Public Enemies, page 53
Then, on May 16, Dwight Brantley, the Oklahoma City SAC, took a phone call from a seventy-six-year-old attorney in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, named A. W. Comstock. Comstock told Brantley he had been contacted by Floyd, who had asked him to negotiate a surrender. He said Floyd was broke and badly wounded, having been shot in the back by parties unknown. Comstock sought two assurances, that Floyd would not be killed and that he would receive medical treatment.8 The Bureau agreed. Hoover called and arranged to have prison hospitals at Leavenworth, Kansas, and Springfield, Missouri, ready to accept Floyd’s surrender.9
Talks with Comstock went on for one week, then two, as he sought information about reward monies and state charges Floyd faced in Ohio. Hoover grew impatient. “[T]his matter must be pressed, and pressed vigorously,” Hoover wrote Cowley on May 31. “This matter has now dragged along for several weeks, and we don’t seem to be any nearer toward the getting hold of Floyd than we were when the original negotiations were entered into.”10 Brantley stayed in contact with Comstock for two more weeks but eventually came to believe the attorney’s only contact had been Ruby Floyd, not her husband. Comstock “impresses me as being silly, inane and bordering on senility,” Brantley wrote Hoover on June 15. “[I]t is my best judgment that it is a waste of time, effort and money to deal with him further.”11
An ensuing set of negotiations, this time with a flamboyant Texas minister named J. Frank Norris, at first seemed a little more promising. Norris, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Fort Worth, was a fire-breathing radio preacher with a past—tried and acquitted of murder at one point, accused of burning his own church at another. Ruby Floyd was one of his listeners, and on Father’s Day, June 17, she arranged to have her son, Jackie, baptized at his church. The ceremony was broadcast before an audience of five thousand on Norris’s radio show; a four-minute film of the baptism was incorporated into Ruby’s vaudeville show, which was booked at Fort Worth’s Palace Theatre. Agents shadowed Ruby and her entourage throughout her ten-day stay in Fort Worth.
Afterward Norris telephoned the Dallas SAC, Frank Blake, and offered to negotiate Floyd’s surrender. Hoover, skeptical after the Comstock episode, took a hard line. “I told Mr. Blake I felt we would have to take the attitude that we will agree not to kill Floyd” if he surrenders, Hoover wrote in a memo June 23. “I suggested, in this connection, that [Blake] make it clear that orders are out to kill Floyd on sight, and if he doesn’t surrender in short time, he will no doubt be killed by our men.”12 The same day, Hoover ordered Pop Nathan to concentrate exclusively on Floyd’s capture. “I think the time has come . . . when we should definitely concentrate upon the handling of this case,” Hoover wrote Nathan, adding in a separate memo, “we are going to kill him if we catch him.”13
Ruby’s run at the Palace Theatre ended on June 27 and she returned to Oklahoma. But the Reverend Norris would not give up. He pleaded with Pop Nathan to let him take an agent to Oklahoma to meet with Floyd’s mother. To the surprise of almost everyone at the Bureau, Norris was as good as his word, and on July 10 an agent accompanied the reverend to a meeting with Mrs. Floyd and Pretty Boy’s siblings. The scene devolved into a gripe session, with his family insisting Floyd had been hounded by police into a life of crime. Still, it represented the first time in nearly a year of investigation the Bureau was able to assemble the names and addresses of Floyd’s immediate relatives.
They were getting nowhere. Though agents combed the towns of eastern Oklahoma and northern Arkansas for months, there hadn’t been a confirmed sighting of Floyd since the previous summer. By July, four months after identifying Richetti’s fingerprint and a year after the massacre itself, the Bureau had a tentative theory of the case—that Floyd and Richetti had somehow teamed with Verne Miller—but other than a single fingerprint, they had no evidence to back it up. They talked to dozens of informants who claimed to know Miller or Floyd, but none produced anything suggesting the two outlaws knew each other.
The mystery of the massacre began to unravel only on July 10, when the Kansas City Mob boss Johnny Lazia was shot down as he stepped from his car outside the Park Central Hotel. The killing initially meant nothing to the FBI, which had no jurisdiction. Not until August 6, when a Kansas City newspaper reported that a hospitalized gangster named Jack Griffin had been one of Lazia’s assassins, did the Bureau stir. The Kansas City office had been looking for Griffin, suspecting—inaccurately—that he was a member of the Barker Gang. For the moment the Bureau had no clue that Griffin might be linked to the massacre.
