by Curt Gentry
Hoover was delighted with this information. He’d been waiting for over a year to take on America’s most famous outlaw. At this time, several months before the passage of the crime bills, neither bank robbery nor interstate flight was a federal crime—but taking a stolen vehicle across a state line was, and this violation of the National Motor Vehicle Act gave Hoover the justification he needed to bring the Bureau into the case.
A special operation was quickly mounted, with the code name JODIL, the Bureau’s telegraphic shorthand for “John Dillinger.” But it wasn’t for another month and a half—during which the outlaw managed to evade two Bureau traps—that Purvis received a telephone tip that Dillinger and five other members of his gang were holed up at Little Bohemia, a summer resort some fifty miles north of Rhinelander, Wisconsin.
Checking the large wall map in his office, Hoover determined that the two field offices closest to Rhinelander were St. Paul (185 air miles) and Chicago (275 air miles), and ordered squads flown in from both.
While the agents were still en route, Hoover called in reporters and announced that his men had Dillinger surrounded. They should notify their papers, he told them, to be ready for good news.
It was almost dark when the first agents landed. Racing to Little Bohemia in whatever automobiles they could commandeer, they arrived too late to scout out the area around the lodge. Also, as they crept forward, intending to surround the building, a dog started barking. Sure the suspects had been alerted, Purvis told his men to be ready to fire. Moments later, as if confirming Purvis’s suspicions, three men hurried out of the lodge and got into an automobile. It was now dark and they didn’t see the agents; nor, with the radio on and the motor running, did they hear the command to surrender. As they started to drive away, the agents let loose a barrage of shots, killing one man and seriously wounding the other two. All three were local workers who’d stopped by the lodge for a drink.
Now alerted by the gunfire, Dillinger and his whole gang—“probably the largest aggregation of modern desperadoes ever bottled up in one place,” Melvin Purvis would ruefully recall8—escaped through the back windows. A short time later, on a back road some miles from Little Bohemia, the Dillinger gang member Lester Gillis, a.k.a. Baby Face Nelson, encountered three lawmen and shot them before they could even draw their guns, killing Special Agent Carter Baum and wounding another special agent and a local constable.
Those papers which had saved space for Hoover’s promised “good news” got another story instead. Before daybreak, reporters from all over the Midwest were descending on Little Bohemia. According to John Toland, author of The Dillinger Days, “No crime story in America had ever caught such excitement.”9 Once details of the botched raid got out, criticism of the Bureau, and its director, was immediate and widespread.
As Will Rogers put it, “Well, they had Dillinger surrounded and was all ready to shoot him when he came out, but another bunch of folks came out ahead, so they just shot them instead. Dillinger is going to accidentally get with some innocent bystanders some time, then he will get shot.”10
This time the BI director let the attorney general talk to the press. Cummings denied that J. Edgar Hoover was to be demoted or discharged. His explanation for the fiasco—that if the Bureau had been given enough funds for an armored car, the result would have been entirely different—was soundly ridiculed by Republican members of Congress.
Under fire, Hoover looked for a scapegoat and chose his once-favorite SAC. Melvin Purvis reluctantly submitted his resignation. It was not accepted. But, although Purvis remained head of the Chicago field office, Hoover gave command of the Dillinger squad to Sam Cowley. A former Mormon missionary who had been working as an assistant to Pop Nathan, Cowley had had no practical experience on the firing line. He was, however, a tough taskmaster, and he drove himself even harder than his men.
Hoover instructed Cowley, “Take him alive if you can but protect yourself.” The attorney general was even more blunt: “Shoot to kill—then count to 10.”11
Hoover also more than doubled the size of the squad, upped the reward to $10,000, and on June 22, 1934—John Dillinger’s thirty-first birthday—in a stroke of public relations genius dubbed him Public Enemy Number One.*
A day short of a month later, an Indiana policeman, Sergeant Martin Zarkovich, contacted Purvis. One of his informants, a brothel madam named Ana Cumpanas, who went by the name Anna Sage, had approached him with the offer of a deal.† Facing deportation for being an undesirable alien, Mrs. Sage offered to turn over Dillinger in exchange for the reward money and the canceling of her deportation.
