INDIANA CRASHOUT - PART TWO

9/26/1933 - Outside the prison walls the escapees break into two groups.  One group, composed of Dietrich, Burns, Fox, and Oklahoma Jack Clark find Sheriff Charles Neel of Harrison County in the parking lot, just finished with dropping off a new prisoner, and force the lawman into his car and then head down the Dunes Highway towards Chicago (but not before Dietrich thumbs his nose at the prison).  The other group, Pierpont, Makley, Hamilton, Russell Clark, Shouse, and Jenkins, run across the street to a Standard Oil gas station where after a failed first attempt (the station manager, Joseph J. Pawelski, takes off running instead of giving up his car keys and the outlaws irate shots miss the man), they grab a car driven by Herbert Van Valkenberg of Oswego.  Forcing Van Valkenberg, his wife, and their eighty-nine-year-old friend Mrs. Minnie Schultz from the vehicle they then take off.  The Pierpont group is not on the road long though, turning down a dirt road only eighteen miles away from the prison, they take a farmer, Sally "Sal" Warner, and his family hostage and stay in the man's house waiting for dark.

                  
                                                                 Dietrich

Meanwhile the Dietrich party loses control of their car and runs it into a ditch, a situation that causes them to look for another vehicle ... one they find at the farm of Carl Spanier.  Off again, the Spanier car soon blows a tire and the men, all still in their blue convict uniforms, are forced to spend the night, still holding the sheriff hostage, in thick underbrush, waiting for light and for the rain to stop.  Lost, Wednesday and Thursday they walk through the back country and eventually the group begins to fracture.  Clark, not agreeing with the others to tie up the sheriff in conditions that could cause the man's death, and suffering from stomach ulcers irritated by dining on raw vegetables since the break, walks and rides a bus into Gary, Indiana with the captive lawman.  There he releases Sheriff Neel who of course lets authorities know of his freedom, and alerted that an outlaw is in the area, Clark is soon tracked to the the town of Hammond and arrested ... he has been free for all of three days and is not happy about being sent back to Michigan City.  The rest of the group will eventually be back behind bars too ... Walter Dietrich joins the Jack Klutas Gang and is arrested on January, 6, 1934 while he is shaving, Joseph Burns is captured in Chicago on December 18, 1934, and Joseph Fox is once more placed in custody on June 4, 1935.

            
                                                              Pierpont

With one exception, the Pierpont group will become the first John Dillinger Gang (called so by law enforcement and the media, though it is Pierpont that has planned the Michigan City escape and leads the men when they move on to bank robbing).  Leaving the farm they have been hiding at, the Pierpont group uses back roads and makes their way to Indianapolis and the home of Pierpont's new girlfriend, Mary Kinder, who is in on the escape plot so her brother could have a place in the breakout (which he would have, but having contracted tuberculosis, he is confined in the prison hospital when the break takes place).  Ahead of their planned exit day, Kinder has not yet procured a hiding place for the gang, and with no room in the house already occupied by Mary, her sister, her mother, and her stepfather, Kinder takes the men to the home of Ralph Saffell, a man she has been dating while waiting for Pierpont to arrive ... he is not amused.  At Saffell's, the gang cleans up, eats, and puts on new clothes before taking their host's car and moving their site of operations to the hideaway that Mary has procured (along with bandit Harry Copeland) that is now ready in Hamilton, Ohio.

