Carnival of Shadows (10 page)

6

Anthony Scarapetto was not the first man against whom Michael Travis had raised a gun in the line of duty, but he was the first man that Travis shot. That the shot was fatal and that Scarapetto was known to him from Nebraska State Welfare made a difference in the way Travis was viewed by others. More important, it made a difference in the way that Travis viewed himself.

Also, not insignificantly, the manner in which that investigation had occurred and its ultimate result was a contributory factor in Travis being in Seneca Falls in the first place.

So it was that on the same day that Eisenhower turned down a plea for clemency from Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Special Agent Michael Travis—just twenty-five years old, having been in the Bureau less than three years—was part of a team that staged an armed assault against a known gang hideout in Stromsburg, Nebraska. The gang had five members, one of whom was Scarapetto himself, but Scarapetto was not the central focus of the Bureau’s interests. The
prima voce
of this violent and sociopathic little ensemble was one Luke “Smiler” Barrett, so called for the ugly two-inch scar that ran from the corner of his mouth, giving him a perpetual sneer. In the fall of ’51, he decided to get a crew together and hit some small-town banks. A couple of the gang—namely Walter Forsythe and William “Wild Bill” Murchison—were a given, and yet it wasn’t until Barrett happened upon Anthony Scarapetto and Scarapetto’s then-sidekick, Federico de Tonti, that the Barrett Gang realized the collective incarnation and subsequent notoriety for which it would forever be remembered.

Plain and simple, a more cruel and divisive bunch of backstabbing, lying, thieving, gun-slinging hoodlums you could not have wished to happen upon, and from the latter part of 1951, on through 1952 and into the initial weeks of 1953, the Barrett Gang evaded capture and yet robbed more than a dozen banks in the eastern half of Nebraska.

Through Christmas of 1952 and the first weeks of 1953, Bureau attention had been directed even more forcefully to the apprehension of Barrett and his gang. The last reported Barrett Gang robberies had been a week apart, the first in Auburn, Nebraska, the second in Maryville, just fifty miles across the Missouri River into Missouri itself. That robbery, merely eleven hundred and eighty-four dollars from the Maryville First Mercantile Bank, had seen a running gun battle with the sheriff and two of his deputies, and while one of those deputies suffered a shoulder through-and-through, it was here that Francine Pinchbeck, on her way back from school, was shot and killed instantly.

Perhaps understanding that whatever run of luck they might have been enjoying had come to an end, Barrett and the others went to ground. The Barrett Task Force, as it was then known, was stationed in Lincoln, and heading up the Nebraska operation was Special Agent in Charge Rex Farraday. Farraday reported directly to Section Chief Frank Gale and on up through the deputy assistant director to assistant director, then to associate executive assistant director and a further four levels of seniority to the director himself, Mr. Hoover. Mr. Hoover did not like bad press. Mr. Hoover did not like bank robbers. Mr. Hoover, most of all, did not like the fact that a seven-year-old girl had failed to make it home from school. He wanted the Barrett Gang put away, and he wanted them put away yesterday.

The agreed-upon Bureau view as of the last week of January 1953 was that Barrett had fled Nebraska, and would not be returning to Missouri anytime soon either. Bureau offices in Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Arkansas, and Iowa had been placed on full alert.

But Michael Travis did not concur with the agreed-upon opinion. He thought of such people as dogs or hyenas, always in packs, always hunting across the same territory, ever aware that new territories meant new challenges and obstacles. Criminals were—essentially—cowards. No, Travis did not believe the Barrett Gang had fled Nebraska at all. When a dog is scared, it goes home. When an animal is frightened or sick, it heads for the familiar.

And so one evening in early February, staying late to look over a series of reported sightings of Barrett himself and the other gang members, Travis came across something that snagged his curiosity. He knew that Scarapetto was part of the gang, and though he remembered Scarapetto from juvy, he did not feel any great sense of advantage for having previously met him.

