• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

A few days later Karpis dropped by George Ziegler’s apartment and briefed him on the Bremer job. “I think it’s a pretty good score myself,” Ziegler said. “Yeah, I’d go on the damn thing.”

On the other hand, Ziegler went on, there was something else they could do. A kidnapping in Chicago.

“Who?” Karpis asked.

“It’s one of the syndicate guys.”

Karpis’s heart flip-flopped. “The Syndicate?”

“Hell yeah. What’s wrong with that?”

Karpis didn’t mention his encounter with Frank Nitti.

“Did you ever hear of a guy named Dennis Cooney?” Ziegler asked.

“Ain’t he in charge of all the hookers, all the whores and whorehouses?”

“Yeah, that’s the guy. His wife has got three hundred thousand dollars put away in a safe deposit box. He’d be a cinch to snatch.” At Ziegler’s behest, Karpis spent the next two weeks shadowing Dennis Cooney, studying the best way to kidnap him. Sitting outside of Cooney’s home one night, he found himself wondering which would be worse, being hunted by J. Edgar Hoover or Frank Nitti. Ultimately Ziegler made the decision for him. Late one night they drove out into the country. Ziegler was silent much of the way. Finally he said, “They had me downtown today.”

“Who?”

“You know who I work for.”

Karpis glanced at him. “Yeah.”

“They asked me if I had heard any rumor about Dennis Cooney being kidnapped.”

As Ziegler told the story, the syndicate bosses had asked him to investigate the rumor and, if true, track down and kill the would-be kidnappers. Ziegler couldn’t figure out where the rumor had started. Whoever was responsible, the Cooney job was clearly off. “Well,” Ziegler said, “we can go on up to St. Paul and that guy up there.”

And so it was decided. Against Karpis’s better instincts, they would stage another kidnapping in St. Paul. Karpis knew it was the wrong thing to do, but he made himself a promise: if they carried out this one last score, he would leave the gang.

San Francisco Late December

Garish neon lights, red, blue, and yellow, glowed in the damp fog that crept in off of San Francisco Bay. A half mile from the waterfront, on a narrow block of Pacific Street crammed with taverns and tinsel halls, Christmas revelers staggered from bar to bar, laughing and backslapping. From the doorway of a joint named Spider Kelly’s came a blast of fresh jazz. Out on the sidewalk a roly-poly Italian man waved in the tourists. It was Fatso Negri, Baby Face Nelson’s old rum-running friend. Negri felt a tug at his elbow. He turned, annoyed, and his jaw dropped. There, a cap shoved down on his forehead, was Nelson himself.

“Why . . . Jimmy Burnell!” Negri exclaimed, using Nelson’s old alias. “Where’d you pop from?”

Nelson grinned. “Oh, I just blew in from the east,” he said. “Say, you’re getting fatter by the day.” He turned to a girl standing at his side. “This is my wife, Helen,” he said.

“Glad to know you,” Negri said, extending his hand.

They went in and Nelson briefed Negri on his new gang and its exploits. After scrambling away from his Indiana lake house a step ahead of Frank Nitti’s enforcers in September, Nelson had relocated to St. Paul. The August robbery with Eddie Bentz in Grand Haven, Michigan, had convinced Nelson he was ready to lead his own gang, and he easily recruited from the Green Lantern’s pool of talent. One recruit was Homer Van Meter, the string-bean loner who had befriended Dillinger in prison.ba Another was Tommy Carroll, who had joined the Grand Haven bank job that August. A handsome, five-foot-ten-inch tough guy with a flattened nose, Carroll was a drinker, a flirt, and a lady’s man who loved the St. Paul nightclubs; he had a wife, a steady girlfriend, and was already romancing a new girl named Jean Delaney, the older sister of Alvin Karpis’s teenage lover Delores Delaney.

The trio’s first target had been the First National Bank in Brainerd, two hours north of St. Paul. In October, after hiring two local thugs as muscle, Nelson and his men moved into cabins at the Sebago Resort, thirteen miles north of Brainerd. They spent ten days cruising the streets of Brainerd, filingin