Public Enemies (30 page)

The Hamm trial began in St. Paul on November 17. The case against the Chicago mob boss Roger Touhy and his gangmates was weak, and prosecutors knew it. Almost all the eyewitnesses were unsure of their identifications, and the defendants’ alibis proved unbreakable. Hamm himself, who remained shaken by his experience, couldn’t identify any of his kidnappers and seemed reluctant to testify. Pop Nathan told an aide he was “disgusted with Hamm’s attitude” and “was suspicious of the entire matter, believing that Hamm had been dealing with the gangster element in distributing his beer.”
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The federal prosecutor, Joe Keenan, closed the door to Hoover’s office before bluntly telling the director, “We have no case.”
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And they didn’t. After a weeklong trial, Touhy and his codefendants were acquitted of all charges.
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Editorialists decried the verdict, saying it would only encourage kidnappers. Hoover was apoplectic.

News in the massacre case went from bad to worse. Verne Miller had vanished, though in the wake of his Halloween escape, agents had learned much about his travels. A search of the car Miller abandoned in Chicago turned up a pair of riding breeches sold by a shop at the luxurious Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. A check of hotel records indicated Miller had registered on August 13 as a doctor from Maplewood, New Jersey, then moved on to the Greystone Inn in Roaring Gap, North Carolina. His golfing partners complained to agents that Miller was a poor sport, quitting one game at the Greenbrier after a bad shot.

Miller had posed as a traveling optician, as indicated by a bag of eyeglasses, frames, lenses, and business cards found in his car. These items led agents to the Mason Optical Service in Newark, New Jersey, whose owner told agents he’d supplied the equipment to a man named Irwin Silvers. Newark police recognized Dr. Silvers as the brother of a gangster named Al Silvers, a member of the Longy Zwillman Mob that dominated the New Jersey underworld. Agents brought in Irwin Silvers on November 15; the doctor admitted buying the equipment for his brother but denied knowing Verne Miller. “This bird certainly is a liar,” Hoover scrawled on a memo the next morning.

Arrest orders were issued for Al Silvers, and the good news came fast: Silvers was found the next day in Connecticut. The bad news was, he was dead. Silvers’s nude body had been found in a field near the town of Somers, with a clothesline wrapped around his neck, his face a bloody mess, apparently thanks to a hammer. The next day an informant for the New York City police reported that Silvers had been killed by Zwillman’s gang for giving Miller unauthorized aid, thus bringing heat onto the gang’s operations. Seventy years later, the killing remains unsolved.

In fact, the FBI had been hearing rumors for months that the underworld wanted the Miller manhunt, with its attendant raids and political pressure, to end quickly. Now it appeared the Bureau was in a race with underworld bosses to get Miller. If the syndicate got to Miller first, Hoover realized, the massacre case might never be solved. Which is why, on the afternoon of November 28, eight days after Silvers’s body was discovered, four FBI men found themselves sitting in a midtown Manhattan lawyer’s office, interviewing Lepke Buchalter.

What the agents expected from the suave head of Murder, Inc., isn’t clear. In the event, Buchalter proved a quiescent witness. He freely admitted knowing Miller, telling agents of a 1932 Thanksgiving dinner with the Millers and Frank Nashes, playing golf with Miller in Hot Springs that winter, even about squiring Vi Mathias that summer. “No one will have anything to do with Miller now,” Buchalter said, according to an FBI summary of the meeting.
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“[But] if Miller shows up in New York, you will know about it.” When the agents pressed, asking if Miller might be “bumped off” within the next thirty days, Buchalter “gave a knowing smile and said he didn’t know about that but would have to make some inquiries around town.”

The next evening, Wednesday, November 29, the FBI got its answer. A man named Vernon W. Northrop was driving home from work when he spotted something in a vacant lot on the outskirts of Detroit. It was a man’s naked body, lying in a drainage ditch, trussed up with rope and in a fetal position. Police were called. When they examined the body, they found a man about five-feet-seven, 150 pounds, with his hair and mustache dyed red. He had been killed by eight or nine blows to his forehead, apparently with a clawhammer. Tied around his neck, so tight that it had crushed his Adam’s apple, was another clothesline, the last twenty feet of which trailed off into the lonely lot.

