Editor’s note: On Saturday the story of the Brady Gang opened with the shocking news that Public Enemy No. 1 Al Brady and a pal, Clarence Lee Shaffer Jr., had been killed by federal agents as they returned to buy a submachine gun at Dakin’s Sporting Goods in Bangor. G-men arrested a third gangster, James Dalhover, inside the store. Also chronicled were the Indiana outlaws’ early years, with details of their three murders and numerous robberies. Escaping a Midwestern dragnet, the trio in 1937 moved to Connecticut where they were living when they made their first visit to Bangor to buy weapons and ammunition on Sept. 21. Today’s conclusion describes their final two Bangor visits and how the FBI cornered the criminals.

Alfred Brady and his gang were having a ball in Bridgeport, Conn., a city they’d moved to in September 1937 with the fantasy of befriending an employee of the Colt Firearms Co. in Hartford and acquiring the weapons of their dreams, the Thompson submachine.

In addition to indulging his passion for horseback riding and roller skating, Brady was also in love again, this time with an innocent, 20-year-old unemployed secretary named Alicia Frawley. Lee Shaffer and Jim Dalhover were happy in New England, too, glorying in a new phase in their lives when their dastardly deeds were paying off in finely tailored suits, silk underwear and expensive shoes.

But again, Bangor beckoned with the prospect of buying more weapons. So, on Oct. 5 Everett “Shep” Hurd, the 42-year-old owner of Dakin’s Sporting Goods Co. at 25 Central St. in Bangor, again saw Dalhover in his store.

Alone this time and once again posing as Charles Harriss, a pseudonym he’d used during his first visit to the store on Sept. 21, the bandit casually check out merchandise on Dakin’s shelves.

“[He] seemed to be a little taken aback when I immediately recognized [him] and asked [him] how the other two .45 Colts were working,” Hurd remembered. “[He] bought another .45 Colt automatic pistol, a .45 caliber automatic clip and a box of 50 .45 caliber cartridges.

“Dalhover asked me if I could get him some cartridge clips to hold 32 separate cartridges for a .38 caliber Luger,” he continued. “I then figured to get him back in the store again and I told him I didn’t have any but could get some. He also wanted me to get some clips for the .45 caliber Colt automatic to hold 25 cartridges and I told him that I had never heard of them but that I would try and get some.”

Dalhover was so encouraged by the conversation that he asked the callous question Bangor people are still snickering about: “Well, how about a machine gun?”

“Well, of course you know that is against the law unless we have a license,” Hurd replied. “If we got one we would have to pay $125 tax and $125 license fee.”

“Think nothing of it,” Dalhover said. “We would be glad to pay it.”

Then Hurd had “a happy thought,” he later recalled. Some time previous to this a coastal fisherman had picked up a tommy gun after a rum-running battle. So he asked Dalhover, “How about getting a secondhand one?”

“Fine,” the outlaw said. “All you have to do is to find out where it is, tell us, and we will go and get it.”

After agreeing to pick up the gun in a week, either on Monday, Oct. 11 or the following day, Dalhover departed, driving off with Brady and Shaffer who had been waiting in front of the store in their double-parked Buick, one of its doors remaining open during their wait.

Turning to clerk Harold Ellingwood, Hurd said, “Do you know who [that] fellow [was]? [He is] the gangster [who was] in a short time ago, that is, I think [he] is the gangster.”

Ellingwood commented, “Why, I think [he was] dressed up fine. I thought [he was] a … school teacher.”

Alerting police

Returning to the Bangor police barracks on Hammond Street, where he had been turned away after reporting his suspicions on Sept. 21, Hurd got as far as the Western Union office across the street when he noticed a tough-looking character leaning against a telephone pole, and another in a doorway.

“Oh, my good Lord, they are checking up on me already,” he imagined, returning to the store to phone the police instead. Again, he was rebuffed, so he called the Maine State Police.

Sgt. Frank Hall of the state police arrived at Dakin’s around 10 a.m. that morning and conferred with Hurd, instructing him not to mention his suspicions to anyone else and to stall the men along should they return for their machine gun.

