Behind the Bastards - Ma' Barker: A Doting Mother And Gangster Overlord

Episode Date: October 31, 2019

In Episode 93, Robert is joined by Emily Yoshida (Night Call Podcast) to discuss Ma Barker, the notorious leader of the Barker Gang.FOOTNOTES: Barker/Karpis Gang The day 'Ma' Barker was slain in Florida TOWN WHERE MA BARKER DIED SURE THAT ALLIGATOR DID HER IN O'Connor Layover Agreement Crooks’ haven: The gangster era in St. Paul ‘Pretty Boy’ Falls Pretty Boy Floyd's Life, Crimes Retold Ma Barker: America's Most Wanted Mother The Terrible Rise (and Subsequent Spectacular Fall) of the Barker/Karpis Gang Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. My guest today is the wonderful Emily Yoshida of the Night Call Podcast with Tess and Molly, who are our guests on the Reagan Astrologer episode. Emily, how are you doing today? I'm doing great. I've been saying it's very good of you to take over the hangover duties this morning because I've been taking them over for most of this week. I'm glad we could coordinate that.

I'm the podcasting equivalent of that Marine who dives on a hand grenade to save his squad. But the hand grenade was drinking too much at the live podcast recording I did last night and then eating Indian food and continuing to drink. It's really hard to turn down free drinks being given to you by people who like you and think that you're cool. It's a tough proposition to turn down. I can absolutely say it beats having free drinks thrown at you by people who hate you and think that you're lame, which is my prior experience. If I have to pick one, I will pick it. Now, Emily, how do you feel about gangsters? I'm relatively down with gangsters.

There's so many genres of gangster across history that it's hard to say blanket I'm into all gangsters, but sure, I'm open to gangsters. Do you think that, damn it, it feels good to be a gangster? I actually feel like it would be very stressful to be a gangster, honestly. Any time I watch one of those noir movies, I'm like, how do you live every night when you're pretty sure that somebody's going to barge in your house with a Tommy gun? That just seems extremely stressful. It does seem very stressful. Would you say you're the kind of person who you get a grab bag of FBI agents on one hand. You get a grab bag of gangsters on another hand.

You pull randomly from both bags. What do you think the odds are you wind up more sympathetic to the gangster you pull out than the FBI agent you pull out? I think I'm always going to trend toward the gangster just on principle. Good. We're copacetic on this because I'm in the same boat. Today, we are talking about a gangster and a gangster that Sophie, our producer, has been wanting me to write an episode about for quite a while. I'm so excited. That's the story of this day. All right.

Good God. Thanks for giving me credit, Robert. Thanks for coming up with the idea. I wrote this on a plane so you can taste the altitude and the words. I assume. Now, as a recovering Oklahoman and a crime appreciator, I too have a lot of inherent sympathy for the gangsters, particularly of the 1920s and 30s. Criminal capitalist speculators and beggars had destroyed the national economy while reckless commercial agriculture had ruined most of the national ecology. None of them had been responsible for this ever suffered any legal consequences for their crimes.

Most of them got to keep living in giant mansions and getting fat off the collected labor of the impoverished American populace. When FDR tried to moderately alleviate the suffering of the American people, these folks attempted to depose him via a military coup. So I look with understanding at the people who robbed banks and burgled the businesses of the 1% particularly during this period. Now, these guys also killed a lot of innocent people with machine guns. So it's kind of hard to call them heroes, but I don't normally call any given gangster a bastard. Some of my bias on this is probably due to the fact that one of the most famous gangsters of the gangster era was a cousin of mine, a fellow named Pretty Boy Floyd Barnes. Oh, really? You related to Pretty Boy Floyd? That's incredible. Yeah, he was my great grandma's first cousin. She's very proud of him, as was my grandmother.

Yeah, she would talk about our outlaw blood all the time. I mean, that's very romantic. It's so much easier to romanticize having a gangster in your family than an FBI agent in your family. It's just true. It's just something elemental about it. Yeah, I would rather be related to a gangster than a cop. Yes. Unless that cop is Bruce Willis in one of the four movies in which he plays a cop. He's a fun cop. He gets to do fun cop things. He does. Real police rarely get to ramp vehicles into other vehicles. And when they do, it's usually racist, so it's a hard one.

Now, Pretty Boy Floyd was known to his fellow Oklahomans as the Sagebrush Robin Hood. He had his start in crime at age 18 stealing $350 in pennies, or if you believe Woody Guthrie, from beating a cop to death with a log chain for cursing in front of his wife. Now, the thing that disturbed authorities, like J. Edgar Hoover of the Bureau of Investigation, was how popular many gangsters were with the common folk. This was in part because they targeted banks. Pretty Boy Floyd was famous for robbing only insured banks and for burning the mortgage papers of farmers when he came across them. The FBI's archive somewhat disputes that, noting while Floyd reportedly destroyed mortgage notes from a bank or two

that he robbed in hopes of saving a few farmers from foreclosure, his reputation as a humanitarian or a Robin Hood is undeserved. Now, they don't go into much detail about that. They just say, because he shot a lot of cops, he wasn't a Robin Hood. But I should note here that the FBI is not the most reliable source on the lives of gangsters in this era. They're the agency that killed most of these people, including our current subjects of the day, Ma Barker and her sons. But the lives of gangsters are very deeply politicized still.

And so the research I've conducted for this episode, which was not crazy extensive, I caught the Bureau in at least one lie by a mission. Now, I say all this to set it up that if you read the official FBI reports on some of the stuff we're talking about, they will contrast with the story I am telling you today. The story I'm telling you today is based primarily on the work of historians who I trust more than cops. So anyway, that's the introduction. Always rob insured banks. I just want to do a PSA out there.

I mean, it's hard not to at this point. If you're going to rob a bank, it's probably insured, but make sure your bank's insured before you rob it. That's the new t-shirt, Emily. Yeah. Always rob insured banks behind the bastards. Always be robbing insured banks. If you get a chance to destroy mortgage paperwork, do it.

Sure. Yeah. Burn up some loans. Burn up some loans. It was a lot easier back when everything was on paper. Yeah, I know. That would have been so fun. You would have really felt like you could make an impact as a bank robber.

It would feel a lot more political. Oh, yeah. Like you're not just point break, like trying to go surfing or whatever. You can actually change a lot of people's lives. Yeah, I guess that is the most political bank robber in a modern movie. I said maybe the Joker is like the guys in point break, and they just wanted to surf. They just wanted to surf, but they did rob the bank in president masks.

They were the dead presidents. Yeah, the dead presidents. Which seems mostly like a non sequitur with the rest of their whole deal, but it was fun. They had flair. They had flair. There was like zero politics actually going on in the movie other than wouldn't it be cool if we hit this wave robber? I mean, it would.

I mean, and anybody who argues otherwise is not somebody I want to align myself with politically. Yeah, yeah. That is my politics is robbing banks to hit sick waves. Now, Ma Barker is not the most famous gangster of her era, but she was at one point public enemy number one, which is objectively the coolest title you can achieve. I hope we all become public enemy number one at some point. Everybody gets their turn on the internet.

