As for the cops, Captain Stege retired and passed away a few years later. O’Neill the same. Zarkovich, however, became chief of detectives in East Chicago and then chief of police, surviving various grand jury investigations and reform administrations, working till his death in 1969. He never bragged about his role in the Dillinger shooting; he would only modestly say, “I just did my job.”
Polly Hamilton dropped out of sight for several years, but she turned up in Chicago in the forties, working at the Ambassador East Hotel in room service. Rumor had it she was doing more than providing late-night snacks and club soda, as she had a fancy Gold Coast apartment at the time. She was living in Old Town, married, still working for a hotel, when she died in 1969 of cancer of the tongue.
Anna Sage, despite Purvis’ pledge, was deported. In 1938 an angry Anna got on a train at LaSalle Street Station, destination Ellis Island; Hal Davis told me he saw a man see her off, and give her a package, whispering to her, calming her down. The man was Zarkovich. But before she sailed, she told reporters, “I will one day reveal startling new facts about the Dillinger slaying! They cannot keep me from coming back—I’ll be back someday!” She never did. After running a nightclub in Romania for some years, she began talking about going onstage to tell the “real story” of the Dillinger shooting. She was found dead along a Romanian roadside in April 1947. Cause of death remains a mystery.
Louis Piquett finally was disbarred, and went to Leavenworth in 1936, for a two-year sentence. He returned to bartending in 1938, but did a lot of legal work on the side, and still had friends in high places: President Truman, in January 1951, gave him a full pardon, and his reinstatement to the Illinois bar was imminent when he died that December.
The publicity the Biograph shooting brought to Melvin Purvis made him, and the G-man in general, a public hero. He resigned the division in 1935, after an apparently jealous Hoover crossed him, failing to back Purvis’ promise to Anna Sage of nondeportation, and (worse yet) pressuring Attorney General Cummings into denying permission for a Hollywood movie about Purvis’ adventures. Little Mel, “the most famous operative of the most famous law-enforcement agency in the United States,” hired on as spokesman for the Post Toasties Junior G-man Corps, appearing in comic-strip ads in the Sunday funnies. He worked on radio, as an announcer for FBI-oriented programs, and as a screenwriter; he even practiced law occasionally. During World War II he was a colonel and worked out of the War Crimes Office. But he ended up back home in South Carolina, running a radio station.
Then in 1959 one of Purvis’ most famous cases belatedly, publicly, unraveled. A judge released Roger Touhy, saying the kidnapping charges Purvis had brought years before were a fabrication devised by organized crime; twenty-three days after his release, Touhy was murdered by mob hit men.
Melvin Purvis, it was later said, read with morbid interest every newspaper and magazine piece he could assemble on the incident. At the same time he was suffering from mental depression, for which he took electroshock therapy. On February 29, 1960, he shot himself in the head with a .45 automatic.
Some reporters were quick to say this was the gun Purvis had carried the night he “shot” Dillinger. Of course, Melvin hadn’t fired a shot that night; nor did he or anyone else kill Dillinger.
No, gun buff that he was, Purvis selected something from his vast collection, specifically a chrome-plated .45, that he knew would do what he wanted it to: kill him.
I noted Purvis’ passing with interest and a little sadness. I didn’t dislike Purvis, really. He was no coward, certainly—he’d gone head-to-head with Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Volney Davis, Doc Barker and others, and come out on top. He’d even done some good investigative work, in the year following the Biograph. But he’d been used by the Outfit, unwittingly, and seeing one of his most famous cases come publicly undone, as it had with Touhy, must’ve been the straw.
Or one of them.
In October 1959, a letter arrived at A-1 Detective Agency addressed to Jimmy Lawrence, care of Nathan Heller.
It said: “Sleep easy. I’m not much for grudges—decided not to even the score. Wish you were here.”
It was signed “JD,” and had no address; just a California postmark.
