Public Enemies (71 page)

All that week the Kansas City office tracked leads on the four men. On Friday morning, August 31, they managed to pull in Griffin’s girlfriend. Agents had just begun to interview her when the
Kansas City Journal Post
hit the streets. The newspaper reported that “Jimmy Needles” LaCapra was in custody in Wichita, Kansas, along with three Kansas City gangsters who had tried to kill him.

Two Kansas City agents, Harold Anderson and Walter Trainor, reached Wichita that night. A desk sergeant briefed them. LaCapra had been hiding in his hometown of Argonia, twenty miles southwest of Wichita. The night before, he had been out driving when a black Ford pulled alongside; three men inside opened up with submachine guns. LaCapra ducked, uninjured, and the Ford sped off. LaCapra scrambled to the Wichita police station for safety even as the men who tried to kill him had a traffic accident and were arrested by the Kansas State Highway Patrol. All four men were now sitting in cells.

Anderson and Trainor first tried to talk to LaCapra’s would-be assassins, whose bruised faces gave vivid testament to the interrogation techniques of Kansas lawmen. “Each of these men sat mute throughout the interviews and all they would say was they had just been out for a little friendly ride,” Trainor wrote in his report. “It was evident from the appearance of the three . . . that they had undergone physical punishment, probably at the hands of the Kansas Highway Patrol.”
¹⁴

Jimmy Needles was another matter. A jittery, emaciated career criminal in his early forties, LaCapra was ecstatic to see the two FBI men approaching his cell. The words came spilling out of him, so fast the two agents at first couldn’t keep his stories straight. “The statements of LaCapra were, of course, very jumbled and rambling and he appeared to be under a very great nervous strain, although he did not appear to be out of his mind in any manner,” Trainor noted in his report. “He asked the Agents to give him protection, stating that he might be killed at any minute by the mob . . . He said that he knows he has but a short time to live but that any help the Government may be able to give him would be reciprocated by him.”
¹⁵

And then he said the words the FBI had waited to hear for more than a year:
The massacre. Verne Miller. Pretty Boy Floyd. Johnny Lazia.
He could tell them the whole story.

Alvin Karpis lay on the warm roof of his Ford, watching the heavens. It was a glorious late-summer day, cotton clouds floating in a turquoise sky. Delores Delaney lay beside him. He could hear her breathing. She was pregnant, almost four months along and starting to show. Above them, the Cleveland Air Show was nearing its climax. Airplanes dived and spun. All around, hundreds of couples sat out on blankets, faces turned upward, watching.

It had been five months since the Barker Gang fled Chicago in the wake of George Ziegler’s murder, five blissfully quiet months without a hint the FBI knew where they were. Karpis had a new job and new friends. He hadn’t committed a notable crime since washing his hands of Ed Bremer in February; he hadn’t robbed a bank in seventeen months. The gang had all but fallen apart. He had done everything he could to distance himself from the others. They were dumb and they drank and they took chances. He and Delores lived a quiet life, in bed most nights by eleven. They could almost relax.

Tensions inside the gang had risen after the move to Toledo. They kept low profiles; a local vice lord, Joe Roscoe, looked after them. Within weeks the money ran low. They still had $150,000 of the ransom money and covered their expenses passing bits of it in Chicago supermarkets. But after the drunken Dr. Moran’s money-laundering operation was uncovered, they could find no one to move the bulk of it. Dock Barker ran out to Reno, but friends there refused to get involved. All the Dillinger publicity had changed the public mood. Now even the gang’s old contacts shunned them. Karpis dwelled on the Syndicate. Dillingermania had brought unwanted heat on its operations, and Karpis wondered whether Frank Nitti wanted them dead.

So they had sat and waited and worried, passing the days drinking beer, fishing on Lake Erie, riding roller-coasters at the Willow Bay Amusement Park, and requesting their favorite songs at Toledo’s premier underworld hangout, the Casino Club. They were all regulars at the club, Karpis and the Barkers sitting in a corner booth, nursing their drinks, old Charlie Fitzgerald cursing the waitresses when they watered his bourbon. An errand boy they brought from Chicago, a onetime golf pro named Willie Harrison, kept everyone entertained, mock-directing the band. One night a singer, a Scottish crooner who performed in a kilt, didn’t take to direction, so Harrison slugged him, igniting a brawl that ended only when Fred Barker coolly placed a pistol to Harrison’s temple. Freddie didn’t like scenes. They drew attention.

