Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [21]
At wit’s end, Clyde drove back to Dallas to get Bonnie’s sister Billie. He reached the Parker home early that evening. Both Mrs. Parker and Mrs. Barrow offered to come to Fort Smith, but Clyde waited instead for Billie, who was at the movies. Clyde paced the Parkers’ living room anxiously, at one point breaking into tears. He hadn’t slept in two days, and the strain was showing. Finally Billie returned and after packing some clothes, left with Clyde.
Ted Hinton, a deputy sheriff who knew Clyde, was on night patrol when he spotted the car heading east. He hesitated because he didn’t recognize Billie. By the time he turned to follow, Clyde was gone. Driving fast through the East Texas night, he and Billie reached Fort Smith at dawn to find Bonnie on the verge of death.
Minneapolis, Minnesota Thursday, June 15 12:45 P.M.
Five days later, as Clyde hovered over Bonnie’s deathbed in Arkansas, the familiar smell of fresh hops and barley hung thick outside Hamm’s Brewery, which rose from the streets of Minneapolis like some medieval European castle. Festooned with flags, its eight-story brick facade had been constructed in the 1840s by a German immigrant named Theodore Hamm. The family’s Tudor mansion loomed on a steep hill above.
On the street outside the brewery, a twenty-four-year-old man in a chauffeur’s cap sat in a black Ford sedan, watching the scene with expressionless eyes. His name was Alvin Karpis, though everyone called him by his alias, “Ray.” Cold, aloof, a ringer for Boris Karloff, Karpis had a frosty demeanor, which earned him the nickname “Old Creepy.” He was the brains behind the unsung villains of Depression-era crime, the Barker Gang, or as Karpis liked to call it, the Barker-Karpis Gang. His partners, the diminutive brothers Fred and Arthur “Dock” Barker, were from Tulsa. Fred was twenty-nine, five-feet-four, lean, feral, and menacing, with three gold teeth and greasy black hair cut high above his ears. His older brother Dock was a borderline moron with three facial moles, an unreliable drunk just six months out of the Oklahoma state prison.
When it was over, J. Edgar Hoover would label the Barkers the “brainiest and most dangerous” gang of the War on Crime. During their lives, however, they received a fraction of the publicity afforded the likes of John Dillinger. Yet the scale and ambition of the Barker-Karpis Gang’s crimes dwarfed those of their peers, and their ability to strike alliances with Northern crime syndicates—no small achievement for what was essentially a pack of murderous hillbillies—would make them the most difficult of the FBI’s public enemies to defeat.
Seventy years after their heyday, all that remains of the gang’s legacy is the FBI-sponsored myth of Kate “Ma” Barker, Fred and Dock’s sixty-something mother, who in a blaze of posthumous notoriety was portrayed as the murderous, machine gun-wielding brains of the gang. “The most vicious, dangerous, and resourceful criminal brain this country has produced in many years belonged to a person called ‘Mother Barker,’” Hoover wrote in 1938. “In her sixty years or so this woman reared a spawn of hell . . . To her [her sons] looked for guidance, for daring, resourcefulness. They obeyed her implicitly.”
It is a characterization advanced by otherwise credible books, notably John Toland’s 1963 Dillinger Days, as well as by B-movies like Roger Corman’s Bloody Mama. Yet there is no evidence whatsoever to support the myth of Ma Barker’s criminal genius. According to FBI files and those few who lived to tell of her, Ma Barker wasn’t even a criminal, let alone a mastermind. There