Later I learned a longer letter had been sent to the Indianapolis Star, with a picture of a white-haired man who might be “Dillinger, twenty-five years later”; and yet another letter with picture to Emil Wanatka, the owner of the Little Bohemia Lodge, for the Dillinger Museum there. Both letters included information about Anna Sage, Jimmy Lawrence and Dillinger that was not common public knowledge.
I don’t know if my letter came from the same old guy who sent letters to the Star and Wanatka. But maybe Melvin Purvis received a similar letter, in early 1960.
And maybe J. Edgar did, as well. It makes me smile to think so, anyway. By the time such a letter might have arrived, the director’s famous displays of ghoulish memorabilia were not just to be found in the FBI Museum, but in the very anteroom where visitors waited for admission to Hoover’s office. Hoover would pass each day glass-cased enshrined mementos of that triumphant night at the Biograph: a straw hat, Polly Hamilton’s picture, gold-rimmed glasses, a cellophane-wrapped La Corona-Belvedere cigar. And of course facsimiles of the famous death mask.
The mask those student morticians made back at the Cook County Morgue.
Despite its extensive basis in history, this book is a work of fiction, and a few liberties have been taken with the facts, though as few as possible—and any blame for inaccuracies is my own, reflecting, I hope, the limitations of my conflicting source material, and the need to telescope certain minor events to make for a more smoothly flowing narrative. When fictional events have been included, an attempt has been made to graft them logically onto history, without contradicting known facts or the behavior patterns of the parties involved.
Several books consulted in the researching of this novel deserve singling out—notably Dillinger Days by John Toland (1963) and Dillinger: A Short and Violent Life (1962) by Robert Cromie and Joseph Pinkston. I am particularly indebted to Jay Robert Nash, whose persistence and research turned the legend of Dillinger’s survival into a bona fide theory; his Dillinger—Dead or Alive? (1970) was most useful, and is highly recommended to readers who would like to dig into that theory further (Nash published a revised, expanded version, The Dillinger Dossier, in 1983). Nash further explores the theory in Citizen Hoover (1972), and in his extensive Bloodletters and Badmen (1973), which served as a general reference for this book. Others have explored the theory, including Toland and Cromie/Pinkston, and in particular Carl Sifakis in The Encyclopedia of American Crime (1982). I should note that I do not draw exactly the same conclusions from the evidence at hand as does Nash, so he should not be held accountable for the version of Dillinger’s “death” as told in these pages; and I do not share with Nash any faith in the reliability of the reminiscences of Blackie Audett, a minor, self-aggrandizing contemporary of John Dillinger—Audett, in his autobiography Rap Sheet (1954) and in interviews given Nash, strikes me as a singularly unconvincing teller of tall tales. On the other hand, my own independent research has tended to substantiate Nash’s findings, and reveal him to have been accurate and thorough in his writings on the subject.
The characterization of Sally Rand is a fictionalized one, though based upon numerous newspaper and magazine articles, and especially drawing from Studs Terkel’s oral history, Hard Times (1970), which was a general reference for this book, as well. I know of no historic parallel in Sally Rand’s life for her relationship with Nate Heller, and (though Miss Rand is treated with great affection in these pages) wish to stress that no unflattering reflection upon this historical figure is intended.
The death of Dr. Joseph Moran, while consistently reported in various sources in a fashion in keeping with its depiction here, varies widely from source to source as to location; so I have taken the liberty of burying Dr. Moran where I please.
The “oth
er” Nate Heller mentioned briefly herein, as a “hot-money” fence, is a historical figure.
