Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [295]
The FBI had no idea Karpis was behind the Garrettsville job. Karpis and Hunter picked up their girlfriends and drove into Texas, where they spent several days relaxing at the home of Goldstein’s brother. They then took a drive along the Gulf Coast, fishing and sunbathing. After three weeks they returned to Hot Springs, where they shuttled from flat to flat, never staying in one place too long.
Karpis sent for Clayton Hall in January, handing him $1,100 to buy him a new car. Afterward, believing it was safe to arrange a more permanent home, Karpis rented a lake house. They passed the days fishing, the nights at the Hatterie. Fred Hunter was gone much of the time, driving through Florida and Texas with his girlfriend. In March, Karpis moved once more, renting a farmhouse south of Hot Springs. A genteel, two-story affair, with trellises flanking the front door, it stood on a wooded hill overlooking the Malvern Road. Karpis liked it. If the FBI staged a raid here, he decided, he would see them coming.
For the Bureau, the story of the Karpis manhunt is one of the least flattering chapters in the War on Crime. There was an air of lethargy and anticlimax about it from the start; none of the agents could get too excited about risking their lives in one last battle of a war they had already won, and it showed.
After ten months of work, following tips from Boston to Havana to Los Angeles, at the moment Karpis robbed the Garrettsville train the FBI had no serious leads on his whereabouts. The Bureau had no jurisdiction for the Garrettsville robbery, and thus performed no investigation. But Garrettsville triggered the entry of another force into the manhunt, an intrepid squad of federal postal inspectors whose dogged pursuit of Karpis quickly eclipsed the FBI’s search. Working from Youngstown, the inspectors needed only twenty-four hours to finger Karpis and Campbell for the Garrettsville robbery; eyewitnesses easily identified photos of both men.ez Keeping this to the postal inspectors, the lead inspector, Sylvester J. Hettrick, reached out to the Kansas State Highway Patrol, which already had a detective named Joe Anderson pursuing rumors Karpis was involved in several Kansas robberies.
Anderson would have made a first-rate FBI agent. Within weeks, working his contacts in the Tulsa underworld, he had identified Sam Coker as a participant in the Garrettsville job; Coker had disappeared in the days before Karpis struck, stupidly telling friends he was heading east to participate in a mail robbery. At first Anderson and the postal inspectors freely cooperated with the FBI, passing on tips about Coker and others. When Connelley heard the rumor Karpis had robbed the Garrettsville train, he asked the Cleveland office to investigate; agents there simply chatted up the inspectors, who happily shared their leads. For the most part the FBI ignored them.
Through December and into January the inspectors’ investigation gained momentum. They traced the car used in the robbery to Akron, where a salesman identified Milton Lett as its purchaser.fa They soon identified the steelworker Clayton Hall, and then Freddie Hunter. Connelley ignored it all. From all appearances the FBI simply couldn’t bring itself to believe a rival agency had mounted a more credible investigation than its own. Despite the obvious progress the inspectors were making, Connelley was dismissive.
“[T]he Post Office Inspectors have themselves all worked up to a heat, and think they are going to catch Karpis and Campbell in a short time,” an aide wrote Hoover after a talk with Connelley. “Connelley said that he does not believe they have half as much as they would have you believe; that they have a few leads here and there, and when these are exhausted they will probably let us have the information.”6
Instead the Bureau stepped up its surveillance of the Karpis and Campbell families. In Chicago agents had the Karpis