The Last Great Train Heist

Bûche de Noël

La Chatelaine French Bakery•Columbus Area ***

Ever since the family-owned La Chatelaine opened in 1991, the French bakery has celebrated the holidays by serving up bûche de Noël (or “yule log”), a confection of genoise, or white sponge cake, rolled like a log with a layer of buttercream, then covered in more buttercream and decorated with colorful candies and plastic trinkets.

“The traditional bûche de Noël is a white sponge cake with vanilla buttercream inside,” says Charlotte Harden, CEO of La Chatelaine and daughter of founders Stan and Gigi Wielezynski. “On the outside we typically offer vanilla, chocolate, Grand Marnier, mocha. We ask my brother to make the cranberry because it’s hot pink.”

The tradition, Harden says, comes from northern Europe, in celebration of a visit from Saint Nicholas.

“You put your shoes in front of the chimney,” says Harden, “and at Christmas your shoes are filled with toys and candy. The folklore of the bûche de Noël was that they chopped down a tree, soaked it in alcohol so it burned overnight so Saint Nicholas could find your shoes.”

La Chatelaine keeps its version booze-free. The bakery serves the cake logs in three sizes: individual, medium (serving eight to 10) and large (feeding 12 to 15). They’re sold the first of December through Christmas Eve. Harden estimates the bakery sold 400 just on Christmas Eve last year. It takes a 24-hour marathon involving the whole family and even past employees rolling the sponge cakes together.

“We pull my parents out of retirement to roll,” Harden says. “They’re not allowed to go on vacation. We call it ‘the rolling of the bûches.’” — ND

Locations in Dublin, Worthington and Upper Arlington, lachatelainebakery.com

Esterházy Torte

Farkas Pastry Shoppe• Cleveland

Farkas Pastry Shoppe’s elegant desserts have been a centerpiece of holiday tables since 1965. Few are as impressive as the bakery’s famous Esterházy torte, named for a 19th-century Hungarian prince. Regal indeed — it is five layers of almond dacquoise (a baked meringue), ground almonds, buttercream, apricot filling and a fondant glaze with chocolate ganache. Each torte takes a few days to make, and Farkas Pastry Shoppe owner Mike Harrison says customers drive from all over to get one. The torte is also gluten free, a rarity for a decadent dessert. During the holidays, there are usually a few in the case, but be sure to order at least 48 hours in advance. 2700 Lorain Ave., Cleveland 44113, 216/2816200, farkaspastries.com — LS

Sufganiyot

Holtman’s Donuts • Cincinnati

Difficult to pronounce but easy to eat, sufganiyot (pronounced soof-gah-neeyote) make an annual appearance at Holtman’s Donuts coinciding with the eight days of Hanukkah. These fried jelly- or custard-filled donuts are sublime in their simplicity. Sufganiyot don’t come with over-the-top icing or covered in sprinkles, just a generous dusting of confectioner’s sugar and a dollop of extra filling that previews what’s inside. Regardless of which seasonal holiday you celebrate, a couple of freshly made sufganiyot will have you believing in miracles. Be sure to visit early in the day for the best selection. Five locations throughout Greater Cincinnati, holtmansdonutshop.com — LS

Stollen

Servatii Pastry Shop•Cincinnati Area ***

You’ll be tempted to saw off a hunk of this traditional German bread and eat it like a slice of cake, but bakery owner Greg Gottenbusch recommends you enjoy it the authentic way: sliced thin, toasted and buttered.

“Germans take our stollen very seriously,” says Gottenbusch. “There are actually laws about it in Germany, the percentage of candied fruit to butter to flour — it’s all dictated.”

Candied fruit is a catch-all term Gottenbusch uses to describe the candied citron peel, raisins, currents and slivered almonds that stud this hearty, springy, sweet loaf. To these treats, the folks at Servatii Pastry Shop add clarified butter, which reduces water content and extends the Stollen’s shelf life, as well as a strip of almond paste that runs through the loaf.

“We flatten the dough, put a strip of the paste in the middle, then handshape it into the stollen,” Gottenbusch explains.

After it is out of the oven, each loaf is brushed with clarified butter and rolled in vanilla sugar. The recipe was perfected by Greg’s brother Gary. Both men trained in Germany, where their father, Wilhelm, emigrated from in the early 1950s. (Servatti is the name of the cafe their grandfather had in Germany, right next to St. Servatii Church.)

