Public Enemies (83 page)

Connelley stood in the yard. No sound came from the house. Minutes crept by. Another agent shouted for the Barkers to come out and surrender. A few men thought they saw furtive movements behind the window screens, but they couldn’t be sure. The only sound was the lake water, lapping against the dock. In the orange grove, Agent Bob Jones took a block of concrete and laid his rifle across it.

After a period of time he later estimated to be fifteen minutes, Connelley repeated his challenge: “Fred Barker, come out with your hands up! We have the house surrounded.” Once again, silence. Connelley glanced at Doc White, the smiling Cowboy who had shot Russell Gibson. White stood behind an oak tree to his left.

Five more minutes passed, and still there was no sign of life. Back in the trees, a few men wondered if the Barkers had already fled town; their car, a black Buick, was parked in the wood-frame garage beside the house, but that meant nothing. Connelley motioned to a pair of rookie agents, Alexander Muzzey and Tom McDade, to fire tear-gas guns. Both men raised their guns and fired, but the gas projectiles missed the windows, thumping against the side of the house and falling to the ground, where gas escaped and began filling the yard.

“Fred Barker! Kate Barker!” Connelley shouted once again. “Come out now with your hands in the air!”

Hiding behind a mossy oak to Connelley’s side, Doc White thought he heard a woman’s voice from inside the house.

“What are you gonna do?” the voice asked.

There was no answer he could hear. But a moment later the woman’s voice rang clear across the yard: “All right, go ahead!”

Lying on the ground beside the guesthouse, Connelley glanced at White. Both interpreted this to mean the Barkers were coming out to surrender. Connelley shouted, “Come ahead! Fred, you come out first!”

Just then a machine gun fired from a second-story window. Bullets chopped the sandy grass all around where Connelley lay and whizzed through the limbs of the orange grove, tiny green leaves fluttering down everywhere. Connelley rolled behind the guesthouse as Doc White fired his .351 rifle. The morning exploded in gunfire. All around the yard agents opened up on the house. White crouched behind his oak tree as bullets struck all around him. He was pinned down.

Seeing White’s predicament, Connelley rose and raced around the guesthouse, emerging on the far side, closer to the front porch. He raised his shotgun and fired, hoping to draw the fire from White. It worked. Machine-gun bullets chattered against the side of the guesthouse. Connelley dived for cover. So did White. Beside them three agents retreated into the trees.

For five minutes the gunfight raged. Shots seemed to be coming from all over the house, from bedroom windows at the north and south, and from the front door. And then, as suddenly as it began, the firing stopped. Connelley peered at the upstairs windows. He guessed the gang was conserving ammunition. He needed gas canisters. He sent an agent back to the cars to get more and ordered a second tear-gas attack. Again the canisters thudded against the window screens and fell to the ground. Gas drifted aimlessly into the trees.

By this time, there was a commotion behind Connelley, in the trees down at the lakefront. The woods were filling with teenage boys.

 

 

Within minutes of the first shots, many of Oklawaha’s three hundred or so residents were peering out their windows and standing in their yards, asking what the sound was. By eight o’clock, crowds of people were milling out on the highway, barred from advancing by two agents. The more curious, many of them teenagers, crept into the woods, where they could make out the figures of FBI men firing at the house. A sixteen-year-old named Harry Scott watched in awe as shots ricocheted through branches above him. “The agents were firing all over the place because Fred was running all around from room to room,” Scott remembered sixty-seven years later. “They must have thought they had the whole gang inside.”

Across the grassy lane to the east of the Barker house, Mrs. A. F. Westberry was asleep when the shooting began. Bullets seared through the walls of her thin frame house, striking the headboard of her bed. Panic-stricken, she crawled to a window and saw men in dark suits firing at her neighbor’s house. She had no idea who they were, but she was so close she could see flames spouting from gun barrels. Not wanting to see any more, Mrs. Westberry grabbed her daughter’s hand and jumped out a window. Once to the ground the two women began running.

Fifty yards away, Agent Ralph Brown saw the women take off. He had no idea who they were. For all Brown knew it was Ma Barker making a getaway. He yelled “Stop! Halt! Federal officers!,” but the women kept running. He began firing over the women’s heads, stopping only when they reached another house.

