Infamous America - BARKER GANG Ep. 4 | “99 Problems”

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

After fleeing Missouri, Ma, Fred, and Alvin Karpis run to the criminal sanctuary of St. Paul, Minnesota. But shortly after they arrive, they are betrayed by an insider. After the betrayal, they suffer a litany of problems during robberies for the first time in the gang’s existence. Thanks to our sponsor, Quince! Use this link for Free Shipping and 365-day returns: Quince.com/infamousamerica Thanks to our sponsor, Mood! For 20% off of your first order, use the promo code INFAMOUS at Mood.com Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join   Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial.   On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage.   For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com or @blackbarrelmedia on Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For about seven months of 1931, Ma Barker, Fred Barker, Alvin Carpus, and Ma's boyfriend, Arthur Dunlop, had a good thing going. When Fred and Alvin had been released from prison in March and May of 1931, respectively, they moved Ma and Arthur from a dirt floor shack in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to a 10-acre farm in Thayer, Missouri. Fred worked tirelessly to turn the farm into a secure criminal hideout, but his efforts fell apart, thanks to his own actions, less than two months after the work was complete. During a span of six weeks, from early November to mid-December 1931, Fred Barker killed the small town chief of police in Pocahontas, Arkansas, and the sheriff of Howell County, Missouri. Alvin Carpis helped with the second killing,

and with the murders of two lawmen within an hour's drive of the farm, the farm was no longer the safe house it was designed to be. The murders forced the Barkers to abandon the farm just before Christmas, 1931. They were on the run, and they ran west to an ally near Joplin, Missouri. Herbert Farmer was an old family friend who had been a small-time crook many years ago, and now used his farm as a fugitive hideout. He was happy to see his old friends when they showed up on his doorstep, but when he heard that Fred and Alvin were wanted for the murder of a county sheriff, they were not yet connected to the murder of the small-town police chief. Herbert knew his farm was too close to the crime scene to provide

shelter. Herbert pointed the group north toward the criminal sanctuary of St. Paul, Minnesota. St. Paul operated under the so-called O'Connor system, and it was a haven for the criminal underworld from the turn of the century until World War II. Former police chief John O'Connor had engineered a unique peace treaty after taking office in 1900. He aimed to scrub crime from St. Paul's streets, and he achieved it by cutting deals with America's most dangerous men. The word went out. Criminals could spend time in St. Paul without being targeted by local police as long as the criminals did not commit crimes within the city limits. The rules were simple, but strict. Gangsters checked in with officials upon arrival and paid regular bribes to ensure

the police continued to look the other way. Chief O'Connor retired in 1920, but the machine he built kept running. Chief Tom Brown did not like to be as personally involved as O'Connor so he used a go-between, Harry Sawyer, to manage communications with the underworld. Sawyer, a known fixer and close associate of Herbert Farmer, was the reason Farmer directed Ma Barker and her boys to St. Paul. By February 1932, Ma, Arthur, Fred, and Alvin had found their new home, which made them some of the earliest arrivals of the soon-to-be famous gangsters of the Depression era. The following year, 1933, John Dillinger and his gang,

would begin their legendary crime spree. And Dillinger and his associates, including Babyface Nelson, would spend plenty of time in St. Paul. By that time, the Barker clan would be well-established in the city, though not without some serious problems along the way. Robberies which had been quick and easy in the past would now be chaotic hostage situations, and worst of all, they would have to deal with a traitor in the group. From Black Barrel Media, this is infamous America. I'm your host Chris Wimmer. In this season, we're telling the story of the Barker Carpus Gang, the longest-running and deadliest group of Depression-era outlaws. This is episode 4, 99 problems. When Ma Barker, Arthur Dunlop, Fred Barker, and Alvin Carpus arrived in St. Paul in February of 1932,

Ma and Arthur took on the roles of a married couple, with Fred and Alvin as their sons. Ma and Arthur became Mr. and Mrs. George Anderson, a bland, common, name designed to deflect suspicion. The group spotted a house for rent, and Ma and Arthur approached the owner, Mrs. Helen Hanagraph, who lived next door with her son Nick. Ma and Arthur claimed their two sons were musicians in the local orchestra, which thrilled Helen to no end. The Anderson family looked like the perfect neighbors, and for a while they were. After the barkers moved in, Maugh and Helen started to share coffee in the mornings, and Ma baked cookies for the neighborhood. When Fred and Alvin hauled their gun cases from the house to the

car, Helen Hanigraf believed the cases held musical instruments, and the boys were simply heading to orchestra practice. Fred and Alvin helped Helen with her granddaughter, offering rides to school during bad weather. For the most part, the fiction worked well. Three of the four members of the group played their roles to perfection. But Arthur Dunlop remained a thorn in the gang side. A year earlier, Fred Barker had accurately labeled Arthur a worthless drunk, and Arthur had done nothing to improve his reputation. But for the time being, Fred and Alvin tolerated Arthur because they had more important matters to attend to. An old friend joined them in St. Paul, and it was time to start making moves. In March of 1932, Lawrence DeVall showed up at the Barker rental house.