                             
                                                           Kinder

Changing cars, police pick up the trail of the gang and almost catch them, but fail when former race car driver Shouse pulls a skidding U-turn that allows the gang to escape at high speed ... save one, Jim Jenkins.  Off balance from the turn, Jenkins falls out of the rear of the car when a door flies open.  On foot, he will then try and make his way back to the gang's hideout ... he first cons a twenty-four-year-old Good Samaritan named Victor Lyle in giving him a ride with a story about a fight and being hunted by an angry mob, but as the ride continues and reality sets in, forces the young man to continue the journey with threats from the outlaw's drawn pistol.  The ride comes to an end when the pair stop because they are almost out of gas ... coasting into a gas station at 3 in the morning, Jenkins leaves the car to wake the owner of the establishment, and driving on fumes, Lyle uses the outlaw's absence to flee and advise authorities that one of the escapees is in the area.  The locals react immediately and both police and vigilantes begin combing the region for Jenkins ... a search that ends that evening near McDonald's Grocery Store in Georgetown.  Trying to convince locals that his car has broken down and he needs a ride to an auto parts store, when his story is not believed Jenkins pulls his pistol again, shooting grocer McDonald in the shoulder, but this time he is dealing with armed men, one of which, farmer Ben Kanter, puts a round of .20 gauge shot in the bandits head, blowing off a major portion of the bandit's skull.  There will be no reunion with his cellmate, Dillinger

Meanwhile, the rest of the men ready themselves for the crime spree that will be front page news for the rest of the year and into 1934, first by increasing their operating funds by taking $15,000 out of the First National Bank of St. Mary, Ohio on October 2nd, and then by venturing into Lima, Ohio to thank a friend for the weapons that got them out of Michigan City, freeing John Dillinger from the jailhouse he is being held in on robbery charges.

                    
                                                     Awaiting Rescue

INDIANA CRASHOUT - PART ONE

9/26/1933 - Years of planning and effort result in a jailbreak that shocks the Midwest.  Running loose since his parole in May, John Dillinger has been robbing stores, payrolls, and banks with one express purpose ... acquire enough money to bribe officials to look the other way, find suitable hiding places for a number of wanted men, and procure the weapons by which his convict pals can force their way out of the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City.

                            

Dillinger's first attempt to get weapons to his friends ends in failure when a convict not in on the plot finds the pistols the outlaw has thrown over the thirty-foot high prison wall the night before and turns the weapons over to Deputy Warden H. D. Claudy.  The second attempt is more successful and when a two-hundred-pound crate of thread bearing a small red cross in crayon on its top from the Henry Myer Manufacturing Company of Chicago is received at the Gordon East Coast Shirt Factory within the prison, the plotters have their guns ... three carefully wrapped .45s and ammo which bank robber Walter Dietrich hides in a small carton of buttons.  Break set for the 28th, when the individuals involved discover that jailhouse snitches are talking to guards about an upcoming escape, the convicts move up their date with freedom to the 26th.  In on the plot are a who's who of Indiana bad apples consisting of:

*Harry Pierpont, thirty-one, serving 10-21 years for bank robbery
                                                
*Charles Makley, forty-four, serving 10-20 years for bank robbery
          
*Russell Clark, thirty-five, serving 20 years for bank robbery
                
*John Hamilton, thirty-four, serving 25 years for bank robbery
                                               
*Walter Dietrich, twenty-eight, serving life for bank robbery and murder while a member of the 1920s Baron Lamm Gang
                  
*James "Oklahoma Jim" Clark, thirty-one, serving life for bank robbery and murder while a member of the 1920s Baron Lamm Gang
                                        
*Eddie Shouse, serving twenty-two years for armed robbery
                                      
*Joseph Fox, serving a life sentence for bank robbery
                                     
*James Jenkins, Dillinger's cellmate, serving a life sentence for the murder of a grocer
                                     
