Public Enemies (8 page)

They drove through the Texas darkness in silence, the only sounds Bonnie’s moans from the backseat. Clyde glanced in the rearview mirror and was pleased to see the marshal, Tom Hardy, stroking her hair, trying to comfort her. After a while she seemed to stabilize. Clyde lightened up and began talking. “Did you coppers ever hear much about the two Barrow brothers?” he asked at one point.

“No, I can’t say that I have,” Hardy answered, not wanting to anger Clyde. “We have no record of them in the office,” Corry added.

“Don’t you mugs ever read the papers?” Bonnie whispered.

At a bridge six miles west of the town of Sayre, Clyde stopped and honked the horn. “Everybody out of the car,” W.D. ordered. The officers lined up against a bridge rail. Clyde covered the men while W.D. walked to the far end of the bridge and talked to someone in a car parked in the shadows. By and by he returned with the lethargic Buck Barrow at his side. “When do we get going?” Buck asked.

“What we gonna do with these coppers?” W.D. asked.

Clyde thought a moment. “Let’s march ’em down the river a piece and tie ’em up.” Buck and Clyde herded the two lawmen down toward the river. At the water’s edge Clyde ordered them to stop.

“What would you do if we turned you loose?” he asked.

Hardy said they would head straight home. He tried to look brave. He would not beg for his life.

“Yeah, I know,” Clyde said, his voice heavy and tired. “You’d run your legs off getting to a phone.”

“What’re you gonna do with ’em?” Buck asked. “Want ’em tended to?” He raised his rifle.

Clyde pondered the two men. “You get a bunch of wire off that fence,” he told Buck, motioning toward a string of barbed wire. “Yeah, they’ve been pretty decent cops. But I’ve said I’d never take a cop for a ride and let him live to squeal his head off.”

Buck brought the barbed wire, and together they tied the men to a tree. They stood before the two lawmen a minute, then started back up the slope. After a moment Buck stopped and turned, his rifle pointed at Hardy. There was a long moment of silence.

“Come on,” Clyde finally said. “Let’s get going.”

They let the men live.

 

 

Clyde’s elusiveness always owed more to his skill with cars than with guns; he thought nothing of driving a thousand miles in a day, if that’s what it took to outdistance the law. That night he drove the length of Oklahoma, reaching Arkansas around dawn. Bonnie deteriorated, pitching and moaning in her sleep. Just after sunrise they pulled up at the Twin Cities Tourist Camp in Fort Smith. After Blanche registered, Clyde carried Bonnie to a bed. She whimpered for her mother. Clyde drove into town alone and found a doctor named Walter Eberle. He told Eberle that his wife had been injured by an exploding oil stove, and the doctor followed Clyde back to the motel. “This woman needs to be hospitalized,” Eberle said after dressing Bonnie’s burns.

At wit’s end, Clyde drove back to Dallas to get Bonnie’s sister Billie. He reached the Parker home early that evening. Both Mrs. Parker and Mrs. Barrow offered to come to Fort Smith, but Clyde waited instead for Billie, who was at the movies. Clyde paced the Parkers’ living room anxiously, at one point breaking into tears. He hadn’t slept in two days, and the strain was showing. Finally Billie returned and after packing some clothes, left with Clyde.

Ted Hinton, a deputy sheriff who knew Clyde, was on night patrol when he spotted the car heading east. He hesitated because he didn’t recognize Billie. By the time he turned to follow, Clyde was gone. Driving fast through the East Texas night, he and Billie reached Fort Smith at dawn to find Bonnie on the verge of death.

Five days later, as Clyde hovered over Bonnie’s deathbed in Arkansas, the familiar smell of fresh hops and barley hung thick outside Hamm’s Brewery, which rose from the streets of Minneapolis like some medieval European castle. Festooned with flags, its eight-story brick facade had been constructed in the 1840s by a German immigrant named Theodore Hamm. The family’s Tudor mansion loomed on a steep hill above.

On the street outside the brewery, a twenty-four-year-old man in a chauffeur’s cap sat in a black Ford sedan, watching the scene with expressionless eyes. His name was Alvin Karpis, though everyone called him by his alias, “Ray.” Cold, aloof, a ringer for Boris Karloff, Karpis had a frosty demeanor, which earned him the nickname “Old Creepy.” He was the brains behind the unsung villains of Depression-era crime, the Barker Gang, or as Karpis liked to call it, the Barker-Karpis Gang. His partners, the diminutive brothers Fred and Arthur “Dock” Barker, were from Tulsa. Fred was twenty-nine, five-feet-four, lean, feral, and menacing, with three gold teeth and greasy black hair cut high above his ears. His older brother Dock was a borderline moron with three facial moles, an unreliable drunk just six months out of the Oklahoma state prison.

