Public Enemies (82 page)

“Are there any others in the apartment?”

“My husband.”

The words had scarcely escaped her lips when gunshots rang out behind the building. “Ooooooh!” Clara Gibson wailed. “They’ve shot my husband!”

 

 

A dozen agents were arrayed at the rear of the apartment, hiding behind fences and garages. Nearest to the backdoor were the old Cowboy Doc White and an agent named Al Barber. They crouched in the darkened alley, no more than twenty feet beyond the steps. The rookie agent Jack Welles peeked from behind a garage on the far side of the alley, forty feet from the kitchen window.
^ep
At 11:30 he heard a woman’s voice, apparently talking to someone in the lobby.

As the woman spoke, Welles saw a second woman peek from behind the kitchen blinds. With his service revolver he drew a bead on her head. The woman disappeared behind the blind. A second later a man attempted to open the kitchen window. Welles put the man’s head in his sights. The man gave up after several moments, then moved to a second window, beside the backdoor. He tried to raise it but failed.

The kitchen light went off, throwing the back porch into deep shadow. The agents waited several long moments. There was the sound of a door closing. Then came what one agent would later describe as “soft noises” on the back stairs. In the darkness Agents White and Barber saw the outline of a man step carefully down the outside stairs. When he reached the bottom, White saw the rifle in his hands.

“Stop!” White yelled.

The man raised his gun and fired. The bullet struck the fence in front of the two agents and ricocheted into a brick wall. White fired, six shots in all, and the man in the shadows fired again, and again. Agent Barber raised his gas gun and fired a shell into an apartment window. Tear gas hissed inside. The agents heard what sounded like a body hitting the pavement. A second later, another group of agents racing up the side of the building saw a man in silhouette, staggering into an adjacent vacant lot. “Halt!” someone yelled.

The man turned and fell. Agent John T. McLaughlin was the first to reach him. He was bleeding heavily from gunshot wounds in his head and chest. He was wearing a bulletproof vest, but not a good one; at least one bullet had blasted right through it.

“Are you Alvin Karpis?” McLaughlin demanded.

“No,” the bleeding man mumbled. “Russell Gibson.”

It was over. In minutes agents stormed the empty apartment. Gibson was loaded into a Bureau car and taken to the American Hospital on Irving Park Boulevard. Doctors in the emergency room summoned a surgeon. A bullet had entered Gibson’s back and blown through his stomach. He didn’t have long. Two agents peppered Gibson with questions. Did he know the Barkers? Karpis? Volney Davis? Gibson shook his head. The doctor told Gibson he was on the verge of death. He urged him to answer the agents’ questions.

Just before dying at 1:40 A.M., Russell Gibson rasped his last recorded words: “Tell you nothing.”
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By Wednesday morning, January 9, Dock Barker was locked away at the Bankers Building. Several newspapers, including the
Chicago Tribune,
carried unattributed comments from police castigating the FBI for failing to notify them of the raids. Hoover blew up. “Well if they cleaned up their own dirty mess and ran out of town this underworld mouthpiece, The Chicago Tribune, the Federal Govt wouldn’t have to do so much work in Chicago,” he scrawled on a memo. “There must be a good reason why most criminals gravitate to Chicago.”

But it was what the papers didn’t say that excited Earl Connelley. While all carried news of the shoot-out at Pine Grove Avenue, none had learned of Dock Barker’s capture. That gave Connelley’s men an opportunity: maybe, just maybe, they could persuade Dock to divulge the rest of the gang’s whereabouts before the others learned he was in custody. His capture wouldn’t stay a secret long, Connelley suspected. That afternoon a reporter called to inquire about a rumor that another suspect was in custody. An agent named Mickey Ladd denied it. But from Connelley all the way up to Hoover, the FBI realized it was in a race against time. They gave Dock a code name, “Number Five,” to ensure that no one would hear his name mentioned in the office. For the plan to work, however, Dock had to talk, and for the moment he wasn’t.

“Mr. Nathan stated that Barker is a tough one and is not going to talk,” an aide memoed Hoover Tuesday night. “They are going to work in shifts during the night.”

