artery, managed to give chase. Sitting beside Artery was Art Keller, the officer with orders to kill Dillinger. Artery pushed the accelerator to the floor and in seconds the officers’ car pulled abreast of Dillinger’s fleeing Essex. “Get down!” Dillinger shouted to Billie, who scrunched into the floorboards.
Keller leaned out a window and opened fire, emptying a .38 and then a shotgun into Dillinger’s car. Dillinger screeched right onto Elston Avenue. Keller’s car stayed with him. In the years to come those involved would inflate the ensuing chase to a multimile, half-hour marathon. In fact, the chase was relatively short, lasting maybe a mile. Keller leaned out the window, repeatedly firing into the Essex, but no one was hit. At one point, Dillinger swung a sharp right off Elston, then swerved into a dead-end street. Behind him Detective Artery didn’t react in time. He raced by the street even as Dillinger reversed the Essex, rocketed in the opposite direction, and made his escape. “That bird sure can drive,” Keller breathed.
Dillinger and Billie abandoned the bullet-riddled Essex on the North Side and took a cab to Russell Clark’s apartment, where the gang was holding an impromptu party, dancing to the tunes on a radio. Mary Kinder heard someone pounding on the door, opened it, and was surprised when Dillinger and Billie tumbled in. Dillinger was convinced it was a syndicate assassination attempt; not till the next morning’s papers were they certain their pursuers had been police.
Front-page stories of the shoot-out introduced Dillinger to thousands of Chicagoans. The
Tribune,
writing that Dillinger’s “prowess in crime has been compared to the James boys and Harvey Bailey,”
19
passed on a breathless account of how police had traded shots with a machine gunner firing from an “unseen portal” within Dillinger’s car. In fact, Dillinger had never fired a shot; he was too busy driving. Several of the city’s six papers drew comparisons to Verne Miller’s escape sixteen days before.
While everyone had an idea who had betrayed them, Dillinger and Pierpont were certain it was Art McGinnis. They wasted no time clearing out of the Clarendon Avenue apartment, moving across town to Russell Clark’s. The Chicago police were right behind them; detectives raided the Clarendon flat the next day. Coincidentally, Dillinger’s old partner, Harry Copeland, whose heavy drinking made him a liability, was arrested the following night, after he had the stellar idea of pulling a gun on a woman with whom he was arguing outside a North Side bar. In his absence Pat Cherrington began sleeping with John Hamilton. Her sister Opal Long was already occupying Russell Clark’s bed.
Dillinger did not let police pressure disrupt his schedule. Gang members had been trying to pass stolen bonds through a fence in Milwaukee and had spotted an attractive bank en route, the American Bank and Trust Company, in the small lakeside city of Racine. That weekend, the gang rented an apartment in Milwaukee and cruised Racine’s downtown streets, studying the bank and scoping out escape routes. The money was beginning to run low, and Dillinger was brimming with expensive dreams, from buying and learning to fly an airplane to taking a long Florida vacation. They planned to hit the bank on Monday.
7
AMBUSHES
November 20 to December 31, 1933
Racine, Wisconsin Monday, November 20 2:30 P.M.
The numbing cold front had moved on, but as the five gang members cruised toward the American Bank and Trust Company, a cool wind was still blowing off Lake Michigan behind the bank. Russell Clark did the driving, dropping the others on downtown corners before parking in a lot behind the bank.
av
It was a mistake: the bank didn’t have a back door. Worse, the gang either didn’t notice or didn’t care that the Racine Police Department was only three blocks away.
Pete Pierpont, wearing a gray overcoat and matching fedora, was first into the lobby. He unfurled a Red Cross poster and without a word taped it up in the bank’s front window, obscuring the view of the teller cages from the outside. Dillinger, Makley, and Hamilton walked in a moment later. At the cages the head teller, Harold Graham, was counting a stack of bills. He had just pulled a NEXT WINDOW, PLEASE sign in front of his window when he heard someone say, “Stick ’em up!”
Graham kept his head lowered and ignored the order, thinking someone was joking.
“Stick ’em up!” Makley repeated.
Graham still didn’t look up. “Next window, please,” he said, with what one imagines was a touch of attitude.
Without a word, Makley raised his pistol and shot him. The bullet went through Graham’s right arm and lodged in his hip. He fell backward, stunned and bleeding. Somehow Graham kept his senses enough to press the alarm button. Outside, the alarm began ringing loudly, echoing up and down Main Street. Dillinger turned his head. Out on the sidewalks, passersby did the same. Two more alarms rang at police headquarters. Dillinger and Pierpont strode past the teller cages, ordering the eight or nine employees there to lie on the floor. Dillinger frog-marched the bank’s president, Grover Weyland, to open the vault, then hustled inside and began shoveling stacks of bills into a sack. Pierpont kept an eye on the front door. Among the frightened tellers and customers who watched him that day, all described the handsome, forceful Pierpont as the clear leader of the robbers.