KARPIS TAKES A TRAIN

11/7/1935 - Missing the adrenaline rush of taking down a big score, Alvin Karpis, Public Enemy #1, decides to rob the mail train ferrying payroll cash from the Cleveland Federal Reserve to Youngstown, Ohio, emulating the Wild West exploits of Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, and the Dalton boys.

   

    Alvin "Creepy" Karpis

For the job, Karpis creates a new gang consisting of former Barker-Karpis Gang member Harry Campbell, a blackjack dealer from Toledo named Freddie Hunter, a 45-year-old bank robber named Ben Grayson, and a bar tending ex-con from McAlester Prison named John Brock.

                         
                                                     Campbell

                                     

                                                     Hunter

Assignments practiced, at around 2:00 in the afternoon the men are in position around the Garrettsville, Ohio train station.  Thirteen minutes later the men, armed with machine guns, spring into action when the mail train arrives.  Hunter and Brock control the crowd of roughly sixty people at the station, Grayson watches the cab of the train, and Campbell and Karpis go after the money ... cowing the clerks to do as they're told by throwing an unlit stick of dynamite into the mail car and saying the next one will have its fuse burning.  The robbery takes only five minutes to accomplish, but unfortunately for the outlaws, the payroll for the town of Youngstown's is missing ... their haul will only be $46,450 (money from several bags of registered mail the bandits steal and the payroll for a steel mill in the city of Warren), five times less than they were expecting to take!

A return to the days of the Wild West, but the robbery is also a leap  into the future, for after driving to the town of Port Clinton, Karpis makes his getaway in a red four-seat Stinson airplane flown by former bootlegger John Zetzer (purchased by Karpis before the caper for the sum of $1,700).

                        

                                               Stinson Reliant

The escape through flight however does not go nearly as well as the robbery had ... over southern Indiana the plane runs out of fuel and Zetzer is forced to land in a field outside of Evansville and hitchhike into town for forty-seven gallons of gas from a Standard Oil station, then aloft again, the same thing happens over Missouri.  Sleeping in the plane, the next morning the winged outlaws make it to Memphis, and by lunchtime the next day they are safely back at their hideout in the city of Hot Springs, Arkansas.  

                                            

At the top of its most wanted list, J. Edgar Hoover and his men have no idea that Alvin Karpis has masterminded the crime.

KING OF THE EVERGLADES NO MORE

11/1/1924 - The outlaw career of the man known as "The King of the Everglades" and "The Swamp Bandit," John Hopkins Ashley, a criminal giant that between 1915 and 1924 robbed at least forty banks of over $1,000,000, dominated bootlegging in Florida, and as a pirate attacked the Bahamas' West End, comes to an abrupt end north of Fort Pierce on a bridge over the Sebastian River.

                                           

Receiving a tip that Ashley and his gang are on their way to rob a Jacksonville bank, with the help of Indian River County Sheriff J.R. Merritt and two of his men, Palm Beach County Sheriff George B. Baker and four of his deputies (Henry Stubbs, Elmer Padgett, L.B. Thomas, and O. B. Padgett) set a trap to put away the outlaw he has been chasing for over thirteen years ... blocking the bridge road with a chain and hanging red lantern and searching each car that tries to pass.  Sure enough, an hour after the stop is set up, at around 10:30 in the evening, the black touring car of Ashley drives into the bottleneck.  According to the official records, surrounded by lawmen with weapons at the ready, Ashley, and gang members Ray Lynn, Hanford Mobley, and Clarence Middleton surrender and are lined up on the bridge while their car is searched ... and while the search is taking place, Ashley draws a concealed pistol and tries to escape, causing Baker and his men to turn the outlaw foursome into bloody Swiss cheese.

            
                         Mobley                                                              Middleton
                                                         
                                                                    Lynn

An alternate tale however is told by two eye-witnesses who were also stopped at the bridge when the Ashley Gang arrives, a story that autopsy records seem to verify (all the corpses show binding marks on their wrists).  The gang is captured and HANDCUFFED, and when defenseless, Sheriff Baker takes out Ashley (and his confederates), the man that has threatened to kill him numerous times over the years for perceived wrongs that include the killing of the bandit's dog and father (indeed, Ashley is planning on shooting Baker later in the month when the lawman is scheduled to appear at the Jacksonville courthouse).  Bad blood, even in death the feud between the two men continues when one of the deputies scoops Ashley's good eye out of its socket (the outlaw wears a black eye patch from a wound received in 1915 while escaping a bank robbery) and offers it to Baker, making good on the sheriff's threat to one day wear the outlaw's eye on his watch fob (the eye eventually is put back with the corpse).  Years of mayhem put to an end, whatever really happened the killings are ruled justifiable homicides and the Ashley Gang is no more!

