Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [104]
No one is certain what Bonnie and Clyde did; according to Clyde’s sister Nell, they probably spent Christmas alone at the abandoned house in Grand Prairie. In the Oklahoma hills, Pretty Boy Floyd’s family wondered what he was doing; no one ever found out. Baby Face Nelson spent the holidays in the Bay Area. In her Chicago apartment, the cranky Ma Barker surprised the gang by holding a Christmas dinner. Everyone exchanged presents, swapping handbags and perfume and shiny shaving kits.
All evening Ma was a woman transformed, smiling and laughing and paying attention to the gang’s girlfriends. “Now you come over any time you want!” she told Delores Delaney at evening’s end. “Why don’t we go downtown and go shopping together?” As they drove home, Delaney and Karpis tried to fathom the change in Ma’s demeanor.
“What the hell got into her?” Karpis asked.
“That old lady,” Delaney said. “She’s lonesome.”
In Daytona Beach the Dillinger Gang threw a rousing party. It was the only time members of the gang ever recalled seeing Dillinger drunk. As the last minutes of 1933 ticked away, he stepped out onto a balcony with Mary Kinder, swinging his submachine gun. He motioned toward the moon. “Think I can hit it?” he asked. As the clock struck midnight and church-bells pealed across the town, Dillinger pointed his gun into the air and fired a deafening volley of bullets out over the Atlantic.
As scattered as they were that night, in San Francisco and Chicago and Florida, virtually all the members of all the gangs had at least one thing in common: it was the last New Year’s Eve celebration of their lives.
8
“AN ATTACK ON ALL WE HOLD DEAR”
January 2 to January 28, 1934
In the opening days of 1934, the Dillinger Gang, Bonnie and Clyde, and the Barkers all began to mobilize for major operations. Karpis and the Barkers got to work first, driving from Chicago to St. Paul on January 2 and converging on an apartment Fred Barker had rented. They had seven men for the kidnapping of Edward Bremer: Karpis, the Barker brothers, Shotgun George Ziegler, Dock’s old friends Bill Weaver and Volney Davis, and the new man from Tulsa, Harry Campbell.
All that week Karpis and Fred Barker tailed Bremer. The obvious time to take him was in the morning when the young bank president dropped his nine-year-old daughter off at the Summit School on Goodrich Avenue. He would be alone, and the streets near the school were quiet. Ever the worrier, Karpis fretted about the cars they would use. St. Paul was frigid in January. The temperature plunged to ten below zero each night. They purchased two new Buicks, and Karpis had them outfitted with radios, extra-strength heaters, and frost shields. The last thing they needed was a getaway car seizing up in the subzero cold.
Each night, Karpis and Barker gathered the gang to review the day’s progress in Bill Weaver’s second-floor apartment at the Kensington, a brick apartment building on Portland Avenue. Their planning was in the final stages on Friday, January 12, when the two returned to Weaver’s apartment after nightfall. They parked beside the building, then stopped. Down an alley, they watched as a man hopped onto a box to peer into a window in the building next door. When the man saw them, he dropped to the ground and disappeared around a corner.
Karpis and Barker exchanged glances: it looked like a cop, probably checking the wrong building. “This is bad,” Dock Barker agreed when they briefed the group upstairs. “I’m gonna walk out and see what’s going on.” Dock returned after several minutes. “I see a guy standing on the corner down there,” he said, “and it don’t look right, him standing on the corner without an overcoat in this kind of weather.” They debated what to do. Finally Karpis said he would check with Harry Sawyer at the Green Lantern. If they were under surveillance, Sawyer could call his police contacts and find out.
They decided to leave the building in pairs.