Read Online Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough - Free Book Online

barley hung thick outside Hamm’s Brewery, which rose from the streets of Minneapolis like some medieval European castle. Festooned with flags, its eight-story brick facade had been constructed in the 1840s by a German immigrant named Theodore Hamm. The family’s Tudor mansion loomed on a steep hill above.
    On the street outside the brewery, a twenty-four-year-old man in a chauffeur’s cap sat in a black Ford sedan, watching the scene with expressionless eyes. His name was Alvin Karpis, though everyone called him by his alias, “Ray.” Cold, aloof, a ringer for Boris Karloff, Karpis had a frosty demeanor, which earned him the nickname “Old Creepy.” He was the brains behind the unsung villains of Depression-era crime, the Barker Gang, or as Karpis liked to call it, the Barker-Karpis Gang. His partners, the diminutive brothers Fred and Arthur “Dock” Barker, were from Tulsa. Fred was twenty-nine, five-feet-four, lean, feral, and menacing, with three gold teeth and greasy black hair cut high above his ears. His older brother Dock was a borderline moron with three facial moles, an unreliable drunk just six months out of the Oklahoma state prison.
    When it was over, J. Edgar Hoover would label the Barkers the “brainiest and most dangerous” gang of the War on Crime. During their lives, however, they received a fraction of the publicity afforded the likes of John Dillinger. Yet the scale and ambition of the Barker-Karpis Gang’s crimes dwarfed those of their peers, and their ability to strike alliances with Northern crime syndicates—no small achievement for what was essentially a pack of murderous hillbillies—would make them the most difficult of the FBI’s public enemies to defeat.
    Seventy years after their heyday, all that remains of the gang’s legacy is the FBI-sponsored myth of Kate “Ma” Barker, Fred and Dock’s sixty-something mother, who in a blaze of posthumous notoriety was portrayed as the murderous, machine gun-wielding brains of the gang. “The most vicious, dangerous, and resourceful criminal brain this country has produced in many years belonged to a person called ‘Mother Barker,’” Hoover wrote in 1938. “In her sixty years or so this woman reared a spawn of hell . . . To her [her sons] looked for guidance, for daring, resourcefulness. They obeyed her implicitly.”
    It is a characterization advanced by otherwise credible books, notably John Toland’s 1963 Dillinger Days, as well as by B-movies like Roger Corman’s Bloody Mama. Yet there is no evidence whatsoever to support the myth of Ma Barker’s criminal genius. According to FBI files and those few who lived to tell of her, Ma Barker wasn’t even a criminal, let alone a mastermind. There’s no evidence she ever robbed a bank or fired a gun. She was never arrested. Hoover’s portrayal of her as “the most feared woman in American crime” is baseless. During her life, Ma Barker was unknown; no one outside the gang knew who she was.
    Short and plump, with stringy black hair she styled into comical piles of curls on special occasions, Arizona Donnie Barker was a frowsy hillbilly woman whose only interest, aside from doing jigsaw puzzles and listening to Amos ’n’ Andy, was the welfare of her sons. She knew of their crimes and lived on their ill-gotten income, but the idea that she was the leader of the gang was “the most ridiculous story in the annals of crime,” Karpis once said. One of the gang’s mentors, the Jazz Age yegg Harvey Bailey, scoffed at the idea that Ma planned their exploits. “The old woman couldn’t plan breakfast,” Bailey once said.
    Ma Barker was born in Ash Grove, Missouri, outside Springfield, probably in 1873. By the time she and her husband moved to Tulsa around 1910, they had four sons, all of whom would become criminals. The eldest, Herman, was a stickup man who wandered the West robbing stores before shooting himself in the head after police cornered him in a vacant lot in Wichita, Kansas,