Seven Silent Men (8 page)

Prairie Port, technically, was in the dominion, and therefore under the jurisdiction, of the St. Louis, Missouri, field office. But Ed Grafton would have no truck with St. Louis. He had, as long as anyone could recall, dealt directly with Washington headquarters … very often took his orders from no mortal less than J. Edgar Hoover himself … operated Prairie Port as its own entity … seemed to be the only SRA or SAC in the Bureau who had the power to reject agents sent to his residency by Washington headquarters. A decade of enormous population growth in the Prairie Port area and the assignment of an assistant U.S. attorney to cover the newly built federal courthouse in the city added credence to those headquarters men pushing for the residency to become a full-fledged and proper field office. The pervasive enemy to such a plan was Grafton. He wished Prairie Port to remain as it was … a curious creature vacillating somewhere between residency and field office. Ed Grafton didn't have to bother about the chaos such vacillation created. John Sunstrom did. Sunstrom served as assistant senior resident agent, the second-in-command to Grafton, and was in sole and total charge of the administrative end of things at Prairie Port.

The telephone conference call with A. R. Roland at Washington headquarters which Strom had hurriedly arranged began at 1
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. sharp in the eleventh-floor residency offices in downtown Prairie Port. Since the temperature outside was ninety-two degrees and the building's central air-conditioning system was non-operative on Sundays and the office's three auxiliary window air-conditioning units had long since broken down, the seven attending Bureau agents were in their perspired-through shirt-sleeves. Twenty-eight-year-old Rodney Willis recorded the Prairie Port end of the conversation on the office reel-to-reel Magnavox tape machine. Billy Yates was relegated to operating the speaker box so all in the room could hear, be heard by, or converse with, the man to whom Sunstrom was talking on the tie-line phone to Washington, assistant to the Director of the FBI A. R. Roland.

Jessup was the first of the group Strom summoned to the speaker box. Reading from his notes for Roland, Jessup recapitulated learning that the Prairie Port police had not told the FBI a robbery was in progress at Mormon State National Bank … how the police rushed the bank thinking the robbers were still inside … how nobody was found inside … how the vault sank into the concrete floor … how the top of the vault was blow-torched open … how nothing was seen inside the vault except Brewmeister's face staring up through a hole in the bottom … how Brewmeister was swept from sight.

Attention shifted to the true reason for the conference call: determining the FBI's legal right to enter the investigation. The robbery of any bank that was federally chartered, as most were, afforded the Bureau automatic jurisdiction to investigate the felony. So did the theft of any bank funds guaranteed under FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. So did, when all else failed, suspicion that the perpetrators had fled across state lines to avoid arrest. Ed Grafton's liberal use of this last federal statute, both for bank theft and other violations, had prompted vehement media and civic condemnation from Prairie Port and other large Midwestern cities in which Wilkie Jarrel held sway. Jarrel was Grafton's white whale. Grafton was Jarrel's
bête noire
.

Wilkie Jarrel headed the all-powerful Grange Association, a multibillion-dollar agricultural combine, as well as its subsidiary, the Prairie Farmer Association, both of which Grafton never stopped investigating. Grafton was forever amassing evidence to prove Jarrel had misappropriated funds for the singular purpose of corrupting elected officials. A. R. Roland had to deal with many of these officials on Capitol Hill in Washington and, more often than not, had to soothe their Jarrel-ordered wrath against Grafton and his ongoing investigation of the Grange Association's top man.

Roland had been the Bureau higher-up who instructed Grafton never to invoke catchall statutes, such as crossing-state-lines, without receiving his prior approval. Now, learning via the conference call the difficulties resident agents were having in determining whether federal laws governing bank theft and FDIC guarantees had been violated, the Grafton-Jarrel feud loomed ever larger in the consciousness of the assistant to the Director of the FBI.

Thirty-one-year-old Donald Bracken explained to Roland, over the speaker box, that Mormon State National Bank did not officially open “until the day after tomorrow,” Tuesday, August 24. This in itself, Bracken estimated, created somewhat shaky grounds for citing violation of FDIC statutes in claiming jurisdiction to investigate the robbery of Mormon State. A strong case might be made proving an investor's deposit could not be insured until such a deposit had been made and that it was physically impossible to deposit funds before a bank was open … that, therefore, FDIC statutes were both invalid and nonapplicable in the Mormon State situation. As if this were not enough, Bracken went on to say his talks with bank officials revealed the FDIC papers had not been signed or made out by the bank's president.

