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By Root 2281 0

and followed Karpis to the outskirts of Warren, where they found their way to an abandoned shed they had rented. There was no pursuit; they had gotten away clean. In the truck Karpis found what he was looking for, a burlap sack packed with bricks of cash. They counted it on the floor of the shed, all $72,000. Joe Rich was so excited he took out a syringe, drained water from the radiator, boiled his morphine, and shot up. Within minutes he was telling Karpis they should rob the Cleveland Federal Reserve. They returned to Toledo safely, where Karpis’s luck held; the next day two local hoods were arrested for the robbery.

Flush with cash, Karpis and Campbell loitered in Toledo the next month, posing as gamblers. Campbell, who was blessed with an uncluttered mind, paid $10 one night to have sex with an eighteen-year-old girl, proposed to her two days later, and married her a month after that, settling into a trailer behind her mother’s house.ev But Karpis was restless. With Campbell idled by domestic bliss, he hit the road with Freddie Hunter. They took a drive through New York State into New England, stopping at tourist camps as far north as Maine. In Saratoga Springs, Karpis thought a man recognized him, and he was right; news of the sighting made the local papers the next day, by which time Karpis had returned to Ohio. They drove on from there, passing through St. Louis and Tulsa, finding none of their old friends happy to see them.

In June they wandered into Hot Springs. Hunter knew the resort town from a visit in 1929, when he sought treatment there for gonorrhea. Karpis liked the feel of the place, and for good reason. Reform may have been sweeping other cities, but Hot Springs was operating exactly as it had in 1933. Six months later it would welcome another criminal vacationer, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, who would seek its shelter to avoid extradition to New York, where Thomas Dewey was hounding him.

It was somehow fitting that Karpis, the last survivor of the War on Crime, should end up where it all began. The White Front Cigar Store, where Frank Nash had been picked up, was still there, as were the casinos, the Belvedere and the Southern Club. Even Dick Galatas was still in town, awaiting an appeal of his sentence in the massacre case. Dutch Akers, the corrupt detective who had collected the $500 reward for betraying Nash, was still in office. Most evenings he could be found lounging around the town’s newest whorehouse, the Hatterie, next to the towering Arlington Hotel, Al Capone’s onetime hangout.

At the Hatterie, Akers enjoyed the favors of the brothel’s madame, a plumpish, sharp-eyed thirty-two-year-old named Grace Goldstein. Goldstein’s real name was Jewel Laverne Grayson; her family in Texas thought she owned a hat shop. Goldstein entertained the cops because it was smart business; they ran the town. But once Karpis began appearing, she later told the FBI, she “made a play for him.” He wasn’t much to look at, but the roll of cash in his front pocket was a Depression-era whore’s dream. Freddie Hunter, meanwhile, fell hard for one of Goldstein’s prostitutes, a teenage runaway from Oklahoma named Connie Morris.

In July, Karpis and Hunter took another long drive, lazing through Texas and along the Gulf Coast all the way to Florida. They returned to Hot Springs in August, renting cottages on Lake Hamilton outside town. Posing as gamblers named Fred Parker (Hunter) and Ed King (Karpis), they spent their days swimming and fishing, Karpis sitting at the lakeside for hours in khakis and a white T-shirt, casting for bass. Evenings they spent at the Hatterie or dining with their girls. In September Harry Campbell, tiring of life in his mother-in-law’s backyard, arrived and was soon squiring one of Goldstein’s girls. He was followed by another of Karpis’s old Oklahoma pals, a McAlester parolee named Sam Coker.ew At midmonth Hunter left for New York City, where he attended the heavyweight title fight between Joe Louis and Max Baer.

Among the other ninety thousand spectators that evening was J. Edgar Hoover. Their juxtaposition