by David Stout
A headline in the next day’s New York Times declared, “Floyd Called Last of Massacre Gang. Justice Department Says All of Kansas City Killers Are Accounted for.”149
But what of Purvis’s remark the previous March that the FBI suspected “Shotgun” George Ziegler might have been among the train station shooters? Purvis made his comment after Ziegler had been blown away outside a restaurant in Cicero, Illinois. Perhaps it doesn’t matter much in the history of the universe if Ziegler was involved. But for the sake of tidiness, it would have been good if the issue had been addressed after Floyd was slain.
Maybe the crime reporters of that time had enough to write about without worrying too much about what Purvis had said several months before Floyd was gunned down. Besides, Hoover and his people weren’t much for engaging in question-and-answer sessions. They issued statements, and reporters dutifully wrote what they said.
The killing of Pretty Boy Floyd so soon after the slaying of John Dillinger was a priceless opportunity for Hoover to rehabilitate his and his bureau’s image. The clean-cut and youthful Purvis, who turned thirty-one two days after Floyd was slain, seemed to embody Hoover’s vision of the ideal FBI agent (although Hoover reportedly referred to him as “Little Mel” because Purvis stood only five feet four inches).
After Floyd was hunted down and killed, Purvis was briefly idolized in the press, as though the debacle at Little Bohemia Lodge had never happened. By extension, the hero worship enhanced the image of the entire bureau. And Hoover could blame Floyd and Richetti for the Kansas City Massacre. Which the bureau does, to this day.*********
Richetti was convicted of murder for the Kansas City Massacre. Proclaiming his innocence to the last, he was executed in the state’s gas chamber on October 7, 1938.
Recall the account of James Henry “Blackie” Audett, the gangster who knew Floyd and Richetti and who witnessed the train station shooting. He insisted that neither Richetti nor Floyd was there. If Audett was right about what he saw, if he was telling the truth, it means that Richetti—a hardened criminal, to be sure—was put to death for something he didn’t do.
*The textile strike, which began around Labor Day, had been years in the making, as manufacturers struggled with declining demand for goods after the end of the Great War as well as increased foreign competition. Industry leaders responded by increasing production demands and, particularly in the South, by resisting workers’ attempts to unionize. The strike of 1934 subsided after three weeks, with workers achieving limited gains.
**This is improvised dialogue, added for dramatic effect.
***Again, for monetary reasons having to do with the Depression and certainly beyond the understanding of this writer, gold notes were being withdrawn from circulation and were therefore becoming scarce.
****It will be recalled that an alert teller at another branch of the Corn Exchange Bank, at Broadway and Ninety-First Street, spotted a gold note from the ransom money in April 1932.
*****This is improvised dialogue, added for dramatic effect.
******The man who was with Hauptmann at the time was never identified. He was not Isidor Fisch, since it was established that Fisch had died in Germany by then.
*******In the aftermath of the Lindbergh crime, New Jersey lawmakers made kidnapping a felony. The law has been revised several times over the years and now provides for a maximum sentence of twenty-five years to life, depending on the age of the victim, whether he or she was harmed, etc. Since the death penalty was abolished by New Jersey legislators in 2007, the maximum sentence for murder in the state is life without parole. Thus, if a fatal kidnapping occurs in New Jersey at present, the kidnapper can be sentenced to life without parole.
********Decades after the Lindbergh case, a well-known New York State judge commented that a prosecutor “could indict a ham sandwich” if he chose to. That was a bit of an exaggeration, but it reflected the power a prosecutor has.
*********Hoover became jealous of the attention Purvis was getting after Floyd was killed. Sensing that he had fallen out of favor, Purvis left the FBI in 1935 to practice law. Rumors persisted that Hoover was still undermining him—plotting to keep him from getting a judgeship, for instance. Purvis died in an apparent suicide in 1960.
CHAPTER FORTY
CLOSING THE RING
Miami
Late 1934
Perhaps the people in the Barker-Karpis gang dared to hope that the arrest of Bruno Hauptmann in the Lindbergh kidnapping, followed just weeks later by the killing of Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, would take them out of the spotlight. Perhaps the law would even forget about them for a while.