*Joseph Burns, serving a life sentence for murder
                                    

Ready, shortly after 1:00 and the end of lunch, as the prison begins its work assignments for the afternoon, nine convicts receive sick passes to go the the institution's hospital ... instead, they join Walter Dietrich in the basement of the shirt factory.  Dietrich gives Makley, Pierpont, and Hamilton the .45s, and arms the rest of the men with recently made fake weapons and the break begins with the group taking the superintendent of the factory, G. H. Stevens, and Day Captain, Albert "Big Bertha" Evans hostage (and in addition, they tie up the factory foreman Dudley Triplett and five convicts who have come downstairs for supplies), then covering their weapons as if they were carrying stacks of shirts, and a hidden battering ram the men have procured, the group marches in regulation quick step through the rain and across the open prison yard to the door to the Guard's Hall.  Above them, armed guards on the walls believe it is just another routine shirt delivery for future sales to the public ... at least that is what the guards that are awake believe, in one of the towers, a soon to be fired rifleman sleeps through the entire escape.   At the door, a pistol thrust into the face of guard Frank Swanson convinces the elderly man to unlock the heavy metal gate.  Two barriers left to go, inside, a turnkey, Guy Burklow, use to deliveries, opens one door as soon as he sees the men approaching, while the second turnkey, Fred Wellnitz, is hit over the head with a blackjack by Shouse, his keys procured, and the final door breached (it is here the the men abandon their battering ram).  Now inside the Administration Building, the warden, Louis Kunkel, and members of his staff are taken prisoner and locked in a vault ... and a few more injuries are sustained by the prison personnel ... Superintendent of Prison Industries, Lawrence Mutch, is beaten up when he bravely refuses to open the door to a storeroom containing machine guns and rifles, Day Captain Evans is slugged when he protests the beating Wellnitz takes, and when he moves too slowly, seventy-two-year-old clerk Finley Carson is shot in the stomach (it is never established which convict does the shooting) ... a wound he will survive.  Success, the ten convicts then step outside into the rain again, and in the parking lot, beginning looking for vehicles with which to make Part Two of their escape.

                                    
                                                           Michigan City

TO BE CONTINUED ...

RATTED OUT FOR THE FIRST TIME

9/22/1933 - Aware that John Dillinger has taken up with the sister of one of his Michigan City convict friends, officers seeking the outlaw on bank robbery charges stake-out the apartment of Mary Jenkins Longnacker, a dark-haired twenty-three-year-old living in Dayton, Ohio.

                                             
                                                     Mary & John

When weeks are spent without the bandit showing however, the police team is finally pulled and assigned other duties ... on the very day Dillinger returns to see his girlfriend.  Arriving around midnight, Dillinger parks his Essex Terraplane outside and sneaks up the stairs to Longnacker's room, but not quietly enough as the nosy landlady, Lucille Stricker, who has rented the room the cops have been using for weeks, hears the outlaw, identifies his car, and immediately calls the police ("He's here you dumb flatfoots," she is quoted as saying).  Jumping into action, uniformed police quickly surround the building while an entry team led by the landlady creep up the stairs and knock on the door.  Answered by Longnacker thinking the landlady needs to borrow some coffee, Detective Sgt. Russell K. Pfauhl armed with a twelve-gauge riot gun and Detective Sgt. Charles E. Gross holding a Thompson sub-machine gun, burst into the apartment and find Dillinger standing in the middle of the room looking at pictures he'd taken with Longnaker during a recent adventure to the Chicago World's Fair, which he immediately drops when he sees the weapons trained on his head and chest.

   
                                                    1933 Chicago Fairgrounds

Trying to give the outlaw a chance to make an escape, Longnaker pretends to faint, but the police are having none of it and never take their eyes or weapons off their quarry, threatening to blow him in half if he makes any kind of move ... he doesn't.  Searching the room and their catch, police find a .38 automatic between the cushions of a sofa, a suitcase containing five pistols, and two pistols on the outlaw.  They also find a diagram marked with Xs that they fail to understand ... a drawing of the plan Dillinger has helped put in place for a breakout of his friends from the Michigan City state prison ... a breakout only days away.  

                                
                                           Mug shot and booking paperwork

Dillinger is in custody again (he had been paroled only a few months before, on 5/20/1933) and with multiple robbery charges against him it appears the thirty-year-old outlaw will now be returning to prison to remain behind bars into his old age ... but Fate has other plans for the criminal who has been nicknamed The Jackrabbit. 
   

A BUNGLED JOB

9/22/1933 - In downtown Chicago at a little after midnight, almost in the shadow of the building containing the city's FBI office (still called the Department of Investigation at the time and the responsibility of Special Agent Melvin Purvis), the Barker-Karpis Gang hits the bags coming out of the Federal Reserve Building.  