Two agents visited Griffin in the hospital. He was suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, the result of a botched attempt on his life. He refused to answer questions, but suggested the agents return a few days later, when he might have something to say. The agents waited seventeen days. When they returned to interview Griffin on August 23, he had disappeared. No one seemed to know where he had gone. For the moment, no one really cared. Griffin was just another yegg.
Then one of the bullets used to kill Lazia, sent for tests to a Kansas City ballistics laboratory, was found to match bullets fired at the massacre. With a start, the Kansas City office realized Jack Griffin might hold the key to the massacre case. The new SAC, Bruce Nathan, shared the news with Kansas City’s chief of detectives, Thomas Higgins. It was then, on August 24, six weeks after Lazia’s assassination, that Higgins told the Bureau what everyone in the Kansas City underworld already knew: Griffin and three of his pals had killed Lazia in a gambling dispute. Lazia’s men had been hunting them ever since. If the FBI thought Griffin and his men could solve the massacre case, they needed to find them before the Mob did.
Once again, the Bureau found itself in a race with the syndicate. Belatedly, the Kansas City office mobilized. They first tried to find Griffin. A little digging turned up the disquieting fact that he had been discharged from the hospital into the care of a notorious Kansas City detective named Jeff Rayan. Rayan was considered to be a mob enforcer; Griffin hadn’t been seen since. All three of Griffin’s partners, a St. Louis racketeer named Al O’Brien, a Kansas City nightclub owner named Nugent LaPlumma, and a skinny drug addict named Michael LaCapra, known as “Jimmy Needles,” had disappeared.
All that week the Kansas City office tracked leads on the four men. On Friday morning, August 31, they managed to pull in Griffin’s girlfriend. Agents had just begun to interview her when the Kansas City Journal Post hit the streets. The newspaper reported that “Jimmy Needles” LaCapra was in custody in Wichita, Kansas, along with three Kansas City gangsters who had tried to kill him.
Two Kansas City agents, Harold Anderson and Walter Trainor, reached Wichita that night. A desk sergeant briefed them. LaCapra had been hiding in his hometown of Argonia, twenty miles southwest of Wichita. The night before, he had been out driving when a black Ford pulled alongside; three men inside opened up with submachine guns. LaCapra ducked, uninjured, and the Ford sped off. LaCapra scrambled to the Wichita police station for safety even as the men who tried to kill him had a traffic accident and were arrested by the Kansas State Highway Patrol. All four men were now sitting in cells.
Anderson and Trainor first tried to talk to LaCapra’s would-be assassins, whose bruised faces gave vivid testament to the interrogation techniques of Kansas lawmen. “Each of these men sat mute throughout the interviews and all they would say was they had just been out for a little friendly ride,” Trainor wrote in his report. “It was evident from the appearance of the three . . . that they had undergone physical punishment, probably at the hands of the Kansas Highway Patrol.”14
Jimmy Needles was another matter. A jittery, emaciated career criminal in his early forties, LaCapra was ecstatic to see the two FBI men approaching his cell. The words came spilling out of him, so fast the two agents at first couldn’t keep his stories straight. “The statements of LaCapra were, of course, very jumbled and rambling and he appeared to be under a very great nervous strain, although he did not appear to be out of his mind in any manner,” Trainor noted in his report. “He asked the Agents to give him protection, stating that he might be killed at any minute by the mob . . . He said that he knows he has but a short time to live but that any help the Government may be able to give him would be reciprocated by him.”15
And then he said the words the FBI had waited to hear for more than a year: The massacre. Verne Miller. Pretty Boy Floyd. Johnny Lazia. He could tell them the whole story.
Cleveland, Ohio September 3
Alvin Karpis lay on the warm roof of his Ford, watching the heavens. It was a glorious late-summer day, cotton clouds floating in a turquoise sky. Delores Delaney lay beside him. He could hear her breathing. She was pregnant, almost four months along and starting to show. Above them, the Cleveland Air Show was nearing its climax. Airplanes dived and spun. All around, hundreds of couples sat out on blankets, faces turned upward, watching.