By the next morning, Dock had still said nothing. As the hours wore on, Hoover grew convinced that Chicago wasn’t working hard enough. One of his top men, Ed Tamm, told Connelley to use “vigorous physical efforts” to break Dock.
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Just what those efforts were, the FBI never disclosed. But in later years one agent, Ray Suran, reportedly bragged that he had broken two telephone books over Dock’s head. Whatever tactics agents employed, Barker still wouldn’t talk.

Bryan Bolton was no Dock Barker. Connelley’s men initially had no idea how much Bolton knew, dismissing him in one memo as a “minor member of the gang.” Friday morning, after more than fifty hours in custody, Bolton suggested otherwise. If the Bureau would put him back “on the street,” as he put it, he would tell them everything: who committed the Hamm and Bremer kidnappings, what became of the money and, best of all, where Freddie and Karpis were hiding.

Pop Nathan briefed Ed Tamm, who wrote Hoover that he “advised [Nathan] that we must consider the possibility that in making the complete statement about the case [Bolton] may implicate himself. Consequently we should be careful in making inducements to him, that no promises be made to him to hold him free of any of his own activities. Mr. Nathan advised that we have nothing against [Bolton] now, and I stated that you had suggested, in questioning him, we not show how little we know about the facts in the case.”
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Connelley sat down with Bolton and made the proposal that policemen have made since the beginning of time. He could make no promises, Connelley said. But if Bolton produced information that helped the FBI, it would be taken into account at his sentencing.

Bolton talked. To Connelley’s amazement, the man was a geyser of information. Bolton laid out every detail of the Hamm and Bremer kidnappings, naming every participant and identifying the location of the long-sought safe house in Bensenville. Best of all, Bolton said Fred Barker and Karpis were staying at a lake house in central Florida. He had visited in December, but couldn’t remember how to get there. He said it was south of Ocala, a six-hour drive from Macon, Georgia. Nor could Bolton remember the name of the lake. But, he went on, it was locally famous as the home of a gigantic alligator named Big Joe. At one point, Freddie had towed a pig behind a motorboat in a vain attempt to catch him. That was all Bolton knew.

Then they found the map. Why it took three days to discover Dock Barker’s map to his family’s Florida hideout is a mystery. It wouldn’t be the last time agents overlooked an important item during a search, a phenomenon that never failed to drive Hoover to apoplexy. When the map was handed to Connelley that Thursday, it had a ring drawn around the area of Lake Weir, twelve miles south of Ocala.

There were probably dozens of houses around the lake, Connelley could see, as well as several smaller lakes nearby. They had to narrow down the search area, and fast. It was only a matter of time before reporters figured out they had Dock Barker, and when that hit the papers, the Barkers would be gone.

Saturday, January 12, Connelley and three agents boarded a 1:00 P.M. charter flight that got them to Jacksonville by nightfall. Ten more agents, toting trunkloads of machine guns and rifles, took an overnight train and arrived Sunday morning. Everyone gathered at the Marion Hotel in Ocala. Connelley was in a touchy position. The area south of Ocala was sparsely populated, dotted with tiny towns where strangers would be noticed. He knew only that the Barkers were in the area. Already the arrival of fifteen men in dark suits was attracting notice.

Connelley moved gingerly. He sent agents to check the maternity ward at Munroe Hospital in Ocala to see if Delores Delaney had been there; she hadn’t. Meantime they needed to find the lake with the alligator, Old Joe. Connelley dispatched two of the Cowboys, Jerry Campbell and Bob Jones, twenty miles east to check out Lake Bryant. Connelley took another agent to look at Lakes Weir and Bowers. Neither group came up with anything, and both felt they had been noticed. Connelley realized they needed help. Monday morning he contacted a deputy sheriff named Milton Dunning and described the story of Old Joe. Dunning said it sounded like Lake Warburg. But when he called a friend on the lake, he found Lake Warburg’s Old Joe had died in 1925.

Connelley decided to forget about the alligator; every lake in Florida seemed to have an Old Joe. The more he mulled Dock Barker’s map, the more he became convinced the Barkers must be hiding on Lake Weir; it lay at the center of the ring Dock had drawn. BELIEVE WE HAVE SPOT LOCATED, IT BEING LAKE SIX MILES LONG FOUR MILES WIDE WITH MANY HOUSES AND COTTAGES IN VICINITY, he telegraphed Hoover Monday night. EXPECT COVER FURTHER TOMORROW IN EFFORT TO LOCATE ACTUAL HOUSE.

