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By Root 2197 0

Zetzer, who had flown bootlegging missions during Prohibition, ferrying Canadian whiskey into northern Ohio. Zetzer no longer had a plane, so Karpis bought him one, a red four-seat Stinson; it cost $1,700. Zetzer was just one of several new men Karpis brought in to handle aspects of the job. He had four for the robbery itself: Hunter, Harry Campbell, Sam Coker, and an aging yegg named Ben Grayson.ex He also brought in a twenty-one-year-old Oklahoma kid named Milton Lett who was sweeping floors at the Harvard Club.

Preparations went smoothly until October 19, when Lett and Clayton Hall bought the getaway car at an Akron Ford dealership. The roll of cash they flashed attracted attention. Later that day Akron detectives arrested the two at a local hotel as “suspicious persons.” They were released on bail, and Karpis decided against allowing the incident to derail his plans. He should have; the brief detention of his new partners would come back to haunt him. Two weeks later, on November 2, Karpis gathered the men at Edith Barry’s brothel to go over their assignments. There was a snag. Sam Coker had come down with gonorrheal rheumatism. Karpis called one of his oldest friends, a Tulsa fence named Burrhead Keady, and had him send up his bartender to substitute.ey

Finally, on the morning of November 7, they were ready. At 2:00 that afternoon Karpis, driving a new Plymouth sedan, cruised into the station lot at Garrettsville. There were about sixty people milling about on the platform. The men took their positions. At 2:13 the train appeared, coasting to a stop just where Karpis knew it would. The engine exhaled. Stepping to the mail car, Karpis saw the new man, Ben Grayson, climb into the cab. Fred Hunter was standing in the parking lot, making sure no one left. The mail-car door opened, and Karpis whipped out his Thompson gun, startling a pair of clerks. Before he could say a word, they disappeared inside. Just then he was distracted by a commotion in the parking lot. He turned and saw Hunter chasing two men, taking his attention off a couple who were starting their car.

Karpis stalked to the car, opened the door and, as the terrified driver froze, grabbed the car keys and threw them across the parking lot. In a moment he was back to the mail car. The clerks were nowhere to be seen. He tossed in a stick of unlit dynamite. “I’m gonna heave another stick in there,” he hollered, “and it’ll be burning. You’ve got five, and I’m counting now. One, two . . .”

A moment later the clerks appeared, hands raised.

“You can’t do this, man,” one of them said.

Karpis set the Thompson gun to single-shot and aimed it over the clerks’ heads. It jammed, but the clerks got the message. He jumped into the car and followed them to the mail bags. Karpis asked for the payroll to Warren. A clerk lifted one padlocked sack and handed it to him. When he asked for the Youngstown payroll, the clerk said it wasn’t on the train. Karpis aimed his Thompson gun at the man’s chest. Just then Harry Campbell climbed into the car. “Look out, Harry,” Karpis said, “I’m gonna shoot this guy.”

The clerk, on the verge of tears, produced a ledger and pointed to it, trying to show Karpis the Youngstown payrolls weren’t on the train. Irate, Karpis told him to snatch up several bags of registered mail instead. Then he ordered the clerks to load them into the back of the waiting Plymouth. It was all over in five minutes.

The getaway went smoothly. They followed Karpis’s git to the Lake Erie town of Port Clinton, where they emptied the money bags in the pilot John Zetzer’s garage. Karpis was disappointed. The take came to only $34,000; he was expecting five times that much. The next morning they were airborne by 10:30, but it was a short flight; the plane ran out of gas over southern Indiana, forcing them to land outside Evansville. Zetzer hitchhiked into town, bought forty-seven gallons of gasoline at a Standard Oil station, and they were soon airborne once more, only to run out of gas a second time, forcing a landing in a field in Missouri. Once again Zetzer was obliged