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Nelson was first out the door, pushing the cashier in front of him. Across the street Kinkema saw him and fired. Nelson ducked, then fired in return, bullets from his submachine gun shattering several car windows. Bentz came out next, one arm around the waist of a teller. The others followed, herding hostages before them.

Then they noticed the getaway car was gone. “Our car—where the hell is it?” someone yelled.

For a moment Bentz was too stunned to speak. Then, spying Kinkema crouched behind a car across the street, he raised his pistol and shot out more car windows. Kinkema ran back into his store. Other gang members fired bursts up and down the street, sending townspeople fleeing for cover. Bentz and Nelson gathered the hostages into a scrum and walked the group down the street, away from the bank. When he reached an intersection, Bentz jogged into the oncoming traffic, waving his pistol, and forced a Chevrolet to stop. The woman driving the car refused to get out until Bentz shoved his gun in her face. Nelson and the others leaped inside—all except a gang member named Earl Doyle, who was tackled by a bank manager and arrested. Nelson demanded that Bentz circle back for Doyle, but Bentz was stopping for no one.

They were in trouble. The “git” was in the getaway car, forcing Bentz to drive the escape route from memory. Worse, the commandeered Chevy had barely a gallon of gas. Eight miles south of Grand Haven they spotted a car parked at the side of the road. They ordered the two women inside to get out and took the car, but two of its tires soon went flat. The gang commandeered yet another car, this one driven by four college students. They didn’t reach Long Beach until dawn.

They pulled up near a local riding academy and counted the take. It was miserable, barely $3,500, or roughly $600 a man. The next morning, Bentz moved out of his Long Beach bungalow. He’d had enough of Baby Face Nelson and his little gang of amateurs. He would never see Nelson or any of the others again. Back at his beach house, meanwhile, Nelson crossed the road to tell Alvin Karpis about his first real bank robbery. But Karpis was gone. He had a job of his own to handle.ac

St. Paul, Minnesota August 30, 8:30 A.M.

“Have you checked out that medicine kit and everything’s all right?” Freddie Barker asked.

“Yeah,” said Karpis. “We’ve got everything in there.”

The mood in the living room was tense. Everyone was there: Freddie and Dock Barker, Alvin Karpis, Bill Weaver, old Chuck Fitzgerald. Everything was set: the guns were oiled, the ammo checked. No one was eager for this job but they needed the money. Karpis had flown out to Reno and passed the Hamm ransom at a cost of 7.5 percent, but even in 1933, $95,000 cut fourteen ways didn’t last forever.ad

“We’ve got the booze,” Karpis went on, “in case we have to wash out any holes anybody gets put in them, and I’ve got the morphine and all those little vials with them. I got quarter-grain and half-grain vials there. Plenty of bandages and everything.”

Barker forced a laugh. “You know,” he said, “it just might be that we’re going to need some of that stuff on all of us today.”

The five men rose and walked out to the cars.

South St. Paul 9:30 A.M.

Every Wednesday morning the Minneapolis Federal Reserve shipped the payroll for the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant to the railway depot in South St. Paul. There two messengers picked up the heavy bags of cash and, escorted by two police officers, walked around the corner to the South St. Paul post office, where they picked up more cash.

That morning when the train coasted to a stop at 9:19, Karpis and the Barkers were waiting. The two young messengers, Joe Hamilton, twenty-one, and Herbert Cheyne, twenty, took the bags, exited the station, and turned up an alley along with the two uniformed officers assigned to escort them that morning: Leo Pavlak, a rookie patrolman and father of two, and John Yeaman, a father of three. Standing at the head of the alley, inside a café on North Concord