“there are no apologies, no
and no animosity. what
happene d, happene d.”
and Ma and Fred Barker died in a shootout with FBI agents in Florida a week later. Karpis had been in Florida as well, but a call from friends in Cleveland alerted him to the FBI closing in. Karpis’ luck held when, a week after Ma and Fred Barker were killed, he had to shoot it out with local law enforcement, escaping from a hotel in Atlantic City. Karpis and Harry Campbell kidnapped a Pennsylvania doctor and made safe passage into Ohio, leaving their hostage bound and gagged in the Guilford Township Hall — with an extra $50 in his pocket for his troubles.
K
regrets , no sorrows
COURTESY OF FBI
arpis assembled a gang of his own and in April 1935 robbed a mail truck in Warren, Ohio, which was delivering payroll from the same train they would rob seven months later. When Karpis’ partners panicked on the station platform, the truck drove off. Karpis cut off the truck, and two accomplices got in and drove it to a garage, where the driver was unburdened of $72,000 of money from the Federal Reserve Bank. Within hours, two men unconnected to the Karpis gang were arrested for the robbery. “I was beginning to think that the jails and prisons of North America were filling up with guys serving time for the jobs that I and the other Karpis-Barker members had actually pulled,” Karpis recalled in his autobiography.
The FBI continued to pursue Karpis, but he had already set his sights on the train robbery. He knew the Erie passenger train, which ran daily from Cleveland to Pittsburgh, regularly carried payrolls from the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank. He had planned it down to the second, even his escape. “I couldn’t lay low in Ohio after the score,” he said. “I’d have to move away fast.” The morning of the robbery, the six-member gang loaded into a new Plymouth (Karpis wanted a Ford V-8 — Clyde Barrow’s favorite getaway vehicle — but couldn’t find one for sale) and headed to Garrettsville. The car was loaded with guns, dynamite and a medical kit — just in case. One accomplice, Ben Grayson — notable that day for his comical fake mustache — jumped into the cab of the locomotive to keep the engineer and fireman at bay. Another, Fred Hunter, monitored the parking lot to make sure no one entered or left. After Karpis yelled “Stick ’em up” to Davis, the mail car workers who were standing in the doorway talking to him, retreated into the mail car. Karpis threw an unlit stick of dynamite into the mail car, and promised the next one would be lit, making the workers more cooperative. The robbery was over in a matter of minutes, with no one hurt. The robbery netted $34,000 in cash and $12,450 in bond securities — around $715,000 in today’s money. “I’d been expecting six times that amount,” Karpis said, expecting another payroll for Youngstown Sheet & Tube to be on the train in addition to the Republic payroll. “I was sore, but I told myself that there’d be plenty of other scores.”
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