Yeah, I feel like that is kind of how Twitter works. Every day we have a new public enemy number one. That sounds way cooler than complaining about cancel culture. Everybody gets their day to be public enemy number one. You can revel in it a little bit, at least it's going to happen. I'm excited for my day to come when my many, many crimes are finally exposed to the world. That's going to be great. Oh boy.

No, that's another thing. See, this is why I wouldn't be cut out to be a gangster. I'm already too stressed out about like just saying one wrong word at one point and getting. I bet anyone realizing how often you shoplift from Costco. Oh my God. I mean, it's not. Yeah, you joke. I have a pretty bad shoplifting pass.

Hey, you know, look, if God didn't want us to shoplift, he wouldn't have given us pockets. And that is my justification. That's, yeah, checks out. Hard to argue with. Now, by some accounts, Ma Barker was the among the most innovative and successful criminal masterminds of any era. By other accounts, she was mostly just a chef and the moral support system for her criminal children. The FBI takes the angle that she was not a mastermind and that she was mostly just supporting her boys who did all of the real crime thinking. The bulk of the evidence seems to discredit them on this.

And I'm, you know, that's enough of my anti FBI pro gangster. Let's get into the story. Ma Barker's life is often summed up like this folksy write up by the University of Florida. Quote, born in the Ozarks, she was poor in her early years. So strong was her lust for money, furs and bobbles. She turned to a life of crime and led four young sons down the same path. The eldest, Herman convinced her crime does pay. So she opened up in her own home, a school of crime for the youngins.

When they were arrested for petty infractions, she upgraded them for getting caught. Trust the University of Florida to use the word youngins in a historical write up. I love, I love, I mean, the idea of a school for crime is just so cute. I mean, it just sounds so, I mean, it's just very, very Oliver twist, of course. But I don't know, it seems like a fun, fun time. It does. It seems like a good, good night of podcasts. The old school of crime, have a bunch of different people come up and like, this is how I got free water from the city.

This is how I got that boot off my car without paying. Yeah, the lecture series would be incredible at the school for crime, the school for petty crime. Yeah, the school for petty, petty crime. Yeah. Yeah. Stealing some lifesavers. Yeah, yeah. The school for getting by crime.

Yeah. Like how to sneak, how to sneak the fixings to make your ramen palatable out of your, out of the grocery store in a jacket without getting caught. See, this is like actually stuff that I thought about trying to turn into a podcast at some point or another is just like actual, like basic poverty skills for 20-somethings and up, like just like, you know, how to, how to jerry-rig things out of other things and make it into, like just so you can get by and have a less stressful life on zero dollars.

Yeah, I have a lot to say about how to specifically jigger the breaking down pieces of your car so that the police won't notice that your registration has been expired for years. That's brilliant. That's a critical skill, critical skill. Yeah, because that ruined me for many, like years. It was my stupid car and it's stupid registration. Yeah, it's a, it says something about our society that almost all of our tips for living in poverty are also crimes,

but that's a story for another day. So my main source for this episode is Ma Barker, America's Most Wanted Mother by Howard Kazanjian and Chris Intz, E-N-S-S, I don't know how to pronounce that, Intz seems to be right. It's the best write-up of this particular story that I found and it's a fun book. So, Arizona Donnie Clark was born on October 8th, 1873 in Green County, Missouri. She was one of four children and her childhood occurred on a small farm 18 miles from nowhere. Arizona's family called her Ari, which she seems to have hated.

Her beloved father died when she was seven. What? That was Sophie. What? And what's wrong with Ari? It's just funny that she's Arizona and then her family's like, you're Ari and she's like, no, I'm not. Call me Arizona.

I don't think she liked that either, which I don't know. It's a very hippie name for the time. Yeah, there's a raising Arizona joke there, but I'm not going to make it. Because I haven't seen that movie. Not one of Nicholas Cage's best, or maybe it is. He's very charming in it, but is he? He is charming. But it's about crimes and it's about a baby.

So far, sounds like her autobiography. I do love baby crimes. Now, Ari's beloved father died when she was seven and her mother remarried not long after to a guy with the last name of Reynolds, who she did not like. Now, the family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where her stepfather took up work as a cop. It would be rank speculation for me to, you know, wonder that her stepfather's career as a police officer had an impact on Arizona's adult life.

But it's hard not to think about given what comes next. Most sources seem to agree that she really hated her stepdad, largely because he favored his natural born children over his wives' children. So this is one of those classic stepparent stories. All stepparents are bastards, apparently. That's the lesson Disney taught me. It's true. It's like, you know, but it also means you're more likely to be a hero in a Disney movie

if you have a stepparent. Oh, yeah. You know, having a stepparent is the key to after 90 minutes or so, winding up in a great place. Yeah, yeah. Being an orphan, having a stepparent. Being somebody's ward also. Yeah.

The first thing I learned from popular fiction as a kid was that the best thing to have is dead parents. You really want to get those parents out of the way as soon as possible. Yeah. Really helps with everything. Now, Mr. Reynolds, her stepdad, did not approve of the man Ma Barker fell in love with at age 19, George Elias Barker. They were married on September 14th, 1892.

Now, George was 10 years older than Arizona, which in most cases would be cause for serious concern that the much older party might dominate the younger. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, nothing like that happened. George was soft-spoken, non-confrontational, and even a bit shy. He was utterly dominated by his young wife. For her part, Kate, which is what she was going by at this point, was disappointed in her man from the beginning of their relationship.

Decades later, the Kansas City star would write this of her upbringing. Her life had been that of an ordinary Missouri farm girl, church, Sunday school, picnics, hayrides, candy poles, and a little red schoolhouse, somewhere she acquired a need for riches and personal power. She hoped to obtain gold and glory by way of her husband, but eventually realized it could only be learned by her sons. So that's kind of the common right up of her. All right. Yeah.

It's interesting to me that they all write like, oh, she wanted all these superficial things. That's what she, like as if it's, yeah, and it's like, well, maybe she just grew up poor on a farm and didn't want to be fucking poor anymore. Yeah. Like painting this picture of like the epitome of Americana and being like, but why did she become so materialistic? It's like it's baked into being an American, especially if you're poor.

Yeah, maybe being poor on a farm sucks. Yeah. It's nice to have furs. Yeah. Like all pop culture seems to tell us unless we try to get it by committing crimes. Well, I do feel like, I mean, I feel like there have been some movies that have addressed this, but like the fact that there is radio and there's like more rapid pop culture that can be disseminated is like why so many of these people get into crime in the first place

and are also like why they become celebrities, become these mythical figures because they are pop cultural figures at the time. Like that's what I think a lot of like Michael Mann's movie public enemies is about. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. I think so. And we'll get to that in a second. So her husband George was uneducated and he had no interest in obtaining an education.

He was a day laborer with zero aspirations beyond working on a small farm and making enough to survive. Kate, though, had spent enough time being poor as a little girl. She wanted more out of life and she asked her stepdad to loan her and her husband some money so they could start a business. Her stepfather turned them down and she never spoke with him again. For a time, Kate tried to push George into success. She lived as a simple housewife and threw herself into religion.

