Summer 2009 Newsletter

Date: Monday, June 15, 2009

G-man Started Here

Early this year SCETV filmed portions of a documentary at the Willcox Law Firm on the life of Melvin Purvis. The documentary is scheduled to be released this summer around the same time the movie Public Enemies is released. In Public Enemies, John Dillinger is played by Johnny Depp and Melvin Purvis is played by Christian Bale. The official site is http://www.publicenemies.net/.

Melvin H. Purvis, Jr., the most famous G-man, began his career in the Willcox Law Firm. Purvis was reared in Timmonsville and his family’s farming and real estate company there, M.B. Purvis Company, was a valued client of the Firm. The life of a small town lawyer in 1925 was not stimulating enough for Purvis, however, so he traveled to Washington and applied for a job in the foreign service. When he learned there were no diplomatic openings, he shrugged and paid a call on the Justice Department. His application for employment listed three partners in this firm as references, and noted “I do not receive a salary. I am in a position to accept temporary employment at any time without previous notice.” He described himself as 5' 4" tall, 127 lbs. and as a “very junior partner.”

In February, 1927 J. Edgar Hoover hired the 23 year old Purvis, the youngest agent ever, despite his age and stature when he received reports of Purvis’s “unswerving devotion to duty.” By 1932 Purvis was put in charge of the Chicago office. Prohibition had by then spawned murderous gangs of bootleggers and gamblers, while the Depression had drawn desperate others into bank robbery and thuggery. Notorious bandits were shooting up the Midwest, and John Dillinger reigned as Public Enemy Number One.

In April of 1934, in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, Purvis raced through a storm in a small plane, commandeered some cars, and converged on a lodge where Dillinger and five members of his gang were holed up at the Little Bohemia Resort. Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and the gang escaped and Purvis recognized his miserable failure: “We had probably the largest aggregation of modern desperados ever bottled up in one place. There seemed no avenue by which they could escape, and yet they did.” Hoover resisted Purvis’s effort to resign: “Well, son, keep a stiff upper lip and get Dillinger for me and the world is yours.”

That chapter reached its climax on an electric July night in 1934. Dillinger was in Chicago undergoing plastic surgery to alter his appearance and had befriended a Romanian prostitute, Ana Cumpanas. Cumpanas offered to lead Purvis to Dillinger in exchange for help with her pending deportation and a $25,000 reward, agreeing to attend a movie dressed in orange, which would be a code message, “Here he is.”

Purvis, with two fellow agents and two policemen, rushed to Chicago’s Biograph Theatre. The film was Manhattan Melodrama, a gangster movie with Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, and William Powell. Purvis bought a ticket and went inside but couldn’t pick out Dillinger, so rather than risk a gunfight inside that might endanger innocent bystanders, he waited on the street with his small back-up contingent. He would give the signal that Dillinger had been recognized by lighting a cigar. Dillinger finally emerged, flanked by two women, including “The Woman in Red.” “Stick ‘em up, Johnny, we have you surrounded!” Purvis shouted in a voice that shook with fright as he dropped his cigar and fired.

Dillinger fell, five bullets in his body, and in his right hand the .38 he had not yet fired. Purvis leaped and grabbed the gun on the first bounce. On Purvis’s orders, the fatal bullets were never compared to the guns at the scene so that no one would ever know for sure who had fired the fatal shot. That only added to the intrigue, but the press gave Purvis all the glory.

At the Cooke County Morgue the next day 15,000 people filed by and viewed Dillinger’s body. The roar of gunfire that dropped Dillinger to the steaming pavement rocketed Purvis into national prominence and made the federal police agency feared by underworld figures everywhere. Purvis demurred: “I am not a gunfighter. I am not a wily sleuth. To tell the truth I was thoroughly frightened every time it fell to my lot to carry a gun on a foray of any kind. I never led a raid without apprehension, and only the knowledge that there was a job to do kept me functioning.”

