2009 is the 75th anniversary of what the FBI calls “the year of the gangster.” 1934 saw an explosion of violent freelance crime in the Midwest, and by the time it was over, our landscape was a graveyard of fallen federal agents, bank-robbers, murderers, and innocent civilians. This was the year of John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, the Barkers and Bonnie and Clyde. This anniversary is the reason we will see yet another release of a Hollywood film about these gangsters, called Public Enemies.
As to those who fought these criminals, most of us know little. Perhaps we have heard of Melvin Purvis, the federal agent who lit his cigar outside the Biograph theater to signal the approach of Dillinger and the lady in red. But we in Riverside have a strong connection to the events of 1934 in the form of a 50-year resident of our village, the late Virgil W. Peterson, former special agent of the FBI and later famed head of the Chicago Crime Commission. He was a man of fearless candor and integrity and it is such men that are perhaps more worthy of remembering.
Peterson moved to Riverside in 1942, when he was recruited from the FBI to head the Chicago Crime Commission. But in an earlier phase of his life, he joined the Bureau of Investigation in Chicago when he graduated from Northwestern Law School in 1930. At that time there were few federal crimes, most were white-collar in nature. But as the Depression deepened, crime exploded, and a host of kidnappings for ransom and bank robberies ensued, bringing with them murders and flights by criminals across state lines, and the need for national law enforcement.
Peterson was on assignment in St. Paul on the kidnapping of a bank president named Bremer when on March 3, 1934, bank-robber John Dillinger escaped from prison for the second time, this time managing to get past the National Guard in doing so. Peterson was on the next flight back to Chicago, now the headquarters of a nationwide manhunt for Dillinger. Melvin Purvis was the Special Agent in Charge of the Chicago office. The next month, the famous raid known as Little Bohemia came to pass. The Bureau was tipped that Dillinger and his gang, now including the crazed murderer Baby Face Nelson, was relaxing in the North Woods of Wisconsin at a place called Little Bohemia Lodge, near Rhinelander. The Bureau chartered planes and Peterson rode in one with Purvis and other agents. The agents commandeered four cars and headed to the lodge as darkness fell. History records the outcome. The Dillinger gang escaped along the shoreline behind the lodge, one civilian was killed, two wounded, a Bureau agent was killed by Baby Face Nelson. Purvis describes Nelson as actually risking capture in order to linger with his machine-gun in his effort to kill, his face illuminated by its gunfire. The next morning Peterson returned to Chicago with Purvis and another agent.
The people were not well pleased by this incident, and the newspapers were calling for the head of Purvis. J. Edgar Hoover responded by appointing Inspector Sam Cowley to head the Dillinger case, and now Peterson reported directly to him. Somewhere in this period Peterson was made the Supervisor of the Dillinger Squad, which came to comprise some thirty men. His position was a pressured one, between his friends Cowley and the Special Agent in Charge of Chicago Purvis, with Mr Hoover utterly fixated on capturing Dillinger. The hot summer of 1934 came on, a deadly heat wave descended on Chicago. In July, the Bureau received the tip from Anna Sage that Dillinger was dating a friend of hers, and that he often took them to the movies of an evening, either at the Marbro or the Biograph. Cowley and Peterson cased the Marbro, mapping all exits. In the event, when the call came on July 22, the party of three went to the Biograph. Peterson, to his chagrin, was stuck in the offices coordinating the response, and the well-known events came to pass.
Once Dillinger was dispatched, Nelson and Floyd remained at large. In October, Floyd was shot down in a cornfield by a Bureau team including Purvis. Inspector Sam Cowley remained in charge of the case of these desperados however, and he and Peterson were close friends. In September, Peterson married. The couple lived in the same apartment building with the Cowleys in Chicago, and their wives were close friends also. The year culminated in tragedy for them all, as on a dark, lonely road in Barrington in November, Cowley and Nelson mortally wounded one another. Nelson then, in his typical way, killed another agent who had taken cover after using all his ammunition. It was left to Peterson to break the sad news to Cowley’s young widow, who was left with their two young children. Their wives and one of the children had just returned from viewing the Christmas windows at Marshall Field.
The year of 1934 might have proved enough for any one lifetime. Melvin Purvis resigned from the Bureau the next year. But Peterson grew in stature and responsibility until in 1942 the Chicago Crime Commission called him away for the problems of which we are only too aware. He moved into Riverside with his wife and first son. Peterson went on to nearly single-handedly precipitating the Kefauver hearings into organized crime, the first of the many Congressional hearings and federal actions that have always been required to free the Chicago area of organized crime. Peterson named names, gave addresses and described the deeds. He wrote two great standard works on the dangerous, corrupting nexus between organized crime and the political structure, not excluding the presidency. He lived in Riverside with his family and his hundred rose bushes and died a natural death in 1989. This gives a new meaning to the phrase good guys come in last.
Many of us like a good gangster film. The heroes who battle glamorized bad guys are often reduced to one person, to whom the deeds of many are attributed. As was once with Elliot Ness, this summer with Melvin Purvis. These are worthy men, but it is as well to remember worthier deeds done in the obscurity of duty and often away from the cameras, and that the truest heroes are often left dead on the battlefield with no sharp clothes, cars or bags of money to show for their efforts, but only honor.
June 2, 2009