The Kidnap Years:

by David Stout

  Of course, that was an enormous deposit for a former railroad worker, and it aroused immediate suspicion. The police in Canada as well as the United States were aware of Robinson’s ties to Sankey. On March 31, 1933, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police caught up with Robinson in a tiny village two hundred miles north of Winnipeg. Robinson readily admitted his own guilt in the Haskell Bohn affair. He also implicated Sankey’s wife, recalling that she had cooked meals for Bohn during his captivity.

  The capture of Robinson and his willingness to talk helped cause an odd coincidence that was part of a human drama. In June 1933, Fern Sankey was transported to St. Paul to stand trial in the Bohn kidnapping. The prosecution’s case was fairly straightforward. It boiled down to a question: How could Fern Sankey not have been a willing participant in the crime when, in fact, Haskell Bohn was held in the basement of the Sankeys’ home where Fern cooked for him?

  But Robinson testified for the defense that Fern had not taken part in the kidnapping itself. What was more, he said, Fern had urged her husband to release Bohn early in his captivity.

  A jury is not supposed to think badly of a defendant in a criminal trial if he or she does not testify. That, at least, is the theory and the law. In reality, many jurors want to hear the defendant say “I’m not guilty!” before giving him or her the benefit of the doubt.

  Fern elected to tell her story: “I begged and pleaded with my husband to release the boy. I told him I had two brothers and how I would feel if one of them were in such a position. But he told me to mind my own business.”56 She said she was never present during negotiations.

  The jurors surely knew that Fern had been separated from her two young children as well as her husband. She cried during part of her testimony. All in all, she was a sympathetic figure.

  The jury got the case late on the afternoon of June 15, the very time when William Hamm Jr. was lying blindfolded on the floor of his kidnapper’s car just after being snatched.

  After deliberating for several hours, the jurors acquitted Fern Sankey of conspiring to kidnap Haskell Bohn. She slumped in her chair and said, “I am so glad.”

  But acquittal did not mean freedom. Fern was quickly rearrested to face federal charges in the Boettcher case.

  Given the fact that a taxi driver had picked out a photo of Verne Sankey as the man who had paid him $2 to deliver a ransom message to William Dunn and considering that Fern Sankey had been on trial, it made perfect sense to conclude that Sankey was lurking in the Twin Cities area. Would he try to free his wife? After all, he had already shown he was willing to shoot it out with the police.

  “Turn your face to the wall.”

  Hamm soon got used to that command, issued each time one of the kidnappers entered the small, dimly lit room where he was being held. He never saw his captors’ faces and could not tell from the voices how old they were. Hamm thought he detected five or six voices.

  Except for the fact that he was being held very much against his will, he was not mistreated. At appropriate intervals, he was fed what he later recalled as decent, if rather plain, food. Nothing like the fare he was used to.

  Now and then, Hamm was given progress reports. Things were moving along, he was told. In fact, the kidnappers were staying in touch by sending the notes pre-signed by Hamm to people who would deliver them to the family.

  On the night of Saturday, June 17, a company beer truck left the Hamm Brewing headquarters, followed closely by a car carrying Dunn, a company lawyer, and several other men. Following them was still another car, driven by Chief Inspector Charles J. Tierney of the St. Paul police. Inside the beer truck was the ransom money, some from the Hamm family and some of it contributed by St. Paul businessmen.

  The exact amount of the entire package was not revealed, but it was soon disclosed that the kidnappers had settled for less than their original demand of $100,000. That was another fact that pointed to Sankey. In both the Bohn and Boettcher cases, he had been willing to bargain down, to quit while he was ahead. It was the pragmatic, professional way to kidnap.

  “Good news,” one of his jailers told Hamm on the afternoon of Sunday, June 18. “The ransom’s been paid, and you’re going home.”

  The kidnappers waited until dark. Then they put the goggles over Hamm’s eyes and put him in a car with three other men, including the driver. Then they were off on another long ride, one that Hamm was happy to be taking. The ride lasted most of the night.

  Shortly after 5:30 that morning, the car carrying Hamm came to a stop, and he was let out.