After meeting with Mrs. Sage, and receiving enough information to convince him that she was in contact with the fugitive, Purvis called Hoover and a deal was struck. Although its terms later became a matter of dispute, Hoover apparently promised her not only a “substantial” portion of the reward but also that the Justice Department would do its best to persuade the Labor Department, which handled immigration matters, to revoke her deportation.
According to Mrs. Sage, Dillinger, who was using the name Jimmie Lawrence, had been seeing one of her boarders, a waitress named Polly Hamilton. The three were planning to go to a movie the following night. No, she didn’t know which one; she would have to call Purvis after they’d decided.
At 5:30 the following evening, Mrs. Sage called Purvis. They were still undecided; however, the theater would probably be either the Biograph or the Marbro. Agents were sent to stake out both theaters, most of the squad, however, remaining at the Chicago field office with Cowley, who was keeping an open line to Hoover at his home in Washington. This time the director did not alert the press.
At 7:00 P.M. Purvis received another call. “He’s here,” Mrs. Sage whispered. “We’ll be leaving in a short while.” But she still didn’t know which theater.12 Only two men could identify Mrs. Sage: Sergeant Zarkovich and Purvis. Zarkovich joined the agents at the Marbro; Purvis waited across the street from the Biograph in a parked car.
Purvis spotted Mrs. Sage just as she and her two companions were entering the theater. She was wearing an orange skirt that looked blood red in the lights of the marquee. Checking at the box office, Purvis learned that the feature, Manhattan Melodrama, starring Clark Gable and William Powell, would run for ninety-four minutes. Purvis called Cowley, who in turn consulted with Hoover. Believing Dillinger was probably armed, they decided against trying to arrest him while he was still inside the theater; there was too much danger that innocent people would get hurt.
Cowley and the rest of the squad hurried to the Biograph. Though Cowley headed the squad, Purvis was senior agent at the scene and therefore in charge. He stationed himself just outside the box office. As a signal to the other agents, the moment he saw Dillinger he would light a cigar.
Then they waited. To Hoover, in Washington, the ninety-four minutes “seemed like a lifetime.”13
As if the situation weren’t tense enough, the theater manager, seeing a number of strange men loitering about, and fearing a robbery, called the police. Under explicit orders from Hoover, Purvis had not informed the Chicago police of the pending arrest.
At 10:20, just ten minutes before the movie was due to end, two Chicago detectives jumped out of a patrol car and, pointing guns at the SAs C. G. “Jerry” Campbell and James Metcalf, ordered them to identify themselves. The pair showed the detectives their credentials and said they were looking for “a fugitive.” Satisfied, the cops drove away.
At 10:30 Dillinger, flanked by the two women, walked out of the theater. Purvis spotted them immediately—they walked right in front of him—but his hands were shaking so badly he had trouble lighting his cigar. As the trio turned left and proceeded down the street, Dillinger either sensed or saw something, and he started running down the alley next to the Biograph.
In his high, squeaky voice, Purvis yelled, “Stick ’em up, Johnny. We have you surrounded.” Instead Dillinger pulled a .380 Colt automatic from his jacket pocket. Three of the
agents fired. One, Herman Hollis, missed. Clarence Hurt and Charles Winstead, both ex-lawmen, didn’t.
Using the telephone in the theater office, Purvis called Hoover. “We got him!”
“Dead or alive?” Hoover asked.
“Dead,” Purvis replied. “He pulled a gun.”
“Were any of our boys hurt?”
“Not one. A woman in the crowd was wounded, but it doesn’t look bad.”
“Thank God.”14
After congratulating both Purvis and Cowley on their fine work, Hoover rushed to the Justice Department to make the official announcement.
