Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [240]
And then he said the words the FBI had waited to hear for more than a year: The massacre. Verne Miller. Pretty Boy Floyd. Johnny Lazia. He could tell them the whole story.
Cleveland, Ohio September 3
Alvin Karpis lay on the warm roof of his Ford, watching the heavens. It was a glorious late-summer day, cotton clouds floating in a turquoise sky. Delores Delaney lay beside him. He could hear her breathing. She was pregnant, almost four months along and starting to show. Above them, the Cleveland Air Show was nearing its climax. Airplanes dived and spun. All around, hundreds of couples sat out on blankets, faces turned upward, watching.
It had been five months since the Barker Gang fled Chicago in the wake of George Ziegler’s murder, five blissfully quiet months without a hint the FBI knew where they were. Karpis had a new job and new friends. He hadn’t committed a notable crime since washing his hands of Ed Bremer in February; he hadn’t robbed a bank in seventeen months. The gang had all but fallen apart. He had done everything he could to distance himself from the others. They were dumb and they drank and they took chances. He and Delores lived a quiet life, in bed most nights by eleven. They could almost relax.
Tensions inside the gang had risen after the move to Toledo. They kept low profiles; a local vice lord, Joe Roscoe, looked after them. Within weeks the money ran low. They still had $150,000 of the ransom money and covered their expenses passing bits of it in Chicago supermarkets. But after the drunken Dr. Moran’s money-laundering operation was uncovered, they could find no one to move the bulk of it. Dock Barker ran out to Reno, but friends there refused to get involved. All the Dillinger publicity had changed the public mood. Now even the gang’s old contacts shunned them. Karpis dwelled on the Syndicate. Dillingermania had brought unwanted heat on its operations, and Karpis wondered whether Frank Nitti wanted them dead.
So they had sat and waited and worried, passing the days drinking beer, fishing on Lake Erie, riding roller-coasters at the Willow Bay Amusement Park, and requesting their favorite songs at Toledo’s premier underworld hangout, the Casino Club. They were all regulars at the club, Karpis and the Barkers sitting in a corner booth, nursing their drinks, old Charlie Fitzgerald cursing the waitresses when they watered his bourbon. An errand boy they brought from Chicago, a onetime golf pro named Willie Harrison, kept everyone entertained, mock-directing the band. One night a singer, a Scottish crooner who performed in a kilt, didn’t take to direction, so Harrison slugged him, igniting a brawl that ended only when Fred Barker coolly placed a pistol to Harrison’s temple. Freddie didn’t like scenes. They drew attention.
The odd donnybrook aside, it was boring. They had little to do but drink. Fred’s girl, Paula Harmon, gulped whiskey all day every day, and she was a nasty drunk. Another gang member, Harry Campbell, bought his nineteen-year-old girlfriend Wynona Burdette an ill-tempered Pekinese. One day Karpis and Freddie were sitting in Barker’s apartment when they heard gunfire. “Did you hear what I heard?” Karpis asked.
“Yeah,” said Barker. “That’s a machine gun.”
A few moments later they heard running steps in the stairwell outside. The bell rang. Someone began kicking the door. Karpis darted into the bedroom, grabbed a submachine gun, and stood to one side of the door. He motioned to Freddie to jerk the door open. Campbell tumbled into the apartment, a bloody towel wrapped around his arm. “What the hell happened?” Karpis demanded. “Is someone after you?”
“No, no,” Campbell said. He was in obvious pain. “That goddamn dog. He went in the neighbors’ yard and I sneaked