It was not to be. One day in Havana, Karpis saw a picture of himself in a local newspaper. For whatever reason, Karpis’s survival instincts, which had served him well up to that time, told him he’d be safer in Miami than in Havana, so he and his girlfriend, Dolores Delaney, moved there in the fall of 1934 and took up residence as “Mr. and Mrs. S. A. Green.”
Fred Barker was also getting homesick for the States. Luckily or not, he met someone in Havana who knew someone who had a cottage in Ocklawaha, Florida, near Lake Weir, a big freshwater lake in Central Florida. Ocklawaha was a little spot on the road that hardly deserved to be called a village, as it consisted of just a few houses and stores on Lake Weir, about a hundred miles southwest of Jacksonville. The community had one telephone. But the isolation was ideal for people wanting to get away from it all—or people running from something.
The man and woman rented the white nine-room summer house of the man who was president of the Biscayne Kennel Club of Miami. It didn’t seem right to call the “Blackburns” a couple, since the woman was considerably older than the man who accompanied her. In fact, they were mother and son.
The region around Lake Weir offered terrific fishing and hunting. “Mr. Blackburn” had hired a guide to lead him to the best spots to catch bass and hunt deer. One day, he did manage to shoot a deer. When he rolled up his sleeves to clean it, a tattooed heart on one arm was exposed. The guide was startled; he recalled reading in a newspaper that one of the kidnappers of Edward Bremer, the St. Paul banker and beer tycoon, had a heart tattoo on one arm. Quickly, the guide notified the authorities.
Thus did federal agents learn that the “Blackburns” were really the Barkers—Kate or “Ma,” still the spiritual leader of the family at fifty-five, and her tattooed son Fred, thirty-two. For a year, they had been hunted for their part in the kidnapping of Edward Bremer. The law had really started to close in on them in December, when Arthur “Doc” Barker and his girlfriend were tracked to a location in Chicago. Biding their time, agents arrested Doc on January 8, 1935, without trouble. In the apartment where he’d been staying, investigators found a Thompson submachine gun believed to have been used in a 1933 payroll robbery in St. Paul, Minnesota, in which a police officer was slain.
Later on the night of January 8, gang member Russell Gibson was also cornered in Chicago. He elected to try to shoot his way out of the jam and was mortally wounded. (He was soon buried, without pallbearers or ceremony, as cemetery workers hustled the casket to a waiting gash in the frozen earth, then sought indoor warmth.)
Searching the places where Doc and Gibson had stayed, agents found firearms and ammunition and a map of Florida—with Lake Weir circled.
Before surrounding the Lake Weir cottage on the morning of Wednesday, January 16, 1935, agents quietly warned nearby residents to get out of the area.
Daylight was breaking when the agent in charge, E. J. Connelly, shouted for the people in the cottage to surrender.
How rich must have been the emotions of mother and son in that moment! They had never wanted to be taken alive, and now they knew that the sun was rising on the last day of their lives. The moment to fulfill their destiny had arrived. All they had to do was reach out and grasp it—or bend their trigger fingers.
They replied to the surrender demand with a burst of machine gun fire. The dozen or so federal agents answered with
their own machine guns, plus tear gas canisters.
“Rifles and machine guns would crack for 15 minutes, then there would be a lull, followed by a renewal of firing from both sides,” the New York Times reported, quoting the Associated Press.150 “Most of the firing from the besieged house came from upstairs.”
After six hours of gunplay, during which agents fired some fifteen hundred rounds of ammunition, the house fell silent. “When the shooting ceased from the house around 11 o’clock, the agents sent a Negro cook, who had been working there, into the building. He returned saying, ‘They are all dead.’”
True to herself to the very end, Ma Barker had died with a machine gun in her hand. A bullet to the head had killed her, perhaps after she saw her son fall. Fred Barker lay near his mother, three bullet holes in his head and eleven in one shoulder.
