CRIME: Old Creepy

On a late autumn day in 1934 the naked, bullet-riddled body of George (“Baby-Face”) Nelson was dumped in a ditch near Chicago after a gun battle in which two agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were also killed (TIME, Dec. 10, 1934). Shortly thereafter a surly, uncommunicative underworldling known to his few intimates as “Old Creepy” discovered that, by courtesy of the Press, he had inherited Nelson’s title of Public Enemy No. 1. By last week the Bureau of Investigation, which has vainly trailed Public Enemy Alvin Karpis for two years, acknowledged that his nickname was no misnomer by slapping a $5,000 price on his head. Only the lives of Nelson and the late John Dillinger had been worth such public rewards to the Federal Government.

In the melodramatic year 1933, spindly Alvin Karpis joined forces in St. Paul with Kate (“Ma”) Barker and her sons Fred and Arthur. In little more than a year the Karpis-Barker gang became the nation’s most formidable criminal outfit, made nearly $500,000 by robbing banks, kidnapping such folk as St. Paul’s Brewer William Hamm and Banker Edward George Bremer. Then police and G-Men began weeding the gang out. “Ma” and Fred Barker and another mobster died un der Federal guns. Six other Barker-Karpis hoodlums and accomplices were put behind bars, seven more were under indictment in St. Paul last week for the Hamm snatching. Only Alvin Karpis and Harry Campbell, companion of Karpis in the Bremer kidnapping, remained at large. Alvin Karpis is a product of Chicago’s Wrest Side. His mother did time in Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma prisons. After fingerprints found on a gasoline tin connected him with the Bremer case, Federal agents got on his trail, narrowly missed him in the Ozarks, in Cleveland. For a time he hid in a $300-per-month villa in Cuba. In the winter of 1934 he and crippled Harry Campbell shot their way out of a police trap in an Atlantic City hotel, leaving Karpis’ pregnant woman and another girl behind. Seven months later he threatened the life of the Bureau of Investigation’s Director John Edgar Hoover in a letter mailed from Dayton, Ohio. Last August he spent three days at Saratoga Springs, N. Y. watching the horse races, fled from a nearby farmhouse six hours before Federal agents got there. Then he vanished.

Same day the Karpis-Campbell rewards were announced, Director Hoover received proof that not all Senators regard him and his work as does Tennessee’s Kenneth Douglas McKellar, who as chairman of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee recently lopped $225,000 off the Bureau’s 1937 appropriation increase recommended by a House committee, accused Director Hoover of “running wild” (TIME, April 27). Up in the Senate last week rose speaker after speaker to praise the Bureau of Investigation’s work, insist that the $225,000 be put back in the appropriation bill. “I would not revive, by any act or vote of mine,” cried Democratic Leader Joseph Taylor Robinson, Arkansas, “one hope in the bosom of a gangster by withholding the means that are necessary to pursue him around this earth, to the very gates of Hell. . . .”

The Senate restored the $225,000.