Most people who knew her in those days say she was almost never seen without a Bible in hand. But at home, away from prying eyes, she developed another obsession. Outlaws. The Jesse James gang and the Dalton gang were her particular favorites. Both groups robbed banks across the same chunk of the country where Kate had grown up. In fact, she'd even watched the James gang ride through town as a girl. Being a woman, and this being the 1890s, Kate did not have any hope of being a successful gangster herself. Bonnie Parker had not yet fired a Tommy gun into that glass ceiling.

So Kate found herself enamored with the mothers of these daring criminals. According to Ma Barker, America's most wanted mother, quote, The Dalton's and the James boys were raised by strong, defiant mothers who made sure they knew how to use a weapon and fight for what they wanted. The influence the women had on their families and the devotion their sons felt towards their mothers struck a chord with Kate. She aspired to have it in her own life. I mean, everybody wants to raise an army of loyal, large adult sons to do crimes for you.

Why? The president did, and look how that's working. Yeah, exactly. They're not great at it, but that doesn't seem to matter. Well, it's all about the intention. I mean, it does take a lot of work to first create that army of large adult sons. I mean, two can be an army, but four is even better. Yeah, I mean, in a way, we're all trying to raise our own large adult sons for a life of crime.

I'm just trying to do it by radicalizing people through podcasts. So again, rob insured banks. Sophie, can we urge people to rob banks on the show? No. What if it's like my views don't reflect the views of the network, but still rob insured banks? My advice that people rob insured banks is purely humor? Yeah. Satire.

Satire. I'm satirizing bank robbers by advising people to rob banks. Yeah, it's a wonderful satire. It's really sharp. That's legally bulletproof. All right. Now, Kate and George had their first son, Herman, on October 30th, 1894. They had three more sons over the next several years, ending with their fourth son, Fred, in 1903.

All these mouths to feed strained George's limited ability to provide. He did manage to save enough cash to buy a small farm, but the house on it was essentially a decrepit hovel, barely fit for human habitation. Kate was desperately unhappy with these circumstances and longed for something better, and it is hard not to see why. When we're talking about the poverty in this era, we're not like talking about like a quaint little farmhouse. We're talking about a building that's essentially made of trash wood, filled with mice and vermin and mosquitoes in the summer,

where people are basically pooping in a hole surrounded by flies. Like it's not a great life. Yeah. This is like dustball time. Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's bad. It's a bad time to be a human being.

This is a little before that during this period, but it's still a time of like unspeakable poverty. It's so crazy that that's still like what we consider the modern era more or less than that people were living. The United States could not necessarily yet be considered a first world country. It's incredible. Not by modern standards. Yes. It is one of those things. You read about like the great battles in World War II and World War I

and how like nightmarish the privations were for the soldiers. But then you have to think like, well, okay, but most of them grew up like farming dirt and shitting in holes. Like it's not like this was new. It's not like living rough was an incomprehensible concept to all of them. You know, a lot of them grew up in cities, but a lot of them were fucking country people. Yeah. The base level you're starting from is considerably different. Yeah.

Yeah, people are tougher in this period of time. This is right around the period that my grandpa left home. When he was 17, the economy collapsed and his dad was like, we can't take care of you. And he walked across two states with nothing but cornbread in his pockets to go get a job with a civilian conservation corps. And it's like, I never had to do shit like that. Like that would have been. This is like a little off topic, but I've been watching the Ken Burns country music documentary and it's like filled with stories like that. Like there's a family like walks, I think from Arkansas to California or most of the way.

Jesus. They walk most of the way and it's just like also it's like everybody dies at 30 and they look like they're 62 years old. And it's like, oh my God, life. Life was, I don't have to go back too far for life to look like that. Your average 31 year old look like Keith Richards. Yes. It was a different time. Yeah.

Now, for his part, George Barker seems to have done his best to provide for his family. His best just wasn't very good. He worked long hours and spent all of his free time with his children, teaching them how to fish and hunt. Thanks to George, the Barker boys all grew up as fabulous shots. Kate, who was renowned to be a great chef, taught them how to cook. She also handled discipline for the family by her own insistence. Whenever George would attempt to discipline any of their kids, she'd shout him down until he backed off. The Kansas City Star in 1936 described the young family thusly.

She, Ma, attended church regularly dragging her brood after her. George, her husband, went as well. He was a mild, ineffective, quiet man who seemed somewhat bewildered by his domineering wife. This was especially true when he attempted to assume guidance of the growing boys. There was a feline intensity about Kate's determination that no one but herself should be their mentor. And in her eyes, they could do no wrong. Ma Barker socialized with very few people. She was cordial when spoken to, but rarely initiated a conversation.

Neighbor and fellow church grower, Gertrude Farmer, was the only woman with whom she spent time. Gertrude and Ma were described by Web City residents as odd and unapproachable. Maybe everybody else just sucked, but... The Barkers lived in Web City, Missouri for the early years of their children's lives, where they met the farmer family whose patron, William, was a small-time con artist. He was no better at earning a living than George, but he did have many half-and-quarter-true stories of outlaws and con men that he regaled the Barker children and Kate with. The Barker kids quickly developed a reputation for being little criminals, damaging property, stealing, and fighting. Kate Barker was reasonably happy with this. Her only real issue was when her children got caught.

Lesson number one at school for petty crime. Yeah, don't get caught committing the petty crimes. Now, George was worried for his boys, and he moved the family to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1910 as a way to get them out of their bad environment. The city was a boom town, though, which means it was as filled with criminals as the Barker family living room. So this was probably a bad move on his part. Now, the Barker home in Tulsa was even worse than their previous home in Webb City. The floor was just boards over dirt, the windows were all shattered, and the bathroom was a shack with a hole on the ground. Flies covered everything any time it wasn't freezing.

Kate continued to be miserable in these circumstances, and her children's early memories were likely full of her lambasting Charles for his failure to provide for the family. So the boys began to strategize, scheming up ways to bring in money via less than legal routes. They had watched their father try and fail for years to make a decent living on the straight and narrow. Crime, they decided, seemed a lot smarter, which, you know... Yeah. I mean, who would not arrive at these conclusions? It's hard to fault, like, the logic here. It kind of seems like obeying the laws for assholes. Yeah. Or, like, that's for a different generation, you know? I feel like there's always some kind of generational shift like that, like...

He doesn't take ad breaks without me telling him. Oh. Yeah. Wait. Sophie is telling me that I don't take ad breaks without her telling me, and I will have her know, yes, that's accurate. Sophie interrupted you, Emily, which is very rude of her, but she did it in order to make sure that we had an ad break, which is very polite of her. Sorry, I didn't realize what it was for, so I didn't know if I needed to stop. It's okay. In order to make up for this, Emily, would you like to plug a random product of your own desire, something you like, or a service, or a crime?

You can plug anything at this point. I think I could plug a good crime. What's a good product that I love right now? I mean, honestly, I feel like I've plugged this so many times on Night Call, but, like, I love a NutriBullet, and I desperately want Night Call to be sponsored by NutriBullet because I would, like, do an entire podcast about the NutriBullet and all the wonderful uses for it. I could start up, like, a school for crimes, but just, like, using the NutriBullet. Anyway, that's my endorsement of a product. Well, I would like to endorse my new Behind the Bastards branded Actual Bullets, which are the first gluten-free ammunition on the open market.

