Public Enemies (86 page)

Karpis sighed: here they were, ready for their first job in over a year, and they were arguing about black cats. A whistle sounded; the train was coming. When it arrived, they watched the couriers load the payroll bags into the truck. As the truck pulled away from the curb, Karpis eased in front of it. He stayed abreast of the truck for several blocks, until it came to a stop at a railroad crossing. Campbell and Joe Rich jumped out of the car, .45s in their hands. The driver took one look at them and tossed his pistol into the street.

Campbell and Rich climbed into the cab, took the driver hostage, and followed Karpis to the outskirts of Warren, where they found their way to an abandoned shed they had rented. There was no pursuit; they had gotten away clean. In the truck Karpis found what he was looking for, a burlap sack packed with bricks of cash. They counted it on the floor of the shed, all $72,000. Joe Rich was so excited he took out a syringe, drained water from the radiator, boiled his morphine, and shot up. Within minutes he was telling Karpis they should rob the Cleveland Federal Reserve. They returned to Toledo safely, where Karpis’s luck held; the next day two local hoods were arrested for the robbery.

Flush with cash, Karpis and Campbell loitered in Toledo the next month, posing as gamblers. Campbell, who was blessed with an uncluttered mind, paid $10 one night to have sex with an eighteen-year-old girl, proposed to her two days later, and married her a month after that, settling into a trailer behind her mother’s house.
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But Karpis was restless. With Campbell idled by domestic bliss, he hit the road with Freddie Hunter. They took a drive through New York State into New England, stopping at tourist camps as far north as Maine. In Saratoga Springs, Karpis thought a man recognized him, and he was right; news of the sighting made the local papers the next day, by which time Karpis had returned to Ohio. They drove on from there, passing through St. Louis and Tulsa, finding none of their old friends happy to see them.

In June they wandered into Hot Springs. Hunter knew the resort town from a visit in 1929, when he sought treatment there for gonorrhea. Karpis liked the feel of the place, and for good reason. Reform may have been sweeping other cities, but Hot Springs was operating exactly as it had in 1933. Six months later it would welcome another criminal vacationer, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, who would seek its shelter to avoid extradition to New York, where Thomas Dewey was hounding him.

It was somehow fitting that Karpis, the last survivor of the War on Crime, should end up where it all began. The White Front Cigar Store, where Frank Nash had been picked up, was still there, as were the casinos, the Belvedere and the Southern Club. Even Dick Galatas was still in town, awaiting an appeal of his sentence in the massacre case. Dutch Akers, the corrupt detective who had collected the $500 reward for betraying Nash, was still in office. Most evenings he could be found lounging around the town’s newest whorehouse, the Hatterie, next to the towering Arlington Hotel, Al Capone’s onetime hangout.

At the Hatterie, Akers enjoyed the favors of the brothel’s madame, a plumpish, sharp-eyed thirty-two-year-old named Grace Goldstein. Goldstein’s real name was Jewel Laverne Grayson; her family in Texas thought she owned a hat shop. Goldstein entertained the cops because it was smart business; they ran the town. But once Karpis began appearing, she later told the FBI, she “made a play for him.” He wasn’t much to look at, but the roll of cash in his front pocket was a Depression-era whore’s dream. Freddie Hunter, meanwhile, fell hard for one of Goldstein’s prostitutes, a teenage runaway from Oklahoma named Connie Morris.

In July, Karpis and Hunter took another long drive, lazing through Texas and along the Gulf Coast all the way to Florida. They returned to Hot Springs in August, renting cottages on Lake Hamilton outside town. Posing as gamblers named Fred Parker (Hunter) and Ed King (Karpis), they spent their days swimming and fishing, Karpis sitting at the lakeside for hours in khakis and a white T-shirt, casting for bass. Evenings they spent at the Hatterie or dining with their girls. In September Harry Campbell, tiring of life in his mother-in-law’s backyard, arrived and was soon squiring one of Goldstein’s girls. He was followed by another of Karpis’s old Oklahoma pals, a McAlester parolee named Sam Coker.
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At midmonth Hunter left for New York City, where he attended the heavyweight title fight between Joe Louis and Max Baer.

Among the other ninety thousand spectators that evening was J. Edgar Hoover. Their juxtaposition that night was symbolic: While Hoover was off winning accolades and attending prize fights, the hunt for Karpis lagged. There hadn’t been a confirmed sighting of him since he had vanished in Toledo eight months before. The truth was, while the Oklahoma City office was still poking around Tulsa, no one was looking that hard. Earl Connelley admitted as much when he sat down with one of Hoover’s aides, Ed Tamm, after the Barker and Richetti trials in August. Tamm tried to put a positive spin on it for the director.

