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Baby Face Nelson’s three-man gang reassembled in St. Paul in the last week of February. Spring meant the opening of bank season. The cat roads would soon be passable, and Nelson sat down with Harry Sawyer’s favorite jug marker, a red-haired ex-con named Eddie Green, to map a plan of attack. It was Green who had identified the string of banks the Barkers had robbed in 1932 and early 1933. For the spring of 1934, Green had targeted three banks for the Nelson Gang, one in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and two in Iowa, at Mason City and Newton. The problem was manpower. Everyone agreed they needed more than three men. But with the arrests of Harvey Bailey and so many others, the pool of experienced yeggs in St. Paul was dwindling; no one was eager to hire strangers.

A solution came with the strange phone call from John Hamilton asking if Nelson’s gang might be able to free Dillinger from the Crown Point jail. By all accounts, Nelson was intrigued by the idea. Hamilton had suggested they smuggle Dillinger a gun. Nelson didn’t know how. But he knew someone who did. Alvin Karpis had once told him of having smuggled a gun to Harvey Bailey in a Kansas jail; the gun was discovered, but at least they managed to get it inside. Using Harry Sawyer as an intermediary, Nelson sent word to Karpis in Chicago.

Karpis drove up from Chicago with Dock Barker for the meeting, a little irritated that Nelson wouldn’t explain what it was about. When darkness fell they drove out to the river cliffs, pulled up to Jack Peifer’s elegant restaurant-casino, The Hollyhocks Club, and left their car with the valet. In an upstairs office they found the Nelson Gang.

“So,” Karpis asked, “what do you guys want?”

“You can go ahead and explain to him if you want,” Nelson said to Van Meter.

“You go ahead, Jimmy,” Van Meter said.

Nelson smiled. “Hey, you remember when you guys robbed that bank in Fort Scott, Kansas?”

“Yeah, I remember it,” Karpis said. “What about it?”

“Well, you remember Bailey was in jail there, and when he got took, they shook his cell down and they found a .45 automatic in the mattress? You probably were the one that got that gun brought in there to him, wasn’t you?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact,” Karpis said. He explained how he had planned an escape, but had given up in the face of tight security.

“How did you go about getting that gun in there and why wasn’t Bailey able to use the damn thing?” Nelson asked.

Karpis explained that Bailey was watched too closely. “Why do you ask? What’s going on?”

Nelson glanced at Van Meter. “Well, look,” he said, “you know we got a guy, a pretty good lawyer in Chicago, and he’s got a real good connection over in Indiana and they can get a gun brought in to Dillinger. But he wanted to know what we were going to do and how we were going to do it, and they wanted five thousand dollars to do the damn thing. We were thinking maybe we could just do this ourselves.”

Karpis sighed. “You mean to say you had me come all the way up here to talk about this goddamn thing?” Nelson apologized. Attempting to placate Karpis, he asked whether anyone in the Barker Gang would join them in the robberies they planned. Karpis begged off; he liked Nelson, but considered him too unstable to work with. “Well, we’d like some guys that could go on that damn thing,” Nelson said.

He turned to Barker.

“Can you go on it, Dock?”

“Yeah, I could,” Dock said. “Why? How many guys do you need?”

“Two,” Nelson said.

“What do you think about Bill Weaver?” Barker asked Karpis.

“Hell yeah, he’d go on it,” Karpis said.

“When are you guys gonna go?” Dock asked.

“Well first,” Nelson said, “we think we can get Dillinger out of there and hell, we got all the arrangements made in Chicago that if he beats that jail, we’ll have him up in St. Paul inside ten hours, and we’d go ahead and take this damn bank in South Dakota.”

“It’s liable to get pretty hot here,” Karpis said. Everyone knew the FBI was flooding agents into St. Paul for the Bremer case. Van Meter spoke up. “We thought so