It was Sunday, but The Blind Pig was open for business. Carl Christensen was behind the bar when the two men came in.
They were unsmiling, drab, 30 or so; they wore city suits and overcoats; they didn't want a drink.Christensen waited uneasily until they produced identification: FBI.
This was April 1934, and prohibition had not yet lurched off the scene. Still, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was not interested in the 33-year-old tavernkeeper as a whiskey-selling lawbreaker. The bureau wanted his services as a lawman.
Christensen moonlighted (for $50 a year) as constable of Spider Lake, Wis. (pop. 300). This night the agents needed his help in setting up road blocks.
They thought they had John Dillinger - the most famous, feared and hero-worshiped killer in the country - surrounded with a half-dozen pals in Little Bohemia Lodge, a modest north Wisconsin vacation retreat, two miles from Christensen's bar.
The three men headed for the Little Bohemia in a 1934 Model A Ford coupe. Agent J.C. Newman drove. Agent W. Carter Baum sat in the middle, a tommy gun in his lap. Christensen, unarmed and uneasy, crowded in next to the passenger-side window.
In 1934, there was no Las Vegas to speak of, and Atlantic City was a place to buy saltwater taffy. The vacationing hoodlum elite of Chicago, Minneapolis and Milwaukee preferred the north Wisconsin woods.
Al Capone had a four-bedroom, lakeside house just down Route 51 from the Little Bohemia. The house had 18-inch-thick stone walls and machine-gun turrets off an upstairs bedroom. Within easy driving range were Ma Bailey's highly regarded whorehouse and several bars with gambling.
Dillinger had nothing to do with Capone and the city mobs. He was an independent, an Indiana farm boy made good in the banking business. In fact he had robbed upwards of three dozen - and escaped from five jails - and killed at least 13 people.
As Public Enemy No. 1 on the FBI's list of the 10 Most Wanted Criminals, Dillinger could summon the cream of his society. For the Little Bohemia weekend, he brought two more of the 10 Most Wanted (Baby Face Nelson and Homer Van Meter) and three who would soon make the list (Tommy Carroll, Eddie Green and Three-Finger Johnny Hamilton).
Baby Face Nelson was probably the most famous and certainly the most murderous of the group. Born Lester J. Gillis, he discarded his "sissy" name early on and announced that henceforth he would be known as Big George Nelson.
The nickname was difficult for most people, because "Big George" was only 5-foot-5 and not very muscular. Still he was a man with a large gun and a small sense of humor, so those of his peers who couldn't manage to call him "Big George" with a straight face, called him Nelson. Behind his back, they called him "Baby Face" - because he had a deceptively guileless countenance and looked a decade younger than his 28 years.
The Dillinger party had arrived at Little Bohemia on Friday, April 20.
The friendly owner of the lodge, Emil Wanatka, sat in on the poker games - and managed to tip off the FBI that the gang was there.
Sunday afternoon, 15 FBI agents, led by the renowned Melvin Purvis, flew into an airfield outside Rhineland, Wis. They crammed into three cars, drove 50 miles to the Little Bohemia and quietly blocked off the place - or thought they did.
There was poker in the bar, with three young women-friends of the gang watching. Not watching or recognizing the hoods were a cook and two young men from a nearby government work camp.
About 8:30, the outsiders went out the front door, a little unsteady from drinking. The FBI men, waiting outside, took them for Dillinger's gang and yelled, "Stop! . . . Hands up!"
Terrified at seeing so many armed men rising out of the bushes, the three started to run.
The FBI opened fire, and Eugene Boisoneau, the cook, was killed on the spot. The other two were wounded and taken into custody.
Inside the hotel, the hoods heard the shooting, and some, including Dillinger, ran up to the second floor, jumped to the roof of a back porch, then to the ground and ran into the woods.
Other gang members scooted out the back door, headed for the lake, then veered off into the woods.
Not knowing the hoods had fled, FBI leader Purvis brought out a bullhorn - and unwittingly set the tone for a thousand subsequent Hollywood movies.
"We know you're in there," he yelled. "Come out with your hands up."
Carl Christensen and the two FBI men who were with him arrived at Little Bohemia to find the gang fled and the agents peeling off to comb the woods. So they drove off to join the search - and soon came upon a car apparently abandoned beside a dirt road.
Before they could get out to look, Baby Face Nelson appeared from behind the abandoned vehicle.
"He moved real fast and stuckhis tommy gun through the driver's-side window," Christensen says. "Neither of the agents had a chance to go for his gun.
"Then Baby Face spoke, and it's been 58 years, but I can still hear that rough, mean voice: `I know who you are, you son of a bitches, and I'm going to kill you.' "
Agent Newman flung open his driver's-side door, bumping Nelson just as he fired. Most of the bullets went through the car roof, but one creased the top of Newman's head, knocking him out.
Meanwhile, Christensen and Agent Baum rolled out the passenger-side door. Baum tried to fire, but Nelson was spraying the ground with his tommy gun.
