Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [241]
Karpis laughed. They unwrapped the towel and found deep, bloody teeth marks up and down Campbell’s arm. “I got to get some kind of shots for this,” he said.
“I’ll get hold of Joe Roscoe and find out if he’s got a doctor who can take care of this,” said Karpis.
Just then Dock Barker walked in. “Well, hell, that Doc Moran, he wants to come here and get away from Chicago,” Barker said. “Why the hell don’t we have him give the shots to Campbell? I’ll go to Chicago and get him and bring him up here.”
A few days later Dock returned with Moran, his assistant and their pal Ollie Berg, all eager to flee Chicago. The trio stayed in a hotel and spent their days drinking. Karpis began to get edgy. “I don’t think I’m gonna stay around here,” he told Fred in May. “There’s too many people and there’s too much drinking going on.”
Karpis’s concerns coincided with a job offer from a pair of new friends, a squat mobster named Shimmy Patton and his partner, a thin blond named Art Heberbrand. The two were opening a swank new casino called the Harvard Club in the Cleveland suburb of Newberg Heights and, worried about threats from a rival syndicate, they asked Karpis if he would handle security. Looking for anything to fill his days, and eager to distance himself from the rest of the gang, Karpis accepted. Fred sulked when he wasn’t asked as well. Within days Karpis packed up and moved with Delores to a brick bungalow near the Cleveland airport. It was a quiet neighborhood, green squares of lawn, children in the streets. Delores got busy buying furniture. Karpis liked it.
The casino job was a breeze. Most evenings Karpis threw on his new tuxedo, drove over to the club, and drifted among the gamblers, checking the dice, watching for trouble, and tossing out the occasional drunk. After midnight he propped himself against a wall and watched the accountants count the cash. It was good money, and in idle moments Karpis allowed himself to imagine his life if he had found such a job early on, before he set to robbing banks. He made a list of the rival syndicates’ addresses and each of their children, then sent it to an intermediary with a blunt message: if the Harvard Club was harassed in any way, their houses would be burned down and their children roughed up. There was no trouble after that.
He drove down to Toledo every few days to talk with Fred. The situation there was deteriorating fast. The drunken Dr. Moran had performed fingerprint-removal “surgery” on Dock Barker and was now demanding a share of the ransom money as payment. He was spending evenings at a Toledo brothel, and its madame, Edith Barry, took Dock aside one night and told him Moran had been bragging about the surgeries. “Everything in general is getting bad with this guy,” Dock told Karpis. “I don’t know what the hell to do.” Actually, they did. A few nights later Fred and Dock forcibly removed Moran from the Casino Club, shot him in the face, and buried him in an unmarked grave in Michigan. The FBI would continue to hunt Moran for months and only reluctantly accepted the fact of his death. His body has never been found.
Moran’s demise did little to assuage Karpis’s concerns. Despite all his efforts, the others stuck to him like tar. Restless in Toledo, they followed him to Cleveland one by one. Freddie and Paula Harmon took a bungalow on West 171st Street. Harry Campbell rented an apartment on Franklyn Boulevard. Even Harry Sawyer and his wife, Gladys, came, taking over Fred Barker’s spare bedroom. The Sawyers had fled St. Paul one step ahead of the FBI that spring, and had been shuffling between Nevada tourist camps ever since. To Karpis’s dismay, they brought their five-year-old adopted daughter, Francine, with them. Karpis so detested their presence he moved to a new house on West 140th Street. He told only Fred his new address, and he forbade Delores from seeing the gang’s other women. They were trouble.
Matters came