He had been part of the Barker's first gang, the Central Park gang, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. nearly 15 years earlier. He had served time with Alvin Carpus at the Kansas State Industrial Reformatory and then had become a criminal mentor to Alvin after the two broke out of prison. Deval had recently finished another stretch and now he was back with the gang. Fred, Alvin, and Deval recruited Tommy Holden and Phil Courtney for the first big job in Minnesota. On March 29, 1932, the five men pulled up to the rear entrance of the Northwestern National Bank in Minneapolis. They arrived in a stolen Lincoln town car, courtesy of Deval. Holden stayed in the alley with the car while the others rushed in through the back door. Phil Courtney held the employees at gunpoint

while Fred, Alvin, and Deval went to work on the safe. Courtney did his job, but not to Alvin's liking. They were professional bank robbers, yet Courtney was wasting time to work. chatting up the female switchboard operator. With his guard down, she likely alerted the police because they arrived too quickly. The group scrambled to grab everything from the safe and raced out the back door, only to find Tommy Holden pointing a gun at the head of a police officer. Luckily for the gang, the officer was alone and had not been able to call for backup before Holden nabbed him. The gang released the terrified officer and sped away. Safely back in St. Paul, they tallied the loot. It was more money than any of them, including Ma,

had ever seen. They had stolen more than $250,000 in cash, coins, and bonds, a value exceeding $5 million today. It was time to celebrate for everyone but Carpus. He was furious at Courtney's unprofessionalism, and he was alarmed that the police had found their car so quickly. Moving forward, he decided he would take over all planning. duties. They believed they had a solid team of professional bank robbers. They just needed to act like it. Without delay, Alvin Carpus started planning their next heist, but they never had a chance to do it. And it wasn't because they had committed a major robbery so close to the sanctuary of St. Paul. Technically, they hadn't violated the O'Connor Code.

Even though the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul sit right next to each other and are often viewed as one unbroken metropolitan area, They're still separate cities. The problem for the gang was the murder of Sheriff Roy Kelly in Missouri. Four months had passed since the murder, but federal and state authorities had not given up on finding the suspects. The problem started with Nick Hanagraph, who lived with his mother next door to the Barker clan. Over the past four months,

as investigators in Missouri had no luck finding the suspects locally, they expanded their search. In addition to mailing the wanted posters everywhere, They printed the posters, which featured the $1,200 awards, in the pages of the widely circulated True Detective Magazine. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Nick Hanagraph saw the posters for Fred Barker and Alvin Carpus in True Detective magazine. Fred and Alvin were using the name Anderson,

but Nick could see the resemblance to the fugitives on the wanted posters. In the past two months, the two men had become pretty close with Nick and his mother. With eyes on the reward money, Nick marched into a St. Paul police station, but to his surprise, he got the runaround. For more than seven hours, the police couldn't seem to locate the right person to take Nick's report. By the time St. Paul officers finally raided the rental house owned by Nick's mother, the gang was gone. The house was mostly empty, though there were clear signs of a hasty exit. Ma Barker left behind one of her favorite fur coats. Dishes were piled in the sink, and burners still glowed hot on the stove. The gang had received a tip-off from

Fixer Harry Sawyer, the right-hand man of police chief Tom Brown, just as Ma had started breakfast. The gang's bribes had bought them time, but just barely. They escaped by the skin of their teeth, and they were furious at the disruption. They had just set up shop in St. Paul, and now they were burned. Worse yet, as they were about to learn, Nick Hanigraph's discovery in True Detective magazine was not as coincidental as it might have seemed. The gang went to ground at a local hiding spot to wait out the heat of the raid. They planned to flee to Kansas City, but not before they figured out how they had been found. Alvin Carpus asked for an explanation from a friendly officer on their payroll.

The cops said Nick Hanagraph brought in the magazine with the mug shots and gave up the gang who was living next door in his mother's rental house. Nick's discovery could have been extraordinary bad luck, but it wasn't. Arthur Dunlop, Ma Barker's boyfriend, had given the magazine to Nick and urged him to act. Carpus was mad, but he knew Fred would explode when he heard the news. So Carpus confronted Ma and Arthur without Fred. He blamed the whiskey, claiming he was drunk at the time, and begged for their forgiveness.