The outside world, including Hoover, learned of the unfolding gunfight from an Associated Press reporter in Ocala, who received a call from a local hotel wondering what all the shooting was about. On a hunch, the reporter phoned the FBI’s Jacksonville office at 10:45, where the SAC, Rudolph Alt, passed news of the gunfight to Washington.
^eq
Hoover, worried that Connelley might run out of ammunition, told Alt to charter a plane and take extra bullets to Oklawaha.

Back at the Barker house, intermittent gunfire continued for the next hour. It was an odd, stop-and-start affair. When shots seemed to come from one window, agents fired at it. They were never able to get a tear-gas canister inside. Around ten, firing from the house ebbed. By 10:30 it had gone silent. Connelley watched the windows. There was no way to know if the Barkers had run out of bullets or were waiting to ambush agents storming the house.

At one point Connelley turned to see a pair of agents bringing up Willie Woodbury, the home’s twenty-five-year-old caretaker. Woodbury and his wife had been asleep in the guesthouse when the first shots rang out, and had crawled under their bed as bullets flew through their windows. Eyeing the house, Connelley asked Woodbury if he would be willing to check inside. Woodbury looked petrified. Connelley assured him the Barkers wouldn’t shoot him. If they were still alive, maybe he could talk them out. Reluctantly Woodbury agreed to try.

Woodbury scampered to the front porch and tried the screen door. It was locked. He ran back to where Connelley stood by the guesthouse. “That door’s shut,” Woodburry said. The gas was getting to him; he was beginning to cry. Someone handed him a pocketknife.

“Go back and cut the screen and kick it down,” Connelley said.

Again Woodbury ran to the door. He cut the screen, shoved the door open, and, pressing a handkerchief over his mouth against the drifting tear gas, stepped across the porch to the front door. Inside, the house was still. Beer bottles were scattered around the dining room. “It’s okay, Ma, it’s me!” Woodbury announced. “They’re makin’ me do this!” There was no answer.

He saw blood on the stairs. In tears Woodbury crept up the staircase to the second floor. The house was silent. Upstairs, there were four bedrooms. He stepped to the door of the southeast bedroom, Ma’s room, and looked inside. It was empty. The door to the southwest bedroom, where Fred usually slept, was ajar. Woodbury stepped to it.

Outside, Connelley and his men waited. There was a minute of silence, maybe two, then Woodbury’s face appeared at a bedroom window. Tears were streaming down his face. It was a sight that would stay with several of the agents for years afterward.

“They both up here!” Woodbury shouted.

“What are they doing?” Connelley replied.

“They all dead!”
⁸

Connelley led a group of agents into the house. They found Ma Barker dead on the bedroom floor, a single bullet hole in her forehead. Fred lay beside her. It was impossible to know how long they had been dead. There was no sign anyone else lived in the house. But a search uncovered an assortment of hotel bills, business cards, and receipts from the El Commodoro Hotel in Miami, the same hotel where Sam Cowley had found a man driving Karpis’s car in November. Several receipts were made out to a “Mr. D. Wagner,” an alias Karpis was known to use. The conclusion was inescapable: Karpis was in Miami. Connelley ordered Ralph Brown and three agents onto the first available flight south. They would hit the ground in Miami at 3:30.

 

 

When Hoover stepped before a Washington press conference that afternoon, he was in a delicate position. There was little chance the Bureau would be criticized for killing Fred Barker; he was a stone-cold killer who had fired on agents with a machine gun. Ma was another matter. Hoover had to explain to the nation’s press just why his men had killed a grand-mother with no criminal record. Rather than wait for the question, he took the offensive, taking advantage of the fact that the Barker-Karpis Gang was the least known of the public enemies.

As reporters scribbled into their notebooks, Hoover announced that Ma, who none of the newspapers or their readers had ever heard of, was the “brains” of the gang. He said she had been found dead with a machine gun in her hand, which was flat-out untrue. To advance the idea that the elderly woman had been an active participant in the morning’s gunfight, Hoover described a dramatic scene in which Earl Connelley approached the Oklawaha house and talked with Ma, who slammed shut the door and yelled to Fred, “Let ’em have it!” Needless to say, there is no evidence of any such incident in agents’ reports of the gunfight.

