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Authors: Bryan Burrough
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in 1927. The second son, Lloyd, had his career in crime cut short by a twenty-five-year sentence in Leavenworth for robbing a mail truck in 1921. Raised in Tulsa, their younger brothers, Fred and Dock, fell in with a rowdy group of teenage burglars and car thieves known as the Central Park Gang, several of whom would join the Barker-Karpis Gang fifteen years later. In later years the FBI characterized the Central Park Gang as a “school” of crime taught by Ma Barker. There’s no evidence to back up this assertion. Ma’s role, such as it was, was to hector policemen and prosecutors who detained her boys.
They kept her busy. A car thief turned cat burglar, Dock drew a life sentence in an Oklahoma penitentiary after shooting a night watchman in 1922. Freddie, meanwhile, was arrested for burglary in Kansas and thrown into a reformatory. There he met Karpis, the son of Lithuanian immigrants, who had grown up in the streets of Wichita before graduating to a life of petty crime. In the spring of 1931, the two were released separately, and Karpis went to Tulsa to find Freddie. He never forgot his first encounter with Ma Barker, at her shack in a trash-strewn lot beside a set of railroad tracks.
“As I approached, I saw this little dumpy old woman standing on a box, wearing a pair of bib overalls over a man’s sweater,” Karpis remembered years later. She was trying to fix a window screen. He introduced himself and she invited him inside. Karpis was appalled. There was no electricity, no running water. In the backyard was an outhouse. Flies buzzed everywhere. Ma volunteered to send a telegram to Fred in Joplin, and in the ensuing days she and Karpis became friends. In time she all but adopted him. Fred said she preferred Karpis to her own sons. “You don’t get on her nerves the way I do,” her son said. 3
Barker and Karpis began pulling nighttime burglaries around Tulsa. Before long both were arrested. Karpis was released, but Barker was detained and forced to escape. Fleeing the authorities, they took Ma and her boyfriend, an old drunk named Albert Dunlop, to southern Missouri, where they robbed their first bank and used the proceeds to buy Ma a farm. All went well until the week before Christmas, 1931, when the sheriff in the town of West Plains approached them at a gas station for questioning. Karpis panicked and shot the sheriff dead.
They fled one step ahead of a posse, grabbing Ma and racing to the home of a Barker family friend, a worldly confidence man named Herbert “Deafy” Farmer, who operated a kind of safe house for outlaws from across the region at his farm five miles south of Joplin. It was Farmer who suggested that Karpis and Barker take refuge in St. Paul, Minnesota, whose corrupt police force had transformed the quiet river city into the crime capital of the Midwest. And so a few days after Christmas, the two aspiring bank men walked into St. Paul’s Green Lantern tavern—and entered the major leagues of Midwestern crime.
The Green Lantern, run by a roly-poly Orthodox Jew named Harry Sawyer, was St. Paul’s criminal headquarters, a clubhouse that drew every major bank man in the Midwest. The Jazz Age yeggs Harvey Bailey and Frank Nash were regulars, as were vacationing gunmen from Chicago and scores of wannabes, including George Barnes, later known as Machine Gun Kelly. Karpis was dazzled. He and Freddie moved Ma and Albert Dunlop into a house on the south side and went to work guarding cigarette shipments and pulling burglaries. In March 1932 they were invited on their first major bank job, in downtown Minneapolis.
Just days afterward, their landlady’s son saw their pictures in a detective magazine. The corrupt detectives who took the call delayed long enough for everyone to get away, but Karpis and Barker blamed the drunken Albert Dunlop for their exposure, dragged him to a lake outside town, and shot him dead. Relocating to Kansas City, they robbed a bank that June in Fort Scott, Kansas,
They kept her busy. A car thief turned cat burglar, Dock drew a life sentence in an Oklahoma penitentiary after shooting a night watchman in 1922. Freddie, meanwhile, was arrested for burglary in Kansas and thrown into a reformatory. There he met Karpis, the son of Lithuanian immigrants, who had grown up in the streets of Wichita before graduating to a life of petty crime. In the spring of 1931, the two were released separately, and Karpis went to Tulsa to find Freddie. He never forgot his first encounter with Ma Barker, at her shack in a trash-strewn lot beside a set of railroad tracks.
“As I approached, I saw this little dumpy old woman standing on a box, wearing a pair of bib overalls over a man’s sweater,” Karpis remembered years later. She was trying to fix a window screen. He introduced himself and she invited him inside. Karpis was appalled. There was no electricity, no running water. In the backyard was an outhouse. Flies buzzed everywhere. Ma volunteered to send a telegram to Fred in Joplin, and in the ensuing days she and Karpis became friends. In time she all but adopted him. Fred said she preferred Karpis to her own sons. “You don’t get on her nerves the way I do,” her son said. 3
Barker and Karpis began pulling nighttime burglaries around Tulsa. Before long both were arrested. Karpis was released, but Barker was detained and forced to escape. Fleeing the authorities, they took Ma and her boyfriend, an old drunk named Albert Dunlop, to southern Missouri, where they robbed their first bank and used the proceeds to buy Ma a farm. All went well until the week before Christmas, 1931, when the sheriff in the town of West Plains approached them at a gas station for questioning. Karpis panicked and shot the sheriff dead.
They fled one step ahead of a posse, grabbing Ma and racing to the home of a Barker family friend, a worldly confidence man named Herbert “Deafy” Farmer, who operated a kind of safe house for outlaws from across the region at his farm five miles south of Joplin. It was Farmer who suggested that Karpis and Barker take refuge in St. Paul, Minnesota, whose corrupt police force had transformed the quiet river city into the crime capital of the Midwest. And so a few days after Christmas, the two aspiring bank men walked into St. Paul’s Green Lantern tavern—and entered the major leagues of Midwestern crime.
The Green Lantern, run by a roly-poly Orthodox Jew named Harry Sawyer, was St. Paul’s criminal headquarters, a clubhouse that drew every major bank man in the Midwest. The Jazz Age yeggs Harvey Bailey and Frank Nash were regulars, as were vacationing gunmen from Chicago and scores of wannabes, including George Barnes, later known as Machine Gun Kelly. Karpis was dazzled. He and Freddie moved Ma and Albert Dunlop into a house on the south side and went to work guarding cigarette shipments and pulling burglaries. In March 1932 they were invited on their first major bank job, in downtown Minneapolis.
Just days afterward, their landlady’s son saw their pictures in a detective magazine. The corrupt detectives who took the call delayed long enough for everyone to get away, but Karpis and Barker blamed the drunken Albert Dunlop for their exposure, dragged him to a lake outside town, and shot him dead. Relocating to Kansas City, they robbed a bank that June in Fort Scott, Kansas,
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