Ma was incensed. She knew Arthur was worthless, but she never thought he would have. be a traitor. Afterward, Alvin drove Ma around the city while they hashed out a solution. They finally settled on a plan to take Arthur with him to Kansas City, then ship him off to exile in Chicago. Ma agreed, though the decision clearly rattled her. She and Arthur had been together long enough to be considered common law married, but her loyalty belonged to Fred and Alvin. Alvin filled Fred in on the situation. Fred agreed they needed to deal with Arthur, but he did not agree on the Chicago plan.

They learned Arthur often got liquored up in local pubs and spilled details about the gang's operations. He had grown too comfortable in his upgraded lifestyle of no work and all play. And if he felt comfortable babbling to strangers while living in the same house as Fred Barker and Alvin Carpus, there was no telling what he would say when he was on his own in Chicago and cut off from the gang support. On April 26, 1932, Fred and Alvin took Arthur for a drive to discuss the disassociation plan.

They stopped for gas near Webster, Wisconsin, then decided to move the conversation to Lake Frimsted a few miles away. The next morning, the naked body of 73-year-old Arthur Dunlop was found near the shore of the lake. He was dead from a gunshot wound to the head. One theory suggested his killer, or killers, tried to drag him into the water, with the hope that the lake would swallow him and dispose of the evidence, but the dead weight was too heavy. Years later, Alvin Carpus tried to deny being at the scene, claiming another gang member handled Dunlop as a favor to Fred. In terms of the investigation, it didn't really matter. There wasn't enough evidence to arrest anyone for the crime. With the murder of Arthur Dunlop,

whoever was responsible, Ma, Fred, and Alvin fled the sanctuary of St. Paul and drove to Kansas City, Missouri. Ma Barker quickly moved on from the loss of Arthur Dunlop. She had taken up with him to ward off loneliness while all her sons were in prison. With Fred and Alvin getting back into the groove of committing big-time robberies, she didn't need Arthur. She wasn't thrilled about being forced to move again so soon after arriving in St. Paul, but she had never really liked the city. She much preferred the farmhouse outside Thayer, Missouri, and to her delight, she wouldn't have to wait very long to find a similar setup. In Kansas City, they started recruiting local talent to round out the gang.

Notorious bank robber Harvey Bailey was in town, and he jumped at the chance to run with Barker and Carpus. The three men spent the next two months scouting before they found the right target. They used the big city as their home base, but they had no intention of robbing banks in it. They were going to go back to the concept of finding small towns with small police forces, and Fort Scott, Kansas fit the bill. Fort Scott, along the Kansas-Missouri border,

two hours south of Kansas City, only had a couple thousand people. And when the gang rolled in with its biggest lineup to date, the local cops would be no match for the gang. In addition to Harvey Bailey, Fred and Alvin brought in Tommy Holden from their Minnesota robbery, trusty old friend Larry Deval,

and two more veteran robbers, so they struck with a gang of seven. On June 17, 1932, the gang stormed Citizens National Bank, cracked the vault, stripped it of cash and bonds totaling $47,000 and vanished in minutes. The Fort Scott job was squeaky clean, no hostages, no injuries, no murders. As they raced away, they deployed a nasty insurance policy, handfuls of roofing nails tossed from the rear window. The nails scattered across the asphalt to cripple any police cars, foolish enough to give chase. It was Harvey Bailey's signature move and won the Barker Carpus gang would adopt as their own from that day forward. But as neat as the Fort Scott job was,

Kansas City soon lost its luster. Ma, Fred, and Alvin wanted to return to St. Paul. It had been nearly three months since they had been outed and had killed Arthur Dunlough, and they gambled it was safe to return. Two weeks after the Fort Scott job, they headed back to Minnesota, but this time with lessons learned. They needed seclusion like they had had at the farm in Missouri, and they would be far more cautious about their interactions with civilians. On July 9, 1932, they leased a sprawling, eight-bedroom house on the shores of White Bear Lake on the northern edge of St. Paul. Ma Barker now called herself Mrs. Hunter, and she rented the luxury property with her sons, Freddie and Raymond. To the locals, they were model citizens, quiet, well-dressed,

and fiercely private. The house came with a boat, which was the perfect place to plan their crimes. Out on the lake, no one could overhear the details of their next job. The neighbors only noted that the boys were gone a lot, and when they were home, they spent their time on the water. But in a vacation community, folks didn't pry like the nosy landlords did in the city. With the neighbors duped, the family turned its attention to the law. They had to rebuild their safety net with the St. Paul Police Department and corrupt city officials. It took weeks of greasing palms and making the necessary contributions to the right people, but soon the protection racket was back in working order. The last two bank jobs had netted the gang a total of nearly