The odd donnybrook aside, it was boring. They had little to do but drink. Fred’s girl, Paula Harmon, gulped whiskey all day every day, and she was a nasty drunk. Another gang member, Harry Campbell, bought his nineteen-year-old girlfriend Wynona Burdette an ill-tempered Pekinese. One day Karpis and Freddie were sitting in Barker’s apartment when they heard gunfire. “Did you hear what I heard?” Karpis asked.

“Yeah,” said Barker. “That’s a machine gun.”

A few moments later they heard running steps in the stairwell outside. The bell rang. Someone began kicking the door. Karpis darted into the bedroom, grabbed a submachine gun, and stood to one side of the door. He motioned to Freddie to jerk the door open. Campbell tumbled into the apartment, a bloody towel wrapped around his arm. “What the hell happened?” Karpis demanded. “Is someone after you?”

“No, no,” Campbell said. He was in obvious pain. “That goddamn dog. He went in the neighbors’ yard and I sneaked up behind to grab him. He wouldn’t come when I called him and that son of a bitch spun around and got me right on the arm. He bit me two or three times.”

Karpis laughed. They unwrapped the towel and found deep, bloody teeth marks up and down Campbell’s arm. “I got to get some kind of shots for this,” he said.

“I’ll get hold of Joe Roscoe and find out if he’s got a doctor who can take care of this,” said Karpis.

Just then Dock Barker walked in. “Well, hell, that Doc Moran, he wants to come here and get away from Chicago,” Barker said. “Why the hell don’t we have him give the shots to Campbell? I’ll go to Chicago and get him and bring him up here.”

A few days later Dock returned with Moran, his assistant and their pal Ollie Berg, all eager to flee Chicago. The trio stayed in a hotel and spent their days drinking. Karpis began to get edgy. “I don’t think I’m gonna stay around here,” he told Fred in May. “There’s too many people and there’s too much drinking going on.”

Karpis’s concerns coincided with a job offer from a pair of new friends, a squat mobster named Shimmy Patton and his partner, a thin blond named Art Heberbrand. The two were opening a swank new casino called the Harvard Club in the Cleveland suburb of Newberg Heights and, worried about threats from a rival syndicate, they asked Karpis if he would handle security. Looking for anything to fill his days, and eager to distance himself from the rest of the gang, Karpis accepted. Fred sulked when he wasn’t asked as well. Within days Karpis packed up and moved with Delores to a brick bungalow near the Cleveland airport. It was a quiet neighborhood, green squares of lawn, children in the streets. Delores got busy buying furniture. Karpis liked it.

The casino job was a breeze. Most evenings Karpis threw on his new tuxedo, drove over to the club, and drifted among the gamblers, checking the dice, watching for trouble, and tossing out the occasional drunk. After midnight he propped himself against a wall and watched the accountants count the cash. It was good money, and in idle moments Karpis allowed himself to imagine his life if he had found such a job early on, before he set to robbing banks. He made a list of the rival syndicates’ addresses and each of their children, then sent it to an intermediary with a blunt message: if the Harvard Club was harassed in any way, their houses would be burned down and their children roughed up. There was no trouble after that.

He drove down to Toledo every few days to talk with Fred. The situation there was deteriorating fast. The drunken Dr. Moran had performed fingerprint-removal “surgery” on Dock Barker and was now demanding a share of the ransom money as payment. He was spending evenings at a Toledo brothel, and its madame, Edith Barry, took Dock aside one night and told him Moran had been bragging about the surgeries. “Everything in general is getting bad with this guy,” Dock told Karpis. “I don’t know what the hell to do.” Actually, they did. A few nights later Fred and Dock forcibly removed Moran from the Casino Club, shot him in the face, and buried him in an unmarked grave in Michigan. The FBI would continue to hunt Moran for months and only reluctantly accepted the fact of his death. His body has never been found.

Moran’s demise did little to assuage Karpis’s concerns. Despite all his efforts, the others stuck to him like tar. Restless in Toledo, they followed him to Cleveland one by one. Freddie and Paula Harmon took a bungalow on West 171st Street. Harry Campbell rented an apartment on Franklyn Boulevard. Even Harry Sawyer and his wife, Gladys, came, taking over Fred Barker’s spare bedroom. The Sawyers had fled St. Paul one step ahead of the FBI that spring, and had been shuffling between Nevada tourist camps ever since. To Karpis’s dismay, they brought their five-year-old adopted daughter, Francine, with them. Karpis so detested their presence he moved to a new house on West 140th Street. He told only Fred his new address, and he forbade Delores from seeing the gang’s other women. They were trouble.

