Barker/Karpis Gang: FBI history page

The FBI’s essay says that William A. Hamm, Jr., president of the Theodore Hamm Brewing Company, was kidnaped at St. Paul in 1933, held at Bensenville, Illinois, and released after the ransom was paid, and that on September 6, 1933 the FBI Laboratory raised latent fingerprints from the ransom notes with silver nitrate, “the first time it was used successfully to extract latent prints from forensic evidence.” It says Edward George Bremer was kidnaped at St. Paul on January 17, 1934 and released three weeks later after a $200,000 ransom, and that “A key break came when the fingerprint of Arthur ‘Doc’ or ‘Dock’ Barker … turned up on an empty gas can found by a local police officer along the kidnapping route.”

It says Doc Barker was arrested without incident in Chicago on January 8, 1935; that agents surrounded the cottage on Lake Weir, Florida “Shortly after 5 a.m. on January 16, 1935”; that after calls to surrender someone shouted “All right, go ahead,” and machine-gun fire came from an upstairs window; and that “By 10:30 a.m., all firing had stopped. Both Ma and Fred, it was soon learned, were dead.” It describes Karpis’s arrest on May 1, 1936 outside an apartment on Canal Street in New Orleans, with Hoover present, and says Karpis pleaded guilty to the Hamm kidnaping and was sentenced to life.

A photograph caption on the same page says the Florida house is where “‘Doc’ and ‘Ma’ Barker were killed.” The page’s own text, the Bureau’s 1936 summary and Doc Barker’s Alcatraz record all say it was Fred and Kate Barker; the caption is an error. The essay calls Karpis “the brains of the gang”; that is the FBI’s characterization.