Portly, forty-seven-year-old Madden “Happy” de Camp provided Roland, and most other men in the room, with the dourest information of all … that a strong argument could be, and might be, made against the federal bank statute itself having been violated. Happy related that his cursory institutional check showed that Mormon State National Bank had obtained a state charter under which to operate rather than a federal charter. And federal bank robbery laws applied only to federally chartered enterprises. What was more, the bank premises, as well as the entire River Rise project, stood on a strip of unincorporated state park land that was exempt from federal taxation … and possibly federal bank statutes legislation.

Happy de Camp saved the worst news for last. He had found, he told his listeners, that Mormon State National Bank was owned by Old City State Bank of Prairie Port and that Old City was owned by the Platte River Bank of North Platte, Nebraska, which in turn was a subsidiary of Rapaho Investments Incorporated. Rapaho Investments, Happy pointed out for those who didn't know, had been purchased three months before by the Grange Association, of which sixty-eight-year-old Wilkie Jarrel was controlling stockholder, board chairman ano chief operating officer.

Resident agent Rodney Willis, in his turn at the speaker box, told of checking at Brink's Incorporated several hours earlier and obtaining verification that the money-moving company delivered twenty-one sacks of currency to the Mormon State National Bank at 4
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., Friday, August 20, in armored truck number 12–311. If the delivered funds had come directly from the Federal Reserve Bank in Prairie Port, the currency would have constituted federal monies, the direct theft of which gave the FBI automatic jurisdiction to investigate. Willis's preliminary findings showed, however, that the twenty-one sacks had been picked up at, and transferred from, Old City State Bank in Prairie Port, the parent company of the violated Mormon State National Bank. The twenty-one sacks; Willis had been told, represented the first of five consigned transfer shipments from Old City. The five shipments contained an aggregate of $1,100,000 in currency which had been packaged in sixty-eight sacks, locked trays and metal money crates. No specific record had been kept as to what each individual package was worth. How much money was in the twenty-one sacks missing from the Mormon State vault could not be determined until a recount was made of the four undelivered money shipments still at Old City State Bank. Since it was Sunday and Old City was having trouble getting cashiers in to count, Rodney Willis had been warned by Brink's officials not to expect a final figure until mid-morning of the next day, Monday, August 23.

Cub Hennessy was the final resident agent Strom had speak with Roland. Cub explained that over the last eight days Prairie Port had suffered a mysterious series of electrical dips and dimouts, the cause of which Missouri Power and Electric Company, better known as Little Mo, had not been able to trace. Cub, just prior to the conference call, had chatted with a senior vice-president and a supervising engineer for Little Mo, both of whom were now absolutely certain the bank robbers had somehow tapped into the utility's main power lines, thereby creating the electrical failure. The two officials were also certain that these power dips would continue until Little Mo troubleshooters could get down under the bank and correct the chaos wrought by the missing thieves. The presumption of deliberate interference in electrical power, Hennessy guardedly proffered, might open up new avenues for claiming jurisdiction, such as those covering the sabotage of public services. Roland said he doubted that it would.

The room was cleared and the speaker box shut down so Roland and Sunstrom could continue their conversation in private. Asked for his assessment of events, Strom confessed never having experienced a situation in which just about every avenue for gaining legal jurisdiction appeared, for the moment anyway, to be blocked. He quietly joked that perhaps God was trying to tell the FBI something, then went on to say he was certain these impasses were temporary, that, as more information became available, a way would be found for entering the case through either the bank theft or FDIC statutes, should the Bureau deem it worthwhile to do so. Strom was fairly certain the Prairie Port Police Department would soon have to put out an official all-states fugitive alarm, which would make “escaping across state lines” more defensible if the FBI chose this path to follow. Sunstrom counseled that when the statutes in question were finally violated, every propriety should be observed in the hope of minimizing the inevitable anti-Bureau criticism to come … that it was wise not to automatically enter the investigation, even when they could, but first to petition for such jurisdiction from the assistant United States attorney of the district, Jules Shapiro.