                            
                                                   Front page news

VERNE MILLER GETS AWAY

11/1/1933 - After months of hunting in the aftermath of the Kansas City Massacre in which government agent Raymond J. Caffrey, officers W. J. Grooms & Frank Hermanson, Police Chief Otto Reed, and bank robber Frank Nash are all killed, the FBI believes it has found the man that orchestrated the bloodbath, lawman turned murderer Verne Miller, and are set to make an arrest.

                               
                                         Moments after the shooting ends

Connecting through a tip nightclub waitress Bobbie Moore to Miller's girlfriend, Vi Mathias, the members of the Chicago branch of the FBI put the Sherone Apartments where the women are living under surveillance, with Special Agent John Madala posing as an traveling auditor moving into a nearby unit.  Three days later, on Halloween, a man wearing horned-rim glasses with a sandy mustache shows up at the apartments.  Is it the sought after Miller?

                           
                                                    Verne Miller

Madala contacts his headquarters and soon the building and street outside are full of hiding law enforcement officers ... some wanting to storm the unit Miller appears to be inside, others wanting a 100% identification before arresting the man when he comes out.  With Melvin Purvis out of town, the senior agent in charge is Ed Guinane who decides on accosting the man when he leaves the apartment with a plan in which a hand chopping motion will unleash six agents now inside Madala's apartment to swarm into the hallway, while the agents outside will be signaled to stream inside by Guinane waving a jacket at them from the apartment window.  Actors in their places, the wait then begins ... and as tensions mount, lasts into mid-afternoon of the next day.  As if an episode of the Keystone Kops was unreeling, accompanied by Mathias in a pair of green silk pajamas, the suspect finally leaves the apartment and is immediately identified as Miller (through a ventilation shutter looking out on the hallway by FBI secretary Doris Rogers and Agent Edward Notesteen, both of whom knew Miller from his days in South Dakota), but at the exact wrong moment ... Guinane who is to receive the hand motion to swarm the corridor has stepped into the living room.  Miller, sensing eyes on him and hearing yelling from inside the apartment he just passed takes off running towards the floor's elevator.  Attack now confirmed with shouts of "It's Miller!", the door to Unit 211 flies open ... and becomes a logjam as all six officers in the room try to get through at the same time.  Out in seconds, they run down the hall, find no one at the elevator, and almost shoot a man that just happens to also be in the corridor ... Miller has taken the stairs!

                            
                                  Mathias and her daughter Betty - 1928

Outside, agents see a man exit the building that looks like Miller, trot over to Bobbie Moore's Auburn and then get into the car's passenger seat.  They do nothing however because no jacket has been waved from the apartment window above ... no jacket waved because Guinane has become caught up in the excitement in the hallway and has forgotten to give the signal.  Action finally begins downstairs when a number of agents come bursting out of the apartment building chasing after Miller.  Unleashed finally, Agent Lew Nichols jumps out of his hiding place on the street as the outlaw begins to drive away, running alongside the vehicle and ordering it to stop ... and is rewarded for his alacrity and awareness to the situation by being fired on by Miller (both shots miss).  Shot at, Nichols returns fires, Agent Allen Lockerman springs from the car he has been waiting in and empties his revolver at the vehicle, and a state trooper fires two machine gun bursts at the Auburn ... all miss doing vital damage to Miller (traces of blood are found later in the car), but do take out the rear window and make the holed vehicle unfit to drive in the rain.  

                                                 
                                                               Miller

Despite overwhelming forces being arrayed against him, Miller has escaped ... a result that causes J. Edgar Hoover to become livid when he hears the news!

DILLINGER AND FRIENDS VISIT GREENCASTLE

10/23/1933 - After raiding police stations in the towns of Auburn and Peru ... raids in which what will be called the First Dillinger Gang gains possession of three Thompson submachine guns, a teargas gun, two .38s, a .30-caliber Springfield rifle, a Winchester semi-automatic rifle, a shotgun, two sawed-off shotguns, a 12-gauge automatic shotgun, a .32-caliber automatic pistol, two .45 Colt automatics, five .38 Special revolvers, a .44 Smith & Wesson revolver, a Spanish .25-caliber automatic pistol, a 9mm German Luger, ten magazines of machine-gun bullets, three badges, a pair of handcuffs, twelve bulletproof vests, two boxes of shotgun shells, and numerous rounds of ammunition ... Russell Clark, Harry Pierpont, Charles Makley, John Hamilton, and John Dillinger make a major cash withdrawal from the Central National Bank of Greencastle, Indiana.