Returning to his office in Lincoln, Hall called State Police Chief Wilbur Towle in Augusta and told him of his meeting with Hurd, suggesting he contact the Boston office of the FBI. Special Agent Chris Callan met with Hurd in his store on Friday, Oct. 8, opening a large book of mug shots of wanted criminals. When Hurd positively identified a picture of Dalhover as the man who twice had visited Dakin’s, he thought he saw Callan’s face fall, asking him “if it wasn’t someone he wanted.”

“Drawingly the G-man replied `Y-e-e-s, I guess we want him’,” Hurd recalled. “I was rather mollified as I thought that I had only run into a very minor criminal. The G-man said he would make preparations for the return visit of this man whose name he would not tell me.”

Hurd was unable to pick out Shaffer’s photo in the book.

The FBI’s plan

On Saturday the FBI’s plan to trap the Brady Gang at Hurd’s store began to come together, but only after around-the-clock planning in Bangor and in the bureau’s Boston and Indianapolis offices, with growing concern about the entire operation being expressed by Director J. Edgar Hoover in Washington. An elite group of 12 G-men, known as the “Braga Squad,” Braga being the code name for the Brady Gang, began filtering into the city from around the nation to prepare for what most of them would later claim was just another day on the job.

But for the people of Bangor, Tuesday, Oct. 12, would be one of the most thrilling days of their lives.

By Sunday evening, Oct. 10, Shep Hurd was frightened and exhausted. At noon inside his store, he had conferred with Bangor Police Chief Thomas Crowley and Myron Gurnea, the tall, taciturn FBI agent who was heading up the Braga Squad. After strong persuasion from Gurnea, Hurd relented and allowed him to conceal plainclothesmen at Dakin’s beginning Monday morning, anticipating the gang’s return. But he still feared for his safety and that of his clerks.

Saturday had been a nerve-wracking day as Hurd waited in vain for FBI agents to meet with him. There were strange men all around his store, he recalled. Even on that day, before the trap was to be set on Monday, there would be two men in front of him and when he turned around to speak to someone, and turned back, the mysterious G-men had vanished.

“The store crew certainly were getting jittery,” he remembered, indicating he had let them in on his secret, “and I hoped that something would be done and done quickly.”

Shep and Marguerite Hurd’s 17-year-old daughter Rae was visiting her parents in Orono that weekend and was concerned when her father told her something was up at the store. At the time, she was a senior at Maine Central Institute in Pittsfield.

“Saturday night Dad was down at the store until late into the evening going all through the mug shot book,” Rae Hurd Smith of Orono recalled. “He never brought it home with him, he only kept it at the store.

“He used to say the G-man who showed him the book smoothed over the gang’s viciousness so as not to get him too excited,” she said. “When Dad asked him just how vicious they were, the man said calmly, `W-e-l-l, they’re not too bad.’ ”

The FBI later maintained it never revealed the gang’s identity to Hurd until after the shootout, but documents and interviews suggest he knew the name Brady Gang in advance. If he wasn’t told the name by federal agents, then certainly he learned the information Sunday evening when he anxiously leafed through detective magazines at Clare’s newsstand on Hammond Street and found stories and photos of the gang.

At the Bangor House and Penobscot Exchange hotels and a Main Street rooming house, the 12 FBI men, along with Meredith Stewart, an Indiana State Police detective whom Hoover was infuriated to learn had joined his men in Bangor, were adding last-minute details to their “battle plan” to take effect the next day. Special agents would work in pairs, two to be concealed inside Dakin’s, the rest hidden in unmarked cars parked on the street and behind the store. They had divided the city into zones searching for the gang’s 1937 Buick Roadmaster, license number YK-747, but never spotted the vehicle.

There was one more matter to attend to. Hoover wanted to fly to Bangor, check into a hotel and conduct the investigation himself. The FBI chief was still smarting from politicians’ criticism that he was merely a bureaucrat in a suit, not a hands-on gang buster.