The thing that secured Travis’s interest was not Scarapetto at all, but someone else entirely. Reading through earlier witness statements of the various bank robberies, he came across a name that caught his attention: Madeline Jarvis. She had been questioned as an eyewitness in the May 1952 robbery in Aurora, Nebraska. She had happened to be in the street as the gunmen fled the bank. Seemingly, she was nothing more than an innocent passerby, and yet her name was again mentioned alongside Barrett’s in an unsubstantiated sighting report from York in the first week of January, 1953. That report had come from one Claude Lefevre, a bar owner who knew Madeline Jarvis not only by face but by name.

She was in and out of here numerous times in the last year
, he told the interviewing agent.
She’s a nice enough
girl, a little on the wild side, but I never had reason to throw her out. Just came in, sometimes alone, sometimes with a feller, and she minded her own business

Claude Lefevre went on to say that Madeline had come in with someone, and it might have been Barrett. Whoever it was, well, he had a scar on the left side of his face. Gave him a mean look, like there was one hell of a nasty streak in there just waiting to get loose.

And that was that. Nothing more was done with the report, because no one had put the two together.

Madeline Jarvis just happened to be a witness to a robbery in Aurora in May of ’52, and then she was seen with a man bearing an uncanny resemblance to Luke Barrett in York all of eight months later.

Travis did not believe in coincidences; he believed in facts.

The following morning, Travis submitted a report of his findings to Special Agent in Charge Rex Farraday. Farraday passed that report on to Section Chief Frank Gale. Gale informed the deputy assistant director, who then informed the assistant director, and on up the channels it went until it came to the attention of Executive Assistant Director Bradley Warren. Warren, above all else, was a fair-minded man, too long in the tooth and too experienced to concern himself with currying favor within the hierarchy of the FBI. He was, after all, the executive assistant director, just a few steps down from Mr. Hoover himself, and he had maintained that position by doing what he intended, by saying what he meant, by affording both credit for success and reprimand for failure as each situation required. He wanted to know who Special Agent Michael Travis was. He wanted to know his record, his experience, and his qualifications. When said information had been furnished, he then asked Travis to submit a plan of action based on this supposed connection between Madeline Jarvis and Luke Barrett.

Travis, industrious as always, had already established several facts relating to Madeline Jarvis. A trouble-free good-time girl she might have been, if Claude Lefevre’s opinion was anything to go by, but looking further into her history, Travis learned that she was not without her blemishes. She had been arrested twice, once for soliciting, once for shoplifting. She had been fined on both occasions. She did not appear to have a specific address—there were reports of her living in rented accommodation in Osceola, Columbus, Central City, Fullerton, and Schuyler. Three of those locations had seen armed heists perpetrated by the Barrett Gang; two of those locations had seen later sightings of Barrett, one in the presence of Walter Forsythe. The other issue, and this was of great interest to Travis, was that Madeline Jarvis’s parents owned a farm in Stromsburg, and Stromsburg sat right in the middle of that network of towns like the hub of a wheel. Madeline’s father, Leonard Jarvis, was a farmer. The family possessed a good-sized property with numerous outhouses, adjoining buildings, barns, and grain storage facilities. What better place for Barrett and his compadres to go to ground?

“I think we place a number of surveillance teams around the perimeter of the family property in Stromsburg,” Travis told both SAC Farraday and Section Chief Gale in a closed-door meeting on the afternoon of Friday, February 6. “We establish whether this property is being employed as a hideout for the gang, and—if so, and dependent upon the movements and activities of the members—we pick them up individually when they make forays beyond the perimeter, or—if they are holed up—we make an armed raid and secure arrests. If they are in fact there, and I consider this a strong possibility, then there is no question in my mind that we can take the majority of them alive and without Bureau casualties.”

“This is good work,” Gale told him.

“Agreed,” Farraday said. “You picked up on a detail here that could so easily have been overlooked.”

Travis nodded in acknowledgment but said nothing.

“I know Mr. Warren is most interested in what now occurs,” Gale went on. “He said that if this proves to be as you have suggested, then there might be a place for you in the establishment of a new unit that is being discussed. Tentatively, it deals with the psychology of the criminal mind, a sort of behavioral science, if you will. Still very much in its formative stages, it is nevertheless of great interest to the director. Mr. Farraday here told me what you said about criminals behaving like pack animals, always reverting to safe patterns when under threat. That made a great deal of sense to me and to him. You verbalized something that has been an opinion of mine for some considerable time, young man.”

