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The Green Lantern, run by a roly-poly Orthodox Jew named Harry Sawyer, was St. Paul’s criminal headquarters, a clubhouse that drew every major bank man in the Midwest. The Jazz Age yeggs Harvey Bailey and Frank Nash were regulars, as were vacationing gunmen from Chicago and scores of wannabes, including George Barnes, later known as Machine Gun Kelly. Karpis was dazzled. He and Freddie moved Ma and Albert Dunlop into a house on the south side and went to work guarding cigarette shipments and pulling burglaries. In March 1932 they were invited on their first major bank job, in downtown Minneapolis.

Just days afterward, their landlady’s son saw their pictures in a detective magazine. The corrupt detectives who took the call delayed long enough for everyone to get away, but Karpis and Barker blamed the drunken Albert Dunlop for their exposure, dragged him to a lake outside town, and shot him dead. Relocating to Kansas City, they robbed a bank that June in Fort Scott, Kansas, alongside Harvey Bailey. When Bailey was subsequently arrested, they struck out on their own, robbing a series of banks across the Upper Midwest. By autumn Fred had enough money to bribe his brother Dock and one of Dock’s Tulsa friends, Volney Davis, out of prison.c Dock and Davis became the gang’s newest members.

Drawing from the most desperate of the St. Paul yeggs, the Barker-Karpis Gang had few qualms about gunplay. In a robbery that December, they machine-gunned two Minneapolis cops; when they stopped to change cars during the getaway, a bystander glanced at Fred Barker a moment too long and Fred shot him dead. After a winter vacation in Reno, where Karpis befriended a gangland chauffeur named Jimmy Burnell, whom he would later introduce around St. Paul, the gang robbed a Nebraska bank in a hail of gunfire. One gang member was killed, and Karpis began thinking of safer ways to make money. It made him open to the idea of the kidnapping that Harry Sawyer brought to him that spring.

As Karpis watched, William Hamm, the brewery’s thirty-eight-year-old chairman, stepped out a backdoor into the noon sun. Turning left, he began walking up the hill toward the mansion for lunch. Across the way, Dock Barker raised his arm, giving the signal. As Hamm stepped onto the sidewalk, another gang member, Charley Fitzgerald, wearing a homburg and a dark suit, walked up to him and offered his right hand.

“You are Mr. Hamm, are you not?” he asked.

“Yes,” Hamm said, shaking the stranger’s hand. Suddenly Fitzgerald tightened his grip, put his left hand onto Hamm’s elbow, and guided him toward the curb. At that point Dock ran up, taking Hamm’s other elbow. “What is it you want?” Hamm asked, confused.

Just then Karpis pulled the Hudson up to the curb, and Hamm was shoved into the backseat. Dock Barker followed, slipped a pillowcase over Hamm’s head, and pushed him down onto the floorboards.

“I don’t like to do this,” Fitzgerald said to Hamm. “But I’m going to have to ask you to get down on the floor because I don’t want you to see where you’re going. I hope you don’t mind.”

They drove east. Thirty miles outside of St. Paul, the car pulled alongside a Chevrolet. Inside sat Freddie and a smooth Chicago gangster named “Shotgun George Ziegler” (whose real name was Fred Goetz), who had been brought in with his partner Bryan Bolton to help on the job.d Ziegler shoved a typewritten ransom note into Hamm’s hands. “I guess you know what this is all about,” he said. “Sign these papers and sign them quick.”

Hamm, on his knees, did as he was told. “Who do you want as a contact man?” Ziegler asked.

Hamm named William Dunn, the brewery’s vice president of sales.

Karpis suppressed a smile. It was exactly what they wanted him to say. Billy Dunn was a bagman for the St. Paul mob, a friend of Harry Sawyer’s, and a man the gang members knew they could count on.

At 2:40 that afternoon, Billy Dunn was sitting in his office at the brewery when his phone rang.