So, buy a NutriBullet, buy some gluten-free bastards' bullets. It's always so frustrating when you have to kill somebody, but they have silly eyes. Exactly. And that's not okay. If you're going to shoot someone with celiacs disease, use gluten-free bullets. Yeah, it's the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do. And the other right thing to do is to listen to these ads. Products.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns.

He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. We're back. Returning from some amazing ads.

What was your favorite one? My favorite one was the ad for carjacking police vehicles. I really enjoyed that one. I never thought of that as a realistic product. And I'm glad that the fine people at Procter & Gamble suggested that because it would be a crime if I suggested that. Really upstanding people over there at Procter & Gamble. Thank you Procter & Gamble for urging all people to hijack police vehicles. Again, Procter & Gamble, the only, what do they make? Shampoo?

Like drugstore products, I suppose. Home cleaning products. As the fine people at Procter & Gamble say, by Procter & Gamble, do crimes. Procter & Gamble had a satanic panic scandal around it. They sure did because they love the devil. That's confirmed. They love crimes in the devil. The devil's a busy guy and he has dandruff and he doesn't have time to use multiple different shampoos. Procter & Gamble 2-in-1 dandruff shampoo is really, that's where the devil's at. The devil is in your psoriasis.

So, back to the Barker family. Between 1910 and 1911, all four Barker boys made the Tulsa police blotter. The Joplin Globe wrote in 1939 that, the boys were known as the town tufts before they were out of school. Their home became a meeting place for Nairdoo Wells, a crime school so successful that many of those who congregated there graduated to try it on a bigger scale, through a variety of assumed names. Now, how much Ma Barker was involved in the training of her children

in the training of other criminals here is up for debate. What's known is that whenever one of her kids would get in trouble, she would write in for the rescue. She was famously charismatic and good at talking to lawmen and judges. Ma would usually argue that her children were just high strong and not nearly as bad as town gossip made them out to be. Plus, she argued, the police were unfairly targeting her family. She insisted repeatedly that if the cops left them alone, her boys would behave.

And she seemed to have been really good at just haranguing police and judges into letting her kids go. I love high strong as the explanation. It feels very contemporary. It feels like something that somebody at a hippie school in Brentwood would say about their kids to get them out of trouble. He's just very, very high strong. The paraphrase warrants Yvonne. They're just excitable boys.

Yes. So in private, Kate Barker took on a different tact. When her young son, Herman, was arrested and confessed to committing crimes, she is reputed to have told him that confessing to anyone but God was a sign of weakness. She expected her sons to never snitch or admit wrongdoing. Instead, they should keep their mouth shut and do their time. So, that's Ma Barker, an important lesson.

You only answered God. Before long, a small community of criminals began to coalesce around Ma Barker and her sons. They became known as the Central Park Gang because they hung out in Tulsa's Central Park, not the one that's famous. Now, the Barker house was their other main gathering point and it quickly became a popular haunt for local crime doers. According to the Joplin Globe, partnerships in crime were engineered in both locations by Ma, who sometimes charged a fee for thieves

to use being in her presence as an alibi when a crime was perpetrated. Sometimes, she conspired with lawbreakers for the sheer warped joy of it. It sounds to me like she's basically Airbnb for crimes. I'm looking to commit a crime and she'll be like, oh, here's a place you can do it. Here's someone who can help you. She's like an incubator. She's like an incubator for crimes. Like a real Silicon Valley pioneer. That's essentially what's going on here.

Who's the famous one of those investors? No, Peter Teal is the Peter Teal of crimes. She's just Ma Barker. That's giving him too much credit. Peter Teal is not the Ma Barker of Silicon Valley. Peter Teal wishes. Who is the Ma Barker of Silicon Valley? I don't know.

Somebody who knows more about Silicon Valley has probably more bastards per capita than Tulsa at this time period. They can let us know. Yeah, they can let us know. At least these Tulsa bastards, these are honest crimes. Nobody's making Twitter here. Now, once her sons were old enough to pull off real capers, they started bringing in real money.

For the first time in her life at just over age 30, Ma Barker started to enjoy the finer things. Fur coats, jewelry, bathrooms with a functional door, and windows. And again, this was binary back in the day. I just hate when hip-hop got so materialistic that they just started rapping about doors and windows. Yeah, Fitty sent bragging to all of us about the knob on his bathroom door, like a goddamn king.

He ain't able to go to the bathroom in private. As she grew used to finery and crime, Kate began directing the efforts of her sons, handing them the names and addresses of people in Tulsa who were doing a little too well, in her opinion, and deserved to be relieved of their wealth. Tulsa police officer, Harry Steege, would later tell reporters, her boys were slippery, young hoodlums.

She adored her children, but apart from Fred, didn't consider them to be especially clever, which is always true of large adult sons and their crimes. They're never as good at it as the parents. Right. Yeah. Now, Ma Barker's sons committed a truly astonishing amount of petty crime in this period. Between all of the bank robberies, jewel store heists,

department store robberies, and kidnappings, the total number of capers probably numbered into the thousands. Many of these were complex and ambitious schemes, but the majority of them were really dumb. Barker boys would be busted more than once because they stole distinctive fine clothing and then wore it around town after robbing it, or because they left said clothing behind at the scene of a crime.

There's multiple hats that get Barker boys arrested. Oh, my God. I want to see these hats. Yeah. They've got to be pretty spectacular. I mean, what's a noteworthy hat in 19, what year is this? Yeah, it's like 1910, 1915, something like that. I mean, it might just be that their hat wasn't a pile of dirt on their hat.

Look at that son of a bitch. His hat's made of fabric. He's got to be robbing. Yeah. So in 1915, Herman was the first of Ma Barker's sons to be arrested on suspicion of attempted theft. He was the first son to leave home, too, and his criminal history on his own was wide-ranging,

but only partly successful. By 1917, he had robbed a number of jewelry stores and banks and was wanted in several states. As their children one by one embarked on their own criminal careers, Ma Barker became something of a mother to countless other bank robbers in Oklahoma. According to the book, Ma Barker, among the fugitives harbored at the farmer's home were bank robbers Al Spencer, Frank Nash, and Ray Terrell, and train robbers Earl Thayer,

Francis Keating, and Thomas Holdings. These accomplished lawbreakers and a number of other wrongdoers would eventually use the Barker's tiny Tulsa home as a safe house. In addition to the farmer's homestead. Ma charged the men a modest fee to hide out at her place, where she kept the fugitives fed and steered authorities in a different direction if they came nosing around. So her kids leave the nest to start committing crimes,

and she turns into like a hostile for other criminals, basically. Now, is this like kind of... I mean, I'm sort of surprised to hear that her sons go on to commit their own crimes, because like, I know that you said that the FBI's telling of the story is that she wasn't really a mastermind, but it also sounds like they're pretty dumb. They're very dumb, and their individual criminal careers in this period are nothing impressive.

