Secret Partners by Tim Mahoney

Author:Tim Mahoney
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-87351-905-2
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
Published: 2013-05-07T16:00:00+00:00

THE CLEANUP MAN

Wallace Jamie, boy wonder, was a criminologist, a rare thing for his day. This 24-year-old teetotaler and vegetarian had a University of Chicago education and a pedigree: His uncle was Eliot Ness. His father, Alexander Jamie, was chief investigator for the Secret Six, an anonymous group of Chicago businessmen who conspired to bring down Al Capone when the government could not. Alexander Jamie had hired his son Wallace to work on that investigation. It was a private enterprise model of crime-fighting that St. Paul would soon adopt.

St. Paul’s civic fathers were beyond embarrassed. Two of the city’s most eminent men had been kidnapped within a few months of each other. The Daily News blamed this squarely on St. Paul police. Now, with the Dillinger fiasco, which of the public enemies hadn’t escaped from St. Paul?

Even before Dillinger’s escape, St. Paul’s business elite had been formulating a plan to investigate the police department. Richard C. Lilly, president of the First National Bank, persuaded nine other prominent men, including William Hamm, to donate $10,000 each to finance a sting. “Mr. Lilly advised that these persons were picked after due consideration,” wrote an FBI agent, “and he made special mention of the fact that the Bremers would not be considered for this purpose under any circumstances.”

The FBI memo added that “this organization did not desire to be uncovered, so they arranged to work through Mr. Kahn, editor of the St. Paul Daily News.”

A few nights after Dillinger’s escape from Lincoln Court, Lilly’s group met with Howard Kahn. They persuaded him to campaign for reform both behind the scenes and in the pages of the Daily News. On May 16, 1934, Kahn and police commissioner Ned Warren hired Wallace Jamie to lead the probe, paying him $300 a month through the Daily News accounts. Jamie hunkered down with assistants and began an undercover probe that would consume him for the next year. His target was the St. Paul police department.

Meanwhile, the feds determined that Tom Filben had supplied Dillinger with getaway cars. Agents brought Filben in for questioning on a Friday morning. Filben’s attorney, Thomas McMeekin, made a “very friendly” visit to FBI offices to discuss a writ of habeas corpus. McMeekin betrayed his client by agreeing to stall the writ until Saturday. “Mr. McMeekin confidentially informed me,” wrote Hoover’s trusted assistant, Hugh Clegg, “that this would permit Filben to remain available for questioning until Monday as it would be impossible for the judge to set the hearing on the petition before Monday.” So McMeekin conspired with federal agents to set up his client to be interrogated all weekend.

But gangland pressure immediately got to McMeekin. “Friends of Filben were bringing tremendous pressure on [McMeekin] as they didn’t know what [Filben] might have said and they wanted him released,” Inspector Clegg wrote. McMeekin revisited the FBI office and told Clegg that he would be forced to file the writ on Friday afternoon, thus springing Filben.

Clegg had another trick in his bag. He made a backroom deal with federal judge Matthew Joyce so that Filben could be held over the weekend.

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