A. R. Roland thanked Sunstrom for his candor but made no comment, signed off telling Strom he wanted to be kept apprised of all events under discussion or relative to the discussion. He emphasized that a careful eye should be kept on the amount of television and press coverage of the crime and manhunt, as well as any perceptible public reaction to this information. The assistant to the Director made no mention of Grafton. Sunstrom thought this odd.

… By 1:30
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. Sunday a small crowd of curiosity seekers had joined the media people gathered in front of the Mormon State National Bank, and the Prairie Port Police Department, which had already picked up some fifty known criminals for questioning, launched a city-wide dragnet but still avoided issuing any out-of-state alarms for the fugitives even though state troopers from Missouri and Illinois had voluntarily erected roadblocks on both sides of the Mississippi River, and the county River Patrol, by itself, was making sweeps of the Prairie Port waterfront and examining midstream islands on which the robbers could have taken refuge. Between 3 and 4
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. the Grange Association offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the apprehension of the robbers, and police teams searched every departing carrier at the bus terminal, the air terminal, the rail terminal, and Army Corps of Engineers divers descended into the flooded tunnels of the rock palisade below the looted bank, and the Prairie Farmer Association added $5,000 to the reward already posted by the Grange Association, and the switchboards at the police station and state police barracks were barraged with tip calls. Even the FBI, which hardly anybody in the area much cared for, got rung up a few times with offers of information.

From 4 to 5
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. the vacationing Ed Grafton was finally contacted in northern Montana, and Martin Brewmeister gained consciousness in University Hospital long enough to give Sunstrom a brief accounting of his adventures in the flooded tunnels, and WJKB, Prairie Port's leading country-and-western radio station, not only set up a robbery “hot line” telephone number for those wishing to provide information on the crime but added $5,000 of its own to the already $15,000 reward money jackpot. Also, River Patrol frogmen jumped from a hovering helicopter into the Mississippi River to retrieve a floating corpse that had been spotted by waterside picnickers some twenty minutes before, and the local rock-and-roll radio station, WQXY, WJKB's main competitor, thrice interrupted programming with bulletins of the robbers having fled in two airplanes, one of which had crash-landed in a cornfield west of town … claimed that a gun battle was under way between the survivors of the crash and encircling state troopers.

At 5
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. Prairie Port's three television channels expanded their half-hour local newscasts to sixty minutes so all aspects of the robbery and manhunt could be gone into depthfully … reported that the latest estimate of missing money was put at four to five million dollars … that the plane which state troopers had surrounded in the cornfield had actually crashed five weeks earlier … that the fishing of the corpse out of the river by frogmen had drawn a shoreline crowd of nearly fifteen hundred spectators and that the body had tentatively been identified as that of sixty-year-old mental retardee Mary Hill, who had disappeared from a county medical institution and who wasn't thought of as having any connection with the robbery … that Mormon State National Bank was also becoming a sightseeing mecca that currently boasted, as live TV coverage showed, a crowd of four hundred neck-craners plus hot dog, soda and ice cream vendors … that no fewer than one hundred and fifty known criminals had been interrogated by the police … that the FBI was not involved in the investigation and would make no comment other than that divers had been frustrated in their efforts to descend into the flooded tunnels but that these tunnels were draining fast and were expected to be unflooded in the coming hours … that the police switchboard was receiving almost two hundred phone calls an hour offering information on the crime … that the city and state police had already checked out some forty-five false leads but were still soliciting the public for more information … that empty money sacks, possibly stolen from Mormon State National Bank, had been found in a midstream tower of the recently begun suspension bridge over the Mississippi River, which when completed in three years would link Prairie Port, Missouri, with Illinois. The scoop of the day came on ABC's local affiliate with the live interview of Franklin Ulick, assistant manager of Mormon State National Bank. Ulick, who was hurrying from his car into police headquarters when he was spotted by an alert news team, stopped long enough to display a typewritten page and explain that these were the names and addresses of the one hundred and eighteen people who had visited the bank premises over the last two or three weeks. He gazed hard into the camera and let it be known that one or more of these one hundred and eighteen people was the key to solving the crime, had to be the robbery gang's inside contact, since this crime was unequivocally an inside job. All of what Ulick said, as well as everything else on the local television, was relayed to an assistant in A. R. Roland's Washington headquarters office by Sunstrom.