It's not until they kind of come back together that they start doing the shit they got famous for. They come back to mama. Yeah, any kid's gonna try to fly the roost and see if he can rob banks without his mom. That's just normal parenting. Now, Herman was imprisoned after a robbery gone bad, and Ma Barker blamed his partner in the robbery, George White, on the endeavor,

mostly on the strength of the fact that he'd received half the sentence for the same crime. She was convinced the judge had been lenient on him due to his family wealth. Reporters at the time suspected that this is what convinced her that, quote, justice could be bought or sold. It seems like to me that this is something she'd always believed, but that's usually how you'll see it written up. It did, however, help to solidify her attitude towards wealthy families, but we'll get to that later.

By 1918, all of Ma Barker's children had graduated to serious crimes. There were not always smart crimes. In July of that year, Arthur Barker stole a Ford Roadster belonging to an apartment of justice employee parked directly in front of a federal building. He was caught almost instantly. Ma Barker attempted to talk her son out of jail, but he escaped on his own and was then arrested again almost immediately.

Kate did succeed. Ma Barker got the charges against him, dropped probably by bribing police officers to destroy the evidence of his obvious crimes, but he was arrested again a year later for stealing another Ford Roadster. Oh, my God, this kid. You can't stop this kid from stealing police vehicles.

He's got to have his Roadsters. He's got to have his fucking Roadster. Oh, my God. I would be so mad. The same crime. Pick a different brand. I mean, maybe it was just Ford's at the moment, but yeah. Certainly after Arthur was jailed,

a sulfuric acid and a saw were smuggled into the prison where he was held. He and 16 other prisoners escaped. It's not known who smuggled these items in, but it was almost certainly Ma Barker. Oh, my God. Again, she's good at talking to cops. She's good at bribing.

She's good at like... Burning a hole through a prison. Yeah. Or what? Is that what happened? Like, they just, like, acid it their way out? I think so. Yeah, I think they weakened the bars with acid

and then sawed through them. And no one was good at making jails back in those days. People were bad at almost everything in the early 1900s. Well, that's good then. If you're bad at crimes and you wind up in jail, then you're in a jail that they were bad at making and you can get out pretty easily. Yeah, exactly.

You just have to be good at getting out of the bad jail. Yeah, the history of the early 1900s is just a bunch of incompetent people fucking up around each other. Yeah. Now, while her sons committed a range of crimes, Ma Barker continued to run her farm as a safe house for gangsters.

She was something of a fixer, helping lone criminals find other people to partner with and take jobs with. She was known to have a good eye for the most corrupt cops and judges in town and how much it would cost to bribe them. The Kansas City Star later wrote, criminals from a dozen penitentiaries sought out Ma Barker.

Only two things were lacking at Ma's. Liquor and women. A man was a fool to drink, she said. Likewise, he's a fool to run around with women. Sooner or later, they'd put the law on him. So she's not a fan of other women. Or booze. Or booze.

Well, that's surprising because the Roadster thing, the only thing way I could justify it in my mind was that he was drunk at the time. He may have been drunk at the time. Possibly. I guess he was out of the house. So, yeah. Yeah.

Now, George Barker, Ma Barker's husband, did not thrive under his wife's new occupation as a mass crime helper. While his children were still mostly in the house, he gave up on challenging them with their constant law-breaking and let Ma Barker mostly handle the discipline. When neighbors would come up to him and complain about his children's stealing shit,

he would say some variation of, talk to their mom, she handles the kids. Kate Barker had never been very happy in her marriage, although from what I've read, George was pretty far from a bad guy, but he was a giant wimp, and far from the kind of successful that Ma Barker wanted. As she grew more comfortable with hard crime and dangerous men,

her husband grew even less appealing. So she cheated on him constantly, with all manner of gangsters. Unlike George, these were passionate men, and they had money to burn. They showered her with presents and took her out on the town. Everyone in Tulsa, including George, knew what was going on,

but the man who wouldn't stand up to his own wife about their children committing an endless series of crimes, was not about to confront actual veteran murderers about taking his wife out to the movies, you know? Oh, my God, George. He's kind of lame. Ma's right. She makes the right call. Look at this guy.

Oh, passionate men with deep pockets. Yeah, yeah. Versus the guy who couldn't buy you a door to the bathroom. I mean, it's... Sophie is showing me a picture of Ma, which I think must have been... Well, no, she's probably... Given the time period, she's probably like,

what, 25 in that picture? Yeah. She's... I mean, it's pretty incredible to imagine her, like, being taken out on the town by these, like, wealthy, Tulsa gangsters. The problem is, like, a month after age 19, everyone back then looked like they got hit in the face

by a train. Oh, yeah, yeah. She's seen some life, but, like, just for all the more reason for her to fucking take these guys up on their whining and dining. Yeah. Sounds fun. Sounds fun.

Now, by the mid-1920s, George had fucked off to Joplin, Missouri, and abandoned his family. And it's hard to blame the guy. Ma Barker, for her part, barely seemed to notice. FBI records from the 20s and early 30s note that she was romantically involved with a number of criminals who bought her drinks and treated her like royalty.

Now, one of the downsides about having a bunch of crime sons is that they tend to get killed. You know, yeah. Ma Barker's first... Even just stealing, like, life savers. I don't know why I keep coming back to the life series. There must be some, like, dumb shoplifting thing

I witnessed as a child. Just, like, how dangerous can they be? I mean, is that the most ambitious thing you've stolen from a group? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay, good, good, good. That just feels like the crime number one. I think that my best theft was figuring out

how to disassemble and steal a plunger from Walmart when I was, like, 19 and in my first place and needed one but had no extra money. Wait, a plunger? A plunger, yeah. But, I mean, okay, sure. So you took off the plunger part and you stuck the dowel,

the rod part down your pants or something? Yeah, and you put the other part in your pants, too, but once it's disassembled, you can, like, kind of flatten it in there, yeah. Man, like, the era of baggy, baggy your pants from then was also, like, very conducive for shoplifting. It's harder when you're a girl... It has helped.

...and you're wearing skinny jeans. Yeah, it has helped. I also had a lot of, like, drank a lot of lunches when I was poor by just walking around the grocery store drinking whatever they had that had protein in it and then leaving it behind. Yeah, I mean, hey, man, it was hard times.

I mean, yeah, no, Whole Foods is basically, like, a buffet, right? You can just, like... Oh, yeah. Get whatever you want and then walk around and, like, look at some products while you eat. You gotta sample that shit before you decide whether or not to pay.

Also, now that Whole Foods is owned by Amazon, I feel no guilt. Zero. Zero. Sorry. Yeah. This podcast is brought to you by Whole Foods. Jeff Bezos specifically funds this podcast.