“G-man” was coined by the Chicago press accounts of Purvis’s exploits, and stands for “government man.” Melvin Purvis would go on to more heroics, tracking down and killing Dillinger’s compatriot, Pretty Boy Floyd, then leading the investigation that brought down Baby Face Nelson and Vern Sankey, as he became the most famous G-man in America. In the span of six months, Purvis had been involved in stopping the criminal careers of five consecutive gangsters whom the FBI had identified as Public Enemy Number One.

The Chicago Press Corps described Purvis as “a clam personified” and said his favorite reply to all questions was, “Sorry, Colonel, I have no comment to make.” Purvis often failed, however, to include the mandatory phrase “J. Edgar Hoover announces ...” in press releases out of Chicago. Purvis’s glowing press clippings gradually caused him to lose favor with the publicity conscious J. Edgar Hoover, who saw to it that he never again got assignments which would spotlight him as the Chicago bureau had. Although the “Woman in Red” got her $25,000 reward and Purvis tried hard to keep her from being deported, Hoover saw to it that she was required to leave the U.S.

Purvis’s laconic testimony during the Adam Richetti trial is probably the longest speech he ever made:
I observed underneath the corn crib, elevated about one and one-half feet on stilts, the feet of a man leaving the car. I observed this man starting to run. I recognized him as Charles Parker (Pretty Boy) Floyd. I and others commanded him to halt. He continued to run a zig-zag course. He was shot.

When Purvis resigned from the FBI in 1935, Hoover fumed as Lowell Thomas told his radio audience, “Well, the G-men have lost one of their biggest G’s, not big physically, but in reputation,” and as Rudy Vallee lauded Purvis on his radio show as “gangland’s greatest enemy.” Purvis moved to San Francisco, where he practiced law for a time and briefly married. His reputation had preceded him, and for a while he lived a glamorous life, dating actress Jean Harlowe and making friends with Clark Gable and Frederick March. General Foods hired him to head the “Melvin Purvis Junior G-man Corps” for children who ate Post Toasties.

It was to the south that Purvis eventually returned, though he did not re-join the Willcox Law Firm. He married Roseanne Willcox, the daughter of one of our founders, P.A. Willcox. Purvis served in World War II as a Colonel and after the war founded and operated Florence Broadcasting Company, then served as Chief Counsel for several congressional committees before his tragic death in 1960.

Roseanne telegraphed J. Edgar Hoover, “Your jealousy hurt him very much, but until the end, I think he loved you.” Hoover was not pleased, perhaps explaining why he then caused the U.S. Congress to amend the law it was then considering; instead of appropriating funds directly to the widow, they were channeled through Purvis’s executor, Hugh L. Willcox, for the benefit of Purvis’s creditors, then heirs.

New Identity Theft Rules Affect Businesses

Faced with the reality that identity theft continues to cause billions of dollars in losses for individuals and businesses each year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued "Red Flag Rules" that are intended to fight the problem by requiring businesses to implement procedures designed to detect and respond to identity theft.

Covered Accounts

The rules apply to financial institutions and creditors with "covered ac-counts." The category of financial institutions includes entities such as banks, savings and loans, and credit unions holding "transactional ac-counts," meaning a deposit or other account from which the owner makes payments or transfers.

The creditor category has raised some eyebrows because it embraces some businesses that in everyday par-lance may not have been considered to be creditors. Basically, a "creditor" is broadly defined as any entity that regularly extends, renews, or continues credit. For example, this means finance companies, automobile dealers, mortgage brokers, and utilities, but it also means nonprofits and governmental entities that defer payment for goods or services.

An account is a "covered account" for purposes of coverage of the new rules if it is used mostly for personal, family, or household purposes, or if it is an account for which there is a foreseeable risk of identity theft, such as small business and sole proprietorship accounts.

