Alvin Karpis

American gangster

• Born: August 10, 1908
• Birthplace: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
• Died: August 26, 1979
• Place of death: Torremolinos, Spain

Major offenses: Bank robbery and kidnapping

Active: 1918-1979

Locale: Midwestern United States

Sentence: Life in prison; served thirty-four years

Early Life

Albin Karpowicz (KAHR-poh-vits) was born to Lithuanian immigrants by way of England and Canada. They settled in Topeka, Kansas, where Albin grew up. Albin’s father farmed, did odd jobs, and worked as a painter for the Santa Fe Railroad. His mother raised Albin and three sisters. An elementary teacher changed Albin’s name to Alvin Karpis (KAHR-puhs) because it was easier to pronounce.

Criminal Career

By age ten, Alvin was running errands for petty criminals whom he admired in Topeka. An older boy then talked Karpis into burglarizing a store, a task that Karpis found thrilling. As a teenager, Karpis did honest work, performed the occasional burglary, and rode freight cars while carrying a loaded pistol. In 1926, he burglarized a warehouse and got five-to-ten years’ time in a reformatory. He escaped with another prisoner and began a small-time crime wave. Caught and sent to a Kansas penitentiary, Karpis met Freddie Barker, who became his best friend and gang cofounder. Discharged in 1931 and schooled by older cons, Karpis partnered with Barker to rob banks because the larger sums attracted them.

In 1931, Karpis married Dorothy Slayman, the niece of a prostitute friend. They lived together for a few months before Karpis left her. Karpis soon dated sixteen-year-old Dolores Delaney, who gave birth to Raymond Alvin Karpis while she was in police custody in New Jersey. Karpis wrote that he read about the birth of his son while hiding in a Toledo, Ohio, brothel.

Karpis and Barker became professional criminals, taking great care in recruiting partners and planning robberies. They rented safe houses under aliases, parked getaway cars out of sight, plotted escape routes, and worked with “pros” such as Harvey Bailey, Volney Davis, and Barker’s brother Doc. They stole more than one million dollars in four to five years’ time. Their tricks included abandoning getaway cars that pointed away from actual escape routes and letting their engines idle until the car ran out of fuel so that police concluded that the robbers had run out of gas while fleeing in that direction. The gang also threw roofing nails out windows to flatten tires on police cars. They robbed exclusively in the Midwest—a lucrative, flat geographic region for robbers in fast cars in the days before two-way police radios.

Karpis wanted as little trouble as possible when stealing, but he admired the fact that Barker never hesitated to kill if threatened. Karpis never admitted to shooting anyone, although it is probable that he did. Even as an old man, he was completely silent on his specific role in the crimes.

In 1933, Karpis and the gang abducted beer brewer William Hamm, Jr., and held him for a ransom of $100,000. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested the wrong gang for the crime. In 1934, the men kidnapped bank president Edward Bremer, demanding a $200,000 ransom. The Bremers were friends of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and extra pressure was put on the nascent FBI to catch Bremer’s kidnappers. The FBI laboratory found Doc Barker’s fingerprint on an empty gas can stashed near the ransom drop-off site. Working backward and sorting out details from other kidnappings and robberies, FBI agents discovered the existence of the Barker-Karpis gang.

Legal Action and Outcome

In 1935, the FBI in Chicago captured Doc Barker and, from a map in his apartment, deduced the whereabouts of Freddie and his mother, Ma Barker. The FBI surrounded the pair’s Lake Weir, Florida, cottage a few days later and shot them to death. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, encouraged the fiction that Ma was the leader of the gang, perhaps as a way to offset blame for her death at FBI agents’ hands. Ma was actually an uneducated Arkansas woman who accepted and benefited from her sons’ crimes. Karpis said she was his second mother, and the gang took her with them for cover.

Karpis found new partners and moved constantly—to Chicago; St. Paul, Minnesota; Toledo and Cleveland, Ohio; Hot Springs, Arkansas; and Cuba. He was apprehended in New Orleans in April, 1935, by surprised FBI agents, who saw him getting into his car. Agents had planned to raid Karpis’s apartment later and probably kill him. An FBI car cut Karpis off before he pulled away, and an agent stuck a gun to his ear. Hoover told the press that he personally arrested Karpis, but in his 1971 autobiography, Karpis claimed that Hoover waited behind a building until it was safe. Indeed, Hoover was not among the arresting officers who improvised Karpis’s capture, but he did appear shortly thereafter.

Karpis was sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping and went to Leavenworth, Kansas, and then to Alcatraz in 1936. He remained at Alcatraz until 1962, becoming the longest-serving inmate on Alcatraz as a result of his twenty-five years there. He was then sent to McNeil Island Penitentiary in Puget Sound, Washington, where he spent another seven years in prison before his release in 1969; he was sent back to his native Canada.

Karpis wrote The Alvin Karpis Story with Bill Trent in 1971. He then moved to Spain, where he invested money in a Montreal pizza business that later failed. He wrote On the Rock: Twenty-Five Years in Alcatraz (1980) with Robert Livesey in the late 1970’s, a book about his years inside Alcatraz. He told Livesey that he amused himself by plotting the robbery of a local Spanish bank. He died in 1979 in Torremolinos, Spain, of an overdose of sleeping pills.

Impact

Alvin Karpis was the last Depression-era “public enemy,” and his pursuit, along with those of other gangsters in the same era, established the FBI as the United States’ chief crime-fighting organization. He was the only public enemy to survive capture. Karpis’s alleged “personal arrest” by director J. Edgar Hoover ended congressional criticism of the agency, which had focused on allegations that the director was reckless and ineffectual. After gangster John Dillinger’s death and Karpis’s arrest, Hoover’s position became unassailable to his critics. He remained director of the FBI until his death in 1972—a tenure of more than forty years. Karpis often claimed that he was responsible for Hoover’s successful career.

Before his accidental fatal overdose of sleeping pills, Karpis was paid twenty thousand dollars to be the consultant for a film about his life. After he died, the film was scrapped. According to Karpis’s ghostwriter, Robert Livesey, Karpis babysat in Toronto for future actors Neve and Christian Campbell when they were in grade school.

Bibliography

Burrough, Bryan. Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-1934. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. A hefty study of four public enemies of the 1930’s, including much discussion of Karpis.

Esslinger, Michael. Alcatraz: A Definitive History of the Penitentiary Years. Carmel, Calif.: Ocean View, 2003. Provides a solid history of “life on the rock” and gives information about Karpis, including his prison mugshots.

Karpis, Alvin, with Robert Livesay. On the Rock: Twenty-Five Years in Alcatraz. Toronto, Ont.: Beaufort Books, 1980.

Karpis, Alvin, with Bill Trent. The Alvin Karpis Story. New York: Berkley, 1971. Karpis claimed to have a near-photographic memory. Both of his books were written with the assistance of ghostwriters, who taped hours of Karpis reminiscing about robbing banks and surviving a quarter century inside Alcatraz.