Public Enemies (73 page)

Dock and Campbell took one car and left for Toledo, promising to meet them by the Casino Club later that day. Karpis called his boss, Shimmy Patton, and asked him to check the women’s situation. Then he and Freddie switched off the lights and sat in the dark, waiting. Delores actually managed to go to sleep. At dawn Karpis was pacing in a back room when Delores materialized and said there was a car out front. Karpis peeked out the blinds. It was a Ford coupe. He recognized the men inside as Patton and Art Heberbrand. Karpis went out to the car, glancing down the street as he walked.

“You guys are gonna have to get out of here in the next half hour,” Patton warned. Patton had called a friend on the force. He said the women hadn’t talked. But little Francine had said plenty. One call to St. Paul would be enough. FBI men would arrive within hours.

“Just get the hell on out of town,” Heberbrand said. “In a few weeks, if you want, come on back and we’ll let you know how things stand around here.”

“How do things look now?” Karpis asked.

“Well, down the street a little ways from here, there’s a police car with two guys in it. But you don’t worry about them, they’re not gonna bother you. They just want to make sure you’re out of that house before they call in to get a raiding party.”

In minutes Karpis and others were on the road to Toledo. Around ten they rendezvoused with Dock and Campbell, who had already rented an apartment that Karpis quickly saw would not be suitable. It was a rundown room in a bad part of town. Karpis’s philosophy had always been to rent in the best areas of a city. Wealthy neighbors didn’t gossip like poor ones, he had found. “This ain’t gonna cut it,” Karpis said. “If we last here till night, we’ll be doing good.”

“What do you think we should do?” Freddie asked.

“What I think we should do is you and Dock go ahead to Chicago, get your mother out of that apartment, put her in a hotel, a nice hotel, for a week or so, or maybe not even that long. But get her out of there. Me and Campbell and Delores will get there this evening.”

What worried Karpis most was the prospect of Cash McDonald returning to Cleveland from Havana with the laundered ransom money and walking into a police trap. “We can just kiss all that money good-bye if that happens,” he said. Somehow McDonald had to be alerted. They split up the guns. The Barkers took a suitcase with two Thompsons. Karpis kept his favorite Thompson gun. Freddie and Dock left immediately for Chicago. Karpis followed that night, meeting them at Ma’s apartment. They had already moved her into a hotel. Ma was on the verge of panic. For the first time she seemed to fully understand their plight. “What’s gonna happen now?” Ma asked. To Karpis she seemed small and weak. All the fight had gone out of her.

Karpis couldn’t get his mind off Cash McDonald. They had to warn him not to return to Cleveland. Then he had an idea. They would leave a message with the manager at McDonald’s Miami hotel, the El Commodoro, in hopes that he would return there after leaving Havana. They would tell McDonald to go straight to Detroit. Willie Harrison could come to Chicago when everything was set. Karpis walked over to a pay phone on 79th Street and made the call. After a few minutes he returned.

“They were in Havana, he’s expecting them back any minute,” Karpis told Freddie. “I explained to him that they were not to go to Cleveland, things had developed there that made it inadvisable for them to return there.” He left instructions for Harrison to meet them in Chicago when everything was set. Then they sat back and waited.

The FBI didn’t learn of the Cleveland raids until Friday morning, when the news broke in the newspapers.
^ea
By then police had firm identifications on all the gang members and had raided Karpis’s bungalow, finding nothing but dirty clothes strewn throughout. Sam Cowley flew to Ohio the next morning to interrogate the three women, who remained in a Cleveland jail. At first they gave bogus stories of having met each other in a nightclub. Paula Harmon threw a series of screaming fits, thrashing and biting at deputies who tried to control her. At one point, she actually defecated on an agent’s shoe.

But by Sunday, when the three women allowed themselves to be taken to Chicago, the fight was going out of them. All three gave long, detailed narratives of their months with the Barker Gang. A few days later Harmon even took agents on a driving tour of northern Illinois in a vain attempt to locate the house where Ed Bremer had been kept.

Karpis and the Barkers, meanwhile, had vanished. Cowley’s last hope of picking up their trail was their informant Helen Ferguson, but he told Hoover he had little confidence she could renew contact with the gang after so long. An agent took Ferguson to Toledo, where she visited the Casino Club and left a message for the Barkers. She was told to stand by; Ferguson took a hotel room, as did her FBI minder. Two days passed. On Sunday, September 9, the agent was called away. He told Ferguson to stay in touch. It looked like a washout. Cowley forgot about her.