Several hardworking people helped me research this book, primarily George Hagenauer, whose contributions include helping develop the plan to kidnap J. Edgar Hoover (as George came to say, after initial skepticism about staging a kidnapping in the Loop, “I think we could pull it off!”). George, a life-long Chicagoan, is a Chicago history buff with an eye for detail; he provided invaluable help, and support. My friend and frequent collaborator, cartoonist Terry Beatty, also lent his support and help to this project, including adapting the map of the Loop printed herein. A tip of the fedora to Catherine Yronwode, for sharing with me the anecdote about a certain distant relation of hers (“Uncle” Lester Gillis) who played the game of “search me” with his young nephew. Thanks are also due Mike Gold; Ann DeLarye; Ray Gotto; Mickey Spillane; and the late Dave Gerrity. And I’d like to thank Dominick Abel, my agent; Tom Dunne, my editor; and Tom’s associate, Susannah Driver.
Photos selected by the author for use in this edition are courtesy UPI/Bettman Archives. Melvin Purvis photo is courtesy Tom Tumbusch, Illustrated Radio Premium Price Guide. Remaining photos have been selected from the personal collections of George Hagenauer and the author. Efforts to track the sources of certain photos have been unsuccessful; upon notification these sources will be listed in subsequent editions.
Hundreds of books, magazine articles (including many true-detectives magazines from the thirties), and newspaper stories (from the Tribune, Herald and Examiner, Daily News and other Chicago papers of the day) have been consulted in researching True Crime, the companion volume to my earlier novel True Detective (1983). I am particularly indebted to the anonymous authors of the Federal Writers Project volumes on the states of Illinois (1939) and Wisconsin (1941). Also, a few other books deserve singling out: The People Talk (1940), Benjamin Appel; The FBI Nobody Knows (1964), Fred J. Cook; Ten Thousand Public Enemies (1935), Courtney Ryley Cooper; Daddy Danced the Charleston (1970), Ruth Corbett; The Real Ma Barker (1970), Mirian Allen deFord; Captive City (1969), Ovid Demaris; The Director (1975), Ovid Demaris; Dining in Chicago (1931), John Drury; Tune in Yesterday (1976), John Dunning; Line Up Tough Guys (1966), Ron Goulart; Persons in Hiding (1938), J. Edgar Hoover; It’s a Racket (1929), Gordon L. Hostetter and Thomas Quinn Beesley; The Alvin Karpis Story (1971), Alvin Karpis with Bill Trent; Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis (1969), Harold M. Mayer and Richard C. Wade; The Bad Ones (1968), Lew Louderback; The Legacy of Al Capone (1975), George Murray; G-Men, Hoover’s FBI in American Popular Culture (1983), Richard Gid Powers; American Agent (1936), Melvin H. Purvis; The Devil’s Emissaries (1969), Myron J. Quimby; No Man Stands Alone (1957), Barney Ross and Martin Abramson; The Verse by the Side of the Road (1965), Frank Rowsome, Jr.; Syndicate City (1954), Alson J. Smith; The Stolen Years (1959), Roger Touhy; Chicago Uncensored (1965), Irle Waller.
When all the debts have been paid, or at least acknowledged, one remains: this book could not have been written without the love, help and support of my wife, Barbara Collins—Nate’s mother.
Photo Credit: Bamford Studio
Max Allan Collins has earned fifteen Private Eye Writers of America “Shamus” nominations, winning for his Nathan Heller novels, True Detective and Stolen Away, and receiving the PWA life achievement award, the Eye. His graphic novel, Road to Perdition, which is the basis of the Academy Award-winning film starring Tom Hanks, was followed by two novels, Road to Purgatory and Road to Paradise. His suspense series include Quarry, Nolan, Mallory, and Eliot Ness, and his numerous comics credits include the syndicated Dick Tracy and his own Ms. Tree. He has written and directed four feature films and two documentaries. His other produced screenplays include “The Expert,” an HBO World Premiere. His coffee-table book The History of Mystery received nominations for every major mystery award and Men’s Adventure Magazines won the Anthony Award. Collins lives in Muscatine, Iowa, with his wife, writer Barbara Collins. They have collaborated on seven novels and numerous short stories, and are currently writing the “Trash ‘n’ Treasures” mysteries.
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