             
                              Pierpont                                        Clark
                  
                                                         Makley
                                
                                                           Hamilton
                                
                                                              Dillinger
      
                                             The Central National Bank

Job timed to coincide with its coffers being full due to the "old Gold" weekend homecoming activities at nearby DePauw University, on Monday, at 2:45 in the afternoon a large black Studebaker double-parks in front of the Central National.  All wearing overcoats against the chilly day, and to hide their weapons, five men exit the vehicle ... Dillinger, Pierpont, Makley, and Clark enter the bank, while Hamilton takes the outside Tiger position near the front door as the gang's lookout (when an elderly foreign woman walks out the door while the robbery is in progress, the outlaw tells her to go back inside to which she replies, "I go to Penny's, you go to Hell" ... stupefied  Hamilton will let the woman go about her business).  As planned, they enter at just the right moment, elderly security guard Len Ratcliffe has just climbed down from a new steel cage constructed over the front door and is in the building's basement stoking the furnace.  Pierpont begins the action by asking Assistant Trust Officer Ward Mayhall to change a twenty dollar, and when he is told to go to another window, pulls a .45 Colt on the man and loudly declares to one and all that a holdup is now in progress and that no one should press any alarms.  At the announcement, the rest of the outlaws pull their guns and immediately begin plundering the establishment.  Stylish as always during a heist, with Makley and Clark keeping their weapons trained on the bank's dozen employees and ten customers, holding his machine gun at the ready, Dillinger vaults over a chest high counter into the loan teller's area and begins filling a muslin sack with money, while at the same time, Pierpont convinces Cashier Harry Wells to open the vault.  Plenty of money to be found, the gang fills it's sacks with over $74,000 (including $400 in half dollars, $200 in quarters, and eighteen silver dollars) in the less than five minutes they are in the bank.

                                     
                                                                  Pierpont

A professional job, but not quite a perfect one.  Makley misses seeing bank employee William Styles slip out of a side door, where once free, he attempts to find some nails to puncture the tires of gang's driverless escape vehicle, and failing that (unbeknownst to Styles, the back seat of the car contains boxes of nails and tacks that the gang plans to use if they are pursued), foolishly calls the Greencastle police to report the in-progress robbery ... foolishly because the office of the County Sheriff is in the courthouse right across the street!  As Dillinger, Pierpont, and Makley are exiting the bank's front door they encounter grocer Rex Thorlton entering, and when the man reaches into his back pocket for the cash he is about to deposit, thinking he is drawing a weapon, Pierpont cracks him over the head with his pistol ... the only violence that takes place during the job.  And they miss by only a minute, Catherine Tillotson of DePauw's treasurer's office, arriving to deposit even more money in the bank.  Robbery complete, the last flaw in the day's activities almost results in unexpected disaster for as the gang drives slowly away, they are horrified when their escape from town is blocked by a random freight train lumbering slowly past ... back tracking, they use an alternate route and soon vanish, headed towards Chicago to spend some of their loot on that big city's "good life." 


                                                                  Dillinger

The robbery is the biggest payday of John Dillinger's short and violent career.

PRETTY BOY GOES UNDER

10/22/1934 - Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd's reign as Public Enemy #1 concludes on a farm in Ohio just three short months after it began with the death of bank robber John Dillinger.

                           
                                 Pueblo, Colorado mug shot of the Pretty Boy

Far from his home turf of Oklahoma, bad luck, slick roads, driving too fast, fog and a car wrecking telephone pole all conspire to put Floyd and his partner, Adam Richetti, afoot in unfamiliar Ohio territory.  Spotted by suspicious locals while waiting for their girlfriends to have their damaged vehicle fixed, and then confronted by gun toting peace officers, Richetti is captured and Floyd flees into the woods.  

                               
                                              Richetti in custody

Word out that an armed criminal is on the loose in the area soon results in police, Federal agents, and armed citizens combining to comb the region in a huge manhunt that after two days finds the bandit at the farm of Ellen Conkle.