  “If there is anything we can do to help you, Mr. Hamm, just let us know,” a kidnapper said. 57

  The car sped off before he could reply—not that he would have asked for anything. He saw lights in a farmhouse. He was glad that farmers rose early and glad that the farmhouse, he soon discovered, had a phone.

  The kidnappers had deposited Hamm near Wyoming, Minnesota. A St. Paul police officer came to fetch him. Hamm was back home around 8:30. His widowed mother collapsed in joy and relief.

  For the time being, a key question remained: Where had Hamm been held? It would be a while before the question was answered.

  Back in his real world, Hamm recalled the moment when he was seized while on his way home for lunch. “I had only a fleeting impression of the two men’s appearances, although one of them resembled Verne Sankey.”

  The Minneapolis Tribune jumped on Hamm’s “partial identification” of Sankey, noting that federal officials had been pursuing a tip that Sankey and Alcorn had been hiding out not far from where the ransom was delivered and Hamm was released.

  The New York Times had implicated Sankey from the start with its headline “Kidnappers Seize St. Paul Brewer…Hold William Hamm, 39, for $100,000 Ransom—Death Threat Made in Note…Sankey Linked to Gang—Fugitive in Bohn and Boettcher Abductions Is Identified as Sender of Missive.”58

  So Sankey had rolled the dice one more time! Or so it seemed.

  But wait. Hamm said one of his kidnappers resembled Sankey. Was it possible that the headline in the New York Times and the report in the Tribune had gone too far in implicating Sankey? Could it be that Sankey had had nothing to do with kidnapping Hamm? And if he hadn’t done it, who had?

  Sifting through the events all these years later, one is tempted to ask why it took so long for lawmen to find the answers, since some avenues of investigation could hardly have been more obvious. Or perhaps law investigators did have suspects in mind but were loath to share their knowledge. For those looking for suspects and clues, they were there for the taking.

  Elsewhere in the country, the summer of 1933 would be a busy one for criminals and those who followed their exploits, perhaps deriving vicarious pleasure in so doing. But let us first acquaint ourselves with St. Paul, Minnesota, and with some of the people who made that city so special.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  DOTING MOTHER, DEVOTED SONS

  The term parenting skills hadn’t come into use in their lifetimes, but it is fair to say that Arizona Donnie Clark Barker and her farm laborer husband, George Barker, lacked them. It is fitting that she is far better known than he is, for she was the dominant personality in the household. She nurtured her four boys, all of whom would grow up to be criminals, and she tried to instill in each a sense of self-esteem. No wonder she was known as “Ma” Barker.

  She was born in 1872 in southwestern Missouri, a rugged region where Civil War hatreds still smoldered, highwaymen roamed, and honest lawmen were scarce. The Barker boys, Herman, Lloyd, Arthur (later to be known as “Doc”), and Freddie, spent their boyhoods in tar paper–shack poverty. They were wild boys, for their passive father was too weak to be a disciplinarian, and their mother never tired of defending them, no matter how outrageous their behavior.

  Around Webb City, Missouri, a mining town where the family settled, the conduct of the lads evolved from bratty to maliciously mischievous and on to criminal—petty at first, then less so. By the time the family moved to Tulsa, O
klahoma, the Barker boys (Freddie was the youngest and his mother’s favorite) routinely engaged in robbery and thievery. But it was not what her boys did that bothered Ma Barker. It was how the law reacted to what they did. She was ever eager to defend her boys when the Webb City cops came after them for one crime or another, but she finally tired of the persecution. So the clan left for Oklahoma.

  Ma Barker’s blind devotion did not lessen as her sons morphed into hardened criminals who took up with men of the same ilk. The Barker boys surely sensed that they had no prospects for honest prosperity and social standing, and they didn’t want their horizons in life defined by the ridges of the Ozarks. Soon, the Barker men were at ease with various Midwestern artists and thugs, including one Frank Nash, who in 1933 would unwillingly play a central role in one of the bloodiest incidents of the thirties. The Barker home in Tulsa became an occasional shelter for criminals on the run.