 

 

For three days Karpis and the Barkers paced Ma’s apartment in Chicago, waiting for word that the money had been exchanged in Havana. Tuesday morning, Dock said to Karpis, “You want to take a look at something?” Karpis stepped to the window and glanced down. Outside, Willie Harrison was standing on the corner, a newspaper under his arm.

Freddie trotted downstairs to get him, and relief swept the group when Harrison walked into the apartment. Everything was fine, he said. The money had been exchanged in Havana. McDonald was waiting with the clean money in Detroit. Karpis and Freddie left immediately. They had only one stop to make, at the Casino Club in Toledo. They had received a message that Helen Ferguson needed to meet.

They should have been driving into an FBI trap. But by the time Ferguson was summoned to the Casino Club that night, she hadn’t talked with an FBI agent in two days. Inside, Bert Angus told her to sit and wait. According to a statement Ferguson later gave the FBI, she was then “contacted” by Fred Barker. Apparently it was a quick conversation. Ferguson asked for money. Barker said he didn’t have any. She asked to see him again. Barker told her to meet him in three nights, in front of the Sears store on East 79th Street in Chicago. Then Barker walked out to the car where Karpis waited and drove off. There wasn’t an FBI agent within fifty miles.
²⁰

 

 

As Helen Ferguson scurried back to her hotel to telephone her missing FBI handlers, Karpis and Barker left Toledo and drove through the night to Cash McDonald’s house in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe. McDonald was waiting with Harry Sawyer. The money, almost $66,000, was on a table; McDonald had taken a 15 percent cut. McDonald insisted that Karpis count it, and he did. “Are you sure now that this money is going to show up as you said, in Caracas and Mexico City?” Karpis asked McDonald.

“Yes, there’s no question about that,” McDonald said.

“I just wanted to know . . .”

“Why?” McDonald asked. “You figuring on going down to Cuba to live?”

“I don’t know where I’m going to go,” Karpis lied.

“Where you gonna go, Ray?” Sawyer asked.

“I really don’t know. What do you want to know for?”

“Well, just in case you wanted to get hold of me or I wanted to get hold of you.”

“You know something, Harry?” Karpis said. “You’d better not be planning on getting ahold of anybody. If I were you, I’d try to figure out where the hell to go to get out from under this heat. This thing is going to be real bad, and you might as well face it. You can forget every connection you had, everything. If you want to stay here, you’re going to have to stay away from everybody.”

They slept that night at McDonald’s. The next morning, they said their good-byes and drove back to Chicago. Karpis and Freddie looked up George Ziegler’s old sidekick, Bryan Bolton, gave him Ziegler’s share of the money, and told him to get it to his widow. Afterward they returned to Ma’s apartment. “I’m leaving tonight,” Karpis announced. “I’m not staying in this goddamn town no longer.” Karpis refused to say where he was heading. Dock volunteered that he and Campbell planned to return to Toledo; maybe they could learn something about the women’s situation. They left. When they were alone, Karpis told Freddie he was heading for Miami. He pointedly failed to mention where he was going from there.

“How can I get ahold of you?” Freddie said.

Karpis suggested they relay messages through the Miami hotel, the El Commodoro. The manager could be trusted. “But I don’t want nobody else to know where I’m going,” Karpis said. They drove on to Ma’s hotel, where Karpis told Delores to pack up. She didn’t understand. It was almost midnight. “We’re not coming back here,” he said. “We’re leaving tonight.”

“Well, am I going to see you again soon?” Ma asked.

“I don’t know,” Karpis said. “But right now I’m taking Delores with me and we’re going down to Florida. Now if you come down there, well and good, I’d like to see you and Freddie, but I couldn’t care less whether I see any of the rest of them or not.”

Karpis shook Ma’s hand, then returned to her apartment, where he had left his Ford. He threw in a briefcase with his .45s and clips. Willie Harrison was there, and Karpis agreed to give him a lift to his wife’s house in Gary. After that, it was every man for himself.