Jeff Bezos, who says, always eat all of the grapes in the bag before you check out. And always rob in shirt banks. Famous Jeff Bezos quote. Now, Ma Barker's first son to die was her oldest boy, Herman. He'd flown furthest from the nest

and he built a gang himself that robbed a number of jewelry stores and made off with tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise. Their method of robbery was actually kind of ingenious. They snuck into crawl spaces or cut holes in the roof in order to drop down

mission impossible-like from the ceiling. For a while, police were flummoxed, but then Herman left his hat at the scene of a crime and police traced it back to the store and sell it to where he purchased it. Not the only time a hat would doom a Barker boy. Oh, my God. These guys,

why are they doing crimes and hats? Stop wearing hats, maybe. Maybe stop wearing hats to crimes. Fashion a chin strap for it if you really need it for style or cover or something. It's amazing to think of an age when hats were so deregure that you'd be like, well, no, I'm not going to commit crimes without a hat.

I mean, the crime will be committed outside. I must have my hat. What am I, a savage? Oh, my God. In June 7th, 1926, Herman and a partner stole a car from a dealership in Fairfax and wound up in a high-speed chase that ended in Kansas.

Herman escaped while his partner was caught, but Herman was caught hours later, buying another hat. Are you kidding me? Yeah, these Barker boys are their fucking hats. Always a problem. Oh, my God. It's like very loony tunes.

You know the cops let him keep the hat. They're like, no, you can't put a man in prison without a hat. What are we? He's got to have his phone call in his hat. Yeah. Now, Ma Barker bailed Herman out, and for a time, he was able to be in the wind again.

But even though he'd just been busted for Grand Theft Auto and was wanted in questioning for two bank robberies, Herman decided to plan a third bank robbery. On January 17th, 1927, Herman and several partners broke into the First National Bank of Jasper, Missouri. They made off with a pile of loot, but the authorities were hot on their trail

and a 30-minute gun battle ensued. Herman was wounded and arrested, but he was out again on bail by August, and I guess this was a time when you could shoot at the police and get out on bail. That's incredible. That is incredible. While he was out on bail for his third robbery,

he and a partner decided to rob an ice plant. They stole $200 from the safe and fled the scene. Next, according to the book, Ma Barker... What about all the ice? What about all the ice? It turns out it's a bad thing to steal. Yeah, probably. If you get caught...

I guess the upside is if you get caught stealing ice, you just keep on the run until the ice melts. It's like, you ain't got no proof. Yeah, exactly. Got a wet car. I just love driving wet. I mean, but I wouldn't put it past this guy, honestly. It'd be like, oh, we're gonna do an ice ice. Probably per pound the stupidest thing

you could set out to rob. The worst crime to engage in. Yeah. Alright, so I'm gonna quote the book Ma Barker talking about what happened after the ice heist. Motorcycle officer J.E. Marshall and his partner Frank Bush spotted the gangster's car speeding through town at 2 in the morning. After a short pursuit, the getaway vehicle stopped,

and officer Marshall approached the car to confront the offenders. Herman was driving, and when the police officer got close enough to look inside the vehicle, he grabbed the officer around the neck, leveled a gun against his face, and fired two shots. So this provoked a chase, and Herman was wounded badly during an automotive firefight. He and his partner crashed their car, and overcome with pain, Herman Barker shot himself dead.

Ma Barker grieved deeply for her oldest boy, and used some of her ill-gotten gains to buy a four-foot-tall marble headstone for Herman. Some lawman would later write that Herman's death caused Ma Barker to turn her back entirely on morality. But this seems to be theatric drama. By the time Herman died, Ma had been a criminal mastermind for nearly a decade.

But the death of her oldest son did have a major impact on her. Ma Barker would not, in the future, be content to let her children fuck up at planning their own crimes. She had bigger plans for them, grander plans, Minnesota-eyer plans. And this brings us to the greatest hive of scum and villainy in the history of the United States,

the city of St. Paul. I knew you were going to say St. Paul. Terrible place, terrible people. Wait, really? Compared to Tulsa? Well, in this time, actually, yeah. I mean, I can't speak for St. Paul today, but during the Great Depression, it was famous for being a haven for gangsters.

Really? And you know what else is a haven for gangsters, Emily? The products and services that support this podcast. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson,

and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. To go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story

is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good-bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure

he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23,

I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut

who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union,

is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on Trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Products done. Services serviced. Boy Howdy. I'm a big fan. Speaking of things I'm not a fan of, let's talk about

St. Paul, the crime city. Wow, apologies to the people of St. Paul, Minnesota. No apologies. The only city I apologize to is Pittsburgh. But nothing for St. Paul. Bring it on. That's true Emily.

Today the city of consistency is everything. And St. Paul was consistently filled with criminals. And probably now I assume. Today the city of St. Paul is most famous for I don't really know.

Being next to Minneapolis. Being next to Minneapolis. But back in the day it was the crime capital of America. I'm going to quote from the Minnesota Post. St. Paul in the late 20s and early 30s was known as a crookshaven, a place for gangsters, bank robbers, and bootleggers from all over the Midwest

for operations or to hide from the FBI. The concentration of local organized crime activity prompted reformers and crime reporters to call for a cleanup of the city in the mid-1930s. So it used to be an interesting place at some point is what I'm getting at here. Has there been a good crime movie

set in St. Paul? I don't know. Probably. I need a good St. Paul movie. I don't watch a lot of crime movies. I don't know. Yeah. Get on it. One of you.

Now, St. Paul earned its reputation as the sanctuary for criminals in the Midwest with the help of corrupt politicians and police chiefs who agreed to turn a blind eye to gangsters' underground activities which included smuggling, racketeering, and gambling. This collaboration began in 1900 with what was known as the layover agreement,

an unofficial contract between criminals and chief of police, John O'Connor. The law in crime and St. Paul worked out a deal. Criminals would minimize the murders they committed in town and give the cops a chunk of their profits. In exchange, the police would warn them

about upcoming FBI raids. This became known as the O'Connor system and represents, quite possibly, the most ethical chapter in the history of American law enforcement. Now, Ma Barker and her remaining kids moved to St. Paul in the early 30s, and for the next couple of years,

Ma Barker would be the grand dam of crime in that town. Along the way, he would be the son's Alvin Karpus, the former Marbles champion of Kansas who was nicknamed Old Creepy for his dead, soulless eyes. Yeah, there's a hell of a sentence. Can I? Is it too late to go with him for Halloween?

I just, like, go mental image is incredible. Alvin Karpus, you have a hide. Just have a gun and a pile of marbles. Yeah. Old Creepy. You like what I can do with this gun? Imagine what I can do with these marbles, kid. Oh, my God. That's incredible.

Ma loved Old Creepy and spent many a night out on the town of St. Paul. So Old Creepy, Alan Karpus and Ma Barker essentially combined their powers to build a gang consisting of Alvin and Ma's sons with Ma as kind of the mastermind.

In June 1923, Alvin and Ma attended the Chicago World's Fair. It is there, reportedly, that Ma Barker first told Alvin that she and her boys would be the vanguards of a new era of crime. Bank robberies beneath our dignity, she said, bigger game is in our future. That bigger game...

