Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough

get in touch with you? I can’t go home. I have no place to go.”
    They talked for a minute or two more. Miller knew he couldn’t handle the rescue alone. From the station he telephoned the Green Lantern in St. Paul looking for the Barkers, not knowing they were busy with the Hamm kidnapping. He was running out of time.

Kansas City, Missouri Saturday, June 17 7:15 A.M.
    Joe Lackey, the Roman-nosed FBI agent, hung out the door as the train eased down Track 12 into Union Station. He had been awake for forty-eight hours and his nerves were on edge. Everyone knew what kind of town Kansas City was, rough and corrupt, a magnet for bank robbers, pimps, and confidence men from Chicago to the West Coast. Everything that mattered, from the police to the polls, was controlled by the political boss Thomas J. Pendergast, whose take from gambling, prostitution, and narcotics approached $30 million a year. (One cog in the sprawling Pendergast machine was a forty-nine-year-old county judge named Harry Truman, who would be elected to the U.S. Senate the following year.)
    The train was scheduled for a one-hour layover before heading to Leavenworth, but the agents agreed that the risk of staying in Kansas City, even for an hour, was too great. Instead the Oklahoma City office had devised a plan with the Kansas City SAC, Reed Vetterli, a baby-faced twenty-nine-year-old Mormon. Vetterli assembled a squad of lawmen to drive Nash the thirty miles to Leavenworth.
    Ahead on the platform, Lackey spied Vetterli, in a dark suit, standing with three men. When the train coasted to a stop, Lackey hopped off and Vetterli made the introductions. Agent Ray Caffrey was thirty years old, an earnest, plain Nebraska native who wore his brown hair parted down the middle. The other two men on the platform, older, seedy, and disheveled, were Kansas City policemen, snaggletoothed Frank Hermanson and Bill “Red” Grooms. Hermanson and Grooms had brought the department’s armor-plated “hot car.”
    Lackey briefed the officers, then returned to the train to get Nash. A few moments later, the three lawmen emerged from the train, pushing their prisoner before them. Nash wore an open-necked white shirt and had a handkerchief thrown over his handcuffed hands. The plan was to drive Nash straight to Leavenworth, escorted by the hot car; with any luck, they would all be back by lunchtime.
    There was little chitchat. Together the seven lawmen formed a wedge around Nash and herded him up the platform. Quickly they ascended the stairs into the cavernous expanse of Union Station, already filling with early-morning travelers. Agent Caffrey walked in back, his .38-caliber pistol jammed into Nash’s ribs. All across the station, heads turned as the strange phalanx strode across the dramatic open space toward the front archway and the parking lot beyond. Lottie West, a Traveler’s Aid Society worker, was standing in front of the Fred Harvey Restaurant, chatting with the manager, when the eight men marched by. “That must be Pretty Boy Floyd,” Mrs. West remarked, motioning toward the prisoner. The morning papers carried the news that Floyd had arrived in town the night before; it was all anyone was talking about.
    The group strode across the plaza to Agent Caffrey’s two-door Chevrolet in the first row of cars. The parking lot was already coming to life, taxis swerving to the curb, a trio of nuns milling about. Caffrey unlocked the passenger door, and Joe Lackey slid in back, followed by Chief Reed. “Get up front,” Lackey told Nash. “We’ll ride like we did out of Hot Springs. That way we can all watch you.”
    Nash climbed into the front seat. Frank Smith joined Reed and Lackey in back. The cops, Grooms and Hermanson, stood facing each other by the right front tire, waiting. Reed Vetterli stood beside the car, poised to slide in beside Nash. Ray Caffrey squeezed past the two cops and stepped around the front of the car, making for the driver’s door.
    Suddenly,