                   
                                                        Site of the heist

Cased for weeks, the gang assembled for the heist includes Alvin Karpis driving a special Hudson sedan equipped with bullet glass, armor plating, and a smoke producing machine, Fred Barker, "Shotgun" George Ziegler, and Bryan Bolton wielding submachine guns, and Doc Barker carrying a .38 pistol.

           
                            Karpis                                        Fred Barker
                                      
                                                          Doc Barker

The first part of the job goes perfectly.  Karpis creates a cloud of smoke that cuts off any traffic that might drive by, and as two clerks wheeling a hand truck with bulging sacks on it come out of the building followed by two armed guards the gang swoops in.  Taking only a minute, the men disarm the guards and then throw five lumpy bags into their car and take off, following an escape route they have already practiced driving.  What they didn't practice however is what to do if they should get into a car accident, which is exactly what happens after Karpis crosses the Chicago River and turns onto Halsted.  Intersection chaos, the violent collision send's the outlaws into a telephone pole ... and worse, draws the attention of two uniformed policemen about to walk their beats through the area.  The first concern of both men is whether anyone is injured and needs immediate medical attention and both men run towards the accident.  Forty-six-year-old Maurice Fitzgerald sprints to several women screaming inside the wrecked Ford coupe the getaway car has hit, while thirty-five-year-old Miles Cunningham approaches the Hudson ... a mistaken random twist of fate which costs the officer his life.  As Doc Barker jumps out of the car and yells "Cops," Bolton raises his submachine gun and unleashes a burst of lead directly into the policeman's chest, killing him instantly ... a volley that also wounds Doc Barker when a ricochet hits the bandit on his right pinky finger, knocking the diamond out of a ring the outlaw has recently purchased.  A new vehicle needed, the gang commandeers a car passing by, transferring their booty and weapons while Bolton keeps Officer Fitzgerald pinned down behind a traffic sign with sprays of bullets.  In flight again, their escape comes to another screeching halt when Karpis discovers their new car is almost out of gasoline ... news that requires another commandeering of alternate transportation and one more transfer of assets.  Finally safe in a garage in the southwest portion of the city later that night, the already jangled gang becomes incensed when they go to count how much loot they have acquired and discover they engaged in a robbery, a jarring car accident, and a killing shootout that has left one of them wounded for nothing but fifty pounds of worthless mail.  The only good news for the bandits is that city authorities investigating the crime will think the robbery and murder are the work of either Machine Gun Kelly or Pretty Boy Floyd.  For the family of Officer Miles Cunningham though there is no good news and in death he leaves behind a widow and two children.

                                       
                                                      Cunningham

DON'T DO LUNCH WITH SCARFACE

9/20/1926 - Proving that a gangster that follows a set of routines is just asking to be killed, Al Capone is almost hit by his rivals in Chicago's North Side Gang.  

                 
                                                                 Scarface

Lunching as he commonly does at the restaurant of the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero, Illinois, the hotel that serves as the headquarters for Capone's underworld activities, the gangster and his bodyguard Frankie Rio hit the floor immediately when a car pulls up outside and unleashes a barrage of Tommy-gun fire.

                                              
                                                        Frankie Rio

Seeking to retaliate, when the firing stops, Capone jumps up and heads for the door, intent on firing at the fleeing vehicle, but the attack has been a ruse to create exactly that reaction from the mobster, blanks being fired to draw the mob boss outside where the real assault is to take place.  Deducing what is coming from the lack of shattered glass, Rio tackles his boss at the door and covers him with his own body.  And not a moment too soon, as Capone and Rio lay on the floor, a convoy of ten large touring cars filled with gangsters led by Hymie Weiss and Bugs Moran slowly passes by out front and fires machine guns, shotguns, and automatic pistols at the restaurant ... a hailstorm lasting minutes of over 1,000 rounds of lead sent out in search of Capone.

       
                                                                   Hymie Weiss
                                  
                                                            Bugs Moran
  
Amazingly, although an estimated 60 people also occupy the dining room with Capone and his bodyguard, only one person, a woman, is injured in the attack when she is struck in the eye by flying glass ... a wound that Capone gladly pays $10,000 to have treated so he can brag to the local newspapers that he saved the woman's sight. 