So Hoover’s men had collected two more trophies, but the operation was hardly flawless. A mother and daughter whose home was nearby almost became casualties. Awakened by bullets crashing through their bedrooms and dining room, the women fled through a rear window.
“As we ran, some men yelled at us to stop,” the older woman said later. “We did not stop. They began shooting at us. I learned later it was the federal men. We kept on running and they kept on yelling and shooting… They didn’t know who we were. It was still a little dark.”
The woman’s account suggests that she and her daughter were nearly killed by agents. If one or both had been killed, the shootout on Lake Weir would have been a tragedy and debacle equal to or worse than the deadly fiasco at Little Bohemia Lodge, Wisconsin, less than a year earlier.
Maddeningly, there seems to have been little or no criticism in the press of the agents’ performance or of the man at the top who was in charge of their training. Blessed with uncanny luck and astonishingly good public relations, Hoover had dodged another bullet.
Days before the Florida shootout that killed Ma Barker and her son, Alvin Karpis’s girlfriend, Dolores Delaney, had begun to wonder just how safe the hideout really was. Acting on her instincts, she hopped a train to Atlantic City, New Jersey, with a friend, Winona Burdette, who also hung around with gangsters. Dolores had friends in Atlantic City, which she decided would be a good place to give birth. She was expecting a child by Alvin Karpis.
Karpis and another member of what was left of the gang, Harry Campbell, stole a car in Florida and drove north to join the women in Atlantic City. But their new hiding place, a small hotel near the boardwalk, turned out to be no safer than the Florida location. An Atlantic City cop spotted the Florida plate of the stolen car in a garage. The police soon deduced that Karpis, Campbell, and the women were staying in the hotel next to the garage.
On the night of Sunday, January 20, several policemen gathered outside the hotel room. When the cops ordered them to come out with their hands up, the bandits replied with machine-gun fire. The police were not only outgunned but probably not as used to deadly gunplay as the men they wanted.
A detective was wounded, as was Dolores Delaney, who was caught in the line of fire and struck in the leg. Karpis and Campbell were such seasoned gunmen that they drove the lawmen back with machine-gun volleys even as they were putting on overcoats and stepping into slippers. They escaped from the hotel (Campbell was reportedly wearing only underwear beneath his coat) and stole another car. And off they went into a snowy night.
The fugitives drove into Pennsylvania. Near Allentown, they forced a motorist off the road, tied him up, put him in the back seat, and sped west. Some 350 miles and many hours later, they put him out of his car near Akron, Ohio, and drove off, leaving the motorist with an adventure story to tell for the rest of his days.
As for Karpis, the target on his back was bigger than ever. Charles “Baby Face” Nelson, notorious killer and robber who had been with John Dillinger in the battle at the Little Bohemia Lodge in Wisconsin, had been cornered and shot dead by federal agents at Barrington, Illinois, near Chicago, on November 27, 1934. But before he was slain, he managed to kill two agents. Since he had already been “credited” with killing one of Purvis’s men at Little Bohemia, Nelson is believed to have killed more federal agents (three) than any other outlaw in United States history.
It may be recalled that Volney Davis had friends in both the Dillinger and Barker-Karpis gangs. Davis was thirty-two years old in 1934. Born in Oklahoma, he was a rather handsome man with wavy hair.
Davis and his then-girlfriend, Edna Murray, were eventually suspected of taking part in the kidnapping of Edward Bremer, once the FBI figured out that the Barker-Karpis bunch (and not Verne Sankey or God only knew who else) had abducted the banker-brewer.
FBI agents caught up with Davis in St. Louis on Wednesday, February 6, 1935, and made arrangements to fly him to St. Paul to stand trial in the Bremer case. But on February 7, soon after the plane carrying him and two federal agents took off from Kansas City, it ran into bad weather and made an emergency landing on a farm near Yorkville, Illinois. Davis had been manacled while on the plane, but after the landing, his chains were removed as a farmer drove the prisoner and two agents to a hotel in Yorkville.
