Public Enemies (72 page)

The more he stewed, the more antsy Karpis grew. He had been in one place too long. It was time to make a clean break from the rest of the gang. First they had to dispose of the remaining ransom money, about $100,000. In August they finally found someone to move it, a wealthy Detroit hoodlum named Cash McDonald. McDonald said he could fence it through gambling friends in Havana, who would disperse the money via banks in Mexico and Venezuela.

Karpis and Fred Barker received a rude surprise when they went to dig up the money. Water had seeped into the Gladstone bags. The bills were sopping wet. The day McDonald was to arrive for his trip to Cuba, the two spent several furious hours scattering wet bills around Karpis’s bungalow, erecting fans to dry it out. McDonald wasn’t happy when they gave him $100,000 in damp bills, but he took it. They sent Harry Sawyer and Willie Harrison along to keep an eye on him. McDonald promised he would return via Miami in several days.

As he lay on the roof of his car that afternoon, watching the planes overhead, Karpis had already decided to leave Cleveland when McDonald returned with the laundered cash. Sitting in the warm sun, his mind wandering, he became transfixed by a biplane flown by a German fighter ace from the Great War. It was odd to see a German pilot here in Ohio, a onetime American enemy now allowed to fly freely in the skies over a Midwestern city; just sixteen years before, the man had tried to kill American fliers, and they had tried to kill him. Now here he was, as free as the proverbial bird.

The German plane flitted about like a mosquito, zooming low over the trees, then climbing straight up toward the sun. At one point another plane came in so low Karpis sat up to follow. As he watched, the plane plunged directly into the ground. The pilot was killed instantly. Black smoke curled into the sky. Karpis stared. For reasons he didn’t entirely understand, he was overwhelmed with sadness.

 

 

Homer Van Meter’s death marked a turning point for the FBI. The Dillinger Gang was finished. As far as Hoover was concerned, what remained of the War on Crime was strictly a mopping-up operation. More than once, he said there was no place left for the “rats” to hide, and in large part he was right. One benefit of Dillingermania was the publicity given the other Public Enemies; their mug shots now scowled regularly from the pages of newspapers from Miami to Seattle.

Hoover had supreme confidence in Sam Cowley. On September 6 the Director formalized Cowley’s position as the Bureau’s wartime field general, handing him unrestricted power to hunt down Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Karpis, and the Barkers; he could go anywhere, mobilize any agent, assume command of any office. “I would like to have these three cases concluded within the next thirty or forty-five days if possible,” Hoover wrote Cowley on September 5.
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Cowley’s elevation came at Melvin Purvis’s expense. Since the Dillinger shooting, Purvis had fallen deeper and deeper into Hoover’s disfavor. Twice Hoover had fired off terse letters when he was unable to reach Purvis by phone. The smallest things set Hoover off; he sent Purvis one letter demanding to know why a delivery of Chicago newspaper articles had been delayed. For the most part, Purvis was removed from all investigative work. As his secretary, Doris Rogers, looked on with sympathy, he spent his days filling out personnel reports, interviewing job applicants, and shining his shoes.

Cowley knew Hoover was underestimating the difficulty of apprehending Nelson, Floyd, and the Barkers. He made the Barkers his new priority, switching a dozen agents from the Dillinger case and putting them to work on the Barkers. Unfortunately, there weren’t many leads to chase. Working at his desk in the Bankers Building late into the night, Cowley cranked out several thick reports listing every member of the gang, their girlfriends, family members, and relatives. He had precious little information on the gang’s inner workings, however. The Barkers seemed far more secretive than Dillinger. They made no contact with their families, as the FBI learned during several frustrating months watching Dock and Fred’s father, George Barker, putter around his Missouri service station. There were no girlfriends to interview; six months after debriefing Beth Green, she remained the only person who had given the FBI any firsthand insight into the gang.

A second had dropped into Cowley’s lap on August 18, when agents arrested a woman named Helen Ferguson at her Chicago apartment. Ferguson had dated a minor member of the gang who had been killed during a robbery in Nebraska; she gave agents chapter and verse on the gang. Unfortunately, she hadn’t seen any of the Barkers for more than a year. After a week of interrogation Cowley released her, but told her to stay in touch. She might prove useful down the line.