  Ma Barker was never shackled to the social norms of the times. She tired of her milquetoast husband and left him for Arthur Dunlop, a shiftless drinker. Nor would Ma be limited by conventional notions of “a woman’s place.” She listened in on the household chatter about bank robberies, then began to take part in planning them, although she could hardly have been described as the “brains” of the outfit. Jigsaw puzzles took up much of her time.

  Of course, Ma Barker envisioned starring criminal roles for her precious sons. The “bloody Barkers,” as the sons came to be known, towered in infamy but they were slight of build. The tallest, Herman, stood only five feet five. He was the first son to die, shooting himself with his own pistol in 1927 when he was cornered and wounded by lawmen in Newton, Kansas, after robbing a store and killing a police officer. Herman was just thirty-four.

  Meanwhile, Fred Barker was doing a stretch of five to ten years in the Kansas State Penitentiary for robbing a bank in Winfield, Kansas, in 1926. That crime, committed when Fred was twenty-four, could be called his first adult offense. He’d been arrested in his youth for vagrancy and relatively minor robberies—then released to the custody of his mother.

  In prison, Fred became friends with Alvin Karpis, a son of Lithuanian immigrants, who was serving time for burglary and theft.

  Fred and Karpis were released in 1931 and embarked upon a series of store burglaries. Surely, Arthur “Doc” Barker was eager to join them. But he was serving a life term in the Oklahoma state prison for killing a night watchman at a Tulsa hospital in 1918 while trying to steal a shipment of drugs.

  Somehow, Doc won parole in September 1932 after serving thirteen years. The reunited Barker brothers, Fred and Doc, and Karpis made a natural team once Karpis was released. Soon, they were robbing banks, stores, and trains across the Midwest. (Sadly, Lloyd Barker could not be with them. He had been caught after robbing a post office in rural Oklahoma in 1922 and sent to federal prison for twenty-five years.*)

  Arthur Dunlop had a reputation for being a big-mouth drunk, which was why members of the gang did not trust him and probably explains why he was found shot to death near the town of Webster, Wisconsin, in 1932, just after gang members fled from their hideout in St. Paul, Minnesota, upon hearing that the police were on their trail. Rightly or wrongly, the gang members believed that Dunlop’s loose tongue had revealed their location. Fortunately for them, they had only to pick up a phone and call St. Paul’s police chief, Thomas “Big Tom” Brown, if they wanted to know what the cops were doing. And sometimes Brown would call them, as he probably did just before the gang left St. Paul in haste.

  Fred, considered the organizer of the outfit, and Karpis were careful planners. They also juggled the members of their gang, recruiting people with certain skills for particular heists, much as a pro football team acquires and sheds backup quarterbacks and placekickers as the needs arise. This technique brought in fresh blood and made it hard for pursuers to keep track of the gang.

  Undeniably, reading about the exploits of Ma Barker and her sons and Alvin Karpis can be entertaining, especially since the people who suffered because of them are long gone. But a quick and perhaps incomplete summary of what the gang members did will dispel any temptation to glorify them. In addition to the night watchman killed by Doc and the Newton, Kansas, police officer slain by Herman, the gang’s victims included a local sheriff slain during the robbery of a store in Mountain View, Missouri, in 1931; the police chief of Pocahontas, Arkansas, kidnapped in 1931 and driven to a field, where he was shot five times in the back; two Minneapolis policemen who were shot dead after a bank robbery in 1932; and a Minneapolis policeman who was slain during a post office robbery in 1933.

  Perhaps the Barkers, Karpis, and other gang members grew weary of killing. Maybe they feared that their own blood would be spilled if they persisted in their violent ways. In any event, we can be sure that the kidnappings of Haskell Bohn of St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1932 and Charlie Boettcher of Denver in 1933 caught their attention, perhaps even inspired them. Verne Sankey had pulled off those operations with apparent ease. He had set a good example in a sense—one that members of the Barker-Karpis outfit were determined to follow.

  But who would be their first kidnapping target? The Barker-Karpis members were open to suggestions. And there was no better place to find prospects than St. Paul.

  St. Paul had a population of just over 270,000 as the thirties began, yet it was in a league with Chicago, Kansas City, and other bigger cities as a haven for bootleggers, bank robbers, and other kinds of gangsters, including kidnappers.