 
                                                   The Conkle Farmhouse

Tired and hungry after spending the weekend living on wild apples, pears, and berries, posing as a lost hunter though he is wearing a sweat stained dark suit, Floyd emerges from a nearby forest and pays the widow Conkle $1 for a last meal of fried pork chops, mashed potatoes, rice pudding, coffee, a doughnut, and a piece of pumpkin pie ... a feast Floyd declares "... was fit for a King." 

                                            
                                                         Ellen Conkle

Sustenance received, when Conkle's brother, Stewart Dyke, and his wife arrive, Floyd convinces the pair to drive him into the nearby town of Clarkson in their Model A Ford.  It is a little past 4:00 in the afternoon.

                                  
                                                  The Model A Ford

About to leave the farm, Floyd's luck runs out when two cars carrying four Federal agents led by Melvin Purvis and four local East Liverpool officers pulls up at the farm.  The only shelter a wooded area two hundred yards away, carrying a .45 automatic in his right hand, Floyd jumps out of the car and takes off through an open field towards the mirage of safety behind the farm.  Shouts of surrender ignored, using his .32-20 Winchester rifle, WWI sharpshooter Chester K. Smith sends a bullet into Floyd's right arm that drops the outlaw ... but only for a second.

                                    
                                        Posse with Smith second from left

Up again in an instant, Floyd begins another zig-zagging dash, flight that causes Purvis to order the rest of the posse to fire.  Hit again multiple times with pistol, rifle, shotgun and Thompson machine gun lead (a count later determines that ninety-three slugs have been sent his way), Floyd goes down once more and does not get back up.  Down, but not quite dead, when Purvis asks the dying outlaw if he is Pretty Boy Floyd, a name he never liked, the outlaw growls he is "Charles Arthur Floyd," calls Purvis a "son-of-a-bitch," and tries to draw his other pistol before dying, handcuffed, under the shade of a nearby apple tree he has been carried to (roughly fifteen minutes after being struck from damage to his lungs, ribs, and heart ... his last words are, "I'm going.").  Floyd is thirty-years-old.

       
                                       At the Sturgis Funeral Home in East Liverpool
                                     
                                        Part of crowd at the funeral home

That is the official story of Floyd's death, but an alternate tale surfaces years later.  In failing health, Smith, the gunner who hit Floyd first, tells a tale in which Purvis, enraged at being cursed out by the outlaw, orders agent Herman Hollis to "Fire into him!" ... which Hollis does, killing the bandit instantly with his Thompson (not around to be questioned, Hollis will perish the next month when he engages in a shootout with Baby Face Nelson). 

                     
                              Special Agent Melvin Purvis

Murderer murdered?  Backing up this version of reality, a female neighbor of Ellen Conkle will tell newspapermen about hearing two individual instances of shooting on her neighbor's farm the day of Floyd's death ... shootings that are separated in time by several minutes.

                
                                                         Some of the damage
                                 
                                                   Fingerprinting the corpse

Whatever the case, Floyd in death moves from Public Enemy to folk hero and legend.  On his body at death the outlaw is carrying $122 in cash, an assortment of coins, a car key, matches, a car key, a loaded .45 ammunition clip, a Gruen pocket watch, a good luck charm in the form of a silver half dollar attached to a pocket chain, and two apples ... negating a gunfighter myth, neither the coin or his watch bear notches for the men he has killed.  

Embalmed, Floyd's body is placed on public display in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, then buried at the town of Akins ... a funeral that draws a crowd estimated to number between 20,000 to 40,000 people!!!!!

                                   
                                           Charles Arthur Floyd

THE DUTCHMAN GETS HIS

10/23/1935 - One of the most famous hits in mob history takes place when thirty-four-year-old Jewish gangster Arthur Flegenheimer, better known as Dutch Schultz, and three of his men are gunned down at the Palace Chophouse in Newark, New Jersey.

                                         

                                                       Scene of the crime
                                         
                                                          The Dutchman

The murders are set in motion by Schultz's need to get rid of his nemesis, New York Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey.  Not a very good salesman, after discussing the pros and cons of killing Dewey for six hours (there is a plan, compliments of Albert Anastasia, to assassinate the man during his daily morning walk with a silenced pistol) with Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro, Charles "Lucky" Luciano, Abner "Longy" Zwillman, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, and Meyer Lansky, the leaders of organized crime in New York City known as The Commission of which Schultz is a member, the gangster brings about his own death by refusing to accept the decision that is made to let the lawyer live.

