Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [293]
“Mr. Connelley and I believe that the lack of concentrated activity upon known contacts of the Karpis mob for the past two months will have a beneficial effect in that it has allowed these contacts to ‘cool off’ to such a point where the members of the mob will be more careless” in contacting them, he memoed Hoover on August 1.4 Connelley decided to assign four members of the Flying Squad to hunt Karpis full-time, concentrating the search on Toledo and Chicago. Picking up rumors that Karpis had been seen at Edith Barry’s whorehouse, they rented a surveillance flat and installed wiretaps.
Meanwhile, Karpis was once again growing restless. In early September, he and his three-man gang checked out of the cabins at Lake Hamilton. After a two-day party at the Hatterie, they left Hot Springs, heading north. The day they departed, the corrupt detective Dutch Akers called in a group of reporters and announced his discovery that Karpis had been staying at Lake Hamilton. He telephoned the FBI’s Little Rock office and furnished the gang’s license plate numbers and aliases. The news made headlines around the country. It must have seemed a canny move. In one fell swoop Akers had not only covered himself, he had all but assured that Karpis would not return to Hot Springs and bring attention to Akers’s enterprises.
To the FBI, Akers’s announcement appeared to be just one more supposed sighting, the kind of Chinese fire drill agents had endured in spots as disparate as Grant’s Pass (Oregon), Sarasota Springs, Atlantic City, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, New Orleans, and half the towns in Oklahoma and Missouri. An agent named B. L. Damron drove down from Little Rock and chatted with Akers, who emphasized he had never seen the suspects himself. Damron drove to the lake and searched the cabins. He found three bottles of gonorrhea medicine. The doctor’s records listed the patient as Freddie Hunter. The name meant nothing to the FBI, and when no one at Dyer’s Landing seemed able to identity photos of Karpis, Damron wrapped up the investigation.5
Because Karpis had been posing as a gambler from Ohio, the gang’s aliases were sent to the Cleveland office, which checked them with police. No one had ever heard of gamblers named Fred Parker or Ed King; unfortunately, agents neglected to ask for information on Freddie Hunter. Afterward, Hoover’s men took the Hot Springs articles, threw them in a file and forgot about it.
Drinking, whoring, and bass fishing were pleasant pastimes, but they weren’t why Karpis had become a criminal. In the balmy days of September, sitting out on the shore of Lake Hamilton in his khakis and white T-shirt, he found himself yearning to take a big score, something exciting, something to get his adrenaline up. He was bored. Hunter suggested a target, a mail train that ferried bags of cash from the Cleveland Federal Reserve to Youngstown to fill the payroll needs of eastern Ohio’s sprawling steel mills. The idea of a train robbery appealed to Karpis’s sense of history. Jesse James robbed trains. Butch Cassidy robbed trains. Now Alvin Karpis would rob a train.
They drove to Toledo, visiting Edith Barry’s brothel just days after the FBI abandoned surveillance and phone taps on the house. After hearing rumors the FBI had been nosing around, they relocated to the steelworker Clayton Hall’s home outside Youngstown. Karpis decided to hit the train at Garrettsville, north of the city. Fearing the FBI, he decided to bring train robbery into the modern age and escape by air. Hunter knew a pilot in Port Clinton named John