Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [74]
Later Karpis and Barker walked down to their cars. Fred was clearly irritated at Ziegler for botching the Federal Reserve job.
“Tell that son of a bitch maybe he can find another caper as good as the one that we just went on,” he said.
“Hell, you can’t blame the guy,” Karpis said. “I’m sure he didn’t go on it for kicks. He thought we were going to get money the same as I did. In fact, I already had planned on going to Australia if we had got anything like what we were supposed to have got.”
Barker looked at him. “Australia?” he said.
“Hell yeah,” Karpis said. “You don’t think if I’d have got a lot of money that I wouldn’t get the hell out of this country? This country’s going to be pretty hot. That damn thing in Kansas City where Verne killed all them cops and Frank Nash? This thing is going to wind up being the worst thing that ever happened to guys like us. In another year or so, the government will probably be taking over the banks to stop bank robbery, so you’d better just figure now that we ain’t got too much damn longer to make a lot of money and get away.”20
Barker made a face; he hated when Karpis got big-picture on him. But he was right. The police were drawing closer. That weekend Chicago detectives traced the gang’s getaway car to the mob mechanic who had serviced Machine Gun Kelly. The mechanic’s detention, in turn, led to the arrest of a syndicate money launderer named Gus Winkler, a man both Kelly and Karpis had done business with. Both were handed over to the FBI. Monday morning Melvin Purvis stepped in front of reporters and announced—inexplicably—that the bullets that killed Officer Cunningham had been fired from the same gun used in the Kansas City Massacre. He speculated that a pair of octagonal glasses Gus Winkler wore might be connected to a pair of glasses Kelly was known to wear.
“There is a possibility that Kelly and Winkler are associated together,” Purvis intoned, “and that they may have had the same idea about octagon glasses, which are used by the extremely sedate type of person. Or they may even have interchanged glasses.”21
Once again others were being blamed for the Barker Gang’s crimes. But it was the heat that police were bringing to bear on the Syndicate that worried Karpis most. Chastened by his meeting with Frank Nitti, he reflected that it might be time the gang left Chicago.
That Friday night, as Karpis prepared for an urgent vacation, Machine Gun Kelly arrived in Memphis with Kathryn and twelve-year-old Geralene Arnold after a daylong drive from Chicago. Kelly headed straight to the garage attendant’s bungalow on East Raynor Street where he had hidden before; the attendant, a small man whose left side was paralyzed, waved the Kellys in without a question.
The next day, Kelly called at the home of his former brother-in-law, Langford Ramsey, and enjoyed a reunion with his two young sons, Bruce and George, Jr. Years later Bruce Barnes remembered his father that day as a smiling, yellow-haired man wearing a charcoal gray suit, a shoulder holster, and pistol. He said he was an FBI agent on a secret mission and gave the boys $20 apiece he peeled from a fat roll of bills.
Kelly and Kathryn began drinking gin with Lang Ramsey that afternoon and continued well into the evening. At some point, Kelly revealed to Ramsey that he was Machine Gun Kelly. For years afterward Ramsey would claim that he thought Kelly was joking. Whatever he believed, Lang Ramsey agreed to do his former brother-in-law a favor, a big one. The Kellys were running low on money; they needed the cash they had buried on Kathryn’s uncle’s ranch in West Texas, but were afraid to retrieve it themselves. Ramsey agreed to get it for them.
The next morning at dawn Ramsey drove west. Beside him on the front seat sat the homesick Geralene Arnold, whom Kathryn had strong-armed into guiding Ramsey to her uncle’s spread. While the Kellys remained at the house