                  
                                  Police and others outside after the attack

Rattled by his near death experience, Capone calls for a truce with his enemies, but it doesn't last long and weeks later he will have six of his men machine gun to death Weiss as the gangster is about to enter the flower shop where he has his headquarters on State Street ... and he doesn't forget the other individual responsible for the attack, Moran he will attempt to kill in a little bit of death dealing that will go down in criminal history as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

                                   
                                        Payback a bitch, Weiss in death

A JACKPOT HAUL

9/17/1930 - Two master criminals prove their prowess by taking down the Lincoln National Bank and Trust Company of Lincoln, Nebraska.  Planned down to the second for weeks by bank robbers Harvey Bailey and Eddie Bentz, at 10:00 in the morning a large blue Buick containing six heavily armed men pulls up in front of the Barkley Building.

                           
                                                                  Bailey
                                                    
                                                                   Bentz

One man staying with the car and keeping its engine running, one man covering the outside activities of the locals by standing on the corner with a machine gun, with guns drawn four members of the robber team enter the bank and quickly scoop up cash and securities in the neighborhood of $2,700,000 ... the largest robbery in the history of the country up to that time.  Pros!  The robbery is planned so well that even though a teller flees out a side door and immediately calls the police, and a passing motorcycle officer is convinced to move on after having a machine gun pointed at his head (moving on directly to the nearby police station), by the time two patrol cars full of cops arrive they are all too late ... the gang is gone in less than ten minutes; helped to speed away from the scene of the crime by having their getaway car enhanced by a siren that causes the local traffic to move out of the way as the outlaws make their way out of the city.

                                  
                                                                   Bailey

In the aftermath of the robbery the local police chief loses his job, two shift new police cars are purchased by the city, outlaws Tommy O'Connor and "Pop" Lee are eventually arrested and sentenced to long prison terms, and Jack Britt is tried twice and eventually let go for lack of evidence.  But it is robber Gus Winkler who pays the biggest price. Free lancing from being a hitman for Al Capone (he is believed to be one of the killers that participates in the St. Valentines Day Massacre), with the heat on Winkler makes arrangements to escape prosecution by returning $575,000 in securities ... a decision that draws the wrath of Capone, who kept from his cut of the proceeds, has Winkler put into Lake Michigan leaking from 109 pieces of buckshot in his body.

                                      
                                                             Winkler

Never given up by members of their gang, only Bailey and Bentz avoid any repercussions for the huge payday!

DOC IS LET OUT OF JAIL

9/10/1932 - The combination of pleading letters from Ma Barker and secret bribes given to government officials using bank robbery assets gathered by outlaw buddies Freddy Barker and Alvin Karpis results in Arthur R. "Doc" Barker receiving a parole from his life sentence for the 1921 murder of Fuller Construction Co. night watchman Thomas J. Sherrill in Tulsa.

                         
                                                        Ma in 1930

A big mistake by the state of Oklahoma, Doc immediately joins his brother and Karpis in a tragic criminal spree that will include three bank robberies, a payroll robbery, the ransom kidnappings of William Hamm and Edward Bremer, and gunplay that results in a police officer being disabled for life, the shooting of a Northwest Airways employee the gang believes is a cop, the murders of four police officers, a civilian being killed for appearing to be interested in the license plate number of the stolen car the gang is using, the assassination of underworld doctor Joseph Moran, and the killing of a gang member thought to be giving information to the authorities.

                            
                                                             Doc  
                                       
                                                            Fred
                                         
                                                         Karpis

There is a plus side however, it is because of Doc foolishly leaving a fingerprint on a gas can (despite Karpis telling him to wear gloves) that the FBI is able to connect the gang to the kidnapping of Edward Bremer, and worse for the gang, when the FBI captures Doc in Chicago in 1935, they discover a map Barker has stupidly circled that shows the latest hideaway of his mother and his brother Freddy in Florida ... a discovery that results in a shootout that his mother and brother will not survive.