Christensen took a bullet in his thigh. Another smashed his hip. Another smashed his ankle.
Baum was hit in the throat. He dropped his tommy gun, staggered and fell, wheezing through a broken windpipe.
Christensen crawled to the tommy gun. "But I couldn't figure out how to take it off safety. If I'd had my rifle, I could have killed him," he adds longingly.
Nelson kept shooting. Bullets hit Christensen's shoulder, arm, other leg. Finally the gun jammed.
"He gave us a look like he'd like to kill us but didn't have time. Then he drove off in our car.
"I lay there on the edge of the road and listened to poor Carter Baum drawing one raspy breath after another. Pretty soon it got real cold."
Tuesday morning, the Little Bohemia shootout was on front pages all over the country. The gang had split up and gone off in hijacked cars. Milwaukee police fired on one of the cars. It got away, but a bullet killed Three Finger Johnny Hamilton.
Baby Face Nelson ended up hiking 20 miles to the Lac du Flambeau Indian Reservation. There he hid out for two weeks with an elderly Chippewa bootlegger named Ole Catfish.
Carl Christensen lay in the road for two hours, listening as Carter Baum's life gurgled away. Finally help came. Men looked him over. He heard someone say, "My God, he's hit all over."
Finally they put him in the back seat of a Buick, next to Agent Newman who had a terrible headache.
They drove 35 miles to a small hospital in Ironwood, got there after midnight. The doctors had all gone home.
Nurses took off his sheepskin coat, found 15 bullet holes in it, but only eight in his body.
"This one's a goner. We'll just close up the holes," one nurse said.
"Don't let him bleed on the mattress," said another.
An orderly brought a sheet of plywood. They put it on a mattress, then put him on the plywood.
They took no X-rays, gave him nothing for pain. By and by, he fell asleep or passed out.
Next morning a doctor turned up. Took no X-rays, set no bones. "You won't last much above four hours," he announced. "Do you have a family?"
They sent word to Christensen's wife and left him on his plywood. "They didn't expect me to live."
He didn't oblige them. Next day, the doctor shrugged irritably and rescinded his death sentence.
He began to heal, and slowly it dawned on people that Carl Christensen had done more than his fair share for law and order. He was written up all over the country. The government paid his medical bills.
Congress voted him $7,500 as a reward. Later President Roosevelt reduced the award to $3,500.
Secret Service men guarded him around the clock, lest Baby Face come back for another go at this witness to the murder of Agent Baum.
Christensen was finally X-rayed, after his fifth week in the hospital. "They told me I had a broken hip and multifractures in my ankle, but it was too late to set them, and I would be a cripple."
They were wrong, of course. He went home after two months, still carrying one bullet in his thigh that has not been removed to this day. His wife, Jeanne, had kept the tavern going.
A Secret Service agent named Johnny Mendello went along, for Nelson was still at large. "When they put Baby Face in the electric chair," Christensen told Mendello, "I want to be there."
"Baby Face Nelson will never die in the chair," the agent said. "We don't bring those animals back alive."
The Secret Service man was right. Three Finger Hamilton was already gone. In June, Tommy Carroll was shot down in an empty farmhouse near Waterloo, Iowa. Eddie Green and Homer Van Meter were killed later that summer.
In July, they got Dillinger.
By fall, only Baby Face was left. To his satisfaction, he had supplanted Dillinger as No. 1 on the Public Enemy list. Now, alone at the top, he had a few months to savor his celebrity.
But on Nov. 27, FBI agents Herman Hollis and Sam Cowley caught up with Nelson, his wife, Helen, and a crook named John Paul Chase. In the firefight that followed, the two agents were killed and Nelson was seriously wounded. He dragged himself to the agents' car and drove to pick up his wife and Chase, who had fled when the shooting started.
After awhile he asked Chase to drive. They went to a hotel, and Nelson died of his wounds. His wife and Chase stripped him to delay identification and left him in a ditch. Police quickly guessed it was Baby Face Nelson. His body had been hit 17 times.
So it was over at last.
The Secret Service left Carl Christensen alone to make a pretty good thing out of the little tavern. His exploits drew customers. He used the $3,500 the government awarded him to expand the place.
He resigned as constable of Spider Lake.
The Christensens had two boys. They sold the tavern, moved to Racine and Carl went into the building business. He prospered. After awhile, he was elected mayor.
In 1970, he retired and he and Anne moved to Largo, Fla. They lived in a comfortable mobile home community and saw a lot of their sons, who had become accountants in Fort Lauderdale.
Last year, Anne died. She was 90. "It's pretty hard to lose someone you've been with for almost 60 years," says Carl, who is 91.
He lives on; his mind is clear; he walks well. Recently, the mail brought a tape he had ordered of classic polkas from the North Woods of America.
"I think about Baby Face sometimes," he says. "He sure had a mean way about him."
Dist. by Scripps Howard News Service