Bureau documents reveal Gurnea and Edward Soucy, agent in charge of the Boston office, hated Hoover’s plan, fearing his presence in Bangor would compromise the secrecy of their operation.

An FBI memo to Hoover, dated 6 p.m. Oct. 10, written by E.A. Tamm of the bureau’s Washington office, notes that “Mr. Soucy stated that Mr. Gurnea is of the opinion that it would be undesirable for the Director to proceed to Maine at this time because of the possible publicity attendant upon the Director’s movements…” To which Hoover scribbled in the margin, “This is just tripe!”

From then on, Gurnea’s G-men were on their own in Bangor, with some direction from Soucy and others in Boston. When Hoover realized a Bangor store owner and other civilians might garner more media publicity than he from the expected coup, he apparently relinquished direction of the operation to others in the bureau.

After the gun battle took place much sooner than the FBI director had been led to believe, he was livid, feeling he then had license to blast his men in Bangor for what he felt had been a botched operation, with property damage and danger to pedestrians walking on Central Street during the gunplay.

The G-men, Hurd and his employees took their places at Dakin’s on Monday morning, but the gang never showed up. He could have cut the suspense with a knife, Hurd recalled. Nervous clerks asked customers to repeat what they wanted four or five times.

Marguerite Hurd provided the day’s only comic relief when she drove up to the store dressed in an old beaver coat, hurried inside and demanded, “Shep, where’s the grocery money?”

“The G-men closed in on her,” Rae Smith recalled with amusement. They released her unharmed when they learned her identity.

After Dakin’s closed at 6 p.m. the agents again drove Bangor’s streets searching for the Brady Gang, even checking out cocktail lounges for the trio.

What they didn’t know was that the desperadoes had slipped back into town late in the afternoon, planning to pick up the tommy gun in the morning. After shopping at J.J. Newberry Co. on Main Street and looking around the city for a room to rent for the night, they stopped at John’s Cafe at Main and Hodsdon streets for dinner.

Louis Skoufis, a teen-ager at the time, was working for his father, John Skoufis, that night. In a 1988 interview he recalled seeing the three men sitting up to the counter chatting with his father through the open kitchen.

“One of the men didn’t care for the way the cook had fixed his potatoes so he sent them back,” Skoufis said. “The cook wasn’t too happy about it, but the gangster kidded him along.”

John Skoufis chatted with the outlaws about Springfield, Mass., where some of his relatives lived. The gang had driven through that city en route to Bangor.

The gangster trio then drove off into the darkness to Carmel, a small town located 12 miles west on Route 2, and rented a $3 cabin at Auto Rest Park, a popular amusement spot they no doubt had seen while driving into Bangor earlier in the day. Around 9:45 p.m., near closing time, owner Leo Wise showed the gang to their cabin. Each unit in the semi-circular tourist court bore a woman’s name; the sign hanging over the front porch of the large Brady cabin read “Elizabeth,” after Wise’s mother.

Brady stayed inside while Shaffer and Dalhover dropped into the park nearby restaurant for a snack. While eating they noticed State Trooper Russell Fletcher at the counter buying takeout coffee. Dalhover later said if the officer had so much as reached for a handkerchief he would have shot him dead.

Shaffer returned to the cabin while Dalhover walked across Route 2 to buy a bottle of beer from Harry Willey, who ran a store and cafe. He returned with this and some food for Brady in the cabin and retired for the night. They never turned the bed clothes down, sleeping on top of the blankets to be on alert for any trouble outside.

Around 6:45 a.m. Tuesday — Columbus Day — the outlaws left Carmel on a postcard-perfect autumn morning. The foliage must have been brilliant all along Route 2 as they headed back into Bangor to buy the tommy gun.

FBI agents inside Dakin’s were alerted by Chief Tom Crowley who said that, while being driven to the police station, he had just spied the gangster car proceeding down Hammond Street to Union. The agents took their positions as on Monday; this time they knew it was not a dry run. In the back of the store, G-man Bill Nitschke waited behind a partition, thirsting for some gun play. With him was Inspector Jack Hayes, who had taken the place of Carl Lobley, the local police sergeant who had hidden there the day before.