It was Miller. Though his murder was never solved, everyone realized that Lepke had won the race. Hoover was beside himself. “Be absolutely certain it is Verne Miller,” he scrawled on one memo. “Do not merely accept the word of the police.”
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But the police were right. Miller was dead, and with him went any hope of a quick solution to the massacre case. Once again agents returned to their files, poring over old leads and reinterviewing people. No one the FBI arrested had anything useful to say. There remained only two suspects at large, Pretty Boy Floyd and one of the men who had escaped prison alongside Harvey Bailey, the wild-eyed Oklahoma outlaw Wilbur Underhill. Hoover’s men were combing the eastern half of Oklahoma in search of both men, but so far had nothing.

In the wake of Miller’s death, the massacre investigation began to spiral off in bizarre new directions. The next morning Ted Conroy, the new Kansas City SAC, wrote a letter to Hoover. Based on interviews his agents had been doing at the Kansas State Penitentiary, Conroy wrote, he had “vitally important” information on the identity of Miller’s partners in the massacre. According to Conroy’s theory, they were none other than Fred and Dock Barker.
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It was progress, of a sort. The FBI was looking for the right suspects, but for the wrong crime.

 

 

In late November, the Barker Gang returned from their Nevada vacations invigorated and ready to work. Once settled into a new set of Chicago apartments, Fred and Karpis drove up to St. Paul, where one night in early December the Green Lantern’s Harry Sawyer had them out to his farm. There was much to catch up on. The Touhy trial had just concluded, and they all had a good laugh at the FBI’s expense. They spent the better part of an hour speculating about who had killed Verne Miller.

Finally Karpis asked Sawyer if he had any jobs in mind for them. He did. To Karpis’s surprise, it was another kidnapping, of another Twin Cities millionaire, Edward Bremer, the thirty-seven-year-old son of Adolph Bremer, one of President Roosevelt’s principal financial backers. The Bremers owned the Schmidt brewery. Karpis thought Sawyer had lost his mind. “Do you realize how much heat there would be?” he asked.

“What do you mean, heat?” Sawyer said. “You know I’m connected here. Hell, you guys won’t have any trouble getting that money. Just like that Hamm thing. You guys didn’t have any trouble doing that or getting the money.”

“This is going to be a hell of a lot different thing,” Karpis said. “You know as well as I do how much money that guy put up for Roosevelt’s goddamn campaign. I was told he put up three hundred fifty thousand dollars and could have been the ambassador to Germany.”

Sawyer laughed. “Well, I don’t know how much he put up, but he could have been ambassador, that’s right.”

“This ain’t gonna be like the Hamm thing,” Karpis said. “This is going to be a hot son of a bitch. How much money you think you ought to get for the guy? I wouldn’t want to do it for less than half a million dollars if I did it.”

“Hell,” said Sawyer, “you ain’t gonna get that kind of money from nobody. Let’s be reasonable about this thing.”

“How much?”

“Well, you could get two hundred thousand dollars without any trouble.”

“Don’t hand me any crap about trouble,” Karpis said. “’Cause that’s all you’re going to get out of this goddamn thing.”

Sawyer turned to Barker, who hadn’t said a word. “What do you think about it, Freddie?”

“Two hundred thousand dollars sounds real good to me.”

Barker turned to Karpis. “What the hell is all this talk about heat? That’s all we’ve had anyway since 1931 is heat.”

“Okay, Freddie,” said Karpis. “But I’m telling you now, if we do this thing, this ain’t gonna be like anything else we ever did.” He’d go along if they wanted, Karpis said. “But I’d hell of a lot rather rob a bank any day. I’d rather do anything than kidnap this guy. If we’re gonna kidnap somebody, let’s kidnap somebody besides this guy here. Let’s go to some other town, too.” They talked about working in Chicago or Indiana, but neither seemed promising: the Dillinger Gang had brought swarms of police into both areas. Sawyer argued that St. Paul was the perfect venue: corrupt cops, good men to work with, and no Dillinger. By daybreak they reached a compromise: if Shotgun George Ziegler favored the job, Karpis said he would go along.

He and Fred continued debating the merits of kidnapping Bremer on the drive back to Chicago. Karpis had a million reasons not to. Among other things, he pointed out how easily the FBI had traced Machine Gun Kelly’s ransom money. “God, all you do is worry,” Fred said. It was true. Karpis had realized the stress he was under only when his girlfriend mentioned how much weight he had lost. He had promised to eat a pint of ice cream each day to put it back on.