Ultimately, Section Chief Frank Gale’s feeling was justified. Surveillance teams were stationed around the perimeter of the Stromsburg farm. Travis himself was assigned as team leader for the unit that watched the Jarvis family home. This was the biggest property, the one where the parents lived, and it was from here that Travis’s team took extensive photographs of Madeline Jarvis carrying various and assorted boxes, pots, pans, other such things back and forth to a smaller property behind and to the left of the main house. It was from the windows of this smaller property that lights shone at dusk and into the small hours of the following morning. And it was from this property that Luke Barrett, Walter Forsythe, Wild Bill Murchison, and Federico de Tonti were seen exiting and reentering on numerous occasions. Only once had Scarapetto been sighted, and there remained the question as to why he did not leave and return to the hideout as the others so frequently did. Unbeknownst to Travis or any of the other agents, Scarapetto had suffered a flesh wound to the left leg during the Maryville First Mercantile shoot-out, nothing too serious, but sufficient to require that he stay horizontal as much as possible.

And so it was that on Monday the ninth of February, Michael Travis was called in to see SAC Farraday, Section Chief Gale, and Executive Assistant Director Bradley Warren, the latter having flown down from Washington to oversee the operation personally. Director Hoover had instructed Warren to come, and with that direction he had also sent a personal message to SA Michael Travis. It read as follows:

Special Agent Travis,

I am actioning a formal commendation for your diligence in this most recent case. However, on a more personal note, I wish to extend my appreciation for your work in this matter. With agents such as yourself in the field, the future of the Bureau is more than secure.

Sincerely,

J. Edgar Hoover

Director

“I’ve seen no more than a dozen of those in my time,” Warren told Travis. “That is quite a privilege, son, and we shall definitely be talking more about your future in this new unit we’re putting together.”

The planning of the Stromsburg operation consumed the remainder of Monday and all of Tuesday. By nine o’clock on Tuesday evening, the strategy itself, the required teams and their respective leaders, had been established. Travis would, once again, lead a team, and it would be one of the teams that entered the smaller property where Barrett and his gang were holed up. From surveillance, it was rare for anyone to leave the property but Madeline herself, and part of that routine was to prepare breakfast in the main building and then carry it back to the hideout. In the very early hours of Wednesday morning, agents would secure the main property. The parents would be spirited away to immediate safety, their involvement in the harboring of the gang to be established later, and there agents would wait until Madeline came across to the house. Here she would be placed under arrest and then taken from the property to a secure location.

There was no visible telephone line between the two properties. The assumption that no such contact existed between the main house and the smaller one was supported by the number of times that members of the gang moved between the two buildings. Had there been a line, Travis felt sure that these trips would have been unnecessary. It was supposition, but there was a pragmatism and a sense of logic in all he considered. Hence, once Madeline failed to return in the usual time, Travis felt sure that Barrett would send one of the other men over to find out why breakfast was delayed. Barrett would be paranoid, ever watchful, on tenterhooks. Whoever was dispatched to determine her whereabouts would then also be arrested, his detention secured, his removal from the premises immediate.

That would leave only four of the gang in the house, allowing for the fact that Scarapetto was still inside, despite merely one sighting of him.

It would be unlikely that Barrett would send a second man to check on breakfast. Travis insisted on this point quite forcibly, and Warren agreed.

“The fact that Madeline has not returned within the usual time frame and then a second member of the gang doesn’t return either… well, I have to say that if I were Barrett, already scared, already in hiding, perhaps tense and paranoid, I would be very suspicious indeed. I don’t think I would send another man across alone. I think I would come as a group, or not come at all. I honestly feel that once the arrest of the first man has been secured, if in fact a man is dispatched at all, then we go in. As I suggested, with a grain delivery truck coming down from the road along the main route to the house, attention within will be distracted. The primary assault is from the rear, and a secondary assault comes from those within the grain truck.”