7

MA BARKER AND THE CENTRAL PARK GANG

After she was shot to death in 1935, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called her a criminal mastermind, a claim Alvin Karpis, one of the most gifted bank robbers of the Depression era, openly ridiculed. Yet there is no doubt at all that Arrie “Ma” Barker raised four sons wholly dedicated to crime and was house mother to many of their friends.

She was born Arizona Donnie Clark near Springfield, Missouri; married George Barker; and gave him four sons: Herman, Lloyd, Arthur (known as Doc or Dock) and Fred. Earlier, while the family was living in southwestern Missouri, the eldest boy, Herman, compiled a juvenile criminal record that Doc quickly surpassed. In 1915, the Barker clan moved to an Oklahoma town that was acclaimed nationwide five years later as “the Magic City, young, prosperous, new oil spewing from the ground, a dream land, the most modern city in the West.”

Tulsa began as a Creek village, became a cow town and later became the “oil capitol of the world.” Yet the Barker place near downtown was hardly palatial. And so it was probably natural that Herman, Doc Lloyd and Fred spent most of their time at Central Park, a wide-open space with plenty of trees, which came in handy when burying the loot they stole in small-time break-ins; eventually, their dad, George Barker, moved back to Missouri without his family.

Fred was the first to do serious time, catching a ten-year maximum sentence for robbing a bank in Winfield, Kansas. While there, he met and befriended Canadian-born Albin Karpowics, whose name had been simplified to “Alvin Karpis” by a teacher in Topeka, Kansas. Later, law enforcement officers nicknamed Alvin “Old Creepy.”

When Fred and Alvin were paroled in 1931, their next stop was Tulsa, where they roomed with the Barkers. While Fred was gone, Herman killed himself while being chased by authorities after botching a 1927 robbery in Newton, Kansas. Lloyd was not in Tulsa because he was doing a life sentence for a 1921 murder across town at St. John Hospital, which then had been under construction.

Undeterred, Fred and Alvin organized a jewel heist operation in Kansas and Missouri. They killed Sheriff C.R. Kelly in West Plains, Missouri, two days after a December 17 robbery in that burg, prompting a Barker family move to Kansas City.

Law officers spotted Karpis and Fred Barker just outside Springfield, Missouri, near a place called Young’s Orchard, on New Year’s Day. Later, the authorities learned that the Barker-Karpis gang had moved north, and for good reason. Years later, Karpis reminisced that “every criminal of any importance in the 1930s made his home at one time or another in St. Paul.” And while there, they took care of some family business.

Ma Barker’s boyfriend, an alcoholic named Arthur Dunlop, turned up dead on April 25, 1932, near Webster, Wisconsin, on the most traveled route from St. Paul to Kansas City. Although many historians believe that Fred Barker and Karpis killed Dunlop, Karpis claimed in a late life memoir that local St. Paul criminals killed him as a professional courtesy. Two months later, somebody, most likely the Barker-Karpis gang, robbed a Fort Scott, Kansas bank of $32,000—a cool half million in modern money—on June 17.

“Open the vault!” Freddie yelled after removing some bad false teeth at the Third Northwest Bank, about twelve miles west of the Barker-Karpis hideout in Minneapolis. The take was $20,000 and nearly five times that amount in securities, but they killed two police officers and a civilian bystander while getting away.

Despite this, the Barker-Karpis gang organized and executed two of the largest kidnappings in history between new bank robberies.

Their first abduction target, precisely a year after the Fort Scott heist, was William A. Hamm Jr., scion of a regional beer-brewing empire from whose family Doc, Fred and Alvin extracted $100,000 on June 15, 1933. Two days later, their friend “Horseback to Cadillac” outlaw Frank “Jelly” Nash and two law officers were killed at Union Station in Kansas City. Nash had visited them on June 9 in St. Paul, just before the Hamm kidnapping.

Just six months later, on January 17, 1934, the Barker-Karpis crew kidnapped thirty-something St. Paul banker Edward G. Bremer, doubling up on the ransom. The Bremers paid $200,000 in cold, hard cash to see Ed alive again, even as the federal government began closing in on Alvin and the Barker clan.

By the end of 1934, public enemies “Baby Face” Nelson, John Dillinger and “Pretty Boy” Floyd were dead, leaving the Barker-Karpis gang survivors to face federal heat. Karpis and Tulsa native Harry Campbell were on the loose in Miami, Florida, when they learned that Fred Barker and his mother had been killed during a gunfight with the FBI on January 16, 1935, near Lake Weir, some 288 miles north. They moved on to New Jersey and eventually Youngstown, Ohio, at the time a gangster haven, where they picked up a crew and snagged a $70,000 steel company payroll—worth $1.2 million in modern money—on April 25. Karpis and several Tulsa associates robbed a train in Garrettsville, Ohio, of about $30,000 in November 1935, giving Alvin extra wherewithal to relax in Hot Springs, Arkansas, before moving on to the Big Easy.

Some twenty-eight FBI agents swarmed Alvin Karpis at about 5:00 p.m. on May 1, 1936, as he was leaving his New Orleans apartment building. Decades later, Karpis told an interviewer that just after the arrest, he could see “the gold dust twins” J. Edgar Hoover and his special assistant, Clyde Colson, peeking from around the corner of the apartment building to see whether they could safely horn in on the snatch.

Karpis spent some thirty years in prison, supposedly taught mass murderer Charles Manson how to play the guitar there and died in 1980 of a drug overdose in Spain, perhaps at his own hand, having written, “My profession was robbing banks, knocking off payrolls and kidnapping rich men. I was good at it, maybe the best in North America for five years, from 1931 to 1936.” That might have been so, but he never discussed one crime he might have been involved in.

James and his wife, Willie Young, were devout Christians laboring southwest of Springfield, Missouri, who saw many disappointments in life. They had moved to a place near Frederick, Oklahoma, won in a 1902 land lottery, but returned to Missouri fifteen years later, only to have three of their eleven children turn into criminals. Paul, Jennings and Harry, who called themselves the “Young Triumvirate,” didn’t care for the day-to-day work on their hundred-acre farm near present-day Brookline. Among other crimes, the older two burgled three Missouri stores; Harry mortally wounded a city marshal in Missouri, bringing law enforcement to the farmhouse door near Springfield on January 2, 1932. The firepower coming from the Young stronghold that day was so overwhelming that the county sheriff, two deputies and three Springfield police officers were killed. Historians have noted that Alvin Karpis and Doc Barker knew the Young brothers, were spotted in Springfield one day earlier and may have been in the farmhouse. Alvin Karpis didn’t mention the “Young Triumvirate” in his memoirs, so no one knows to this day.