The clue that finally led the Bureau to Toledo had been moldering in the Chicago file room for four months. It was contained in a list of phone calls made from Dr. Moran’s office. In the heat of the Dillinger hunt, agents simply hadn’t enough time to track down all the numbers. Not until Dillinger’s death did the Detroit office discover that Moran had phoned a Toledo gambler named Ted Angus, owner of the Barker’s favorite nightspot, the Casino Club. On Tuesday night, September 4, the Detroit SAC, William Larson, took a risk and telephoned Angus at his club. Larson identified himself as a friend of “Dock’s” and said it was urgent he reach Dock Barker. “Well, you know Dock is a pretty hard man to get in touch with,” Angus replied.

Yes, Larson went on, Dock was hard to find, but it was urgent he know of some things developing in Chicago. “Where can I call you tomorrow?” Angus asked. Larson said he was at a pay phone and couldn’t be reached. He promised to call again the following night.

Larson put down the phone convinced that Angus knew where the Barkers were. Now he needed someone inside, someone who could gain Angus’s confidence. He telephoned Chicago and told one of Cowley’s men to send Helen Ferguson to Detroit as soon as possible.

The morning after Larson’s ruse call to Toledo, a man walked into Cleveland police headquarters and asked if he could see a photograph of Baby Face Nelson. He thought he might know where Nelson was living. The man was taken to the Bureau of Identification, shown the picture and shook his head, saying it wasn’t the man he had seen. He asked to see other Wanted posters but was told the department didn’t keep such a file. Well, the man said, he was positive there was a fellow living at 4419 West 172nd Street in Cleveland who was a wanted criminal. Then he left. No one got his name.

A few hours later, at a bungalow at 4419 West 171st Street, three women were preparing for an afternoon on the town. Life as a fugitive was ponderous, and Paula Harmon, Gladys Sawyer, and Wynona Burdette had taken to coping the best way they knew. They drank. That afternoon, the three women put on their finest clothes and jewels and, along with Sawyer’s adopted daughter, Francine, drove downtown to the Cleveland Hotel, where they took seats in the hotel bar, the Bronze Room.

By five o’clock all three women were thoroughly and loudly drunk. When the manager asked them to leave, Harmon told him to go to hell. The manager called a house detective, who confronted the women and, as Harmon loudly cursed him, escorted them to the lobby, where Gladys Sawyer vomited impressively on the marble floor. The police were called. At 5:30 a policewoman named Mildred Wilcox arrived and told the women they were under arrest for disturbing the peace. Harmon took off a diamond bracelet and offered it to Wilcox if she would leave them alone.

Wilcox declined the offer. The women went quietly—at first. Gladys Sawyer was so drunk they had to cart her out in a wheelchair. It was when they were being led to a waiting patrol car that the trio realized they were in trouble. Cursing and shouting, Sawyer swung at Officer Wilcox, hitting her beneath the right eye. Wilcox charged the three women and all four fell in a heap on the sidewalk, Harmon and Burdette cursing and kicking Wilcox in the ribs. The policewoman yelled for help. Two beat cops heard her cries. Harmon was trying to run off when they arrived. Together the three policemen dragged the struggling, cursing trio into a squad car. Little Francine came along, too.

The two male cops jumped onto the running board as they headed downtown. As they drove, Harmon opened a window and attempted to dump out the contents of her purse. The officers stopped the car and retrieved the things she dropped. At the Women’s Bureau of the Cleveland Jail, all three women gave false names and refused to answer any questions. Thrown into cells, Harmon screamed and cursed, demanding that someone call Shimmy Patton, the Harvard Club’s boss. Gladys Sawyer sat and cried, worrying about Francine. Wynona Burdette stood in a corner, brooding. “Keep a stiff upper lip,” Burdette hollered to Gladys at one point. “Don’t say nothing.”
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Karpis sat down on the bed, his Thompson submachine gun on the side table, as Delores slid beneath the covers. Suddenly there was a loud knock at the front door. Karpis sprang to attention; no one but Freddie knew his new address. He put on his shoes and trousers and grabbed the Thompson. “You go to the door and if it’s anybody at all that we don’t know, just let them come on in,” he whispered to Delores. “I’ll take care of the rest of it.”

Delaney threw a coat over her nightgown, walked into the living room, and opened the door. Karpis heard Freddie’s voice. Freddie, Dock, and Harry Campbell walked in.

