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Dock had wanted to pull a job in Cleveland, Freddie explained. But Shimmy Patton had insisted that Freddie and Karpis be brought in. No one wanted to do business with Dock by himself. Karpis sighed. There seemed no way to get rid of Freddie’s brother.

A few days later Karpis returned to Lake Weir to discuss the Cleveland job with Freddie. Dock was packed and ready to drive back to Chicago when Karpis arrived. Everyone sat around the kitchen table planning how to get in touch once everything was set for the Cleveland job. Dock would send word, but he wanted to be certain he could remember how to find Freddie’s lake house. He hunched over a road map. “Well hell, I know, I’ll just circle it right here,” Dock said, “and I’ll know this is the town you want me to send the word to. I’ll send it in a letter. Is that the way you want it?”

“Yeah,” Freddie said, “just send a letter down here. Say anything in it, that my brother’s sick or anything, we’ll know they want us in Cleveland.”

Dock stuffed the map into his suitcase.

Chicago, Illinois Tuesday, January 8, 1935 11 A.M.

Earl Connelley stared out the window of the cramped second-floor apartment at 3920 Pine Grove Avenue, one of the two apartment buildings agents had been watching for a week. The night before, “Mr. Esser,” the man they suspected was Dock Barker, had returned to the other building, the Surf Lane Apartments. Below, in the Pine Grove apartment, two couples were living. The agents suspected one of the men was Dock’s pal Russell Gibson. The other, tall and thin, they couldn’t place. An hour earlier they had seen one of the women take her brown Chow tinkling in the alley. A little after that they had seen the thin man on the back porch in his bathrobe.

Connelley studied the ground. The apartment had a single rear entrance, up a flight of wooden stairs from a scrubby backyard. Twenty feet behind the stairs a four-foot fence fronted the alley. Along the walls of the surrounding apartment buildings and garages, Connelley saw, he could station twenty agents. He was satisfied. If all four occupants were inside the apartment, they would raid the building at nightfall. After that they would hit the Surf Street address.

Downtown, Doris Rogers watched the men assemble for the raids. She was struck by the transformation they had undergone these last few months. The nervousness and unsteadiness she had seen in the Verne Miller and Dillinger raids were gone; in its place was a cool professionalism, men comfortable with their guns, jaws set, eyes confident. All that afternoon FBI agents filtered into the two surveillance apartments. Connelley would wait until all the occupants were inside. Then they would move in.

Surf Lane Apartments 6:30 P.M.

It was a mild January evening, the temperature in the upper thirties. Old snow, gray and gritty, clogged the gutters and lined the sidewalks. A dozen agents lingered at spots all around the building. Connelley had left orders to await the raid at 3920 Pine Grove unless the man they believed was Dock Barker attempted to leave.

Jerry Campbell, the marksman Hoover had hired from the Oklahoma City Police Department, was sitting in a car outside the Surf Lane with a rookie named Alexander Muzzey when they saw Mildred Kuhlmann and Dock Barker emerge into the apartment’s courtyard and begin walking toward them. Campbell, a veteran police officer, reacted immediately. Tucking a Thompson gun beneath his overcoat, he stepped from the car. Muzzey got out, too. As the couple strolled out onto the sidewalk and turned west, away from Lake Michigan, the two agents fell in behind them, about twenty feet back.

“Are we gonna take them?” Muzzey whispered.

“Yeah,” said Campbell.

They walked a few more feet. Barker glanced over his shoulder. Kuhlmann kept walking. When Barker turned around once again, Campbell took out his machine gun, Muzzey his pistol. They could see other agents converging all around.

“Stick ’em up!” Muzzey hollered. “We’re federal agents!” Three agents in front of the couple drew their guns.