When it was over, J. Edgar Hoover would label the Barkers the “brainiest and most dangerous” gang of the War on Crime. During their lives, however, they received a fraction of the publicity afforded the likes of John Dillinger. Yet the scale and ambition of the Barker-Karpis Gang’s crimes dwarfed those of their peers, and their ability to strike alliances with Northern crime syndicates—no small achievement for what was essentially a pack of murderous hillbillies—would make them the most difficult of the FBI’s public enemies to defeat.

Seventy years after their heyday, all that remains of the gang’s legacy is the FBI-sponsored myth of Kate “Ma” Barker, Fred and Dock’s sixty-something mother, who in a blaze of posthumous notoriety was portrayed as the murderous, machine gun-wielding brains of the gang. “The most vicious, dangerous, and resourceful criminal brain this country has produced in many years belonged to a person called ‘Mother Barker,’” Hoover wrote in 1938. “In her sixty years or so this woman reared a spawn of hell . . . To her [her sons] looked for guidance, for daring, resourcefulness. They obeyed her implicitly.”

It is a characterization advanced by otherwise credible books, notably John Toland’s 1963
Dillinger Days,
as well as by B-movies like Roger Corman’s
Bloody Mama.
Yet there is no evidence whatsoever to support the myth of Ma Barker’s criminal genius. According to FBI files and those few who lived to tell of her, Ma Barker wasn’t even a criminal, let alone a mastermind. There’s no evidence she ever robbed a bank or fired a gun. She was never arrested. Hoover’s portrayal of her as “the most feared woman in American crime” is baseless. During her life, Ma Barker was unknown; no one outside the gang knew who she was.

Short and plump, with stringy black hair she styled into comical piles of curls on special occasions, Arizona Donnie Barker was a frowsy hillbilly woman whose only interest, aside from doing jigsaw puzzles and listening to
Amos ’n’ Andy,
was the welfare of her sons. She knew of their crimes and lived on their ill-gotten income, but the idea that she was the leader of the gang was “the most ridiculous story in the annals of crime,” Karpis once said. One of the gang’s mentors, the Jazz Age yegg Harvey Bailey, scoffed at the idea that Ma planned their exploits. “The old woman couldn’t plan breakfast,” Bailey once said.

Ma Barker was born in Ash Grove, Missouri, outside Springfield, probably in 1873. By the time she and her husband moved to Tulsa around 1910, they had four sons, all of whom would become criminals. The eldest, Herman, was a stickup man who wandered the West robbing stores before shooting himself in the head after police cornered him in a vacant lot in Wichita, Kansas, in 1927. The second son, Lloyd, had his career in crime cut short by a twenty-five-year sentence in Leavenworth for robbing a mail truck in 1921. Raised in Tulsa, their younger brothers, Fred and Dock, fell in with a rowdy group of teenage burglars and car thieves known as the Central Park Gang, several of whom would join the Barker-Karpis Gang fifteen years later. In later years the FBI characterized the Central Park Gang as a “school” of crime taught by Ma Barker. There’s no evidence to back up this assertion. Ma’s role, such as it was, was to hector policemen and prosecutors who detained her boys.

They kept her busy. A car thief turned cat burglar, Dock drew a life sentence in an Oklahoma penitentiary after shooting a night watchman in 1922. Freddie, meanwhile, was arrested for burglary in Kansas and thrown into a reformatory. There he met Karpis, the son of Lithuanian immigrants, who had grown up in the streets of Wichita before graduating to a life of petty crime. In the spring of 1931, the two were released separately, and Karpis went to Tulsa to find Freddie. He never forgot his first encounter with Ma Barker, at her shack in a trash-strewn lot beside a set of railroad tracks.

“As I approached, I saw this little dumpy old woman standing on a box, wearing a pair of bib overalls over a man’s sweater,” Karpis remembered years later. She was trying to fix a window screen. He introduced himself and she invited him inside. Karpis was appalled. There was no electricity, no running water. In the backyard was an outhouse. Flies buzzed everywhere. Ma volunteered to send a telegram to Fred in Joplin, and in the ensuing days she and Karpis became friends. In time she all but adopted him. Fred said she preferred Karpis to her own sons. “You don’t get on her nerves the way I do,” her son said.
³

Barker and Karpis began pulling nighttime burglaries around Tulsa. Before long both were arrested. Karpis was released, but Barker was detained and forced to escape. Fleeing the authorities, they took Ma and her boyfriend, an old drunk named Albert Dunlop, to southern Missouri, where they robbed their first bank and used the proceeds to buy Ma a farm. All went well until the week before Christmas, 1931, when the sheriff in the town of West Plains approached them at a gas station for questioning. Karpis panicked and shot the sheriff dead.