“What the hell’s going on?” Karpis asked.

“Go ahead get your clothes on,” Freddie said. “Things are real bad.” Karpis and Delores finished dressing, then sat in the living room. Freddie told them what had happened. He wasn’t worried about the women. “But they’re questioning that little girl and she’s gonna tell them everything,” Freddie said. “They’ve probably sent for the FBI.”

They hadn’t. The Cleveland Police Department, in fact, had no idea who the three drunken women hauled into headquarters that evening actually were. Harmon gave her name as “Mrs. Earl J. Matterson,” Burdette as “Wynona Walcott.” Only Gladys Sawyer inexplicably gave her real name. She even gave her address in St. Paul. None of it meant anything to the desk clerk who checked them into jail that night.

But the policewoman, Mildred Wilcox, suspected something was amiss. The jewelry, the screaming fight, the attempted bribe—she could tell the women were hiding something. She and a detective sat little Francine in a chair and gently questioned her.

What did her daddy do for a living? they asked.

“He runs a joint,” Francine said. In St. Paul.

And her daddy’s friends? “They never work and they have lots of money.” How did her mommy get to the Cleveland Hotel? “In the Packard,” Francine said. She mentioned the name of the garage where they had parked. “Do the men ride around in the Packard, too?” one of the detectives asked. “Oh, no!” Francine answered. “They go out in the little car they get in just outside town. They put blue license plates on it first.” And could she remember the license plate number?

“No, sir,” said Francine. “I am only a little girl and I can’t count higher than thirteen.”
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When another detective mentioned the man who thought he had seen Baby Face Nelson, his superiors smelled something big. Escorted by Francine, detectives descended on the garage she had mentioned and found the Packard. In it they discovered a .38 caliber pistol and a slip of paper with two addresses written on it. One was 4419 West 171st Street. It was one block away from the address of the supposed Nelson sighting. At 4:00 A.M. a squad car under the direction of Detective Lieutenant Kirk Gloeckner was sent to raid the house on West 171st Street.

Midnight came and went as the gang clustered in Karpis’s living room, debating how long their homes would be safe. There was talk of leaving town immediately, but that made no sense. At the very least, they needed their guns. Between them the four men had a single machine gun and the pistols they carried. Freddie wanted his clothes.

They drove to Freddie’s house on West 171st Street, cruising by without seeing police. Freddie ran inside. He returned with several Gladstone bags filled with his guns. From there they drove to Harry Campbell’s flat, thinking they could retrieve another machine gun. From the street they saw three men inside.
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Karpis cursed. The machine gun was the one they had used in the South St. Paul robbery. If it was identified, there would be no doubt who they were. They returned to Karpis’s bungalow to debate their next move.

The squad car commanded by Lieutenant Gloeckner pulled up outside 4419 West 171st Street a little after four. Officers pounded on the door. No one answered. The cops forced their way in. Inside, Gloeckner and his men found papers indicating the occupants were Mr. and Mrs. Earl Matterson, Gladys Sawyer, and one other man. But what drew Gloeckner’s attention were the contents of a bedroom drawer. In it he found a notebook. The pages were covered with penciled notations. It was a route map between two locations. The FBI would later identify it as a getaway map.
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Beside the notebook Gloeckner found a rolled-up piece of paper that turned out to be the fingerprint portion of a torn-up Wanted poster. On the back was a notation that “Fred Barker” was wanted for murder; later that day, a clerk at the police headquarters would identify the fingerprint as Fred Barker’s. Gloeckner’s boss, Captain Frank Story, realized the Barker Gang must be hiding in Cleveland. After the sun rose he hurriedly canvassed other detectives for any stories of suspicious new faces in town. One detective told him of a man his sister-in-law had mentioned. He lived on a bungalow on 140th Street. On a hunch, Story had the woman review photographs of the Barker Gang. Immediately she chose a picture of Alvin Karpis. Story dispatched a car to the 140th Street bungalow.
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As police closed in, the four gang members remained at Karpis’s bungalow in the hours before dawn, debating their next move. “The best damn thing we can do now is somebody leave and get into Toledo and get an apartment,” Karpis said. “First thing in the morning we’re gonna duck in some place till we decide what to do, but you can bet we’re gonna have to get the hell out of here.”