Famous last words. Oh, really? No. But it led to her last words. Now, that bigger game was kidnapping and ransoming the children of wealthy families. In 1932, the baby of Charles Lindbergh, famed American aviator

and fascist piece of shit, had been kidnapped by persons unknown. He found dead six months later and probably had died that very night. An innocent man named Bruno Hauptmann was arrested for the crime in 1934. The guilty parties were never caught and almost certainly made off

with tens of thousands of dollars and a baby murder got free. This was all widespread knowledge in the criminal community in 1932 when Jack Piper, head of the Holly Hawks Casino in St. Paul, went to Fred Barker and Alvin with a plan. He knew the schedule and travel routes

of William Ham, Jr. and he felt like the man's family would pay handsomely if their heir was kidnapped. Now, if you don't hail from the center-northish parts of the country, Ham's is a hilariously named mediocre beer that's better than being sober but not a whole lot better.

William Ham's, Jr. was the scion of this beer dynasty and a very wealthy man. Jack basically told the Barker gang that they could make a lot of money if they stole him. So, the gang kidnapped Ham fairly easily and by all accounts they treated him well.

Four days after his capture his $100,000 ransom was paid and he was returned unharmed to his family. The cost of the ransom was relatively minor in the scheme of the family's $4.5 million fortune. When he was returned to his family, William told a local paper although it was a trying experience

I was treated with the utmost respect and courtesy but like the old adage home sweet home is the best place of all. So, Ham seems to say yeah they were all right. That feels like he's just shy of being like I wish I could have stayed forever it was so much more fun. I wish I could have stayed forever

food was great. Now, the Ham family had asked authorities to hold back on doing anything while their kid was kidnapped and the police had agreed. I'm going to read a quote from the interview that William Ham gave the Decatur Herald after he had been freed.

Ham only saw his captors but dimly, the windows of the house in which he was placed in a second floor room were boarded up. I never saw them in because I didn't have on my goggles and they made me turn my face towards the wall when they came into the room. They were very nice to me. I asked for anything I wanted and ordered anything I wanted. The medials were good and simple.

Nothing elaborate but whoever did the cooking knew their way around the kitchen. That was almost certainly Ma Barker. Now, the FBI did not catch on to the fact that the Barker family was behind this caper. Instead, they arrested another gangster, Tuhi who was innocent of this crime. By at least some accounts, Tuhi was tortured

by law enforcement in an attempt to get him to admit his guilt. He refused and eventually killed himself in jail. Interestingly enough, the FBI leaves this story out of its account of the arrest of the Barker gang. Of course. Yeah. Oh, God. I'm just splitting hairs here.

Now, the Barker gang was doing very well at this point. The Ham's caper was their highest profile crime of this period but they also continued to rob banks at a pretty ridiculous rate. Meanwhile, Ma Barker continued to manage the fine details of the gang. Reportedly going so far as to drive the getaway routes before major crimes

to ensure every aspect of the plan was mapped out to her satisfaction. She did not draw the line at just micromanaging the business aspects of her gang. According to the book, Ma Barker, she also kept a strong hand in the romantic lives of her sons and adopted sons. Okay. Quote,

Members of the Barker-Karpus gang who were close to Ma generally kept the women they were seriously involved with away from her. It was a crazy system, Alvin admitted years later and often created friction with our women who couldn't understand why we were so careful with her feelings. The boys preferred to avoid Ma's jealous anger. They were devoted to her and considered

her contribution to their organization invaluable and something they would not jeopardize. Not only did she recruit in school the hoodlums who joined the group, but she was always a foolproof cover for the gang. Ma could project an innocence and wholesomeness to the rival the Whistler's mother but she could be fiery and obstinate. So, yeah,

that's Ma. She won't let you have a girlfriend but she'll get you out of trouble with the cops. You've got to keep your mind on crimes. You've got to keep your mind on crimes. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. Makes sense. Now, Ma was a complicated

person and while she was a domineering field within the criminal underworld she operated out of her homes, she was also vulnerable to being victimized by abusers in her own romantic life. Starting in the late 1920s she dated a man named Arthur Dunlop. What started as emotional support in the wake of her first son's death

evolved into a profoundly abusive relationship. Arthur was basically the opposite of George Barker. He refused to work or contribute to the family finances in any way but he was also a powerful personality who constantly derided and physically abused Kate Barker. The Barker boys hated Arthur

but for a while they tolerated him because their mothers seemed to love him for some inexplicable reason. Arthur moved with the family to St. Paul but soon after they began their kidnapping game he started to make trouble. Arthur was no gangster but he loved to go out drinking on the town and brag about the crimes of the Barker-Karpus gang

even though he had nothing to do with those crimes. Now he's a piece of shit, real piece of shit. I take back what I said about passionate men with deep pockets. He was just taking their money and bragging.

Just commit your own crimes. Have the decency to commit your own crimes and I don't know. It's always a bummer when your significant other tries to take credit for your career. Yeah, absolutely.

He's like who we compare him to as celebrities. He's like Kevin Federline. He's the Kevin Federline of this story. A meaner Kevin Federline although I'm sure that Kevin Federline wasn't that nice of a person.

No, history's greatest monster. Yeah. So, when Arthur's bragging finally got loud and boisterous enough that multiple criminal friends of the family warned Ma Barker she finally agreed that he had to go. Fred and Alvin shot him dead and disposed

of the corpse. Yay! Yay! By January 1934 the Barker gang was ready to try their luck at another high dollar kidnapping. Their next subject was Edward George Brimmer Jr. the scion of a wealthy banking family. By this point, the Great Depression was well underway

and the whole country was filled with rage at the corrupt bankers who had brought calamity down on the heads of the nation. While the heir to the Ham's beer fortune had been treated well Brimmer was beaten badly and repeatedly by the Barker gang, particularly by Fred Barker, who hated bankers. According to the book Ma Barker

the gang did not keep him blindfolded at all times at the hideout and he was able to observe things which were later to be of assistance in identifying the place where he was held captive. The men who held him captive spoke with various accents of French, German, Italian. At one point he heard the voice of an older woman praising the criminals holding him hostage saying

now you're thinking boys, now you're thinking. Mr. Brimmer assessed it was the voice of Ma Barker. I mean why did they not blindfold him? This seems like a major oversight. I mean I'm all for beating up a banker at least have the

foresight to blindfold him. I mean they were usually, their faces and stuff so he wasn't able to identify him and they were speaking in different accents but they weren't actually a bunch of different nationalities. They were just trying to confuse him. I would love to hear

all those accents. I'd love to hear all of their attempts at an Italian and French and German accent. Yeah, I want to know what a bunch of fucking criminal gangsters in Minnesota in the 1930s think a German sounds like.

I bet it's hilarious. Now eventually the Brimmer family paid $200,000 for the return of their son and this left the Barker-Karpus gang fantastically wealthy. But by this point they had committed too many serious crimes to not be considered public enemies.

