The Alvin Karpis story
Alvin Karpis (Author), Bill Trent (Editor)
From his early days as a petty thief, his meeting with Freddie Barker and the Karpis-Ma Barker gang's personal crime wave that swept the Midwest and carried them into the headlines, to his enduring duel of nerve and wits with his nemeses, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, Alvin Karpis recalls a remarkable life in crime. At the same time, he re-creates the full flavor of a unique chapter in American history: the desperado-ridden years of the Depression, when payroll heists and bank robberies, and gunpoint confrontations between cops and robbers filled the front pages and the daring escapades and high living of the Karpis-barker gang provided a colorful contrast to the severity of those very hard times
Print Book, English, 1971
Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc., New York, 1971
History
256 pages : illustrations, portraits ; 22 cm
9784871873338, 4871873331
125265
"My profession was robbing banks"
"I was ten years old...and already on my way to being U.S. public enemy number one"
"Well, I don't care : all the banks ever do is foreclose on us farmers"
"That was my friend Freddie Barker. All business"
"Bank robbery, dangerous as it was, could get to be routine"
"Ma was always somebody in our lives"
"Everybody had a price"
"No woman of mine ever got around to setting up permanent housekeeping"
"The Depression made crime a tough proposition"
"How would you boys like to work on a kidnapping?"
"Chicago blues"
"So, what the hell, we started the operation rolling on our second big kidnapping"
"On the run"
"Freddie and Ma were gone. But we were still free and loose"
"My last two jobs"
"we kept shifting locations...we had to present the Feds with moving targets"
"Put the cuffs on Karpis"
Epilogue