Seven Silent Men (33 page)

Four miles across town Sissy Hennessy completed the tale of the bucking bronco Sue Ann Willis had told her and Tina Beth early in the day.

“The horse bucks from one end of the arena to the other with Cowboy Carlson holding on as best he can,” she told Cub in the darkness of their bedroom. “And then the poor animal dropped dead. At the height of a buck its heart must have given out. It hit the ground and collapsed and died with Cowboy partially pinned underneath. The rodeo officials temporarily suspended Cowboy Carlson's license until an autopsy could be done on the horse, an autopsy to see if he had given it some drug. The veterinarians found a bag of stolen antique coins in the anal tract. Luckily for Cowboy, the coins weren't valuable. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and served two months at a county work farm but had his rodeo license revoked for good. Poor Cowboy was barred from rodeo-riding for life.”

“Poor?” Cub said.

“He was innocent, Cub,” Sissy said. “Whatever his other crimes, he was innocent of smuggling. And who knows, could he have ridden in a rodeo, maybe he wouldn't have had to return to theft?”

“Who knows?”

“When Cowboy Carlson got back to Prairie Port he of course went looking for Mule Corkel. Mule Corkel was nowhere to be found. He was hiding from Cowboy. Some months later, when he thought Cowboy had calmed down, Mule Corkel surfaced. Nothing happened for a while. One night late, Cowboy Carlson was walking down the street and saw Mule Corkel sitting in Howard Johnson's having a sandwich. Cowboy Carlson ran all the way to a stable. The next thing Mule Corkel knows, he's looking up from his sandwich in the Howard Johnson's and Cowboy Carlson is trying to ride through the door on a horse. Mule Corkel ran out the back door and down the street with Cowboy Carlson riding after him on this horse, riding after him and trying to rope Mule Corkel with a lariat … Cub, maybe that's what Mule Corkel saw when Les Kebbon was trying to lasso him from the jeep. Maybe he saw Cowboy Carlson coming at him.”

“… Maybe.”

“Cowboy Carlson chases Mule Corkel down the street. Rides behind Mule Corkel, not roping him with the noose but lashing him on the back with it. He rides and lashes and drives Mule Corkel right through a plate-glass window. Mule Corkel was three weeks in a hospital recovering from the cuts. Then he invites Cowboy Carlson to his ranch and gives him a new horse and they make up.”

Sissy lit a cigarette. “Even if it was true, why would Denis Corticun hide it?”

“It is true,” Cub told her. “It's been confirmed.”

“But why cut it out of even interoffice reports?”

“It makes us look bad, Sissy,” Cub told her. “God only knows I don't care for Corticun or Quinton or any of their headquarters crowd, but this gang of criminals is making us look the laughingstock.”

“When more comes out, you'll look just fine. The Bureau always does.”

“No, it doesn't, Sissy. And it hasn't for a while. What's worse with the Mormon State robbers is, they're funny. Really funny. Chasing Mule down the highway with him dressed like an Indian with war paint on, the man was
funny
. He was yelling out the name ‘Vonda Lizzie' and letting out war whoops and every now and then turning back and sticking his tongue out at me, and I almost cracked up. He had tried to cut down our guys with a machine gun minutes before, and it took all I had not to laugh while I chased him … but we're
not
funny, Sissy. Nothing about the FBI is humorous. We're looking bad in this. The public is amused by the crooks. It likes them. It may not like us.”

Sissy turned to her husband, put her arms around him. “The Bureau is fine. You're fine. You don't have to keep back reports, you just don't.”

“If we want to keep them out of the press, Sissy, I think we must. Everything we do in that office of ours has a habit of ending up on the front page. Someone sees to it.”

FOURTEEN

It had taken the strongest agents of the residency office, E. G. Womper and Ralph Dafney and Cub Hennessy, to hold Marion “Mule” Corkel down and handcuff him. It had taken the heaviest, Happy de Camp and Hank Perch, to sit on Mule and keep him from thrashing and kicking on the auto trip into the city. One of the bravest agents, or more foolhardy, Dick Travis, had leaned over from the front seat and tried to apply a gag to the cursing, spitting, shouting white-nosed prisoner in the back. Travis was bitten three times before succeeding.