                                         
                                                    Prosecutor Dewey

"Dewey's gotta go," Schultz screams over and over, upset that he is the target of the lawyer's investigation into selling restaurant "protection" policies, but when the irate mobster finally leaves, the men instead then vote that it is the Dutchman that must be go.

              
                              Lepke                                       Shapiro                            
                                   
                                                      Lucky  
                
                               Bugsy                                    Lansky
                                        
                                                         Zwillman

Anastasia, there already for his presentation on how Dewey could be hit, gets the assignment, and in turn gives the contract to a three-man death squad of his Murder, Inc. killers ... twenty-eight-year-old gunman Emanuel "Mendy" Weiss, twenty-seven-year-old gunman Charles "The Bug" Workman, and a driver that will be known to criminal history only as "Piggy."

                                      
                                                          Weiss
                   
                                                                   Workman

The stage is set for the Dutchman's murder when he as usual goes to his favorite restaurant that night for dinner, drinks, and back room business with a group of his associates (through the evening others will be present, like Schultz's wife, twenty-one-year-old Frances, but will leave before the bullets begin flying) ... Otto "Abbadabba" Berman, a mathematical wizard and numbers cruncher for the gang, bodyguard Bernard "Lulu" Rosenkrantz, and chief henchman Abe Landau.

                          
                                                              Landau

After numerous drinks and a dinner of steaks and fries, the men are discussing gang business at their normal back room table, the same spot they'd occupied nightly for three straight weeks, when at about 10:15 they are joined by the members of Murder, Inc.  A double whammy of death, Workman enters the restaurant, walks to the back and fires a .38 into the three men sitting at the table, Landau, Berman, and Rosenkrantz, while following, Weiss fires at the same group with a double-gauge shotgun.  Thirty-six-year-old Rosencratz takes seven hits from his chest down to his foot, Berman is hit six times on his left side, in wrist, elbow, shoulder, and neck (a bullet that exits through the side of his face), and Landau takes hits to his wrist, right arm, and shoulder (a bullet that exits through the right side of his neck, severing an artery).  Accurate targeting, only two bullets seem to miss, shattering a wall mirror.  Then making sure that they haven't missed anyone, Workman goes into the bathroom and confronts a man standing at the urinal peeing ... Dutch Schultz (an alternate tale has the bathroom events taking place first).  In the unequal battle that ensues, the mobster actually has only brought a knife to a gunfight, a 3.5-inch switchblade called a Chicago Spike.  Reaching for the weapon, Schultz is hit by one of the two bullets Workman fires his way before retreating ... a steel-jacketed .45 slug kept rusty on purpose to cause infection that goes into Schultz's chest, tears through his abdominal wall, and does massive damage to the mobster's large intestines, gall bladder, and liver.  While this is going on, amazingly, Landau and Rosenkrantz fight back, firing at the fleeing Weiss until both collapse from their wounds, Rosenkrantz on the restaurant floor and Landau outside, sitting on a trash can.  Also amazingly, Schultz zips himself up, and calling for help, stumbles to the murder table and collapses ... help request heard, Rosenkrantz gathers enough strength to lift himself from his position on the floor, go to the restaurant's phone booth, and call the local police switchboard for help, but not before actually demanding the frightened bartender make change for the quarter he is holding so the phone company won't receive a twenty cent bonus the frugal mobster doesn't think they deserve for a five cent call.  Not as big a penny-pinch as his bodyguard, when help finally arrives, Schultz tips the emergency personnel twenty bucks to take good care of his friends.

                               
                                                    The Dutchman

Taken to the hospital, the bullet-riddled men will linger for various amounts of time as police question them as to who has done the shooting (different members of a twenty-man operating team will spend 27 hours and 20 minutes trying to salvage the four men).  No one tells the police anything.  Abbadabba is the first to leave, exiting at 2:55 in the morning of the 24th, as dawn is breaking, Landau checks out a few hours later at 6:30, and Rosenkrantz, despite massive blood loss, lasts until 3:20 of the morning of the 25th.

Thought at first to not be mortally wounded, Schultz develops peritonitis, and fever fueled, babbles gibberish for hours (all of it taken down by a police stenographer) before succumbing at 8:35 in the evening, about twenty-two hours after being shot.  The gangster's last words are, "Max come over here ... French Canadian bean soup ... I want to pay, let them leave me alone ..."


                                                     Still lucid Dutch
                                
                                                 Adios Arthur