Public Enemies (85 page)

Karpis, meanwhile, was safely hidden in an upstairs room at Edith Barry’s brothel. He had escaped the FBI’s dragnet for now, but the world around him was changing, and Karpis knew it.

 

 

The killings of Fred and Ma Barker marked the end of the active phase of the War on Crime, and as such presented an opportunity for the nation to appraise what the FBI had wrought. After all it had achieved, one might presume Hoover and his “G-men” were acclaimed national treasures. At least initially, they weren’t. What glory flowed to the FBI that winter flowed largely to one man, Melvin Purvis, whose tenuous position inside the Bureau was lost on the public; a magazine poll that winter named Purvis the seventh-most-respected person in the country.

If that galled Hoover, he wasn’t yet in a position to change it. Historians make much of the FBI’s vaunted public-relations apparatus, which at its height in the mid-1930s churned out a blizzard of Bureau-sponsored comic strips, newspaper articles, and books, but that winter it remained in its infancy. During the War on Crime, Hoover did surprisingly little public-relations work. The decision to publicly promote the FBI, in fact, had not been Hoover’s; it was Homer Cummings’s. In August 1933, at a time Cummings was attempting to publicize the War on Crime, he had met with the Washington columnist Drew Pearson, asking how best to broadcast his message. Pearson and others suggested playing up the FBI, and Cummings hired a Brooklyn newspaperman named Henry Suydam to do just that.

Suydam, in turn, brought in a flamboyant freelancer named Courtney Ryley Cooper, a specialist in pulp crime stories. In a series of sixteen articles in
American Magazine
beginning in late 1933, Cooper placed Hoover at the nexus of the War on Crime, describing him in one article as “the master detective who simply does not conform to any picture of the average crime chaser.” Hoover liked Cooper’s articles so much they began collaborating on a book. Cooper was given a desk at headquarters and widespread access to agents and their reports.

It wasn’t Hoover or even Courtney Cooper, however, who created the G-man legend. It was Hollywood. Just days after the Barker killings, word reached Hoover that Warner Brothers was developing a script called
G-Men.
The studio billed it as “The First Great Story of the Men Who Waged America’s War on Crime.” Neither Hoover nor Homer Cummings was wild about the idea. Cummings actually issued a statement refuting the studio’s claim that the film was an official record of the War on Crime. Inside the FBI, Hoover’s men debated whether even to embrace the term “G-Man”; in the end, they did.
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Courtney Cooper’s book on the War on Crime,
Ten Thousand Public Enemies,
was still weeks away from publication when
G-Men
was released that April with a massive publicity campaign. The movie, starring Jimmy Cagney as a young FBI agent battling a vicious band of kidnappers modeled on Dillinger, Floyd, and Nelson, was a smash. In just days it did what reality hadn’t, enshrining Hoover as the symbolic head of the nation’s crime-fighting forces.
G-Men
was so successful it spawned seven more FBITHEMED movies by the end of the year, from
Public Hero Number One
to
Let ’em Have It.
Whatever qualms Hoover had about relinquishing his image-control efforts to Hollywood fell away. He sat for scores of interviews and even posed for photos with Pat O’Brian, the star of
Public Enemy’s Wife.
The Bureau was inundated with fan mail. Overnight, Hoover and the FBI were crowned the nation’s supreme symbols of justice and strength.

Ten Thousand Public Enemies,
released that May, rode the crest of this wave onto bestseller lists. It told Hoover’s version of the War on Crime as a single seamless narrative, promoting the FBI’s clean-cut agents as the mirror image of the criminals they fought. All but forgotten in the hoopla was Hoover’s boss Homer Cummings, who had launched the War on Crime. “After 1935,” the historian Richard Gid Powers has noted, “the attorney general faded from the public’s image of federal law enforcement. Hollywood had done something Hoover would not have dared, something that Cummings could not prevent—it had turned the top G-Man into a star and it had demoted the director’s boss to an offscreen nonentity.”
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At least Cummings still had his job, which was more than Purvis could say. Purvis resigned from the Bureau that June after months of harassment from Hoover and his aides. Feted as a national hero, Purvis wrote a book,
American Agent,
which was published in 1936. The book, a primer on the FBI and the War on Crime, tellingly made no mention of either Hoover or Cowley. In response Hoover declared Purvis persona non grata. He began amassing scurrilous gossip on him. In time Purvis’s FBI file grew as thick as that of the criminals he had hunted.