“Mr. Connelley and I believe that the lack of concentrated activity upon known contacts of the Karpis mob for the past two months will have a beneficial effect in that it has allowed these contacts to ‘cool off’ to such a point where the members of the mob will be more careless” in contacting them, he memoed Hoover on August 1.
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Connelley decided to assign four members of the Flying Squad to hunt Karpis full-time, concentrating the search on Toledo and Chicago. Picking up rumors that Karpis had been seen at Edith Barry’s whorehouse, they rented a surveillance flat and installed wiretaps.

Meanwhile, Karpis was once again growing restless. In early September, he and his three-man gang checked out of the cabins at Lake Hamilton. After a two-day party at the Hatterie, they left Hot Springs, heading north. The day they departed, the corrupt detective Dutch Akers called in a group of reporters and announced his discovery that Karpis had been staying at Lake Hamilton. He telephoned the FBI’s Little Rock office and furnished the gang’s license plate numbers and aliases. The news made headlines around the country. It must have seemed a canny move. In one fell swoop Akers had not only covered himself, he had all but assured that Karpis would not return to Hot Springs and bring attention to Akers’s enterprises.

To the FBI, Akers’s announcement appeared to be just one more supposed sighting, the kind of Chinese fire drill agents had endured in spots as disparate as Grant’s Pass (Oregon), Sarasota Springs, Atlantic City, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, New Orleans, and half the towns in Oklahoma and Missouri. An agent named B. L. Damron drove down from Little Rock and chatted with Akers, who emphasized he had never seen the suspects himself. Damron drove to the lake and searched the cabins. He found three bottles of gonorrhea medicine. The doctor’s records listed the patient as Freddie Hunter. The name meant nothing to the FBI, and when no one at Dyer’s Landing seemed able to identity photos of Karpis, Damron wrapped up the investigation.
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Because Karpis had been posing as a gambler from Ohio, the gang’s aliases were sent to the Cleveland office, which checked them with police. No one had ever heard of gamblers named Fred Parker or Ed King; unfortunately, agents neglected to ask for information on Freddie Hunter. Afterward, Hoover’s men took the Hot Springs articles, threw them in a file and forgot about it.

 

 

Drinking, whoring, and bass fishing were pleasant pastimes, but they weren’t why Karpis had become a criminal. In the balmy days of September, sitting out on the shore of Lake Hamilton in his khakis and white T-shirt, he found himself yearning to take a big score, something exciting, something to get his adrenaline up. He was bored. Hunter suggested a target, a mail train that ferried bags of cash from the Cleveland Federal Reserve to Youngstown to fill the payroll needs of eastern Ohio’s sprawling steel mills. The idea of a train robbery appealed to Karpis’s sense of history. Jesse James robbed trains. Butch Cassidy robbed trains. Now Alvin Karpis would rob a train.

They drove to Toledo, visiting Edith Barry’s brothel just days after the FBI abandoned surveillance and phone taps on the house. After hearing rumors the FBI had been nosing around, they relocated to the steelworker Clayton Hall’s home outside Youngstown. Karpis decided to hit the train at Garrettsville, north of the city. Fearing the FBI, he decided to bring train robbery into the modern age and escape by air. Hunter knew a pilot in Port Clinton named John Zetzer, who had flown bootlegging missions during Prohibition, ferrying Canadian whiskey into northern Ohio. Zetzer no longer had a plane, so Karpis bought him one, a red four-seat Stinson; it cost $1,700. Zetzer was just one of several new men Karpis brought in to handle aspects of the job. He had four for the robbery itself: Hunter, Harry Campbell, Sam Coker, and an aging yegg named Ben Grayson.
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He also brought in a twenty-one-year-old Oklahoma kid named Milton Lett who was sweeping floors at the Harvard Club.

Preparations went smoothly until October 19, when Lett and Clayton Hall bought the getaway car at an Akron Ford dealership. The roll of cash they flashed attracted attention. Later that day Akron detectives arrested the two at a local hotel as “suspicious persons.” They were released on bail, and Karpis decided against allowing the incident to derail his plans. He should have; the brief detention of his new partners would come back to haunt him. Two weeks later, on November 2, Karpis gathered the men at Edith Barry’s brothel to go over their assignments. There was a snag. Sam Coker had come down with gonorrheal rheumatism. Karpis called one of his oldest friends, a Tulsa fence named Burrhead Keady, and had him send up his bartender to substitute.
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Finally, on the morning of November 7, they were ready. At 2:00 that afternoon Karpis, driving a new Plymouth sedan, cruised into the station lot at Garrettsville. There were about sixty people milling about on the platform. The men took their positions. At 2:13 the train appeared, coasting to a stop just where Karpis knew it would. The engine exhaled. Stepping to the mail car, Karpis saw the new man, Ben Grayson, climb into the cab. Fred Hunter was standing in the parking lot, making sure no one left. The mail-car door opened, and Karpis whipped out his Thompson gun, startling a pair of clerks. Before he could say a word, they disappeared inside. Just then he was distracted by a commotion in the parking lot. He turned and saw Hunter chasing two men, taking his attention off a couple who were starting their car.