  St. Paul’s reputation as a sanctuary for criminals began at the turn of the century with what became known as the “layover agreement,” an understanding between criminals and the police chief, John O’Connor. Simply put, when out-of-town gangsters visited St. Paul, they notified the St. Paul police. If the gangsters behaved themselves while in the city, they were unmolested and even tipped off about forthcoming FBI raids.

  O’Connor’s successors continued this arrangement, the intent of which was not just to keep crime down in St. Paul. In return for tolerating the criminals in their midst and warning them of impending federal raids, the police brass accepted payoffs, with some of the money trickling down to lowly patrolmen. And of course, some cash flowed into city hall.

  Not surprisingly, alcohol was sold and consumed openly during Prohibition. There was a speakeasy in St. Paul called the Green Lantern where criminals gathered to see and be seen.** Bank robbers and other crooks from across the Midwest gathered there when they were in town. The notorious gangsters Harvey Bailey and Frank Nash were regulars. So was Verne Miller, a one-time South Dakota sheriff who found breaking the law more rewarding than enforcing it.

  One reason gangsters felt at ease in the Green Lantern was the establishment’s owner, Harry Sawyer (originally Sandlovich). Sawyer had inherited the Green Lantern, so to speak, after the car-bomb assassination of its proprietor, “Dapper Dan” Hogan, on December 4, 1928.

  Hogan, a money launderer, dealer in stolen goods, and all-around fixer who distributed turkeys to the needy at Christmas time, was perched comfortably on the bridge between St. Paul’s criminal underworld and the city’s compliant police force. He was known to encourage out-of-town mobsters to stay out of St. Paul unless they agreed to make their visits violence-free.

  With Hogan’s death, the Green Lantern was taken over by Sawyer, Hogan’s top aide. The sixth of nine children, Sawyer was born in 1890 to an Orthodox Jewish butcher and his wife. Before landing in St. Paul and becoming Hogan’s protégé, Sawyer lived in Nebraska, where he acquired the nickname “Omaha Harry” and compiled a record that included larceny, robbery, and auto theft. But he was never known to possess bomb-making skills, so people who believe that Sawyer was behind Hogan’s assassination, which remains unsolved officially, are fairly certain that he hired outside talent to install the explosives beneath Hogan’s car seat.

  At the Green Lantern, Sawyer was a networker extraordinaire. If a visiting mobster confided that his gang needed a specialist—a burglar, say, or s
afecracker or getaway driver—Sawyer could find a candidate in no time. It might take a bit longer to find a reliable hit man, but he could do that too.

  One can imagine a law-abiding citizen with a Walter Mitty complex, dropping in to the Green Lantern to quench his thirst after a routine day at his humdrum job, hoping to catch a glimpse of John Dillinger or Al Capone or the city’s own Leon Gleckman, a bootlegger so successful he was known as the “Al Capone of St. Paul.”

  After a drink or two, a law-abiding citizen could go home and brag to his wife about standing at the bar near a lowlife mobster who might even be a cold-blooded killer but looked good in a double-breasted suit.

  Gleckman had been kidnapped in September 1931 and held for a week in a cabin in northern Wisconsin. The price for his freedom was originally $75,000, but the kidnappers settled for just over $5,000. The main negotiator with the kidnappers was Jack Peifer, owner of the Hollyhocks, another St. Paul nightclub where crooks were more than welcome.***

  We don’t know for sure if the FBI agents stationed in St. Paul ever dropped by the Green Lantern or the Hollyhocks, but they probably didn’t. They wouldn’t have gleaned much of value anyhow. The shady imbibers along the bar would have picked them out too easily.

  For whatever reasons, intelligence gathering was not the FBI’s strongest suit at the time. Had Hoover and his men been better at it, they might have realized that clues to the kidnapping of William Hamm were available amid the bar chatter and the clinking of cocktail glasses at the Green Lantern and Hollyhocks.

  Hamm’s sales manager, William Dunn, was reputed to be a middleman who delivered bribes to the police. Harry Sawyer knew Dunn, and Sawyer knew that Hamm (himself no stranger to mob people) followed the same routine every weekday, walking home from the brewery to have lunch at 12:45.