Less than a month later, Dillinger’s death mask, the strawhat he’d been wearing, and his Colt were put on display in a glass case at headquarters. They were still there in 1937 when Jack Alexander wrote his New Yorker profile (and remained there for another thirty-five years, until L. Patrick Gray became acting director). Alexander wrote, “There are other exhibit cases in the anteroom, but this one, like a prize scalp, is significantly located near the director’s office.”15
Asked in later years the “greatest thrill” in his long career, Hoover immediately replied, “The night we got John Dillinger.”16 He didn’t mention the morning after.
John Dillinger, America’s leading public enemy, was dead. Hoover awoke the following day to find that he had been replaced by Public Hero Number One, Melvin “Little Mel” Purvis.
The diminutive SAC had talked freely with reporters. Although he modestly downplayed his own role, the press was not deceived. He was credited, in many of the accounts, not only with masterminding Dillinger’s capture but also with firing the shots that had killed him.
Hoover declined to identify the agents who had shot Dillinger, and no ballistics comparison was made. According to Hoover, there were two reasons for this: he didn’t want a particular agent to bear the burden of knowing that he had killed a man; and he didn’t want to make him a target for Dillinger gang members and friends.*
Both seemed valid reasons. But not as valid as two others which Hoover left unstated: he didn’t want it known that Dillinger had been slain by two “hired guns,” rather than his Bureau-trained law school graduates; and he didn’t want to make any more heroes. He already had one too many. Overnight, Melvin Purvis had become more famous than J. Edgar Hoover.
Shooting down a public hero proved harder than shooting down a public enemy, however. Publicly, Hoover praised both Cowley and Purvis, and both were given promotions in grade. Privately, he wrote Cowley, “To you…must go the major portion of the credit.” There was no such letter to Purvis.17
Not until September 29, with the arrest of Bruno Richard Hauptmann in the Lindbergh case, did the spotlight move off Purvis, and it was back again, on October 22, when the press credited him with killing Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd.”
Trapped on an Ohio farm by Bureau agents, Floyd had chosen to shoot rather than surrender and had been badly wounded. When Purvis, who led the raiding party, asked the fallen desperado if he was Pretty Boy, he denied the nickname, responding, “I’m Charles Arthur Floyd,”18 and died. Although Purvis never claimed to have shot Floyd—in his book, American Agent, he clearly implied that another special agent, armed with a submachine gun, was responsible*—the public needed a hero, and a few days later a Hollywood studio announced that it intended to make a movie on “the manhunting activities of Melvin H. Purvis.” Attorney General Cummings promptly announced that the Justice Department would not approve the project. “These things are not in accord with our ideas,” Cummings said.19
On November 27, 1934, Sam Cowley and another special agent, Herman Hollis, were killed by Baby Face Nelson in a gun battle near Barrington, Illinois. After rushing to the bedside of the dying Cowley, Purvis told reporters he had taken an oath in Cowley’s blood to avenge him. For Hoover it was the last straw; he yanked Purvis off the case.
Afraid of the public reaction, Hoover could neither demote nor fire Purvis. But he had another alternative: to make life in the Bureau so uncomfortable for him that he would resign.
Although he remained nominal head of the Chicago field office, Purvis was sent on back-to-back inspection tours, usually to out-of-the-way resident agencies, far from reporters. Each time the deaths of Dillinger and Floyd were mentioned, Hoover emphasized the role of the special squads, implying that it was teamwork, and not the solitary efforts of a lone SAC, which had brought an end to the careers of these and other desperadoes. And within the Bureau the director let it be known that he held Purvis personally responsible for the two deaths and the wounding of four others at Little Bohemia. These remarks, when relayed to Purvis, especially angered him, for Hoover was in effect blaming him for the death of his fellow special agent and close friend Carter Baum.
Although it had little more than nuisance value, Purvis did find one way to strike back. Hoover’s Achilles’ heel, Purvis believed, was his tremendous ego. It was accepted Bureau practice that anytime a major criminal was apprehended the press release read, “J. Edgar Hoover today announced…” Accepted practice, that is, except in Chicago, where Special Agent in Charge Melvin Purvis substituted his own name.