They fled one step ahead of a posse, grabbing Ma and racing to the home of a Barker family friend, a worldly confidence man named Herbert “Deafy” Farmer, who operated a kind of safe house for outlaws from across the region at his farm five miles south of Joplin. It was Farmer who suggested that Karpis and Barker take refuge in St. Paul, Minnesota, whose corrupt police force had transformed the quiet river city into the crime capital of the Midwest. And so a few days after Christmas, the two aspiring bank men walked into St. Paul’s Green Lantern tavern—and entered the major leagues of Midwestern crime.

The Green Lantern, run by a roly-poly Orthodox Jew named Harry Sawyer, was St. Paul’s criminal headquarters, a clubhouse that drew every major bank man in the Midwest. The Jazz Age yeggs Harvey Bailey and Frank Nash were regulars, as were vacationing gunmen from Chicago and scores of wannabes, including George Barnes, later known as Machine Gun Kelly. Karpis was dazzled. He and Freddie moved Ma and Albert Dunlop into a house on the south side and went to work guarding cigarette shipments and pulling burglaries. In March 1932 they were invited on their first major bank job, in downtown Minneapolis.

Just days afterward, their landlady’s son saw their pictures in a detective magazine. The corrupt detectives who took the call delayed long enough for everyone to get away, but Karpis and Barker blamed the drunken Albert Dunlop for their exposure, dragged him to a lake outside town, and shot him dead. Relocating to Kansas City, they robbed a bank that June in Fort Scott, Kansas, alongside Harvey Bailey. When Bailey was subsequently arrested, they struck out on their own, robbing a series of banks across the Upper Midwest. By autumn Fred had enough money to bribe his brother Dock and one of Dock’s Tulsa friends, Volney Davis, out of prison.
^c
Dock and Davis became the gang’s newest members.

Drawing from the most desperate of the St. Paul yeggs, the Barker-Karpis Gang had few qualms about gunplay. In a robbery that December, they machine-gunned two Minneapolis cops; when they stopped to change cars during the getaway, a bystander glanced at Fred Barker a moment too long and Fred shot him dead. After a winter vacation in Reno, where Karpis befriended a gangland chauffeur named Jimmy Burnell, whom he would later introduce around St. Paul, the gang robbed a Nebraska bank in a hail of gunfire. One gang member was killed, and Karpis began thinking of safer ways to make money. It made him open to the idea of the kidnapping that Harry Sawyer brought to him that spring.

 

 

As Karpis watched, William Hamm, the brewery’s thirty-eight-year-old chairman, stepped out a backdoor into the noon sun. Turning left, he began walking up the hill toward the mansion for lunch. Across the way, Dock Barker raised his arm, giving the signal. As Hamm stepped onto the sidewalk, another gang member, Charley Fitzgerald, wearing a homburg and a dark suit, walked up to him and offered his right hand.

“You are Mr. Hamm, are you not?” he asked.

“Yes,” Hamm said, shaking the stranger’s hand. Suddenly Fitzgerald tightened his grip, put his left hand onto Hamm’s elbow, and guided him toward the curb. At that point Dock ran up, taking Hamm’s other elbow. “What is it you want?” Hamm asked, confused.

Just then Karpis pulled the Hudson up to the curb, and Hamm was shoved into the backseat. Dock Barker followed, slipped a pillowcase over Hamm’s head, and pushed him down onto the floorboards.

“I don’t like to do this,” Fitzgerald said to Hamm. “But I’m going to have to ask you to get down on the floor because I don’t want you to see where you’re going. I hope you don’t mind.”

They drove east. Thirty miles outside of St. Paul, the car pulled alongside a Chevrolet. Inside sat Freddie and a smooth Chicago gangster named “Shotgun George Ziegler” (whose real name was Fred Goetz), who had been brought in with his partner Bryan Bolton to help on the job.
^d
Ziegler shoved a typewritten ransom note into Hamm’s hands. “I guess you know what this is all about,” he said. “Sign these papers and sign them quick.”

Hamm, on his knees, did as he was told. “Who do you want as a contact man?” Ziegler asked.