Matters came to a head when Volney Davis arrived from Chicago and began demanding his cut of the ransom. The money was an increasingly sore subject. Dock had kept it for a while, but eventually they decided to stow it at Bill Weaver’s lakeside cottage. It fit into two Gladstone bags, and Karpis gave it all to Weaver, but warned him never to leave it in the house unattended. Weaver wasn’t the brightest soul, however, and the next time they visited the cottage they discovered the house unlocked and empty. They found Weaver walking on the beach and roundly cursed him. After that Fred and Karpis took the money and buried it in the soft dirt beneath Karpis’s garage.

By mid-summer only Ma Barker remained in Chicago, lost in her jigsaw puzzles. Karpis drove over to visit her one weekend and found she was doing surprisingly well. He and Dock took her to see a movie. To their horror, the film was preceded by a newsreel warning moviegoers to be on the lookout for Dillinger, Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Karpis, and the Barkers. Karpis scrunched low in his seat as their pictures flashed on the screen. “One of these men may be sitting next to you,” the announcer said. Karpis pulled his hat low over his forehead. Afterward he made the rounds of Cicero taverns, trying to deduce whether the Syndicate was after them. An old friend told him to beat it. Karpis got the message. He quickly returned to Cleveland.

Weeks crept by. Fred and Karpis talked about taking an Ohio bank, but until the money ran out there was no rush. Delores got pregnant and asked Karpis whether she should get another abortion; he didn’t have the heart to put her through it again, so he would soon be a father. Then one night in July, Karpis showed up for work at the casino and Art Heberbrand took him aside. “An hour from now, there’s going to be a couple of guys coming in, we want you to talk to ’em,” he said. Karpis asked if they expected trouble. “No, no, no trouble,” he said. They waited in the office until darkness fell, and Heberbrand rose from his chair. “Let’s walk out to the parking lot,” he said.

Karpis followed. Outside he sat on a car’s running board and wondered what all the mystery was about. Finally one of Heberbrand’s men materialized and said, “They’re here, boys.”

“Come on,” Heberbrand said.

Karpis followed him toward a Ford sedan. Inside were two men. Karpis immediately recognized the driver. He couldn’t believe it: it was Pretty Boy Floyd. Beside him sat Adam Richetti. Heberbrand made the introductions. The four men took seats in a shack at the back of the parking lot. Floyd was morose. “Chances are we’ll both get killed or get caught in the end,” he said. “But I’m hoping that we both get killed rather than get caught.” Karpis nodded. He knew the feeling.

Floyd hemmed and hawed a few minutes before coming around to the purpose of his visit. He wanted to take a bank with the Barker Gang. As he put it, “Us guys would like to make some money if you guys got anything that you’d like to take that you need more guys on.”

Karpis thought about a Cleveland bank Fred had been casing. “Well, we might have something in a few weeks, but I’m not too certain about it,” he said. “But you know how these things are. It may be good, it may be bad. If you guys are willing to go on it and we need someone, how’ll we get ahold of you?” Floyd pointedly declined to reveal where he was hiding. “You can get hold of me through these guys here, they know how to get ahold of me,” he said. Afterward Karpis watched Floyd drive off. “I wish to Christ you hadn’t even let them guys know we’re around here,” he told Heberbrand.

“Hell, I thought all you guys stick together.”

“Don’t believe everything you read,” Karpis said. “We could have been with Dillinger, we could have been with this guy or that guy, but we didn’t want no part of ’em. These guys, they seem to get jumped up every week or so. Just any day now I expect to see where Dillinger’s been hopped up and maybe even killed. It won’t be long. These guys, I don’t know, they just seem to draw the heat wherever they go.”

Karpis never saw Floyd again, and a few nights later he emerged from a movie to hear newspaper vendors calling out news of Dillinger’s death in Chicago.
^dx
Karpis considered it an assassination. It could just as easily have been him; just a few nights earlier, he and Delores had seen
Manhattan Melodrama,
the same movie Dillinger watched before his death. A month after that came news of Van Meter’s death in St. Paul. Karpis read of Tom Brown’s involvement and guessed that Van Meter had been betrayed. This was bad. Chicago and Reno were already closed to them. And now St. Paul. “You and I can expect that same goddamn thing from now on,” he told Fred. “No one wants us around.”