It had been five months since the Barker Gang fled Chicago in the wake of George Ziegler’s murder, five blissfully quiet months without a hint the FBI knew where they were. Karpis had a new job and new friends. He hadn’t committed a notable crime since washing his hands of Ed Bremer in February; he hadn’t robbed a bank in seventeen months. The gang had all but fallen apart. He had done everything he could to distance himself from the others. They were dumb and they drank and they took chances. He and Delores lived a quiet life, in bed most nights by eleven. They could almost relax.
Tensions inside the gang had risen after the move to Toledo. They kept low profiles; a local vice lord, Joe Roscoe, looked after them. Within weeks the money ran low. They still had $150,000 of the ransom money and covered their expenses passing bits of it in Chicago supermarkets. But after the drunken Dr. Moran’s money-laundering operation was uncovered, they could find no one to move the bulk of it. Dock Barker ran out to Reno, but friends there refused to get involved. All the Dillinger publicity had changed the public mood. Now even the gang’s old contacts shunned them. Karpis dwelled on the Syndicate. Dillingermania had brought unwanted heat on its operations, and Karpis wondered whether Frank Nitti wanted them dead.
So they had sat and waited and worried, passing the days drinking beer, fishing on Lake Erie, riding roller-coasters at the Willow Bay Amusement Park, and requesting their favorite songs at Toledo’s premier underworld hangout, the Casino Club. They were all regulars at the club, Karpis and the Barkers sitting in a corner booth, nursing their drinks, old Charlie Fitzgerald cursing the waitresses when they watered his bourbon. An errand boy they brought from Chicago, a onetime golf pro named Willie Harrison, kept everyone entertained, mock-directing the band. One night a singer, a Scottish crooner who performed in a kilt, didn’t take to direction, so Harrison slugged him, igniting a brawl that ended only when Fred Barker coolly placed a pistol to Harrison’s temple. Freddie didn’t like scenes. They drew attention.
The odd donnybrook aside, it was boring. They had little to do but drink. Fred’s girl, Paula Harmon, gulped whiskey all day every day, and she was a nasty drunk. Another gang member, Harry Campbell, bought his nineteen-year-old girlfriend Wynona Burdette an ill-tempered Pekinese. One day Karpis and Freddie were sitting in Barker’s apartment when they heard gunfire. “Did you hear what I heard?” Karpis asked.
“Yeah,” said Barker. “That’s a machine gun.”
A few moments later they heard running steps in the stairwell outside. The bell rang. Someone began kicking the door. Karpis darted into the bedroom, grabbed a submachine gun, and stood to one side of the door. He motioned to Freddie to jerk the door open. Campbell tumbled into the apartment, a bloody towel wrapped around his arm. “What the hell happened?” Karpis demanded. “Is someone after you?”
“No, no,” Campbell said. He was in obvious pain. “That goddamn dog. He went in the neighbors’ yard and I sneaked up behind to grab him. He wouldn’t come when I called him and that son of a bitch spun around and got me right on the arm. He bit me two or three times.”
Karpis laughed. They unwrapped the towel and found deep, bloody teeth marks up and down Campbell’s arm. “I got to get some kind of shots for this,” he said.
“I’ll get hold of Joe Roscoe and find out if he’s got a doctor who can take care of this,” said Karpis.
Just then Dock Barker walked in. “Well, hell, that Doc Moran, he wants to come here and get away from Chicago,” Barker said. “Why the hell don’t we have him give the shots to Campbell? I’ll go to Chicago and get him and bring him up here.”
A few days later Dock returned with Moran, his assistant and their pal Ollie Berg, all eager to flee Chicago. The trio stayed in a hotel and spent their days drinking. Karpis began to get edgy. “I don’t think I’m gonna stay around here,” he told Fred in May. “There’s too many people and there’s too much drinking going on.”
Karpis’s concerns coincided with a job offer from a pair of new friends, a squat mobster named Shimmy Patton and his partner, a thin blond named Art Heberbrand. The two were opening a swank new casino called the Harvard Club in the Cleveland suburb of Newberg Heights and, worried about threats from a rival syndicate, they asked Karpis if he would handle security. Looking for anything to fill his days, and eager to distance himself from the rest of the gang, Karpis accepted. Fred sulked when he wasn’t asked as well. Within days Karpis packed up and moved with Delores to a brick bungalow near the Cleveland airport. It was a quiet neighborhood, green squares of lawn, children in the streets. Delores got busy buying furniture. Karpis liked it.
