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From Primedia Publications
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Gangster St. Paul (cont.)
The Twin City comes to terms with its notorious past.
But those paid to ignore St. Paul outlaws were stunned on June 15, 1933, when the Barker-Karpis Gang kidnapped William Hamm, Jr., president of the Hamm Brewing Company (today, standing as the Stroh Brewery at 681 East Minnehaha Avenue, near Payne Avenue).

The gang abducted Hamm as he walked from his brewery to the Hamm family mansion, 671 Cable Avenue at the intersection of Greenbrier and Margaret Streets. (The mansion burned down in 1954, but a nine-foot brick column from the estate remains on the site.) They released the brewery mogul after payment of a $100,000 ransom.



The kidnapping was planned inside the Hollyhocks Club Casino, visible today as a three-story private residence at 1590 South Mississippi River Boulevard, near Cleveland Avenue between 1606 and 1616 South Mississippi River Boulevard (new buildings threw off the street numbers). Legend holds there was a tunnel from the casino to the Mississippi for smuggling in liquor and dropping corpses from the gambling rooms to the river below.

After half a century of hiding from its nefarious past, St. Paul now embraces its Dillinger-era legacy.
Ma and her crew gathered in January 1934 at Freddy Barker's Dale Apartments, 628 Grand Avenue (a three-story building still standing at the intersection of Grand and South Dale Street), to plan the kidnapping of another millionaire. Their next victim, Edward Bremer, was president of Commercial State Bank and son of Adolf Bremer, president of the Jacob Schmidt Brewing Company (now the Minnesota Brewing Company), 882 West Seventh Street at Webster Street.

The boys seized Bremer at the corner of Lexington Parkway and Goodrich Avenue on January 17. St. Paul was outraged. Even U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a statement decrying the crime. Recalled crime reporter Nate Bomberg, "When you started to pick on the fat boys," millionaires like Hamm and Bremer, "then people get alarmed."

Finally convinced to abandon its deal with the underworld, St. Paul was rocked by a series of shootouts involving John Dillinger, the baseball-loving Indiana felon whose career left 12 men dead, seven wounded and $500,000 criminally "withdrawn" from U.S. banks. Dillinger and his girlfriend Evelyn Frechette lived at the Lincoln Court Apartments (locals will point out the location of Dillinger's third-floor apartment, at 93 South Lexington Avenue at Lincoln). The gangster had just escaped from Indiana's Crown Point Jail and was wanted for stealing $49,000 from a bank in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and $52,000 from a Mason City, Iowa, bank.

On March 31, FBI agents knocked on Dillinger's door, acting on a tip from a suspicious landlady. The bankrobber responded by spraying the hallway with machine-gun bullets, then escaping out the back into a getaway car. "We had a quiet, well-to-do neighborhood," remembers Bob Geisenheyner, then a 7th-grader living opposite Dillinger's apartment. "Except for the John Dillinger shootout and the kidnapping of [Ed] Bremer down the block!"

Next St. Paul cleaned out its home-grown corruption, beginning in the Ramsey County Courthouse (St. Paul City Hall, still standing at 15 West Kellogg Boulevard). It was here in an 8th-floor courtroom Roger "The Terrible" Touhy, who the FBI mistakenly believed was responsible for the Hamm kidnapping, was tried and acquitted. By 1935, police corruption trials were held in the 11th-floor courtrooms. Based on evidence from 2,500 wiretapped phone conversations between police and gangsters, the city fired the crooked officers and dismantled the O'Connor Agreement for good.

Your Crook's Tour of St. Paul terminates where the careers of remaining gang members ended, at what is today Landmark Center (formerly the Old Federal Courts Building) at Fifth and Market Streets. Built in 1902, the neo-Romanesque structure housed the FBI field office in Room 203. There agents interrogated Karpis and others. Climb one floor up to courtroom 317, lush with marble and hand-carved cherrywood, where the Barker-Karpis Gang members were finally convicted for the Hamm and Bremer kidnappings.

After half a century of hiding from its nefarious past, St. Paul now embraces its Dillinger-era legacy. The St. Paul Convention and Visitors Bureau welcomes travelers by promoting the city's gangland history. Restaurants like Forepaugh's host gangster-themed dinners, the St. Paul Saints sponsor Public Enemy baseball nights, a costumed Ma Barker character leads visitors through Landmark Center, and St. Paul Gangster bus tours, led by costumed guides, entertain tourists with tales of St. Paul's lawless past.

For some, the era of John Dillinger never ended. "I dream about him every day," Dillinger's sister Audrey told a Chicago Reader reporter in 1984, "and I wonder what I would do if he came in that door. I dreamed about him one night. I heard him calling, 'Sis!' just so plain, and I got out of bed and swung that door wide open, expecting to find my brother there. But it wasn't [him]: it was a dream. I never have had a dream as real as that one."
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