The Third Northwestern Bank Robbery

Of all the Depression-era outlaw gangs, none was considered smarter or nastier than the Barker-Karpis bunch. The Barker boys were Doc and Fred, dark-haired brothers who were so mean they wouldn’t hesitate to gun down a cop who even looked at them the wrong way. Alvin “Creepy” Karpis was considered by many to have a near-genius IQ, and he acted as the brains of the gang, masterminding some of the most brilliant kidnappings in American history.

Prominent Minnesota businessmen William Hamm Jr., heir to the Hamm’s Brewery fortune, and Edward Bremer of the Bremer banking family were both snatched by the gang in St. Paul, and their collective ransom totaled an impressive $300,000, a near fortune in the early 1930s. Ma Barker (Doc and Fred’s mother) is probably the best-known member of this traveling death circus, and was portrayed by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI as a cold-blooded woman who trained her boys from birth in pure evilness. In reality, this wasn’t the case. Hoover hadn’t even heard of her until his men cornered her and Freddy in a house in Florida and filled it with holes. When they discovered her body, the myth was created to cover up the fact that the FBI had killed a harmless old woman. Ma did travel with Doc, Freddy, and Alvin, and they conveniently used her as cover, but she didn’t commit the crimes herself. She preferred to put puzzles together and listen to hillbilly music on the radio rather than bother with the business of her men.

One of the Barker-Karpis Gang’s first forays into the Twin Cities was in 1932. The gang had been trying to smooth the way politically in Minneapolis for months, with Alvin Karpis and Fred Barker giving over $10,000 in campaign contributions to a candidate for mayor, Ralph Van Lear. They wanted the ability to come and go in Minneapolis without fear of police harassment while they planned their bank robberies. And planned they did. Through the fall of 1932 they held up banks in Redwood Falls, Minnesota, and Wahpeton, North Dakota, hightailing it back to the Twin Cities to lay low and regroup. On December 16, 1932, however, they changed their minds and decided to hold up a bank in Minneapolis. It would end up being one of the bloodiest days in the Barker-Karpis Gang’s spectacularly violent history. Their target was the Third Northwestern National Bank, a three-sided building filled with big glass windows, sitting on a three-sided lot bordered by 5th Street, Central Avenue, and Hennepin Avenue.

The gang numbered seven that day, including Doc, Fred, Alvin, Larry “The Chopper” DeVol, William Weaver, and Jess Doyle. Rounding out the group was Verne Miller, who would later, along with Pretty Boy Floyd, be responsible for the Kansas City Massacre, which killed an FBI agent, three police officers, and the man they were trying to break out of police custody, Miller’s pal Frank “Jelly” Nash.

The gang had prepared well for this Minneapolis heist and had cased the bank for weeks. On December 16 they made their move, quietly entering the building to take some money. Two of the outlaws went in through the Central Avenue entrance and two others used the Hennepin Avenue doors, armed with Thompson submachine guns and .45-caliber automatics fitted with extra-large clips. Larry DeVol, carrying a machine gun, stood in front of the bank, guarding the entrance. The hoods inside, led by Fred Barker and Verne Miller, got to work. Fred yelled at the bank tellers to open the vault, and Miller forced the bank’s customers to the floor, face down. When a teller insisted he couldn’t get the vault open, Miller pistol-whipped him, but not before the teller managed to trip the bank’s silent alarms. That brought two police officers, Ira Evans and Leo Gorski, to the scene. Their shifts had just ended, but they raced to the bank and were met by Larry DeVol, who immediately sprayed their car with machine-gun fire from fifteen feet away. Other gang members inside broke the bank windows and joined in barraging the street with bullets, instantly killing Officer Evans and mortally wounding Officer Gorski.

The gang made for their getaway car, fresh with $22,000 in cash and $100,000 in securities. Their Lincoln tore east on Fifth, then onto Hennepin Avenue, and finally onto Larpenteur Avenue, screeching back to St. Paul along a series of twists and turns that Karpis would fondly remember in his autobiography, years later, as Bank Robbers’ Row. As they sped to safety, they realized a tire had been punctured by one of their own stray bullets. Driving much of the way on the rim, they finally made it to an area of Como Park where they’d parked a Chevy for just this possibility. The gang piled out of the Lincoln, and as they began switching the license plates onto the Chevy, a passing car slowed down to see what was going on. It was driven by a man named Oscar Erickson, out trying to sell Christmas wreaths to neighbors in the area. As the car passed by, Fred Barker, thinking the driver was trying to copy down their license plate number, pulled out a pistol and opened fire on Erickson, landing a fatal shot to his head.

Erickson left a grieving family behind, along with Officers Evans and Gorski. The Barker-Karpis Gang got away, at least for a while, and lived to terrorize another day.