In Washington, Hoover paced his office. Already rumors were flying in Chicago that Dock Barker had been arrested. They had days, maybe hours, before the story broke. Tuesday morning, as Connelley’s men set out to study Lake Weir, a reporter from the
Chicago American
called the Bankers Building and was again passed to Mickey Ladd. “What can you tell me about Dock Barker?” the reporter asked.

Ladd denied Barker was in custody. But the reporter wouldn’t give up. “Where are you holding Dock?” he asked in a second call. After the second call, Ladd called Washington. If they kept Barker in Chicago, Ladd warned, the story would get out.
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Hoover ordered Barker moved to the Detroit office, which had a gun room with bars on the windows. Ladd promised to move him at nightfall.

As Chicago jousted with the inquisitive reporter that morning, Agent Bob Jones climbed into a motorboat with the deputy sheriff, Milton Dunning, and cruised the shoreline of Lake Weir. While the two inspected lakeside cottages, Connelley took a gamble on the postmaster in the village of Oklawaha, on the north bank of the lake. The postmaster couldn’t identify photographs of Barker or Karpis. But when Connelley asked if any strangers had moved into the area, he mentioned a Mr. Blackburn, who was renting a nice lakefront house with a dock. He received several out-of-town newspapers. The postmaster suggested they approach Mr. Blackburn’s neighbor, a man named Frank Barber, who had once worked as a guard at Leavenworth. Connelley drove to Barber’s house and immediately received the confirmation they needed. Barber identified a photo of Fred Barker as his new neighbor Mr. Blackburn.

Connelley studied the Blackburn house through the trees. It lay on the south side of Route 41, the area’s main road, and as he cruised past it at 11:00, he caught a glimpse of a small man and an aged woman in the yard. It was Fred Barker and his mother.

Back in Ocala, Connelley called and briefed Washington. The situation looked ideal. The house sat a hundred yards back from the road, maybe ten from the lakeshore. There were no natural obstructions around it, only what appeared to be a guesthouse, a garage, and some chicken coops. They could use these buildings as cover. Connelley was determined to avoid another Little Bohemia. He sat down with his men later that day, drew detailed maps of the Blackburn house, and outlined every man’s position in the raiding party. Weapons were checked, then double-checked. They would move in before dawn.

The inky tropical night still enveloped the hamlet of Oklawaha as the FBI cars slid to a stop and extinguished their headlights out on Highway 41. Fifteen agents stepped from the cars into a primeval scene of lush woods dominated by ancient oak trees dripping with Spanish moss. Deep in the shadows they could just make out a smattering of darkened houses and outbuildings. There was no movement, no light, no clue anyone knew they were coming.

The Barker house, a two-story white clapboard with green trim, sat a hundred yards off the road, facing south toward the lake. There was a screened-in porch facing the water in front, a long dock out to a boathouse, and two grassy lanes on either side of the house. Connelley positioned cars at the end of each lane. At 5:30 they moved in and surrounded the house. Connelley took five men and crept down the west side of the property, jogging through a grove of spindly orange trees to the lakefront; they took shelter behind a small guesthouse, which sat thirty paces from the front porch. It was a strangely intimate setting for a potential shoot-out; Connelley’s position was so close to the porch he could underhand a softball and hit it.

A group of the Cowboys—Charles Winstead, Jerry Campbell, and two other marksmen—took positions behind the stone wall at the roadside, covering the back of the house. Two more agents trotted down the east side of the yard, hunching behind Frank Barber’s home. The last two agents were placed on the highway to block traffic.

The sun was to rise at seven, and Connelley planned to wait until daylight to make his move. In the meantime they waited. Crouching behind a tree beside Connelley stood Agent Johnny Madala, the onetime office boy, fighting his nerves. This wasn’t Dillinger or Floyd; they wouldn’t be catching the Barkers by surprise. Inside the shadowy house were gang members no doubt armed with Thompson submachine guns. They couldn’t get away, and they probably wouldn’t surrender. His mind drifted to Sam Cowley and Ed Hollis.

Finally, when the first rays of dawn seeped over Lake Weir, Connelley emerged from behind the guesthouse and took two steps toward the front porch. “Fred Barker, come out!” he shouted. “We are Department of Justice agents, and we have the house surrounded.”

Silence. Connelley repeated the command. If they came out with their hands raised, he announced, no one would get hurt.