Karpis stalked to the car, opened the door and, as the terrified driver froze, grabbed the car keys and threw them across the parking lot. In a moment he was back to the mail car. The clerks were nowhere to be seen. He tossed in a stick of unlit dynamite. “I’m gonna heave another stick in there,” he hollered, “and it’ll be burning. You’ve got five, and I’m counting now. One, two . . .”

A moment later the clerks appeared, hands raised.

“You can’t do this, man,” one of them said.

Karpis set the Thompson gun to single-shot and aimed it over the clerks’ heads. It jammed, but the clerks got the message. He jumped into the car and followed them to the mail bags. Karpis asked for the payroll to Warren. A clerk lifted one padlocked sack and handed it to him. When he asked for the Youngstown payroll, the clerk said it wasn’t on the train. Karpis aimed his Thompson gun at the man’s chest. Just then Harry Campbell climbed into the car. “Look out, Harry,” Karpis said, “I’m gonna shoot this guy.”

The clerk, on the verge of tears, produced a ledger and pointed to it, trying to show Karpis the Youngstown payrolls weren’t on the train. Irate, Karpis told him to snatch up several bags of registered mail instead. Then he ordered the clerks to load them into the back of the waiting Plymouth. It was all over in five minutes.

The getaway went smoothly. They followed Karpis’s git to the Lake Erie town of Port Clinton, where they emptied the money bags in the pilot John Zetzer’s garage. Karpis was disappointed. The take came to only $34,000; he was expecting five times that much. The next morning they were airborne by 10:30, but it was a short flight; the plane ran out of gas over southern Indiana, forcing them to land outside Evansville. Zetzer hitchhiked into town, bought forty-seven gallons of gasoline at a Standard Oil station, and they were soon airborne once more, only to run out of gas a second time, forcing a landing in a field in Missouri. Once again Zetzer was obliged to trek to a filling station. They slept in the plane that night, reaching Memphis the next morning. By noon the next day they were safely back in Hot Springs.

The FBI had no idea Karpis was behind the Garrettsville job. Karpis and Hunter picked up their girlfriends and drove into Texas, where they spent several days relaxing at the home of Goldstein’s brother. They then took a drive along the Gulf Coast, fishing and sunbathing. After three weeks they returned to Hot Springs, where they shuttled from flat to flat, never staying in one place too long.

Karpis sent for Clayton Hall in January, handing him $1,100 to buy him a new car. Afterward, believing it was safe to arrange a more permanent home, Karpis rented a lake house. They passed the days fishing, the nights at the Hatterie. Fred Hunter was gone much of the time, driving through Florida and Texas with his girlfriend. In March, Karpis moved once more, renting a farmhouse south of Hot Springs. A genteel, two-story affair, with trellises flanking the front door, it stood on a wooded hill overlooking the Malvern Road. Karpis liked it. If the FBI staged a raid here, he decided, he would see them coming.

 

 

For the Bureau, the story of the Karpis manhunt is one of the least flattering chapters in the War on Crime. There was an air of lethargy and anticlimax about it from the start; none of the agents could get too excited about risking their lives in one last battle of a war they had already won, and it showed.

After ten months of work, following tips from Boston to Havana to Los Angeles, at the moment Karpis robbed the Garrettsville train the FBI had no serious leads on his whereabouts. The Bureau had no jurisdiction for the Garrettsville robbery, and thus performed no investigation. But Garrettsville triggered the entry of another force into the manhunt, an intrepid squad of federal postal inspectors whose dogged pursuit of Karpis quickly eclipsed the FBI’s search. Working from Youngstown, the inspectors needed only twenty-four hours to finger Karpis and Campbell for the Garrettsville robbery; eyewitnesses easily identified photos of both men.
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Keeping this to the postal inspectors, the lead inspector, Sylvester J. Hettrick, reached out to the Kansas State Highway Patrol, which already had a detective named Joe Anderson pursuing rumors Karpis was involved in several Kansas robberies.