Tough Customers

Early autumn with frost in the air--just before the shooting season opens--is a busy time at Dakin's sporting goods and hardware store on Central Street in the quiet little city of Bangor, Me. Proprietor Everett ("Shep") Hurd would not have been at all surprised one day last month when three undersized young men bought two .45 Colt automatics and a generous supply of ammunition, except for one fact.

All three wore city clothes and they talked in a kind of English that sounded strange to Maine ears.

When the men left, after ordering another Colt and a .35 automatic Winchester rifle, promising to drop in to get them in a few weeks, Proprietor Hurd, to be on the safe side, called the Bangor police. The Bangor police called the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington. To the F.B.I. Mr. Kurd's description of his customers sounded exactly like Al Brady, Clarence Lee Shaffer Jr. and James Dalhover, notorious midwest bank robbers, who liked to boast that John Dillinger was only a "creampuff" bandit. These diminutive badmen (all three between 5 ft. 5 in. and 5 ft. 6 in. tall) escaped from a Greenfield, Ind. jail on Oct. 11, 1936, left a trail that grew cold near Bridgeport, Conn.

Exactly a year and a day after the gang's escape in Greenfield, James Dalhover, its "trigger man," walked into Dakin's store for the second time, to pick up his merchandise. Said he: "Where's the stuff I ordered?" The clerk who stepped forward was not Hurd but Walter Walsh, a crack G-man and specialist in trick shots. Walsh's job was to signal 13 more G-men, 30 Bangor patrolmen and a squad of Indiana and Maine State troopers posted outside the store as soon as a member of the Brady gang came in. As Walsh moved to pull a cord which would, set a signal in the window, Dalhover realized that he had walked into a trap.

Dalhover fired, wounding Walsh in the shoulder. Suddenly more Federal agents appeared in the store attempting to seize the gangster, who dashed for the cellar, emerged by a back door where two policemen collared him without difficulty. Meanwhile on the street outside, Brady and Shaffer, alarmed by the barrage from inside the store, jumped from their car and began firing wildly through the plate glass windows. Bangor citizens popped into the street, among them. Maine's Republican

Representative and onetime (1925-29) Governor, Ralph 0. Brewster, who had been lunching in a drugstore nearby. G-men opened fire from all directions on Brady and Shaffer. The chatter of machine-gun fire lasted about five minutes. When it ended Brady and Shaffer were lying dead on the car tracks, their little bodies about 15 ft. apart (see cut).

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