While all this history makes Servatii’s stollen a traditional favorite among those in Cincinnati with German heritage, Gottenbusch points out that the treat has reached well beyond that population since the shop opened in 1963.

“The popularity has extended to the whole Cincinnati area. We actually sell them in grocery stores around Ohio,” Gottenbusch says. “It’s become a tradition for lots of people.” — RCB

Servatii Pastry Shop has 12 locations in the Cincinnati area, servatii.com

he 1930s were the age of the celebrity bank robber. Newspaper front pages were splashed with enormous headlines detailing the exploits of bandits like Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson. No doubt like many people who read of those daring robberies, Earl Davis wondered what he’d do if he found himself at the business end of a gun. On Nov. 7, 1935, he found out. Davis went to the Garrettsville, Ohio, train station that afternoon to pick up copies of the Press, Cleveland’s afternoon paper, for the newsstand at his dry cleaning shop. Also on the passenger train was the payroll for Republic Steel, delivered from the Federal Reserve Bank in Cleveland. Davis picked up his bundles of 60 newspapers, paying little attention to the men who’d taken positions on the train station platform. Davis made conversation with the men working in the mail car — and felt something pressed up against his back. “I turned around and saw a fellow there, and at first glance, I thought he was a fellow I knew, but he wasn’t,” Davis recalled in the next day’s Warren Tribune-Chronicle. “And he had a machine gun jammed right against me. “He said ‘Stick ’em up!’ Believe me, I did, and in a hurry too.”

Davis said he didn’t know the guy, but he’d likely seen his face before. It was Alvin Karpis, who had been identified as Public Enemy Number One and doggedly pursued by the nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation, just finding its footing as the nation’s law enforcement agency under director J. Edgar Hoover.

Karpis was notorious for a string of robberies and kidnappings committed with the Barker gang. But with most gang members dead or in prison, he was on his own, and found a welcome home in northeast Ohio. He had already robbed a mail truck in Warren — for which two other men had been arrested — when he fixated on a brazen plan, hearkening back to the days of the James brothers and the Dalton gang. “Who the hell robs a train in this day and age,” one of his accomplices asked during the planning stage.

“I was aching for an exciting heist,” Karpis recalled years later. It turned out to be his last big score.

Raymond Alvin Karpovicz was born on Aug. 10, 1907, in Montreal, Quebec. When he was 8, his parents, both Lithuanian immigrants, moved the family to Topeka, Kansas. At 16, he was arrested for stealing tires and sentenced to a 10-year term at the state reformatory. After three years, he escaped and remained at large for a year before he was recaptured. He returned to the reformatory, but when he was later found to have knives in his possession, he was sent to the state penitentiary in Lansing, Kansas.

There, he became acquainted with Fred Barker, who with his three brothers — Herman, Lloyd and Arthur, nicknamed “Doc” — were infamous criminals known throughout the Great Plains. (Their mother, Kate, became known as Ma Barker, but pop-culture depictions of her as “Bloody Mama” may be more hyperbole than reality.)

Karpis, intelligent but strange enough to earn the nickname “Creepy” from his accomplices, was a meticulous planner, who approached robbery like other people approach careers. (He said never to rob a bank when you needed money; rob it when you have enough money to escape if things go sideways.) On his watch, what became known as the Barker-Karpis gang committed a variety of robberies and two high-profile kidnappings — first of Hamm’s Brewery president William Hamm Jr. in Minnesota in 1933, and then banker Edward Bremer the following year. Both men were released when ransom was paid — $100,000 for Hamm and twice that for Bremer — and the gang went its separate ways.

Karpis ended up in Cleveland, which he had found welcoming on many occasions. When John Dillinger was killed by FBI agents outside of a Chicago movie theater in 1934, Karpis had been watching the same movie — “Manhattan Melodrama,” starring Clark Gable and William Powell — in a Cleveland movie theater. He was also a regular visitor to the Harvard Club, an illegal gambling casino just outside the city limits in Newburgh Heights, and occasionally worked security there. He kept a bungalow in the city and had even buried some of the proceeds from the Bremer kidnapping underneath the garage floor.

Doc Barker was captured in Chicago in January 1935,