Thoughts of bringing Mule to the eleventh-floor residency office for fingerprinting and photographing, as was routine procedure, were dismissed. The media hung out on the twelfth floor, was in and around the building almost as often as the agents themselves. The media, for reasons incomprehensible to the local agents, had not learned of the raid on Mule's farm. Had either not found out about the Baton Rouge arrest of Wiggles Loftus and the “all points” alerts emanating from that city for the two other suspects or had not connected these events to the Mormon State robbery.

Mule was driven to the rear entrance of the federal building. When the coast seemed clear, was carried bodily and on the run through the door down into a steel isolation cell in the basement. Once loose in the cell and unhandcuffed, Mule, in his war paint and loin cloth, began shouting and cursing and kicking the walls and beating his head furiously against the door. Cub and Dafney and Womper and two U.S. marshals rushed in and restrained him. Shackled his wrists and ankles. Locked a metal body belt around his waist and chained the belt to a steel rung in the steel wall.

Legal procedure dictated the prisoner must be afforded an arraignment before the assistant U.S. magistrate as quickly as possible, must be provided with legal counsel. The assistant U.S. magistrate could not be reached, and word was left for him. Mule would not answer whom he wished to defend him, would not make a phone call … did nothing but twist and curse in his irons. The Bureau photographer and fingerprint equipment arrived. Four men held Mule while a fifth cleaned away his war paint. A picture was gotten. With inordinate trouble, so were prints. E. G. Womper and Ralph Dafney stayed inside the steel cell with Mule. Dick Travis waited on the other side of the door. The rest of the agents hied it back to the office.

There was excitement on the eleventh floor. And suspense. The rare sort which comes only as a great case begins to crack … can be expected at any moment to burst full open. Manpower lacked, that was so. Brewmeister was in Baton Rouge waiting to escort Wiggles Loftus to Prairie Port. Les Kebbon and Ted Keon were en route to Meridan County to retrieve Elmo Ragotsy from Chief Sheriff O. D. Don Pensler. Three agents had been left with Mule in the basement of the federal building. But Jez Jessup had returned from Louisiana and he worked feverishly along with Strom and Cub and Yates and Rodney Willis and Hank Perch and Preston Lyle and Donnie Bracken and Hap de Camp and Butch Cody and Heck Bevins. Worked feverishly over incoming information on the eight men alleged to be the Mormon State robbers … and the jigsaw puzzle rapidly began falling into place. Began producing images.

River Rat Ragotsy, according to the latest informant accounts reaching the eleventh floor, had used the caves and tunnels in the area of Mormon State bank to hide contraband … had been doing so for years … had used the tunnels and caves north and south of the bank as well … was a scavenger in such tunnels … had been picked up several times, but never booked, for scavenging in the city's water and sewerage tunnels. There was no known direct connection between Ragotsy and Reverend Wallace Tecumseh “Windy Walt” Sash, but, thirty years before, both men had been listed as possible witnesses for the aborted 1941 grand jury inquiry into the disappearance of heavy machinery from the MVA hydroelectric plant inside Warbonnet Ridge. Fifty-three-year-old Wallace Sash was, in fact, a reverend of the First Church of the Holy Conversion, an Illinois-based and-accredited operation that the federal government had unsuccessfully tried to discredit as nothing more than a tax dodge. Sash had a number of arrests, but no convictions, for petty theft, petty extortion and the molesting of children. His only conviction was for a felony—extorting funds from a mentally incompetent uncle—and ended in a three-year jail sentence. An appeals court reversed the decision. Windy Walt, a native Illinoisan, was a long-time friend and alleged underworld associate of another Illinois resident, Bicki “Little Haifa” Hale. It was believed that Sash had first served as the “keep” or “holder” of stolen funds entrusted to him by Bicki Hale, that later he became a full partner in many of Hale's illegal ventures.

Bicki “Little Haifa” Hale did look Semitic, but he received his nickname in an Indiana reformatory, where he was the constant shadow of an older inmate, Clarence Highfall. Clarence had a speech impediment and pronounced his name “Cwarence Highfaw.” Around the yard he became Haifa. His shadow, Bicki, became Little Haifa. Bicki Hale was a car thief and adequate lockpicker before going to reform school. He came out a journeyman safecracker. Years of subsequent practice elevated this skill, but only somewhat. According to underworld sources, Little Haifa rated as a competent box man who was far better with drills than with explosives. Where Little Haifa excelled, in the estimation of his criminal peers, was at organization. They attributed Bicki's almost nonexistent conviction record to this. To organization alone. Not to spotting the potential mark, definitely not. If Bicki picked the mark, there was every chance it was an impractical, if not preposterous, choice. Bicki was a dreamer. A Don Quixote. His eyes were far bigger than his talent. That's why he and Windy Walt Sash were a perfect pair. Both were down-home crooks who aspired to be big-time operators. With Bicki, confidential underworld informants told their Romor 91 contacts, “Let the other guy spot and pick the score.”