On July 12, 1935, just ten days before the first anniversary of Dillinger’s death, thirty-one-year-old Melvin Purvis announced his resignation from the Bureau. Questioned by reporters, he denied he’d quit because of “differences” with his chief; the reasons for his decision were “personal,” he said. The press speculated that Purvis had resigned in anger after Hoover had reneged on his assurances to Anna Sage (although she had been given $5,000, half of the Dillinger reward, no effort had been made to stay her deportation, and she had been sent back to her native Romania), but the differences went much deeper.
Within hours after Purvis’s resignation Hoover announced the arrest of a major extortionist. The trick didn’t work. The headlines went to “the man who became the Nemesis of Public Enemies…Melvin Purvis, arch enemy and captor of some of the worst criminals of modern times.”*20
After leaving the Bureau, Purvis opened his own detective agency. Word went out, however, that no cooperation was to be extended him by law enforcement, and after a time he closed his office. In 1936 Purvis’s autobiography, American Agent, was published. The book, in which J. Edgar Hoover’s name was conspicuous by its absence, became an immediate best-seller. Hoover’s own ghost-written first effort, Persons in Hiding, which was published two years later and which recounted most of the same cases, failed to attract book buyers, although it inspired three separate motion pictures. Hoover provided his own review of American Agent by changing Purvis’s resignation to a “termination with prejudice.”†
In 1937 Hoover was further incensed when Purvis’s name, face, and exploits appeared nationwide on breakfast cereal boxes, as head of the Melvin Purvis Law-and-Order Patrol, a Junior G-Man Club sponsored by Post Toasties.
After a brief stint as announcer on an “unsanctioned” radio show called “Top Secrets of the FBI,” Purvis found work at a small radio station in North Carolina. During World War II he joined Hoover’s nemesis William “Wild Bill” Donovan and served as an OSS agent in Europe, often working with Leon Turrou, who had also left the Bureau after incurring Hoover’s wrath. In 1960, learning that he had inoperable cancer, Purvis committed suicide, using the pistol his fellow agents had given him at his retirement party.
Purvis’s death would seem to have permanently disposed of one of Hoover’s enemies. But Hoover was determined to obliterate even the memory of Melvin Purvis. In FBI-authorized accounts of the Dillinger case, Purvis’s role was minimized and even, in some instances, deleted entirely. However, as Richard Gid Powers has observed, this created a problem: “there still had to be someone in charge at the Biograph.”
“With Purvis out of the Bureau and in disgrace, Sam Cowley fit the bill perfectly,” Powers notes. “First, he was dead, so there was no danger that he would turn his glory to personal advantage. Second, by honoring one of its martyrs, someone who had given
up his life for the FBI, the Bureau would be honoring itself. Third, since Cowley had been Hoover’s personal representative on the Dillinger case, any credit Cowley got flowed directly back to Washington without being absorbed by the agents in the field. For these reasons it became permanent FBI policy to tear down Purvis as a glory hound and build up Cowley as the epitome of the corporate G-Man hero.”22
* * *
*Hoover identified the Kansas City killers as Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Adam Richetti, and Verne Miller.
Miller was found dead on November 29, 1934, in a drainage ditch near Detroit. He had been choked, his tongue and cheeks punctured with ice picks, his body burned with hot irons, and his head bashed in by a blunt object—apparently in retaliation for bringing the heat down on the underworld. Adam Richetti was captured near Wellsville, Ohio, by local police, on October 21, 1934; tried and convicted of the Kansas City murders, he was executed on October 7, 1938. The day after Richetti’s capture, Floyd was shot to death a few miles away, in a gun battle with the Chicago SAC Melvin Purvis and other Bureau agents.
Some writers believe that Floyd and Richetti had no part in the Union Station killings, maintaining that the real killers were Miller, Maurice Denning, and William “Solly” Weismann, all professional hit men, who had a syndicate contract to silence Nash.
*For a time John Keith was assigned to the training school, as a firearms instructor. Ignoring Hoover’s no-alcohol edict, Keith would retire to his tent at night, drink himself to sleep, and then, with a shaking hand, outshoot everyone on the range the next day. It was a measure of the awe and esteem in which Keith was held that none of Hoover’s spies reported him.