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Friends say William Hamm was never the same after his kidnapping by the Barker Gang. Though he continued as chairman of Hamm Brewing until his retirement in 1965, he tended to brood, and he surrounded himself with bodyguards. He died in 1970. Roger Touhy, the gangster who was acquitted in the Hamm case, was wrongfully convicted of the kidnapping of the syndicate con man Jake Factor. He served more than twenty years in prison before his release in November 1959. Touhy was shot and killed on the front porch of his sister’s home less than a month later, presumably by old enemies in the syndicate.

Edward Bremer died of a heart attack following a swim at his Florida home in 1965. His father, Adolph, had met the same fate in a Seattle hotel in 1939. Tom Brown, the corrupt detective who conspired with the Barkers, was never prosecuted. He was fired after a civil inquiry and died in 1959 in Ely, Minnesota, where he ran a liquor store.

Dock Barker was shot and killed attempting to escape from Alcatraz in January 1939. Ma Barker’s last living son, Lloyd, who never joined the Barker Gang, was released from Leavenworth in 1947 and was shot to death two years later by his wife at their Denver home. The Barker Gang’s Bill Weaver was felled by a heart attack in Alcatraz in June 1944. Charles Fitzgerald died seven months later, at Leavenworth. Harry Sawyer was released from prison in February 1955 after doctors diagnosed him with inoperable cancer. He died four months later.

Harry Campbell was still in a federal prison hospital in Missouri in 1958; his fate is unknown. Volney Davis was paroled from Alcatraz in the 1950s; according to one source, he died in Oregon in 1978. Wrongfully convicted of taking part in the Urschel kidnapping, Harvey Bailey was finally released from federal custody in 1961 but was immediately rearrested for an old Kansas bank robbery. Released for good in 1965, he married Deafy Farmer’s widow and settled down to a quiet life of carpentry in Joplin. He died in 1979 at the age of ninety-one.

The Barker Gang’s girlfriends and wives faded from public view. Paula Harmon was last seen living with her parents in Port Arthur, Texas, in the late 1930s. Wynona Burdette disappeared, as did Delores Delaney and Harry Sawyer’s wife, Gladys. Mildred Kuhlmann, the Toledo girl whose dalliance with Dock Barker led to the demise of the gang, returned to Ohio, where she married a Sandusky man named Joseph Auerbach; the couple operated a lounge for years. The Auerbachs had two children; today their daughter is married to one of New York’s most prominent criminal-defense attorneys. According to family members, Mildred Kuhlmann Auerbach never spoke of the role she played in the FBI’s war against the Barkers. She died at the age of eighty-five in a Sandusky nursing home on December 10, 1993.3

Then there was Alvin Karpis. After thirty-three years behind bars, Karpis was paroled from the federal prison at McNeil Island, Washington, in January 1969 and deported to Canada. He authored two ghostwritten books, including an autobiography, before moving to Spain in the early 1970s. He died in Torremolinos, Spain, apparently from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, on August 26, 1979.

So much has changed in seventy years, and so little. Many of the War on Crime’s battle sites remain as they did then, out-of-the-way spots, now dusty and cobwebbed, of interest only to the middle-aged crime buffs who come with their cameras and trivia questions. In northern Wisconsin Little Bohemia still sits on the shores of Star Lake. It’s bigger now, with a new bar and lacquered wooden tables in the dining room, the kind of sturdy place where tourists can grab a cheeseburger before an afternoon swim. The foyer walls are lined with cuttings about that night in 1934, but the simplest questions draw friendly shrugs from the bartenders. On a bright August afternoon in 2002 Emil Wanatka’s son was there, visiting from his Florida retirement; the poor man couldn’t get away fast enough