The FBI’s rise to prominence, coming as it did on the backs of public enemies, was generally greeted with favor by the press. Only a handful of liberal organs raised red flags. In a November 1934 article entitled “The American National Police: The Dangers of Federal Crime Control,”
Harper’s
magazine asked the question, “How many persons know that there is at this moment a national police force, or, if they know it, realize what this implies?” Citing the new criminal-enforcement powers Congress had bestowed on the federal government at the height of the Dillinger hysteria,
Harper’s
opined, “Never had legislation been enacted which was more unnecessary or dangerous despite all the glowing propaganda in its favor.”
³
The magazine worried about the potential for abuse. It was a concern that would not be shared by other leading voices for decades.

The pursuit of Alvin Karpis lagged that winter because the Bureau was stretched thin. Members of the Flying Squad were already furiously compiling evidence for the trial of Dock Barker and other gang members. Others were building files for the trial of Johnny Chase, who had been arrested in northern California a month after Baby Face Nelson’s death, of Louis Piquett and of those who harbored Nelson in Reno. Still more men were needed to track down the remaining members of the Barker Gang.

It was a riotous roundup. On February 6, 1935, two weeks after Karpis’s escape from Atlantic City, Volney Davis was arrested in St. Louis and packed onto a charter flight for Chicago. When the plane refueled in Yorktown, Illinois, Davis joined two agents drinking beer at a local bar. When one agent went to make a phone call, Davis smashed the other agent in the face with a beer mug, jumped out a window, and disappeared. The same day, Davis’s girlfriend, Edna Murray, and another gang member were arrested after a running shoot-out in Kansas. Davis wasn’t rearrested until June 1, in Chicago.
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Harry Sawyer was next. The FBI had concentrated its search for the mastermind of the Hamm and Bremer kidnappings in New York. They had put Sawyer’s picture in Jewish newspapers, hoping someone of “that race” would turn him in, as an FBI memo put it. In the end, a motorcycle cop arrested Sawyer. He was captured in his car at the seawall in the Gulf Coast town of Pass Christian, Mississippi. He had been running a bar in a poor section of town. Police found his wife in a nearby tourist camp. Sawyer went without a fight, and was extradited to St. Paul for trial. Three months later the FBI tracked the Barker Gang’s last member, Bill Weaver, to a farm in northern Florida. Weaver was arrested when he went to feed his chickens.

Those who survived the War on Crime were paraded through court-rooms all through 1935. In January the Kansas City Massacre conspirators—Deafy Farmer and company—were each convicted in a trial at Kansas City; all received light sentences. The same month twenty-three people, including members of both the Barrow and Parker families, were put on trial in Dallas for harboring Bonnie and Clyde; all but one were convicted and received prison sentences. Three months later Clyde’s one-time partners Raymond Hamilton and Joe Palmer were executed. In March, Delores Delaney and Wynona Burdette received five-year sentences for harboring Alvin Karpis and Harry Campbell.

The Dillinger trials began in Chicago that same month. Johnny Chase received a life sentence for the murders of Sam Cowley and Ed Hollis. Helen Gillis received a one-year sentence for harboring her husband. That summer Louis Piquett received a two-year sentence for harboring; his investigator, Art O’Leary, received a suspended one-year sentence. Another set of trials, for those indicted for harboring Baby Face Nelson, were held in San Francisco. Everyone involved, including the mechanic Frank Cochrane, drew brief sentences. In two trials in St. Paul members of the Barker Gang were convicted of the Bremer kidnapping. Dock Barker, Harry Sawyer, Volney Davis, and Bill Weaver all drew life sentences and were sent to the new federal “super prison” on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.

In June, Pretty Boy Floyd’s sidekick, Adam Richetti, went on trial for the Kansas City Massacre.
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From an analysis of the FBI’s own files, the proceedings were a travesty. Each of the agents who survived the massacre—Frank Smith, Reed Vetterli, and Joe Lackey—took the stand and identified Floyd and Verne Miller as the shooters; this despite the fact that all three agents had repeatedly told their superiors they could not identify any of them. Lackey went one step further, identifying Richetti himself. Richetti’s attorneys put up a hapless defense. Richetti was convicted and sentenced to death, and died in the gas chamber at Jefferson City, Missouri, on October 7, 1938.

