Bandits & Renegades: True Crime Stories (Crimes Canada: True Crimes That Shocked The Nation Book 14) by Edward Butts & Peter Vronsky Ph.D. & RJ Parker Ph.D

Author:Edward Butts & Peter Vronsky Ph.D. & RJ Parker Ph.D. [Butts, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: VP Publications - An Imprint of RJ Parker Publishing
Published: 2016-06-01T23:00:00+00:00

Old Creepy: The Saga of Alvin Karpis

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Alvin Karpis

With the exception of the Old West of Billy the Kid, Frank and Jesse James, and Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch, no period of outlawry in North America has been more romanticized than the early years of the Great Depression. These were the “Dirty Thirties” when the 1929 collapse of a poorly regulated stock market shut down factories and threw millions of people out of work. Banks foreclosed on the mortgages of homes and farms. Soup kitchens and breadlines became facts of life for destitute people. Desperation led to an increase in the crime rate. Much of that was due to small-time theft: shoplifting, burglary, mugging, and two-bit stick-ups, as unemployed men tried to steal what they could no longer get through honest labour.

However, most of the individuals whose criminal exploits earned them international notoriety were not “driven to it” by the social injustices of “hard times”. Almost all of them had criminal records before the disastrous stock market crash. Some had served apprenticeships in crime by working for bootleggers during the Prohibition era of the Roaring Twenties. Others had been armed robbers, hijackers, and the paid thugs of big city crime bosses.

The arrival of the automobile had revolutionized crime. Fast cars and an ever-expanding network of roads and paved highways opened the way for the “automobile bandits”, desperadoes who would swoop down on a small town bank, loot it at gunpoint, and then make a quick escape in a stolen car. The media of the time made celebrities of some of these criminals. Their brazen robberies and colourful nicknames sold newspapers. Some even achieved “Robin Hood” folk hero status among the poor and disposessed because they preyed on the hated banks and were hunted by the police, who were often resented as the strong arm of the rich and powerful.

Only a handful of these hoodlums became icons of Depression Era crime: Clyde Barrow and his girlfriend Bonnie Parker, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Lester Gillis – better known as Baby Face Nelson, and John Dillinger, the first of this bunch to be listed as Public Enemy Number One. Also in this rogues' gallery were Freddie and Arthur “Doc” Barker and their pal Alvin Karpis.

While all of the other headline-making outlaws were American born-and-bred, Karpis was Canadian. He was born in Montreal in 1907 to John and Anna Karpowicz, Lithuanian immigrants who named him Albin Francis. While Albin was still very young, his family moved to Topeka, Kansas, where he and his three sisters grew up. An elementary school teacher found his foreign-sounding name too awkward to pronounce, so she called him Alvin Karpis.

John Karpowicz worked hard at whatever jobs he took on, but the family was always poor. The fact that his father “worked like a slave” for little financial return left a strong impression on young Karpis. John was also a very strict father who administered discipline with a whip.

Karpis fell in with bad company early in life.

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