The casino job was a breeze. Most evenings Karpis threw on his new tuxedo, drove over to the club, and drifted among the gamblers, checking the dice, watching for trouble, and tossing out the occasional drunk. After midnight he propped himself against a wall and watched the accountants count the cash. It was good money, and in idle moments Karpis allowed himself to imagine his life if he had found such a job early on, before he set to robbing banks. He made a list of the rival syndicates’ addresses and each of their children, then sent it to an intermediary with a blunt message: if the Harvard Club was harassed in any way, their houses would be burned down and their children roughed up. There was no trouble after that.
He drove down to Toledo every few days to talk with Fred. The situation there was deteriorating fast. The drunken Dr. Moran had performed fingerprint-removal “surgery” on Dock Barker and was now demanding a share of the ransom money as payment. He was spending evenings at a Toledo brothel, and its madame, Edith Barry, took Dock aside one night and told him Moran had been bragging about the surgeries. “Everything in general is getting bad with this guy,” Dock told Karpis. “I don’t know what the hell to do.” Actually, they did. A few nights later Fred and Dock forcibly removed Moran from the Casino Club, shot him in the face, and buried him in an unmarked grave in Michigan. The FBI would continue to hunt Moran for months and only reluctantly accepted the fact of his death. His body has never been found.
Moran’s demise did little to assuage Karpis’s concerns. Despite all his efforts, the others stuck to him like tar. Restless in Toledo, they followed him to Cleveland one by one. Freddie and Paula Harmon took a bungalow on West 171st Street. Harry Campbell rented an apartment on Franklyn Boulevard. Even Harry Sawyer and his wife, Gladys, came, taking over Fred Barker’s spare bedroom. The Sawyers had fled St. Paul one step ahead of the FBI that spring, and had been shuffling between Nevada tourist camps ever since. To Karpis’s dismay, they brought their five-year-old adopted daughter, Francine, with them. Karpis so detested their presence he moved to a new house on West 140th Street. He told only Fred his new address, and he forbade Delores from seeing the gang’s other women. They were trouble.
Matters came to a head when Volney Davis arrived from Chicago and began demanding his cut of the ransom. The money was an increasingly sore subject. Dock had kept it for a while, but eventually they decided to stow it at Bill Weaver’s lakeside cottage. It fit into two Gladstone bags, and Karpis gave it all to Weaver, but warned him never to leave it in the house unattended. Weaver wasn’t the brightest soul, however, and the next time they visited the cottage they discovered the house unlocked and empty. They found Weaver walking on the beach and roundly cursed him. After that Fred and Karpis took the money and buried it in the soft dirt beneath Karpis’s garage.
By mid-summer only Ma Barker remained in Chicago, lost in her jigsaw puzzles. Karpis drove over to visit her one weekend and found she was doing surprisingly well. He and Dock took her to see a movie. To their horror, the film was preceded by a newsreel warning moviegoers to be on the lookout for Dillinger, Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Karpis, and the Barkers. Karpis scrunched low in his seat as their pictures flashed on the screen. “One of these men may be sitting next to you,” the announcer said. Karpis pulled his hat low over his forehead. Afterward he made the rounds of Cicero taverns, trying to deduce whether the Syndicate was after them. An old friend told him to beat it. Karpis got the message. He quickly returned to Cleveland.
Weeks crept by. Fred and Karpis talked about taking an Ohio bank, but until the money ran out there was no rush. Delores got pregnant and asked Karpis whether she should get another abortion; he didn’t have the heart to put her through it again, so he would soon be a father. Then one night in July, Karpis showed up for work at the casino and Art Heberbrand took him aside. “An hour from now, there’s going to be a couple of guys coming in, we want you to talk to ’em,” he said. Karpis asked if they expected trouble. “No, no, no trouble,” he said. They waited in the office until darkness fell, and Heberbrand rose from his chair. “Let’s walk out to the parking lot,” he said.
