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 later would 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 conferred with Bangor Police Chief Thomas Crowley and Myron Gurnea, the tall, taciturn FBI agent who headed the Braga Squad. After strong persuasion from Gurnea, Hurd relented and allowed him to conceal plain-clothesmen 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 often be two G-men in front of him who would suddenly and mysteriously disappear.

"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. 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 shoot-out, 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 who 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, Ohio license No. 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 gangbuster.

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 scribble 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, 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.