Entities subject to the rules must develop a written policy to identify and detect the warning signs—the "red flags" of identity theft. Detection should involve the regular review of accounts, at a minimum. The plan must describe appropriate responses to pre-vent or mitigate the effects of the crime. There also must be training for staff members, oversight for any service providers, and overarching management of the plan by the board of directors or senior employees of the financial institution or creditor. How extensive a plan must be will vary depending on the size of the entity and the kind of credit accounts it maintains. The new rules also mandate an annual update of the plan.

Red Flags

So just what are those red flags for possible identity theft? An exhaustive list may not be possible, but a supplement to the Red Flag Rules identifies and describes 26 separate red flags. They fall into five broader categories: (1) alerts, notifications, or warnings from a consumer reporting agency; (2) suspicious documents, including any that have signs of having been altered or forged; (3) suspicious personal identifying information, such as personal information that does not match information from external sources; (4) unusual use of, or suspicious activity relating to, a covered account, such as the use of an account that had been inactive for a long time or, more generally, any sudden and unexplained change in the patterns of activity for an account; and (5) notices from customers, victims of identity theft, law enforcement authorities, or other businesses about possible identity theft in connection with covered accounts.

The consequences for not complying with the Red Flag Rules are significant. The FTC itself has provided for the potential imposition of monetary sanctions and an FTC enforcement proceeding. An even more far-reaching incentive for compliance is not to be found in the fine print of the rules but is no less real. The Red Flag Rules are likely to become the prevailing standard of care for what preventive measures companies are expected to take if they hope to be able to defend themselves successfully in civil lawsuits arising out of identity theft. Religious Land-Use Lawsuits.

The land-use portion of the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) was enacted to prevent discrimination by the government against the use of real property by religious organizations. On its face, the wording of the statute may appear to apply to circumstances that arise infrequently, but many churches and other religious institutions have used the RLUIPA to get their way in zoning standoffs with local governments.

The RLUIPA prohibits the government from imposing or implementing a land-use regulation in a manner that imposes a "substantial" burden on the religious exercise of a person, including a religious assembly or institution, unless the government demonstrates that imposition of the burden is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest and is the least restrictive means of furthering that interest. Thus, a complaining party has the considerable initial burden of showing that the land-use regulation substantially bur-dens the exercise of religion, and is not expensive or inconvenient. If that hurdle is crossed, however, the government may well have a difficult time showing both the "compelling" government interest and that it has selected the least restrictive means to advance that interest.

In one RLUIPA case, a village zoning board violated the RLUIPA when it denied an application for a special-use permit allowing a private religious day school to construct a classroom building on its campus. The expansion project was a building on and conversion of real property for the purpose of a religious exercise, within the meaning of the RLUIPA, given that the rooms that were planned and the facilities to be renovated would all be used, at least in part, for religious education and practices.

Notwithstanding a substantial burden imposed on the school's religious exercise, the zoning board did not act to further any compelling state interest, as was shown by the lack of evidence for its stated reasons for denying the permit. Instead, the board had acted with undue deference to the opposition of a small group of neighbors. Even if some compelling state interest was involved, the board refused to consider approving the application subject to conditions, and thus had not used the least restrictive means available to it.

Of course, religious organizations have not batted a thousand when they have invoked the RLUIPA. Sometimes, even similar cases have had opposite outcomes, making any predictions difficult. In another case of a growing church that had plans to expand the church facilities, including a school on its property, a federal appellate court upheld a township's decision to deny the church's application for a special-use permit. The court found that the township's denial of the church's application to build a structure in excess of 25,000 square feet on its property did not impose a substantial burden on the church's religious exercise, so as to violate the RLUIPA.

The denial would require the church to incur increased expense to accomplish its goal of building a significantly larger church and school, and to endure increased inconvenience if it were not able to build a facility of the desired size, but, in this court's view, nothing the township had done required the church to violate, modify, or forgo its religious beliefs or precepts, or to choose between those beliefs and a benefit to which the church was entitled. That the church was still free to carry out all of its missions and ministries, just not on the scale it de-sired, foreclosed any finding of a" substantial" burden.