After the Brimmer heist the Barker-Karpus gang scattered to the four winds across the nation and several other continents in an attempt to evade justice. Two of Ma Barker's sons tried the most extreme method imaginable to hide from the law that decided to undergo dangerous experimental surgery to change their faces

and their fingerprints. Now we're talking. This is a terrible story. It's real bad. An ex-convict named Joseph P. Moran was in charge of the procedure which involved looping elastic bands tightly around the gangsters' fingertips

at the first joint and injecting cocaine into each of their fingers and thumbs. Using a scalpel the doctor would then scrape to skin completely off the digits. The work of Dr. Moran did to remove the scars on Alvin's face as quickly as barbaric and unpleasant. In the end the extreme discomfort proved to be a waste of time and money. According to the FBI

report dated November 19th, 1936 Fred Barker was a raving maniac due to the pain. Dr. Moran performed other services for the gang such as laundering some of the kidnapped money through his Chicago practice. Dr. Moran suffered from the same problem of running his mouth. He drank too much which made him especially talkative.

He bragged to a couple of prostitutes in his company that he was a big doctor from Chicago who could erase fingerprints and change people's appearances. His actions weren't tolerated for long by the Barker-Karpus gang. He was warned to be quiet but defied orders by stating, I have you guys in the palm of my hand. You want to guess what happened to this guy?

Uh, he got, got, got. Yeah, he got fucking, he got fucking killed really fast. Okay, yeah, yeah. Yeah, Alvin and Arthur Barker acting on Ma's orders gunned Dr. Moran down July of 1934. They buried him in a hole under a pile of lye. So that's good.

Uh, so wait, so it didn't even work though? The fingerprint removal? It removed the fingerprints that the guys had on them, but it also, like, drove one of them crazy and, uh, made them look as if they'd been horribly burned and it was obvious, like,

well, you clearly tried to have your fingerprints removed. Look at your, look at your hands. Oh my God, so stupid. Really, this is just incredible. Like, who's good, who's the best? Well, when we're finished, we should go through a ranking of, like, who's actually good at their job and this because there aren't that many people.

Now, speaking of not being good at their job, it took the FBI until after this point to actually get their shit together and realize that the Barker gang was behind the kidnapping of several of America's wealthiest citizens. J. Edgar Hoover declared Kate Ma Barker to be

the brains of the gang's operation and the most dangerous woman in America. The dogs were out and the Barker family days were numbered. Flesh with cash and fleeing the law, they made their way to the only true home of all dangerous, unhinged criminals. Florida. Fred, his mother, and a few other sympatheticos

rented a house in Lake Weir and attempted to lay low until the heat died down. What happened next is a matter of historical debate. Since this is my podcast, the version of the story I've decided to believe is the one that involves a three-legged alligator named old Joe. As the story goes, at least according to one Chicago Tribune article

written in the 1980s based on some of the few living people who remembered these events, by January of 1935 the FBI had found one member of the Barker-Karpus gang in Chicago, Arthur Barker. When they arrested him in his hotel room, they found the partially burnt remnants of a letter

from Ma Barker. In the letter, Ma Barker had written that wherever they were hiding, it was good hunting for a three-legged alligator called old Joe. So, to their credit, the FBI had some good investigators and they combed the numerous swamps of the American south

until they found some yokels on the outskirts of Lake Weir, Florida. After that point, it was only a matter of refining for the Bureau to lock down the last few state-side remnants of the Barker gang, Ma Barker and her son Fred. Next, according to the Chicago Tribune, on the morning of Wednesday, January 15, 1935,

15 agents swooped down on a large frame house on the shores of Lake Weir on the outskirts of this Florida citrus-belt town. When the shooting ended four hours later, they found Ma Barker, 63, dead in an upstairs room, cradling a submachine gun.

The other cradling her dead son, Fred, 32. Oh, my God. Went out like a fucking G. That's tough as hell. Yeah. Machine gun in one arm, dead son on the other. It's a pretty good way to go if you're a primer. Baby in bullets. Yeah.

That's great. I'm glad that it ended in Florida as all crime stories must end. As all crime stories end and most begin. Yeah, yeah. I like that we did a detour through Minneapolis because I will differ with you on the point that I do think

Minnesota is a lovely state and it's part of the great patchwork of America, so I'm glad that they found a home there. I'm going to war with both Minneapolis. Well, no, just St. Paul. Sorry, I'm at St. Paul, yeah.

Whatever. No, somebody's going to get actually mad at me if I say whatever. Yeah. Minneapolis will get mad. Nobody in Florida is going to get mad at us saying that all Floridians are criminals. They're used to that.

If you live in Florida, you know what you are. It's like Australia. You've elected to this lifestyle. You didn't know and forced you to live in Florida. That's where you go if you want to be a criminal or you want to be friends with a three-legged alligator.

Yeah. Wow. Well, this was amazing. I have a lot of respect for her, honestly, and I feel like I guess I don't know well enough to know where you would find the seams in this, but I do kind

of feel like the FBI is sort of undermining her by trying to say that she's not the mastermind here. Yeah. What? Who would the mastermind be? If not the mastermind, she's a great instigating force that's just as important

to be moral support and provide food and shelter for your gang of criminal sons and not sons. I don't know. That's as important as being

the mastermind. I agree. I think that there's this impulse in law enforcement to kind of reduce any sort of the myth-making around these figures which never works. You can't stop

people from fundamentally wanting to side with the charismatic criminals over the G-men. It's the same reason Scarface is more popular than, I don't know, a movie about whoever the fuck shot Scarface. Right.

And it always, I guess it's more beneficial to be like, oh, all these crimes are stupid done by idiot people, which to be fair, a lot of these seem like pretty stupid crimes done by idiot people. But that version of events definitely is less

romantic. I mean, it's at least funny, but it's not like, oh, I want to grow up to be like that in the same way that having a criminal mastermind who's plotting all these amazing bank robberies or whatever, that feels more like something that someone might be tempted to emulate if given hard enough

times. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I stand Ma Barker. She's not a bastard. She's a hard-working mom than an eventual single parent.

Just doing her best to survive in tough times. Doing her best to survive in this workaday world and get a door for the damn bathroom. She's doing her best. I feel like all great careers start with wanting a door for your bathroom.

Yeah. Well, Emily, speaking of doors for the bathroom, do you have anything you'd like to plug? Well, you can listen to Night Call on this very podcast network. I co-host it with

Molly Lamberton, Tess Lynch, as you said, previous guests on this podcast. So we have new episodes every Monday and yeah, I'm getting ready to record with them later today. I've got a real podcast marathon day today.

Yeah, we're on social media, Night Call podcast, or Night Call podcast, depending on what platform it is. It's inconsistent, which is stupid of us. Me, actually, I'm the inconsistent one.

And then I'm on Twitter personally at Emory Yoshida. Just my first and last name. Public enemy number one. Public enemy number one. Public enemy number one. If you want to be public.

Well, that's going to do it for Behind the Bastards today. You can find us on the internet at BehindTheBastards.com where you can find the sources for this episode. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at AtBastardsPod. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. And you can find crime in your heart

when you look down the aisles of an Amazon-owned grocery store. This podcast does not endorse committing crimes. Thanks. Thank you, Sophie. Are we safe legally now? Is the lawyer happy? Don't

commit a crime. Don't commit a crime. Do not commit a crime. Yeah. Commit multiple crimes. That's that. The words of this guest do not

necessarily reflect the wishes of this podcast. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the

2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying

to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping

that he would be able to get the job done. Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring

him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the floor, wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the

forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days

after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.