So who were Verne Miller’s confederates that morning in Kansas City? Historians have debated their identities for seventy years. Many, including Floyd’s biographer, Michael Wallis, have come to the conclusion that Floyd was not involved.
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He almost certainly was. Research for this book identified three people who discussed the massacre with Floyd or Miller before their deaths; two of these witnesses gave detailed, nearly identical statements to the FBI—statements that, tellingly, were not introduced at Richetti’s trial. Nor are they included in the FBI’s massacre files. Instead, they are located in the Barker-Karpis files; the statements were given by Volney Davis and his girlfriend Edna Murray, who spoke with Miller two days after the massacre, when he visited their Chicago apartment. According to Davis and his girlfriend, who had no reason to implicate Pretty Boy Floyd, Miller said his partner that morning was in fact Floyd. According to Miller, Richetti wasn’t with them. He had been too hungover to go.

In the only known occasion where Floyd told what happened at Union Station, he related an almost identical story. The source of this conversation is none other than Alvin Karpis, who discussed the massacre with Floyd when the Oklahoma outlaw visited him in Cleveland during the summer of 1934. According to unpublished interviews Karpis gave his biographer, Bill Trent, in 1970, Floyd admitted he had carried out the massacre. He did not mention whether Richetti was involved.

 

 

An era had passed. There would be no more of this sort of American outlaw for the simple reason that there was no more outdistancing the law; the FBI could go anywhere. Moreover, the harboring trials sent exactly the message Hoover intended; one by one, the yeggmen’s havens were closing down. St. Paul’s days as a crime center were passing; the Green Lantern had closed. In Chicago the Syndicate wanted nothing to do with the heat yeggs brought. Louie Cernocky was already gone, felled by a heart attack in September 1934. Miami, Reno, and Cleveland were shutting down.

No one felt the winds of change more acutely than Alvin Karpis. Pacing a Toledo whorehouse that winter, Karpis tried to make sense of the new world he faced. He thought about putting together any number of bank jobs, but finding partners was difficult. All the good yeggs were gone. He was lonely; he missed Freddie. He passed the days reading newspapers,
Reader’s Digest, Time, Field & Stream, The Saturday Evening Post
. He read that Delores had given birth in a Philadelphia hospital. He was now the father of a son named Raymond. He read that his parents had taken the boy when Delores drew a five-year sentence in Milan, Michigan. She was put in a cell near Kathryn Kelly.

After a few weeks, Karpis stirred. The Toledo police were still launching periodic raids around the city. A friend from his Harvard Club days, a slender, stuttering blackjack dealer named Freddie Hunter, found him a new place to live, at the Youngstown home of a sheet-metal worker named Clayton Hall; Hall’s house was so small that for a time Karpis was obliged to sleep with Hall’s teenage son. In time his money ran low. Hunter suggested robbing a payroll shipment bound for Hall’s employer, the Youngstown Steel & Tube Plant in Warren. Hunter couldn’t go; Warren was his hometown, and he feared he would be recognized.

Karpis studied the job and felt he needed three men in total; with Harry Campbell, who had remained in Toledo, as his partner, he needed one more. Karpis and Campbell drove to Tulsa on a recruiting trip. They could find no one to join them; they were too hot. Karpis returned to Ohio and, at wit’s end, hired one of Freddie Hunter’s pals, a heroin addict named Joe Rich who lived with a whorehouse madame in Canton. Karpis joked that he would have hired the madame at that point.

On the afternoon of April 24, 1935, Karpis drew up to the train station at Warren. The mail truck was already parked, waiting for the train to arrive. Campbell and Joe Rich got out, guns beneath their overcoats. Karpis thought they looked too conspicuous on the empty platform. Apparently the station master thought so, too. He watched them intently. Campbell returned to the car, worried.

“Do you realize we’re gonna have to kill a lot of people to take this payroll?” he asked. Karpis sighed and said everything would be fine. Suddenly a cat darted in front of the car.

“That was a black cat,” Campbell said.

“Forget it,” Karpis said. “The cat had white marks all over its chest.”

“That cat was black as coal,” Campbell said.