$300,000 in loot. Whatever the take was for Ma, Fred, and Alvin, it was enough for the house, the bribes, and Ma hoped, enough to get her sons Lloyd and Doc out of prison. Lloyd was serving 25 years for robbery at Leavenworth in Kansas, and Doc was serving life for murder at McAllister in Oklahoma. Ma hired a private investigator who was famous in the underworld for knowing which officials were for sale. She handed him a bank roll and the assignment to get both of her sons released. The fixer hit a wall at Leavenworth. Federal prison guards didn't come cheap or at all, but Oklahoma might have been a different story. Arthur Doc Mark Barker had served 10 years in prison for killing a 68-year-old night watchman at a construction

site in Tulsa in 1921. In 1932, he was granted parole. He was set for release in early September. It's hard to tell if Ma's efforts were the reason, but either way, she would have another son home with her in just two months. Ma told Fred and Alvin to wait so Doc could be part of the next job, but in a rare moment of defiance, Fred and Alvin ignored her. They had their sights set on the Cloud County Bank in Concordia, Kansas, and they didn't want to sit around and wait for at least two months doing nothing.

Now that the gang had reestablished itself in St. Paul, Minnesota, it was a full eight-hour drive back down to the tiny town of Concordia on the plains of northwest Kansas. The distance would turn the robbery into a logistical challenge. Alvin Carpus mapped out a route from Concordia to White Bear Lake. To avoid stopping at towns during the escape from the bank and the drive back to the lake, the gang hid spare gas cans, food, and thermoses of coffee along the roads while they drove down to Kansas. Carpus carried a stockpile of corks, typically used for wine or whiskey bottles, so they could use them to plug holes in the car's gas tanks. Over the last few years, as the number of armed robberies by gangs with fast cars rose dramatically,

the cops had started shooting the gas tanks to stop the vehicles. In an emergency, a simple cork could save the getaway. When the gang arrived in Kansas, they did their final recon of the town and the bank. Carpus thought he had every angle covered, but he wasn't prepared for the one variable he had never encountered, a bank cashier who was willing to risk his life and the lives of others for money that wasn't his. Late in the day on July 26, 1932, the five-man crew ran into the Cloud County Bank. They herded the customers into a back room and grabbed the cash out of the tellers' drawers. Then they turned to the vault.

The cashier with the combination refused to open it. He stood his ground and boldly claimed he wouldn't open the vault for anyone. Carpice decided to test the man's resolve. He grabbed a female employee, jammed his, pistol into her stomach and said, I'll blow her in half. The cashier didn't blink. He responded, go ahead. She's not mine. Carpus was astounded. When the threat to kill a fellow employee didn't work, he and Fred threatened to hurt the cashier in agonizing ways, and that didn't work either. Meanwhile, the clock was ticking. Customers kept wandering in from the street, and the back room

was bursting at the seams. They could barely force the door shut. The gang had been in the bank for 45 minutes, which was an absolute eternity. Finally, the gang aborted the vault robbery, grabbed every available dollar, and dragged two female hostages out to the car. They balanced the women on the car's running boards to act as human shields to discourage the police from opening fire as they sped out of town. A few miles into the countryside, they dumped the women unharmed, but they had lost valuable daylight. It was dusk, and they faced a long, unfamiliar drive in the dark. As night fell, the gang got lost, and they couldn't find the roads along which they had stashed their supplies.

And then they got bogged down in the mud on a country road. Hungry, furious, and exhausted, they eventually muscled the car out of the mud pit, but there was no celebration, just arguments about which way to go. It wasn't pretty, but they limped back to St. Paul the next day. Alvin Carpus collapsed onto his bed to count the loot. Despite the setbacks, they had actually snatched $22,000 from the teller windows, far more than anyone expected. Ma was pleased with the cash, but she repeated her request to wait for Doc before the

boys pulled any more jobs. Doc Barker walked out of the Oklahoma State Prison in McAllister on September 10, 1932, on the condition that he leave Oklahoma and never return. It was an easy condition to meet. Doc didn't head straight for St. Paul. First, he went to Joplin, Missouri for a couple months to visit his father. While Fred and Alvin were thrilled Doc was out, they again were not willing to wait for him to make the trip north. They had already planned their next job, Citizens National Bank in Wapperton, North Dakota. That was the one that would be a blueprint for Hollywood