That night Helen Ferguson stood on the corner by the Sears store, frightened and alone. Cowley had decided against watching or following her, apparently fearing it would tip the Barkers off or even place Ferguson’s life in danger. Once again, she was on her own.
^eb

At 10:00 a Chevrolet sedan approached at a high rate of speed, stopping suddenly in front of Ferguson. She stepped into the front seat and the car drove off. Cowley’s men didn’t hear another word from Ferguson for twenty-six hours, when she called the Chicago office. She had made contact, she said, but not with Fred Barker. For twenty-four hours she had driven nonstop through the streets of Chicago with Dock Barker and his friend Russell Gibson. As Ferguson told it, Gibson had driven while Dock Barker sat behind her, cradling a machine gun. The two men claimed Freddie had gone to Kansas City but were careful to reveal little else. At one point, Dock pointedly asked Ferguson about a rumor that she had been picked up by the government. She denied it.

Cowley wasn’t sure how much of Ferguson’s story to believe. She said she had a follow-up rendezvous the following week. When the appointed night came, Ferguson again stood outside the Sears store. This time no one showed up. It was the end of Helen Ferguson’s useful service to the Bureau. A month later Cowley approved her request to take half-ownership in a Toledo whorehouse.

As September gave way to October, the FBI was no closer to catching Karpis and the Barkers than it had been a month before.

 

“Fuck you.”

—PRETTY BOY FLOYD TO SPECIAL AGENT SAM McKEE

 

 

 

The story of the Kansas City Massacre as told by Michael “Jimmy Needles” LaCapra was everything Hoover could have wanted. Pacing a Wichita, Kansas, jail cell in the predawn hours of September 1, LaCapra told agents he had learned details of the massacre from his brother-in-law, one of the mob boss Johnny Lazia’s henchmen.

What happened, LaCapra said, was this:

Late on the night of June 16, 1933, barely two hours after learning FBI agents were bringing Frank Nash to Kansas City the next morning, Verne Miller had driven to Union Station. The FBI knew this much was true; they had traced calls Miller made from a pay phone outside the station around midnight. But surveying the ground for the rescue was only one reason Miller drove to the station, LaCapra explained. The other was to see Johnny Lazia, who held court at the station’s Harvey Restaurant. According to LaCapra, Miller asked Lazia for men to help him rescue Nash. Lazia demurred, saying he didn’t want the heat that would bring.

Instead, LaCapra said, Lazia had mentioned someone else, a man who had arrived in Kansas City with his partner that same evening: Pretty Boy Floyd. Floyd was staying that night at the Sexton Hotel, where one of Lazia’s men ran a gambling parlor. According to LaCapra, Lazia had taken Miller to meet Floyd; short of money, Floyd agreed to help out, apparently after Miller emphasized that there would be no gunplay involved. LaCapra wasn’t certain whether a third man—a “little wop”—might have participated in the massacre. The agents assumed the “little wop” was Adam Richetti.

It was Floyd, LaCapra said, who had shouted “Hands up!” the next morning outside the station, a command that was greeted with a gunshot from the lawmen’s car. In the ensuing gunfire Floyd was wounded in the left shoulder, presumably by a ricochet. Afterward Floyd fled to a safe house, where a doctor had treated his wound. Miller, meanwhile, had returned to see Lazia and apologized for the heat the massacre would bring. Afterward Miller fled. Once his wound was bandaged, Floyd was smuggled out of the city by several of Lazia’s men.

LaCapra’s story was perfect. It explained almost everything: how Miller and Floyd, strangers to one another, could have teamed up, and why Adam Richetti would have stayed at Verne Miller’s home, leaving behind his fingerprint on a beer bottle. As far as Hoover was concerned, there was just one problem. A secondhand story told by a frightened junkie would do little to sway a jury. What they needed was confirmation, and there was only one person in custody who could furnish that: Verne Miller’s girlfriend, Vi Mathias.

Mathias had been languishing in the federal women’s prison in Milan, Michigan, since the previous November. She was to be paroled on Tuesday, September 18, a fact the Chicago office noted several days before her release. For months Kathryn Kelly had been trying to pry information out of Mathias, but to no avail. Now, with her impending release, Sam Cowley proposed a bold, if extralegal plan. Mathias should be released onto the steps of the prison with no guard present, Cowley suggested, and at a time when no buses or taxis were available. No one would be allowed to meet her.