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“Well, down the street a little ways from here, there’s a police car with two guys in it. But you don’t worry about them, they’re not gonna bother you. They just want to make sure you’re out of that house before they call in to get a raiding party.”

In minutes Karpis and others were on the road to Toledo. Around ten they rendezvoused with Dock and Campbell, who had already rented an apartment that Karpis quickly saw would not be suitable. It was a rundown room in a bad part of town. Karpis’s philosophy had always been to rent in the best areas of a city. Wealthy neighbors didn’t gossip like poor ones, he had found. “This ain’t gonna cut it,” Karpis said. “If we last here till night, we’ll be doing good.”

“What do you think we should do?” Freddie asked.

“What I think we should do is you and Dock go ahead to Chicago, get your mother out of that apartment, put her in a hotel, a nice hotel, for a week or so, or maybe not even that long. But get her out of there. Me and Campbell and Delores will get there this evening.”

What worried Karpis most was the prospect of Cash McDonald returning to Cleveland from Havana with the laundered ransom money and walking into a police trap. “We can just kiss all that money good-bye if that happens,” he said. Somehow McDonald had to be alerted. They split up the guns. The Barkers took a suitcase with two Thompsons. Karpis kept his favorite Thompson gun. Freddie and Dock left immediately for Chicago. Karpis followed that night, meeting them at Ma’s apartment. They had already moved her into a hotel. Ma was on the verge of panic. For the first time she seemed to fully understand their plight. “What’s gonna happen now?” Ma asked. To Karpis she seemed small and weak. All the fight had gone out of her.

Karpis couldn’t get his mind off Cash McDonald. They had to warn him not to return to Cleveland. Then he had an idea. They would leave a message with the manager at McDonald’s Miami hotel, the El Commodoro, in hopes that he would return there after leaving Havana. They would tell McDonald to go straight to Detroit. Willie Harrison could come to Chicago when everything was set. Karpis walked over to a pay phone on 79th Street and made the call. After a few minutes he returned.

“They were in Havana, he’s expecting them back any minute,” Karpis told Freddie. “I explained to him that they were not to go to Cleveland, things had developed there that made it inadvisable for them to return there.” He left instructions for Harrison to meet them in Chicago when everything was set. Then they sat back and waited.

Cleveland, Ohio Friday, September 7

The FBI didn’t learn of the Cleveland raids until Friday morning, when the news broke in the newspapers.ea By then police had firm identifications on all the gang members and had raided Karpis’s bungalow, finding nothing but dirty clothes strewn throughout. Sam Cowley flew to Ohio the next morning to interrogate the three women, who remained in a Cleveland jail. At first they gave bogus stories of having met each other in a nightclub. Paula Harmon threw a series of screaming fits, thrashing and biting at deputies who tried to control her. At one point, she actually defecated on an agent’s shoe.

But by Sunday, when the three women allowed themselves to be taken to Chicago, the fight was going out of them. All three gave long, detailed narratives of their months with the Barker Gang. A few days later Harmon even took agents on a driving tour of northern Illinois in a vain attempt to locate the house where Ed Bremer had been kept.

Karpis and the Barkers, meanwhile, had vanished. Cowley’s last hope of picking up their trail was their informant Helen Ferguson, but he told Hoover he had little confidence she could renew contact with the gang after so long. An agent took Ferguson to Toledo, where she visited the Casino Club and left a message for the Barkers. She was told to stand by; Ferguson took a hotel room, as did her FBI minder. Two days passed. On Sunday, September 9, the agent was called away. He told Ferguson to stay in touch. It looked like a washout.