filmmakers. Five men, Fred, Alvin, Larry DeVal, Tommy Holden, and another man hit the bank on the the bank on September 30, 1932. All five carried Tommy guns. Four men kicked open the double doors of the bank and rushed inside. Tommy Holden remained behind the wheel of the car as the getaway driver. Inside the bank, Alvin, Fred, and the others screamed for everyone to hit the floor. All but one person obeyed. A teller ran toward the back, but one of the robbers subdued him by smashing the butt of a pistol against his head. The blow knocked the teller out cold, but not before the man had slapped the silent alarm button. While local police officers started to swarm the perimeter,

the crew grabbed every dollar they could carry, seized two female hostages, and burst out of the front doors. Tommy Holden unleashed a barrage of fire from his Tommy gun at the oncoming police cars. The gang shoved the two women onto the running boards of their getaway car. Most times, the human shields stopped the police from firing at the outlaws, but not that day. The lawmen returned fire. They didn't aim for the women, but in the crossfire, both women were injured.

The gang members fired from the car. Police officers fired from their positions in the street, and the two women on the running boards screamed as they gripped the vehicle while it roared out of town. Past the edge of town, the gang members pulled the women into the car and deployed Harvey Bailey's signature security measure. They dumped milk cartons filled with roofing nails onto the asphalt behind them. them. The nails shredded the tires of police cars which tried to follow. The gang escaped their immediate pursuers, but they were in trouble. The two women in the backseat of the car cried and thrashed from the pain of gunshot wounds. And bullets from the police officers had flattened two tires on the car and punctured the gas tank. The nails bought them a few

precious miles, but the car was dying. Tommy Holden was able to sear it onto a dirt road shrouded by trees just as the rubber peeled off the tires. The car ground to a halt. The gang spilled out and debated their options. Fred spotted a dilapidated farmhouse and signaled the crew forward. Alvin lingered by the car. He administered morphine from the gang's medical kit to the wounded women. He told them to blame the cops for the bullets, not the gang, and then he sprinted to catch up. As they closed in on the farmhouse, they spotted a vehicle. The owner emerged. just as the gang began to inspect it. Carpus stepped up to handle the farmer. Carpus wanted to avoid killing the man, if at all possible, and he decided on a wild gamble. He told the truth.

He said they had just robbed the bank in Wappaton, and they needed the man's car to get away. Carpus wasn't asking, but he did offer payment. Larry DeVall took the queue and produced a thick roll of stolen bills from a bag. He handed the wad of cash to the farmer, who reportedly cracked a grim smile and said, You robbed a bank, did you? Well, I don't care. All banks ever do is foreclose on farmers. The gamble paid off. The gang had a new getaway car, and the farmer had made more money in a few seconds than he'd probably made all year. The gang piled into the car and sped off, leaving the wounded women in the woods where they were eventually found by lawmen. Both women survived, though they carried the bullets in their bodies for the rest of their lives.

The gang made the four to five-hour drive back to the lake house outside St. Paul, only to discover they had another problem. After they cleaned and repaired the car, the take was a measly $6,900. After two messy jobs in a row, Fred Barker and Alvin Carpice decided to heed Ma's advice and lay low until Doc showed up. 1932 had been an exhausting year, from moving from southern Missouri to St. Paul, then to Kansas City, then back to St. Paul, to nearly getting captured because of Arthur Dunlop's betrayal, to pulling off two robberies which were technically successes, but were also riddled with

the types of problems the gang had never experienced. But 1933 would be different. 1933 would be the year of the gangster. It would be unlike any other year in American criminal history. Doc would rejoin the Barker gang in Minnesota. John Dillinger's gang would start an epic Spree in Illinois and Indiana. Pretty Boy Floyd and George Machine Gun Kelly would light up Missouri and Oklahoma, and Bonnie and Clyde would terrorize Texas. Not local police nor state agencies nor the FBI were ready for what was to come. Next time on Infamous America, the gang nails two more high-stakes bank robberies before switching to the flavor of the year, kidnapping. After the saga with the Lindbergh baby in 1932, kidnapping becomes all the

the rage in 1933. The Barker Carpus Gang commits its first kidnapping, at the same time Machine Gun Kelly commits his last. Robberies, kidnappings, and a growing cast of the most infamous gangsters of the era is next week on Infamous America. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program received the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com.

This series was researched and written by Mandy Wimmer. Additional research in writing by me, Chris Wimmer. Original music by Rob Villeer. Thanks for listening.