Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [291]
An era had passed. There would be no more of this sort of American outlaw for the simple reason that there was no more outdistancing the law; the FBI could go anywhere. Moreover, the harboring trials sent exactly the message Hoover intended; one by one, the yeggmen’s havens were closing down. St. Paul’s days as a crime center were passing; the Green Lantern had closed. In Chicago the Syndicate wanted nothing to do with the heat yeggs brought. Louie Cernocky was already gone, felled by a heart attack in September 1934. Miami, Reno, and Cleveland were shutting down.
No one felt the winds of change more acutely than Alvin Karpis. Pacing a Toledo whorehouse that winter, Karpis tried to make sense of the new world he faced. He thought about putting together any number of bank jobs, but finding partners was difficult. All the good yeggs were gone. He was lonely; he missed Freddie. He passed the days reading newspapers, Reader’s Digest, Time, Field & Stream, The Saturday Evening Post. He read that Delores had given birth in a Philadelphia hospital. He was now the father of a son named Raymond. He read that his parents had taken the boy when Delores drew a five-year sentence in Milan, Michigan. She was put in a cell near Kathryn Kelly.
After a few weeks, Karpis stirred. The Toledo police were still launching periodic raids around the city. A friend from his Harvard Club days, a slender, stuttering blackjack dealer named Freddie Hunter, found him a new place to live, at the Youngstown home of a sheet-metal worker named Clayton Hall; Hall’s house was so small that for a time Karpis was obliged to sleep with Hall’s teenage son. In time his money ran low. Hunter suggested robbing a payroll shipment bound for Hall’s employer, the Youngstown Steel & Tube Plant in Warren. Hunter couldn’t go; Warren was his hometown, and he feared he would be recognized.
Karpis studied the job and felt he needed three men in total; with Harry Campbell, who had remained in Toledo, as his partner, he needed one more. Karpis and Campbell drove to Tulsa on a recruiting trip. They could find no one to join them; they were too hot. Karpis returned to Ohio and, at wit’s end, hired one of Freddie Hunter’s pals, a heroin addict named Joe Rich who lived with a whorehouse madame in Canton. Karpis joked that he would have hired the madame at that point.
On the afternoon of April 24, 1935, Karpis drew up to the train station at Warren. The mail truck was already parked, waiting for the train to arrive. Campbell and Joe Rich got out, guns beneath their overcoats. Karpis thought they looked too conspicuous on the empty platform. Apparently the station master thought so, too. He watched them intently. Campbell returned to the car, worried.
“Do you realize we’re gonna have to kill a lot of people to take this payroll?” he asked. Karpis sighed and said everything would be fine. Suddenly a cat darted in front of the car.
“That was a black cat,” Campbell said.
“Forget it,” Karpis said. “The cat had white marks all over its chest.”
“That cat was black as coal,” Campbell said.
Karpis sighed: here they were, ready for their first job in over a year, and they were arguing about black cats. A whistle sounded; the train was coming. When it arrived, they watched the couriers load the payroll bags into the truck. As the truck pulled away from the curb, Karpis eased in front of it. He stayed abreast of the truck for several blocks, until it came to a stop at a railroad crossing. Campbell and Joe Rich jumped out of the car, .45s in their hands. The driver took one look at them and tossed his pistol into the street.
Campbell and Rich climbed into the cab, took the driver hostage,