Incredibly, while one agent was telephoning Chicago for instructions, his partner took Davis to the hotel bar. “What’ll you have?” the agent asked his prisoner and new drinking buddy.151
“I’ll take beer,” Davis replied. He held his stein just long enough to throw the contents into the face of the agent, whom he stunned with a punch. Then Davis plunged through the nearest window as the agent fired three shots at him. All missed. Davis quickly stole a car and motored off—to Chicago, fifty-eight miles to the northeast, it would be learned later.*
Months afterward, Purvis would concede in the Chicago Tribune that the agents had bungled the handling of Davis, and indeed it cost them their jobs. Yet their flabbergasting incompetence seems to have set off little, if any, criticism of the bureau’s leadership. Yet again, Hoover seemed almost immune.
Davis would remain at large until June 1, when he was caught in Chicago, this time for good. In his initial capture and before he fled after the plane made a forced landing, agents had found on him a piece of paper with a Chicago phone number. Agents staked out the address that matched the phone number and waited for Davis to show up—which he eventually did, no doubt much to the bureau’s relief.
Davis sought to lessen his punishment by giving information on what was left of the Barker-Karpis gang and giving testimony against them. Still, he was convicted of taking part in the kidnapping of Edward Bremer and was sent off to Alcatraz to meditate for several decades.
By the spring of 1935, it was clear that the heyday of the Barker-Karpis gang was over and that the white heat generated by the kidnapping of Edward Bremer, which had once seemed such a tidy, professional job, had contributed to the gangsters’ undoing.
On Saturday, May 3, Harry Sawyer was arrested in New Orleans, becoming the thirteenth person arrested in the Bremer case. He had been doing what he knew best: running a dance hall and gambling den on the Mississippi coast.** Altogether, some dozen people had been indicted for the Bremer kidnapping by this time. It was believed to be the first case in which the federal government went after not only the principals but virtually everyone involved in a kidnapping.
On Friday, May 17, 1935, five defendants were convicted in St. Paul of taking part in the Bremer crime. Two of them, Doc Barker and Oliver Berg, were immediately sentenced to life in prison for being among the ringleaders of the enterprise (though it probably didn’t matter much to Berg, who was already serving a life term in Illinois state prison for murder).
But the biggest fish of all, Alvin Karpis, was still at large. Another suspect still missing was Dr. Joseph Moran, whose remains at that moment were floating across Lake Erie toward Canada. Another gang member, it was learned later, shared a weakness with Dr. Moran. He talked too much. His name was William Harrison, and it was discovered later that he had been lured to an abandoned barn in rural Illinois in early 1935 a
nd shot to death. His body was incinerated.
And one mystery about the Bremer kidnapping remained. It will be recalled that during Bremer’s captivity, he heard church chimes playing the “Angelus.” Investigators set about trying to find the church, thinking it might lead them to the kidnappers’ lair. But did it?
Not long after Edward Bremer was freed, the New York Times reported that FBI agents had zeroed in on the small village of Menominee, in northeastern Nebraska, where a Catholic church with chimes was found. But Bremer eventually identified his place of imprisonment as a house owned by one Harold Alderton in Bensenville, Illinois, not far from Chicago and well over five hundred miles east of Menominee, Nebraska.
On Hoover’s orders, agents spent hundreds of man-hours “revisiting every town between Joliet and central Wisconsin in search of the right combination of trains, church bells, and factory whistles Bremer had heard while in custody. The agents churned out hundreds of reports but…found nothing.”152 One FBI official even floated the idea of enlisting boy scouts in the search.
What part the mysterious chimes played, if any, in leading investigators to the kidnappers wasn’t explained after the initial flurry of publicity at the time.***
There was so much domestic crime news in the early months of 1935 that it may have been hard for some readers to keep up with international affairs. And no doubt about it, much of the news from abroad was depressing, particularly in Europe. Adolf Hitler seemed less and less willing to be friendly with Britain and France, who had fought Germany in the Great War, and more and more eager to reclaim his country’s place on the world stage.
