Free Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough

mother. Mrs. Hamm insisted on bringing in the police. A meeting was arranged at the Lowry Hotel. There Dunn briefed St. Paul’s police chief, Thomas Dahill, an honest man who was frustrated by the corruption on his force.
    Dahill contacted the head of the local FBI office, Werner Hanni, who sent a man to Dunn’s home at 1916 Summit Avenue to install a recording device on his telephone in preparation for the kidnappers’ next call. Two members of the St. Paul Police Department’s new kidnap squad were summoned as well. One was Tom Brown, a former St. Paul chief of police whom the gang was paying for inside information. e
    As the police and FBI gathered at Dunn’s home, William Hamm was driven across Wisconsin into northern Illinois. Karpis did the driving; Fred Barker and Shotgun George Ziegler stayed behind to deal with the ransom negotiations. Around midnight Karpis pulled up beside a two-story house in the northwest Chicago suburb of Bensonville. It was owned by the local postmaster, a friend of Ziegler’s. They guided Hamm into a bedroom whose window had been boarded shut. Karpis gave him some magazines and a beer, and left him alone. Hamm sat, stared, and waited.

Midnight
    Billy Dunn was waiting in his home when the phone rang. “Well, Dunn, you’re following instructions very well so far,” a voice said. “Now, I have given you time to recover from the shock of the telephone call this afternoon and you must realize that the call was not a joke as you thought. All you’ve got to do is follow instructions.”
    Dunn was struck by the caller’s tone; it intimated that he knew precisely what Dunn had been doing all day and didn’t appear upset that the police had been brought in. Dunn phoned Tom Brown, who had run home for a late dinner. Around two, as Brown returned, he saw a taxi cruising by, throwing a spotlight on the quiet homes, obviously looking for an address. Brown walked up to the taxi, and the cabbie gave him a note for Dunn. He said a man—later identified as Shotgun George Ziegler—had handed it to him outside of a downtown garage. You know your boyfriend is out of circulation, the note read. You are to pay off $100,000 in the manner explained to you this afternoon . . . If you fail to comply with our demands, you will never see Hamm Jr. again.
    Brown took the note inside to Dunn. Everything was on schedule.

Near Boliver, Missouri Friday, June 16 Dawn
    The next morning, Pretty Boy Floyd and his sidekick Adam Richetti said good-bye to their family and friends and headed to Kansas City. At dawn, they were driving north on Highway 16, a rough road heading out of Springfield, Missouri, when the Pontiac they had stolen from Joe Hudiberg’s garage coughed, sputtered, and died. Irritated, Floyd flagged down a passing farmer, who agreed to tow them into nearby Boliver, where, as it happened, Richetti’s brother Joe worked as a mechanic. The two men piled into the farmer’s truck and thanked him for his trouble.
    The drowsy town was still slumbering that morning when the farmer’s truck pulled into the driveway of the Bitzer Chevrolet dealership about ten minutes past seven. Floyd gave the old man a few bills and watched as a group of mechanics pushed the Pontiac into the garage. There was nothing to do but wait, so Floyd paced the garage as Joe Richetti opened the hood. Adam unscrewed a Mason jar of moonshine and began drinking. Floyd eyed him with disgust. He had repeatedly warned Richetti to watch his drinking. It made him sloppy.
    Before long a group of car salesmen, freshly scrubbed in saddle shoes and khaki suits, gathered to admire Floyd’s big new Pontiac. No one appeared to recognize Floyd. Around eleven, as Joe Richetti continued working on the car, Ernest Bitzer, the dealership’s owner, wandered in, sat on a bench beside Floyd, and shook his hand. “That car looks as if it could go pretty fast,” Bitzer remarked.
    “It’ll hit eighty-five,” said Floyd.
    It took Bitzer a moment, but