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

*This is an improvisation of dialogue for dramatic purposes.

**This is an improvisation of dialogue for dramatic purposes.

***I choose not to dwell on Fish’s legal journey from arrest to trial and beyond, which has been superbly told in Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America’s Most Fiendish Killer!, Harold Schechter’s book on the life, crimes, and death of Albert Fish. The book was invaluable to me.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

IN GUN-BLAZING PURSUIT

Chicago

Early 1934

In following the travels of members of the Barker-Karpis gang and other bandits of the mid-1930s, one has to wonder: considering all they went through to evade the law, did they ever ask themselves whether it was worth it? But by the time they scattered in flight after the Bremer kidnapping in January 1934, it was much too late for soul-searching. The gang members had already crossed a Rubicon of blood.

On March 10, 1934, Alvin Karpis and Fred Barker underwent surgery in Chicago. The “operating room” was a hotel room, and the surgeon was Dr. Joseph Moran of Chicago, whose healing skills were blurred by alcoholism. Moran had done prison time for performing illegal abortions, and upon his release, he had no prospects of establishing a conventional practice. He did, however, manage to land an appointment as the physician for the Chicago Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen, and Helpers Union. (Was it just coincidence that Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert, Chicago investigator and pursuer of Roger Touhy, was a power in the Teamsters union at the time?)

Moran became noted for emergency stitching and bullet-removal work on wounded gangsters. Besides dabbling in plastic surgery, he was believed to help gangsters launder money now and then.

Karpis and Barker were in no position to look for an ideal doctor or to seek second opinions. They wanted to alter their faces and erase their fingerprints. The “surgery” by Dr. Moran was only partly successful, and the pain drove Fred Barker half-crazy for a time.

Then there was Fred Samuel Goetz, whose name somehow morphed into “Shotgun” George Ziegler. He was a gunman believed to have participated in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929.

Ziegler, then in his midthirties, had a personal profile unusual for a gangster. He was a graduate of the University of Illinois, where he earned respectable grades. He aspired to a degree of sophistication and was said to be a decent golfer. He had been an army aviator during the Great War, serving stateside and earning a commission as a second lieutenant.

But this officer was no gentleman.

He had a weakness for women—and girls, including those young enough to get him into trouble, especially if he forced himself on them, which he was not above doing. He was suspected in the attempted robbery of a Chicago doctor. The doctor was wounded, and his chauffeur was shot to death.

But the most impressive mark on his resume was his reputed role in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929, the bloodbath that left seven gangsters dead in a Chicago garage. And he was believed to have been one of several men who robbed a bank in Jefferson, Wisconsin, of $352,000 in cash and bonds in 1929.

Yet for all his crimes, he was able to avoid capture. Unfortunately for him, when discretion was called for, he sometimes chose to boast, typically after a few adult beverages. He unwisely bragged to gangster friends that he had planned the kidnapping of Edward Bremer. (He was exaggerating his role, though he was reputed to have helped plan the caper and to have taken part in ransom negotiations.)

Oddly enough, Ziegler appeared to have been trying to inject some boring domesticity into his life. In March 1934, he was reportedly living with a woman in an expensively furnished apartment on Chicago’s South Shore Drive. The couple called themselves “Mr. and Mrs. George Seibert.”

Late on the night of March 20, Ziegler was shot to death while emerging from Minerva’s restaurant, a favorite hangout of his in suburban Cicero. His big mouth had apparently been his undoing. Appropriately enough, he was slain by shotgun—several blasts to his face, rendering him physically unrecognizable.

If the people who killed him were also Barker-Karpis gang members or alumni (a reasonable assumption), perhaps they should have lingered long enough to go through the dead man’s pockets. As it was, lawmen found valuable information on Ziegler’s corpse: slips of paper with names, aliases, addresses, and contact information for the Barker-Karpis bunch. One last item was added to Ziegler’s resume, albeit posthumously. Chicago FBI agent Melvin Purvis said the bureau was looking into the possibility that Ziegler was one of the shooters in the Union Station Massacre in Kansas City the previous summer. And why not speculate about Ziegler? It couldn’t be proven that he wasn’t at the train station. And if people wanted to believe that he was there, it helped the FBI in its efforts to show that people who took part in the station slaughter were getting their just deserts, indirectly or otherwise.

Meanwhile, life on the run was anything but easy for the Barker-Karpis folks. Arthur “Doc” Barker and an associate, Volney Davis, took their cues from Karpis and Doc’s brother Fred and decided to have their appearances altered. This was done in Toledo, Ohio, in the spring of 1934, likely by the aforementioned Dr. Joseph Moran. After this ordeal, Davis decided he wanted a whole new life, so he and his girlfriend traveled to Buffalo, which had an underworld presence. There, they bought a truck and drove to Montana.

But they soon sensed that even the land under the Big Sky was not big enough. After picking up rumors that the law was on their trail in Montana, they traveled to Kansas City, Missouri, still a reliable sanctuary for those who had run afoul of the law.

Around this time, Karpis and his girlfriend had settled in Cleveland. Karpis just wanted to lie low. He had no interest in any “reunion” of the Barker-Karpis gang, which at full strength numbered in the dozens, if one