The Kidnap Years: by David Stout (if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud TXT) 📕

FBI official even floated the idea of enlisting boy scouts in the search.

What part the mysterious chimes played, if any, in leading investigators to the kidnappers wasn’t explained after the initial flurry of publicity at the time.***

There was so much domestic crime news in the early months of 1935 that it may have been hard for some readers to keep up with international affairs. And no doubt about it, much of the news from abroad was depressing, particularly in Europe. Adolf Hitler seemed less and less willing to be friendly with Britain and France, who had fought Germany in the Great War, and more and more eager to reclaim his country’s place on the world stage.

Chancellor Hitler was even uttering suspicious and hostile words toward the Soviet Union, complaining that the Land of the Tsars posed a security threat to Germany in the East. All in all, there was almost nothing conciliatory in what the German leader was saying. But upon reflection, a reader might find comfort. Surely, the German dictator would not go to war against Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. That would be an unimaginable conflagration.

In the summer of 1935, Doc Barker was shipped to Alcatraz for what was supposed to be a long stay. (He would make his stay a relatively short one, as he was shot dead on January 13, 1939, during an escape attempt.)

But though the Barker-Karpis gang had been dismantled—all but destroyed, really—Hoover could not have been totally content. Alvin “Creepy” Karpis remained at large, traveling from Hot Springs, Arkansas, to New Orleans (or so it was rumored) and venturing north now and then to pull off another heist.

Hoover detested Karpis—detested the cold, defiant eyes, the insolent lips that looked as though a worm might crawl from between them. Given what we have learned about the director over the years, he may well have disliked the very foreignness of Karpis, né Karpowicz, born in Montreal to Lithuanian parents.

If his agents could capture Karpis, the last slimy vestiges of the gang would be eradicated forever. Then the bureau would finally get the full credit it deserved.

In the spring of 1936, the “war on crime” hadn’t gone out of fashion, and Hoover and his men still enjoyed a good public image, mostly. So Hoover felt confident enough to seek a doubling of the FBI’s budget for the next fiscal year.

But not everyone in law enforcement worshipped the FBI. Far from it. Lawmen in other agencies, federal as well as state and local, thought Hoover and his men hogged the credit for a notable arrest whenever possible. And despite his bureaucratic agility and his political in-fighting skills, Hoover made his share of enemies, sometimes because of pure pettiness.

So it was that on the morning of Friday, April 10, 1936, when Hoover walked into a Senate hearing room to push for his huge budget increase, he got a hostile reception. And small wonder: the budget subcommittee chairman was Senator Kenneth McKellar, Democrat of Tennessee, who despised the director. Hoover had ignited the senator’s fury by refusing to hire a pair of Tennessee men backed by McKellar and, when the senator complained, by firing three agents from Tennessee out of spite.

Hoover came into the hearing armed with charts, graphs, statistics, and other data to convince the lawmakers that the bureau was accomplishing a lot—and could accomplish even more with a bigger budget.

But McKellar seemed not much interested in Hoover’s dog-and-pony show. He began with some barbed questions about how the bureau generated publicity for itself. “It seems to me your department is just running wild, Mr. Hoover. With all the money in your hands, you are just extravagant.”153

McKellar grilled Hoover on his qualifications to run the bureau. Hoover noted that he had been with the Justice Department for nineteen years.

“Did you ever make an arrest?” the senator asked.154

“No, sir,” Hoover replied. “I have made investigations.”

“How many arrests have you made, and who were they?”

Somewhat lamely, Hoover replied that arrests were made by “officers under my supervision.”

Then the stinger: “I am talking about the actual arrests,” McKellar said. “You never arrested them, actually?”****155

The silence was deafening. The director was being subjected to the kind of ear-burning humiliation he was used to dishing out but wasn’t used to taking. When he got back to his inner sanctum, he issued an edict: find Alvin Karpis, and fast. And save him for me.

As it turned out, Karpis was relatively easy to find. By late April, he was in New Orleans, and the stage was set for the director’s moment in the limelight.

When FBI agents, aided by postal inspectors, knew with near certainty where Karpis was holed up, Hoover was flown to New Orleans. On the evening of May 1, with Hoover waiting in the wings with a posse of his men, Karpis and an associate and the latter’s girlfriend emerged from their hotel. Agents swarmed about them, and they were taken without resistance.

It has long been debated whether Hoover trained a gun on Karpis or just how close he was physically to the gangster, but no matter.

“Karpis Captured in New Orleans by Hoover Himself” read the headline in the New York Times the next day. “Another Man and Woman Are Also Seized by 15 Agents Under Federal Chief.”156

All these years later, the episode conjures images of bwana sitting under a shade tree, sipping a gin and tonic and rifle at the ready, as bush beaters drive a trophy animal in his direction. But the headline and article beneath it conveyed none of that.

Karpis was soon on a plane to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he was under federal indictment for the kidnappings of William Hamm and Edward Bremer. Perhaps hoping for leniency, he agreed just before trial to plead guilty to the Hamm kidnapping alone. But there was no mercy. By late summer, he was on his way to Alcatraz to serve a life sentence. The Barker-Karpis gang had passed into history, at long last.*****

*The account of Volney Davis’s