The Kidnap Years: by David Stout (popular books of all time TXT) 📗

Meanwhile, Fred Barker was doing a stretch of five to ten years in the Kansas State Penitentiary for robbing a bank in Winfield, Kansas, in 1926. That crime, committed when Fred was twenty-four, could be called his first adult offense. He’d been arrested in his youth for vagrancy and relatively minor robberies—then released to the custody of his mother.

In prison, Fred became friends with Alvin Karpis, a son of Lithuanian immigrants, who was serving time for burglary and theft.

Fred and Karpis were released in 1931 and embarked upon a series of store burglaries. Surely, Arthur “Doc” Barker was eager to join them. But he was serving a life term in the Oklahoma state prison for killing a night watchman at a Tulsa hospital in 1918 while trying to steal a shipment of drugs.

Somehow, Doc won parole in September 1932 after serving thirteen years. The reunited Barker brothers, Fred and Doc, and Karpis made a natural team once Karpis was released. Soon, they were robbing banks, stores, and trains across the Midwest. (Sadly, Lloyd Barker could not be with them. He had been caught after robbing a post office in rural Oklahoma in 1922 and sent to federal prison for twenty-five years.*)

Arthur Dunlop had a reputation for being a big-mouth drunk, which was why members of the gang did not trust him and probably explains why he was found shot to death near the town of Webster, Wisconsin, in 1932, just after gang members fled from their hideout in St. Paul, Minnesota, upon hearing that the police were on their trail. Rightly or wrongly, the gang members believed that Dunlop’s loose tongue had revealed their location. Fortunately for them, they had only to pick up a phone and call St. Paul’s police chief, Thomas “Big Tom” Brown, if they wanted to know what the cops were doing. And sometimes Brown would call them, as he probably did just before the gang left St. Paul in haste.

Fred, considered the organizer of the outfit, and Karpis were careful planners. They also juggled the members of their gang, recruiting people with certain skills for particular heists, much as a pro football team acquires and sheds backup quarterbacks and placekickers as the needs arise. This technique brought in fresh blood and made it hard for pursuers to keep track of the gang.

Undeniably, reading about the exploits of Ma Barker and her sons and Alvin Karpis can be entertaining, especially since the people who suffered because of them are long gone. But a quick and perhaps incomplete summary of what the gang members did will dispel any temptation to glorify them. In addition to the night watchman killed by Doc and the Newton, Kansas, police officer slain by Herman, the gang’s victims included a local sheriff slain during the robbery of a store in Mountain View, Missouri, in 1931; the police chief of Pocahontas, Arkansas, kidnapped in 1931 and driven to a field, where he was shot five times in the back; two Minneapolis policemen who were shot dead after a bank robbery in 1932; and a Minneapolis policeman who was slain during a post office robbery in 1933.

Perhaps the Barkers, Karpis, and other gang members grew weary of killing. Maybe they feared that their own blood would be spilled if they persisted in their violent ways. In any event, we can be sure that the kidnappings of Haskell Bohn of St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1932 and Charlie Boettcher of Denver in 1933 caught their attention, perhaps even inspired them. Verne Sankey had pulled off those operations with apparent ease. He had set a good example in a sense—one that members of the Barker-Karpis outfit were determined to follow.

But who would be their first kidnapping target? The Barker-Karpis members were open to suggestions. And there was no better place to find prospects than St. Paul.

St. Paul had a population of just over 270,000 as the thirties began, yet it was in a league with Chicago, Kansas City, and other bigger cities as a haven for bootleggers, bank robbers, and other kinds of gangsters, including kidnappers.

St. Paul’s reputation as a sanctuary for criminals began at the turn of the century with what became known as the “layover agreement,” an understanding between criminals and the police chief, John O’Connor. Simply put, when out-of-town gangsters visited St. Paul, they notified the St. Paul police. If the gangsters behaved themselves while in the city, they were unmolested and even tipped off about forthcoming FBI raids.

O’Connor’s successors continued this arrangement, the intent of which was not just to keep crime down in St. Paul. In return for tolerating the criminals in their midst and warning them of impending federal raids, the police brass accepted payoffs, with some of the money trickling down to lowly patrolmen. And of course, some cash flowed into city hall.

Not surprisingly, alcohol was sold and consumed openly during Prohibition. There was a speakeasy in St. Paul called the Green Lantern where criminals gathered to see and be seen.** Bank robbers and other crooks from across the Midwest gathered there when they were in town. The notorious gangsters Harvey Bailey and Frank Nash were regulars. So was Verne Miller, a one-time South Dakota sheriff who found breaking the law more rewarding than enforcing it.

One reason gangsters felt at ease in the Green Lantern was the establishment’s owner, Harry Sawyer (originally Sandlovich). Sawyer had inherited the Green Lantern, so to speak, after the car-bomb assassination of its proprietor, “Dapper Dan” Hogan, on December 4, 1928.

Hogan, a money launderer, dealer in stolen goods, and all-around fixer who distributed turkeys to the needy at Christmas time, was perched comfortably on the bridge between St. Paul’s criminal underworld and the city’s compliant police force. He was known to encourage out-of-town mobsters to stay out of St. Paul unless they agreed to make their visits violence-free.

With Hogan’s death, the Green Lantern was taken over by Sawyer, Hogan’s top aide. The sixth of nine children, Sawyer was born in 1890 to