“We’d better start making some money,” Karpis said, “and start figuring on getting the hell out of this country because things are going to get real bad. You can read the papers, you can see for yourself what Hoover’s saying, what the attorney general is saying. They want all them laws passed, and they’re going to get a lot more of them FBI guys . . . So whatever we’re going to do to make money, we’d better make it by next summer and get the hell out of here or we’re both going to get killed or get caught.”

Barker said nothing. “Which brings me to your mother,” Karpis said. “Now I’ve brought it up two or three times to you about you’re going to have to do something with her. We’re going to have to quit living with her. You know that, don’t you?” Barker got defensive, as he always did when Karpis brought up Ma. “I got that apartment, didn’t I?” Barker said, alluding to a new flat he had rented for Ma.

“Yeah, but hell, you ain’t staying there. You’re staying home.” Even on the nights when he went out with his girlfriend, a drunken harpy named Paula Harmon, Barker was sneaking home to sleep at his mother’s. He let the matter drop. It was impossible to talk to Fred about Ma. She was a meddler, always complaining about their girlfriends, and if Fred wasn’t careful, she would get them killed. If the FBI found them, how nimble in flight would a sixty-year-old woman be? “Come on,” Barker said when they reached Chicago, “let’s go on over with my mother. She gets kind of lonesome. She keeps wondering why you don’t come over more often.”
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The next day Karpis found Ma immersed in her jigsaw puzzles. She worked on them for hours each day, and whenever Karpis came by, she dragged him into sorting the pieces at her side. As Karpis sat down beside Ma, Fred staggered out of his bedroom. He had obviously been up late. “I was over at Paula’s last night,” he said in a low voice.

“What did your mother say?” Karpis asked. “Anything about coming home late?” Fred was more frightened of his mother than of the police.

A few days later Karpis dropped by George Ziegler’s apartment and briefed him on the Bremer job. “I think it’s a pretty good score myself,” Ziegler said. “Yeah, I’d go on the damn thing.”

On the other hand, Ziegler went on, there was something else they could do. A kidnapping in Chicago.

“Who?” Karpis asked.

“It’s one of the syndicate guys.”

Karpis’s heart flip-flopped. “The Syndicate?”

“Hell yeah. What’s wrong with that?”

Karpis didn’t mention his encounter with Frank Nitti.

“Did you ever hear of a guy named Dennis Cooney?” Ziegler asked.

“Ain’t he in charge of all the hookers, all the whores and whorehouses?”

“Yeah, that’s the guy. His wife has got three hundred thousand dollars put away in a safe deposit box. He’d be a cinch to snatch.” At Ziegler’s behest, Karpis spent the next two weeks shadowing Dennis Cooney, studying the best way to kidnap him. Sitting outside of Cooney’s home one night, he found himself wondering which would be worse, being hunted by J. Edgar Hoover or Frank Nitti. Ultimately Ziegler made the decision for him. Late one night they drove out into the country. Ziegler was silent much of the way. Finally he said, “They had me downtown today.”

“Who?”

“You know who I work for.”

Karpis glanced at him. “Yeah.”

“They asked me if I had heard any rumor about Dennis Cooney being kidnapped.”

As Ziegler told the story, the syndicate bosses had asked him to investigate the rumor and, if true, track down and kill the would-be kidnappers. Ziegler couldn’t figure out where the rumor had started. Whoever was responsible, the Cooney job was clearly off. “Well,” Ziegler said, “we can go on up to St. Paul and that guy up there.”

And so it was decided. Against Karpis’s better instincts, they would stage another kidnapping in St. Paul. Karpis knew it was the wrong thing to do, but he made himself a promise: if they carried out this one last score, he would leave the gang.

Garish neon lights, red, blue, and yellow, glowed in the damp fog that crept in off of San Francisco Bay. A half mile from the waterfront, on a narrow block of Pacific Street crammed with taverns and tinsel halls, Christmas revelers staggered from bar to bar, laughing and backslapping. From the doorway of a joint named Spider Kelly’s came a blast of fresh jazz. Out on the sidewalk a roly-poly Italian man waved in the tourists. It was Fatso Negri, Baby Face Nelson’s old rum-running friend. Negri felt a tug at his elbow. He turned, annoyed, and his jaw dropped. There, a cap shoved down on his forehead, was Nelson himself.