                                     
                                                Next stop Alcatraz for Doc

And like the other members of his family, Doc will eventually be shot to death while trying to escape from Alcatraz in 1939 (oldest brother Herman will commit suicide when cornered after a 1927 robbery, Ma and Fred are blasted by machine guns in 1935, and Lloyd Barker, after being released from serving a 25-year stretch in Leavenworth, on the losing end of a family argument, is shot and killed in Colorado by his wife in 1949).

                   
                                                            Doc

THE BOSS OF BOSSES NO MORE

9/10/1931 - Arrogance does in Mafia crime lord Salvatore Maranzano.  The winner of what is known as the Castellamarese War, a nation-wide battle to control Italian crime in America that kills dozens over a year's time, Maranzano upon the death of his New York rival, Giuseppe "Joe the Boss" Masseria (thanks to the betrayal of his second-in-command, Charles "Lucky" Luciano) calls a meeting of over 500 killers and crooks to let everyone know who is in charge and what the new rules will be governing their criminal activities.

                            
                                                                 Maranzano
                                              
                                                                   Masseria
                              
                                    Masseria after Coney Island lunch with Lucky Luciano

At a large hall on Washington Avenue in the Bronx. Maranzano declares himself to be the "Capo de tutti Capi," the Boss of Bosses who will run a criminal underworld of Italians he calls "La Cosa Nostra" ("This thing of ours") in an organization patterned after Julius Caesar and his Roman legions.  Listening, young killers like Luciano, Vito Genovese, Thomas Lucchese and others are less than happy with the myriad of rules that must be followed and the tribute they must pay monthly to their new leader and immediately begin plotting to give Maranzano a Caesar-like sendoff.

                
                              Luciano                                  Genovese
                                        
                                                       Lucchese

No fool, at the same time as a plot is being hatched against him, Maranzano decides to have a purge of his own of the "Young Turks" in his new organization and authorizes hits on Luciano, Genovese, Al Capone, Frank Costello, Willie Moretti, Joe Adonis, and Jewish gangster Dutch Schultz.  A race of blood baths, at 2:50 in the afternoon Maranzano is in his Manhattan real estate office in the Eagle Building at 230 Park Avenue when four men arrive and flash badges and state they are police officers and tax agents come to inspect the books, an audit the crime boss is expecting.  Unfortunately for Maranzano, the group has not been sent by the local authorities, but consists of a squad of killers put together by Luciano buddy Meyer Lansky ... Red Levine, Bugsy Siegel, Albert Anastasia, and Lucchese (the core of a group that will soon be known as Murder, Inc.).

                                     
                                                                  Levine                                            
           
                                                                 Meyer Lansky
                         
                                                                      Anastasia
                                        
                                                                     Bugsy

Fighting for his life once the actual occupation of his visitors is revealed when knives and guns are pulled, Maranzano is stabbed six times in the stomach and chest by Levine, and then to make sure he stays down, shot once by each of the killers.  Mission accomplished the murderers then flee, passing killer Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll on the stairs of the building, late for a scheduled meeting with Maranzano to discuss the execution of Luciano and his supporters.

                                          
                                                         The Boss of Bosses

The killing is not over though, and in real scenes that portend the end of The Godfather when Michael Corleone takes over, across the country a mass extermination of Maranzano allies takes place that leaves various police departments to deal with over forty corpses (Maranzano lieutenants Samuel Monaco and Louis Russo will wash ashore in Newark with their heads crushed, throats slashed, and various pieces of their body missing compliments of meat cleaver hacking).  Hold on power solidified, Luciano and his peers do away with the title of Boss of Bosses, and instead former a commission of criminal leaders that will vote on matters of importance to organized crime, while retaining some of Maranzano other ideas like the establishment New York City's Five Families ... Italians that will wreck mayhem over the city under the banners of the Lucchese Family, the Bonanno Family (now Massino), the Mangano Family (now Gambino), the Luciano Family (now Genovese), and the Profaci Family (now Colombo, the family that Mario Puzo is said to have used as the inspiration for his Godfather novel).