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

“Floyd Called Last of Massacre Gang. Justice Department Says All of Kansas City Killers Are Accounted for.”149

But what of Purvis’s remark the previous March that the FBI suspected “Shotgun” George Ziegler might have been among the train station shooters? Purvis made his comment after Ziegler had been blown away outside a restaurant in Cicero, Illinois. Perhaps it doesn’t matter much in the history of the universe if Ziegler was involved. But for the sake of tidiness, it would have been good if the issue had been addressed after Floyd was slain.

Maybe the crime reporters of that time had enough to write about without worrying too much about what Purvis had said several months before Floyd was gunned down. Besides, Hoover and his people weren’t much for engaging in question-and-answer sessions. They issued statements, and reporters dutifully wrote what they said.

The killing of Pretty Boy Floyd so soon after the slaying of John Dillinger was a priceless opportunity for Hoover to rehabilitate his and his bureau’s image. The clean-cut and youthful Purvis, who turned thirty-one two days after Floyd was slain, seemed to embody Hoover’s vision of the ideal FBI agent (although Hoover reportedly referred to him as “Little Mel” because Purvis stood only five feet four inches).

After Floyd was hunted down and killed, Purvis was briefly idolized in the press, as though the debacle at Little Bohemia Lodge had never happened. By extension, the hero worship enhanced the image of the entire bureau. And Hoover could blame Floyd and Richetti for the Kansas City Massacre. Which the bureau does, to this day.*********

Richetti was convicted of murder for the Kansas City Massacre. Proclaiming his innocence to the last, he was executed in the state’s gas chamber on October 7, 1938.

Recall the account of James Henry “Blackie” Audett, the gangster who knew Floyd and Richetti and who witnessed the train station shooting. He insisted that neither Richetti nor Floyd was there. If Audett was right about what he saw, if he was telling the truth, it means that Richetti—a hardened criminal, to be sure—was put to death for something he didn’t do.

*The textile strike, which began around Labor Day, had been years in the making, as manufacturers struggled with declining demand for goods after the end of the Great War as well as increased foreign competition. Industry leaders responded by increasing production demands and, particularly in the South, by resisting workers’ attempts to unionize. The strike of 1934 subsided after three weeks, with workers achieving limited gains.

**This is improvised dialogue, added for dramatic effect.

***Again, for monetary reasons having to do with the Depression and certainly beyond the understanding of this writer, gold notes were being withdrawn from circulation and were therefore becoming scarce.

****It will be recalled that an alert teller at another branch of the Corn Exchange Bank, at Broadway and Ninety-First Street, spotted a gold note from the ransom money in April 1932.

*****This is improvised dialogue, added for dramatic effect.

******The man who was with Hauptmann at the time was never identified. He was not Isidor Fisch, since it was established that Fisch had died in Germany by then.

*******In the aftermath of the Lindbergh crime, New Jersey lawmakers made kidnapping a felony. The law has been revised several times over the years and now provides for a maximum sentence of twenty-five years to life, depending on the age of the victim, whether he or she was harmed, etc. Since the death penalty was abolished by New Jersey legislators in 2007, the maximum sentence for murder in the state is life without parole. Thus, if a fatal kidnapping occurs in New Jersey at present, the kidnapper can be sentenced to life without parole.

********Decades after the Lindbergh case, a well-known New York State judge commented that a prosecutor “could indict a ham sandwich” if he chose to. That was a bit of an exaggeration, but it reflected the power a prosecutor has.

*********Hoover became jealous of the attention Purvis was getting after Floyd was killed. Sensing that he had fallen out of favor, Purvis left the FBI in 1935 to practice law. Rumors persisted that Hoover was still undermining him—plotting to keep him from getting a judgeship, for instance. Purvis died in an apparent suicide in 1960.

CHAPTER FORTY

CLOSING THE RING

Miami

Late 1934

Perhaps the people in the Barker-Karpis gang dared to hope that the arrest of Bruno Hauptmann in the Lindbergh kidnapping, followed just weeks later by the killing of Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, would take them out of the spotlight. Perhaps the law would even forget about them for a while.

It was not to be. One day in Havana, Karpis saw a picture of himself in a local newspaper. For whatever reason, Karpis’s survival instincts, which had served him well up to that time, told him he’d be safer in Miami than in Havana, so he and his girlfriend, Dolores Delaney, moved there in the fall of 1934 and took up residence as “Mr. and Mrs. S. A. Green.”

Fred Barker was also getting homesick for the States. Luckily or not, he met someone in Havana who knew someone who had a cottage in Ocklawaha, Florida, near Lake Weir, a big freshwater lake in Central Florida. Ocklawaha was a little spot on the road that hardly deserved to be called a village, as it consisted of just a few houses and stores on Lake Weir, about a hundred miles southwest of Jacksonville. The community had one telephone. But the isolation was ideal for people wanting to get away from it all—or people running from something.

The man and woman rented the white nine-room summer house of the man who was president of the Biscayne Kennel Club of Miami. It didn’t seem right to call the “Blackburns” a couple, since the woman was considerably older than the man who accompanied her. In fact, they were mother and son.

The region around Lake Weir offered terrific fishing and hunting. “Mr. Blackburn” had hired a guide to lead him to the best spots to catch bass and hunt deer.