Let Bicki organize and execute and pay off and you can't go wrong, stated the question-and-answer report sent in from an FBI agent interviewing an underworld contact outside of Moline, Illinois. The full transcript went on to say:

Q: How large a score has Bicki Hale made?

A: He's In the four to five range, definitely.

Q: Four to five hundred thousand dollars?

A: That's his ballpark.

Q: Nothing bigger?

A: He could hit bigger, sure. We all could hit bigger. Luck burps, we all hit bigger. Even you.

Q: Without luck, reasonably, how much bigger a score do you feel Bicki could perpetrate?

A: I love that word, perpetrate.

Q: How big?

A: Bicki? If he gets all the luck, he could maybe bring home a million or two for the night.

Q: That's all, two million?

A: Hey, big roller, show me where I can pick it up and I don't have to talk to you no more.

Q: Is it possible he could bring off a score larger than two million?

A: Anything's possible. Only don't let him do the spotting. Let someone else find it and bring it to Little Haifa, like I said. That's how he got pinched the last time. Sent to the crapper. 'Cause he picked it too. Spotted and picked. He ain't no spotter. He's day labor.

Bicki “Little Haifa” Hale's cellmate at Statesville Penitentiary in Illinois, as revealed by data being assembled on the eleventh floor, was Willy “Cowboy” Carlson. Carlson and Hale were known to be friendly with another inmate on the tier below them, thirty-one-year-old Thomas “The Worm” Ferugli. Ferugli, a former coal miner, was associated with criminal “tunnel jobs” and petty burglaries. While pleading for a lesser sentence in court, his lawyer argued Ferugli had an aversion to guns, reasoned that if Ferguli had carried a gun when burglarizing the Alcyon Flower Shop outside of Chicago at midnight, the shop's unarmed owner probably wouldn't have attacked Ferugli with his fists … would have most likely stepped back and put his hands up and let Ferugli empty the cash register and escape. The judge wondered aloud what would have happened if the defendant was holding a gun and the owner still attacked. The judge sentenced Ferugli, a chronic burglar of cash registers, to three to five years at Statesville.

Lionel “Meadow Muffin” Epstein, proprietor of a modest Peoria, Illinois, wholesale hardware and plumbing supply warehouse, had no known criminal record but was suspected by state trooper intelligence of being the illicit purchasing agent for equipment needed by robbery gangs. The Q&A with the Moline informant hinted of other activities:

Q: Have you heard of Lionel Epstein?

A: I think so.

Q: Is he an associate of Bicki Hale?

A: Little Haifa? Nah, that ain't where I heard of him from. It's Epstein's got to do with Windman.

Q: Windman?

A: Windy Walt Sash, a scam artist down southways. Windy Walt and this Epstein run second-rate hustles. Crooked lotto games and the like. Epstein, I think he got this cut-rate supply house going, see what I mean? Sells you guns and nitroglycerin and drills. Anything for a job. Sells it cut-rate 'cause most of it's defective. He's a real piece-of shit, Epstein is. Soft shit. They call him Meadow Muffin.

New intelligence reaching the eleventh floor on Marion “Mule Fucker” Corkel stated he was a good handyman who was particularly skilled at repairing automobiles and electrical gadgets. Mule was described as being “perhaps a borderline psychotic” who possessed an extremely quick temper and was given to sudden violent and dangerous rages.

Mule, as agents of the residency knew from earlier reports, was directly connected with Cowboy Carlson in several small smuggling activities and one horse death. Cowboy had shared an apartment with River Rat Ragotsy as well as worked on Ragotsy's boat. Lamar “Wiggles” Loftus had also worked on the Ragotsy boat, where he met Carlson, and with Carlson attempted an armed robbery which was bungled and landed Carlson in prison. Wiggles, a World War II hero, was believed to be an expert with explosives.

There was a pall, a numbing, which affected certain of the agents as the incoming information was shouted out across the room. These were not, these eight suspects, the breed of super-criminals described by the press or Denis Corticun. Not wizards or even sub wizards. Not the cream of the crime world by a longshot.