In the front window hunt a hunting advertisent with a string attached to be pulled from inside as a signal to G-men hidden on the street that a gang member had entered the store.

The thugs again pulled up to John’s Cafe on Main Streetwhere they ate a leisurely breakfast. Around 8:15 or 8:20 a.m. they finished, leaving dozens of pennies under their plates as a tip. John Skoufis, who thought they were nice young men, surmised they must have been playing penny-ante poker the night before.

Shaffer took his usual position behind the wheel, with Dalhover seated beside him. In the back seat, on the passenger’s side, sat Brady. Shaffer drove down Main Street by Freese’s Department Store and the New Atlantic Restaurant on the right. Kalil Ayoob, a young newspaper editor, and others were soon to have their morning meals inside the cafe interrupted by some goings-on down on Central Street.

Shaffer then turned their stolen Buick into Central Street. Unlike today’s rotary traffic, downtown streets then were two-way.

Across the street from Dakin’s, the Paramount Restaurant, owned by Cost S. Vafiades, was filled with the usual breakfast crowd, many of them downtown store employees who had to work that day despite its being a holiday.

Driving by Dakin’s on their right, the three outlaws gawked into the store but passed by, proceeding up the street and turning left onto Harlow Street.

The gang is spotted

G-man Walter Devereux, hiding in a car near the Paramount, jumped out and ran across to Dakin’s after making a positive identification of all three men, especially Brady. He had studied the public enemy’s mug shots so many times while chasing him in Chicago, there was no mistaking his profile, especially his prominent nose.

“I went to the alley along the store to where squads of other agents were stationed in the back,” the tall, burly Devereux recalled in a 1980 tape recording, “and told them the suspects had just gone north in their automobile and crossed the bridge, going out of sight. I then ducked into the store and told Walter Walsh, who was posing as a clerk in the store…”

Devereux’s insubordination nearly blew the plan wide open. Walsh urged him to return to his vehicle and soon afterward the gang’s car passed the store again, now headed in the opposite direction. When Shaffer drove up Hammond Street and possibly out of town, Devereux and his partner, and two men in another FBI car, decided to tail the Buick and catch the bandits.

After five or 10 minutes, having lost the gang’s car in traffic, the G-men returned to Central Street to find the Buick double-parked a few doors down from Dakin’s. Dalhover had gotten out of the vehicle, walked down the sidewalk and into the store.

After a while, Shaffer also left the car, perhaps fearing his pal had been inside too long. Brady waited in the back seat.

“When Dalhover came into the store I saw that he and his picture that I’d been studying were absolutely identical,” said Walter Walsh, now 90 and living in Arlington, Va. Disguised as a clerk behind the counter, the G-man casually polished guns and waited on customers.

Hurd recalled, “I made pretense that I had not seen [Dalhover], and I walked behind Walsh and took a couple of films off the shelf and in walking back I nudged Walsh and said, `There he is.’

“Then I walked out into the floor and suddenly looked up and said `hi’ to Dalhover,” Hurd said. “He walked up to me and said, `Have you got that stuff I ordered?’ ”

Hurd never had a chance to answer because Walsh, a quick-draw artist, stuck a gun into the outlaw’s ribs and barked, “Stick ’em up!”

“Dalhover had both of his hands in his pockets and, of course, he had a gun in each hand,” Hurd said, “and he sank down as if he were going to shoot. Then he drew out his hands and they started crawling up in the air.”

Hurd recalled that Walsh then grabbed Dalhover by the shoulder, turned him around and booted him, where he fell to the floor. Walsh landed on his back and with the butt of his gun, Hurd said, began to hammer Dalhover behind the ear, screaming, “Where are your pals? Where are your pals?”

Nitschke raced toward Dalhover and the two G-men yanked the gangster to his feet. Dalhover still didn’t answer while Walsh was pounding him in the face with the pistol butt.

“Finally, Dalhover said very quietly as if nothing was happening at all, `They’re right outside’,” Hurd said.

