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

gravel road. Two of the kidnappers got out, removed cans full of gasoline, and refueled the car. Then they drove back to the paved highway to continue the journey.

Finally, Bremer was put out of the car at Rochester, Minnesota, about eighty-five miles south of St. Paul. He made his way home by train and bus, still bruised and dazed. Given the hours that Bremer had spent in the kidnappers’ car after he was seized, investigators speculated that he might have been driven to Kansas City, Missouri, some 440 miles due south of St. Paul. After all, Kansas City had a vibrant mob presence, and the kidnappers surely could have found accommodations there.

But they would have been welcome in Sioux City, Iowa, as well. Some 280 miles southwest of St. Paul, Sioux City had a population of about eighty-five thousand and was known informally as “Little Chicago” because of its thriving beer businesses during Prohibition.

But what about the chimes Bremer recalled hearing during his captivity? How many Catholic churches were there within a radius, say, of three hundred or four hundred miles of St. Paul that chimed out the “Angelus” twice a day? Maybe that was an angle worth pursuing.

Only hours after Bremer returned safely to his home, agents had more concrete clues to go on. The clues had practically been gift-wrapped for them—and their discovery made it clear that while the kidnappers of Edward Bremer were nasty, violent men, they were not particularly intelligent.

In retracing the route taken by Magee to rendezvous with the kidnappers, agents found four flashlights fitted with red lenses next to the road several miles south of Zumbrota, Minnesota. The flashlights bore the trademark “Merit Product.” Checking the outlets where flashlights of that type were sold, the agents found that one outlet was the F. & W. Grand Silver Store in St. Paul.

Meanwhile, on February 10, a farmer near Portage, Wisconsin, found four empty gasoline cans and a tin funnel by the side of a road near his spread. He turned them over to the local sheriff, who turned them over to FBI agents, who immediately sent them to Washington for testing.

A clerk at the Grand Silver Store was shown a photograph of a man whose criminal exploits throughout the region were well known. Yes, she said. That was the man who bought the flashlights. His name was Alvin Karpis. His nickname was “Creepy,” perhaps because of his eyes, which glittered with malevolence, and his pouty, mean lips.

The kidnappers’ carelessness in leaving the flashlights and red lenses at the ransom-drop site was a big break for investigators. Had the kidnappers taken the flashlights and lenses with them, it probably would have taken much longer to trace the purchase to the Grand Silver Store.

And back came the results from the FBI laboratory in Washington. Its vaunted fingerprint unit had lifted a latent print from one of the gasoline cans. It had been made by the right index finger of one Arthur “Doc” Barker, whose fingerprints were in the FBI’s collection because of his earlier arrests.

Feeling intense heat, members of the Barker-Karpis gang began darting hither and yon across the country, occasionally recruiting quack doctors to perform makeshift plastic surgery. Some gang members ventured as far as Cuba. The big showdown would come in a remote rural part of Florida where people coexisted with alligators and coral snakes.

But before that happened, a veritable feast of crime news (and entertainment!) would be served up almost daily.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

A GAMBLER FOLDS HIS HAND

Chicago

Early 1934

Verne Sankey knew all the clichés of gambling; he lived by them. You have to play the hand you’re dealt; you have to know when to hold and when to fold. It was neither fair nor unfair if you were dealt three bad hands in a row—or three good ones. It was what it was.

But there was one gambling cliché he failed to heed: quit while you’re ahead.

He had pulled off the kidnapping of Haskell Bohn, the son of a refrigerator tycoon, in St. Paul, Minnesota, the previous summer. No one had been hurt, and the operation had netted a decent profit. He probably should have bowed out of the kidnapping racket right then.

But no. He had gone to Denver and masterminded the kidnapping of Charlie Boettcher in February 1933. The Boettcher family was wealthier and more influential than the Bohns, so it should not have come as a surprise that the Denver kidnapping generated much more heat. Plus, the operation was accompanied by a shootout with the police.

Sankey had become a trophy for ambitious lawmen. But it wasn’t all his doing! He’d had nothing to do with the kidnapping of William Hamm, even though the newspapers had all but declared him guilty in that snatch. And the fact that Charlie Boettcher and Charles Lindbergh were friends had stirred whispers that Sankey might even be involved in the Lindbergh kidnapping. Yes, he was a gambler, bootlegger, robber, and kidnapper, but he was no killer. The very idea that he could have killed a child must have wounded him deeply, for he was a husband and father, a family man.

All right, he was not a perfect family man. He’d fled to Chicago to lie low, and he’d been lonely. So he’d taken up with another woman. After all, he didn’t know when he’d be reunited with his wife, Fern, if ever. He tried to build a new life for himself in the Windy City.

Sankey had read newspaper reports about himself, in particular articles describing three prominent moles on his face. So one day in January 1934, he had a doctor remove them with an electric needle. Then he grew a beard, as the removal of the moles had made him unable to shave. By this time, he had become a regular at John Mueller’s barbershop at 4823 North Damen Avenue in the city.

A sharp-eyed Chicago woman who lived in the neighborhood had spotted him on the street more than once, entering or leaving the barbershop. She remembered