History is written by the victors, they say, and there was no one alive who would come forward to dispute Hoover’s fabricated story. Never mind that there was no indication whatsoever in Bureau files that Ma Barker had ever fired a gun, robbed a bank, or done anything more criminal than live off her sons’ ill-gotten gains. According to Hoover, Ma Barker was “a criminal mastermind.” Reporters ran with it.

As vivid a portrait as Hoover painted, their stories did not immediately produce anything like the public fascination with Dillinger. It took time for reporters to embroider the FBI myth. Not for six weeks would the notion of Ma Barker’s criminal genius be explored in any detail, in a multipart feature distributed by the King Features Syndicate. The FBI cooperated with the piece, which was headlined MA BARKER: DEADLY SPIDER WOMAN. “[T]he withered fingers of spidery, crafty Ma Barker,” it read, “like satanic tentacles, controlled the skeins on which dangled the fate of desperadoes whose activities hit the headlines on an average of once a week.”

“In many ways they were the smartest outlaws we’ve encountered,” Hoover was quoted saying. “And Ma was the mind behind the operations. She was so smart that we never got anything on her—although we knew plenty. We had to kill her to catch up with her.”
⁹

Hoover never deviated from that line. It became one of his favorite stories; he made the tale of Ma’s “criminal genius” the centerpiece of his 1938 book,
Persons in Hiding,
which is chock-full of dramatically imagined scenes inside the Barker Gang. Hoover’s demonization of Ma Barker, much like that of Kathryn Kelly, went beyond the need to defend the facts of her death. It neatly fit into themes he had been airing in interviews since the 1920s. The root causes of crime, he argued, were not poverty and economic disparity. Crime was the result of a widespread deterioration in family values, of parents who did not teach their children right from wrong. In time, Ma Barker became Hoover’s favorite symbol of all that was wrong in American families. It was far more than she had ever been in life.

 

 

Ralph Brown’s four-man detail arrived at the El Commodoro Hotel in Miami around five that afternoon. After checking in, one of the agents, who had stayed at the hotel two months before, motioned to a clerk he knew, L. E. Grey, to join him in his room. There they showed Grey a collection of Barker photos. Nervous, Grey identified photos of the Barkers as frequent guests. More important, he pointed to a picture of Harry Campbell as a man who had just checked in that Sunday, leaving the next morning. The agents emphasized that anything Grey could do to locate Campbell would be an enormous help to the government.

As the FBI descended on the El Commodoro that afternoon, Karpis and Campbell were wrapping up a long day of mackerel fishing off Ever-glades City. They tossed their rods into Karpis’s Ford around five o’clock and reached the bungalow on 85th Street after dark. Delores Delaney and Wynona Burdette were waiting in their car a block away from the house. The moment Karpis pulled to the curb, Delaney ran to him. She was frantic.

“You should have come home sooner!” she said.

“Take it easy,” Karpis said. “What’s the matter?”

Delaney took several deep breaths. “The FBI shot up Freddie and Ma’s place. Freddie’s dead. Ma’s dead.”

Karpis was stunned. He made Delaney repeat everything she knew. He had to think fast. There was no time to grieve. He knew what this meant. They had to get out of Miami. Delaney’s advanced pregnancy, however, meant they couldn’t hide just anywhere. They would need a safe, clean place, and a doctor. He thought of going to Joe Adams at the El Commodoro but wisely judged it too risky.

That night at 11:30 Adam’s errand boy, Duke Randall, was working his usual shift at a window at the Biscayne Kennel Club, a dog-racing track. A dark-haired girl he would later identify as Wynona Burdette appeared and asked him to join her in the parking lot. There Randall found Karpis waiting in a car. Karpis said he was heading north fast and needed a safe place to stay. Randall suggested a hotel he knew in Atlantic City, the Dan-mor. Karpis wrote it on a card. He told the girls to go with Randall. They could head north on a train the next morning. Karpis and Campbell would go that night. It was too risky for Delaney to ride with them. The FBI was everywhere.

As Karpis spoke, agents flooded into Miami. By midnight they had staked out the Pan American and Eastern Airlines terminals, and were checking every hospital and maternity ward in search of Delaney. But as they fanned out across the city, Karpis was already speeding up Dixie Highway, the lights of Miami growing dimmer behind him.