While Hayes handcuffed Dalhover at the rear of the store, Walsh looked up to see Shaffer standing in the door trying to enter the store. Believing the latch was locked, the outlaw began firing through the glass.

Immediately Walsh, who had been hit high in the right chest by one of Shaffer’s bullets, fired back at the outlaw, with Nitschke shooting machine gun bullets over his shoulder. Walsh was able to open the door despite his chest and facial wounds caused by flying glass.

With the help of two riflemen firing from a third-floor window across the street, the G-men finished off Shaffer with a total of 23 bullets. He fell hard onto the street’s cobblestones.

Devereux and other agents had approached the rear of the Buick while Shaffer was being shot.

“I got out my .351 rifle,” Devereux recalled, “went to the left rear door of the four-door sedan and tried the door but it was locked so I smashed the window with my rifle, reached in and unlocked it. My partner was on the other side of the automobile doing the same thing to that door. Brady, who was in the back seat resting his arms over the front seat, with his head toward the store, jerked around and I told him he was under arrest, get out of the car.”

Brady slid along the seat toward the driver’s side, nearly falling out of the car as he lost his footing due to the many weapons on the floor concealed beneath a blanket.

“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot me, I’m coming,” he cried as he inched toward the door. But as he stepped out onto the running board, he reached into his waistband and pulled out the .38 revolver he’d stolen from State Trooper Paul Minneman as he lay dying at the Caley Church in Indiana following a bank robbery on May 25, 1937. Like Minneman, Brady fired four shots while holding the gun in his right hand.

Devereux and three others, including Myron Gurnea shooting from across the street, returned the bandit’s fire. He collapsed onto the streetcar tracks after running several feet from his car, having made a brief stand true to his word that “no copper’s going to take me alive.”

For a moment there was silence. Then shoe leather hit the pavement as the curious ran to the scene to view the mangled remains of the nation’s most-wanted criminals. A few minutes later Jack Hayes, who had been waiting behind Dakin’s, walked a badly shaken Dalhover through the crowd, past his dead buddies and to the city jail a block away.

While Walsh was standing outside Dakin’s waiting to be taken to Eastern Maine General Hospital, a woman, appalled at the sight of the dying Shaffer twitching helplessly in the street, ran up to Nitschke and made an appeal.

“Oh, get an ambulance, this man is still breathing,” she said.

Nitschke responded with a string of off-color epithets, Walsh said, and ended with the remark, “We shot him to kill him! Get this man of ours to the hospital.”

Shaffer’s mother wired money for his body to be returned to Indianapolis for burial, but because Brady had no close relatives, and since times were hard during that Depression year, no one claimed his. So he was quietly buried in the city grounds of Bangor’s Mount Hope Cemetery in a grave that remains unmarked.

Dalhover was executed in the Indiana electric chair on Nov. 18, 1938, after having been found guilty of the murder of trooper Minneman.

Shep Hurd was awarded the entire $1,500 reward posted by Attorney General Homer Cummings leading to the apprehension of the Brady Gang. For years afterward, he displayed the canceled check in a frame at his Central Street store and later, at his expanded store on Broad Street.

Long after the autopsy of Al Brady, whenever curious nursing students or vacationing G-men were in Bangor they stopped at Eastern Maine General Hospital where doctors showed them the outlaw’s brain preserved in a glass jar. It didn’t look different from any other brain, they agreed, and eventually it most likely was destroyed.

“Frankly, I doubt if he had a brain,” mused Walter Devereux in 1980.

Devereux went to his own grave convinced his rifle shots hadn’t killed Al Brady, but confessing he had no memory of the brief gun battle beyond the point when the outlaw exited the car with his hands in the air.

Following the shooting, in which his pack of cigarettes and holster were damaged by Brady’s gunfire, Devereux rested on the curb for a few moments.

“I was numb in body and spirit, having never experienced anything like it,” he recalled.

Neither had the people of Bangor, who still talk about the day Central Street ran red with the blood of the infamous Brady Gang.