The Snatch Racket: The Kidnapping Epidemic That Terrorized 1930s America by Carolyn Cox

Author:Carolyn Cox [Cox, Carolyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime, Social Science, 20th Century, HIS036060 History / United States / 20th Century, General, TRU000000 True Crime / General, sociology, history, Abductions; Kidnappings & Missing Persons, United States
ISBN: 9781640122031
Google: oAcWEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2021-03-15T23:36:59.787519+00:00

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Whenever Alvin Karpis and Fred Barker were in St. Paul, they spent a lot of time at the Green Lantern speakeasy operated by fixer Harry Sawyer. The entrance to the Green Lantern was through a cigar store on Wabasha Street leading to a back room lined with dark wooden booths. There customers relaxed, did business, and guzzled real beer brewed by the Schmidt Brewing Company. It was also where visiting criminals checked in to let the police know they were in town and to pay their bribes. Karpis liked to refer to it as his “personal headquarters in St. Paul.”2

One day in the fall of 1933 Sawyer told Karpis he wanted Edward Bremer grabbed. All the kidnappers would have to do was hold Bremer for a couple of days and collect $200,000 (over $3.7 million in 2020). Sawyer promised it would be safe and easy: his police contacts would let him know what the police knew and what to watch out for. Except for doubling the amount of the ransom, Sawyer’s spiel was pretty much the same one Peifer had given them before the Hamm snatch.

“Forget the cops,” Karpis told Sawyer. “This will be strictly a government thing. We’ll have the G to deal with.”3 Karpis understood immediately that snatching Bremer would be an entirely different matter than Hamm. A second kidnapping in the same city within six months would be tempting fate, but especially so given the Bremer family’s powerful connections. Edward’s father, Adolph, was president of the Schmidt Brewing Company. He also controlled the Commercial State Bank run by Edward. So many racketeers were rumored to have accounts there under assumed names that it was called the “Racketeer Bank of St. Paul.”4 Adolph’s brother, Otto Bremer, was chairman of the American National Bank of St. Paul and one of the Midwest’s most prominent bankers.5 Both Adolph and Otto were leaders of St. Paul’s Democratic Party; Adolph, a personal friend of President Roosevelt,6 had reportedly contributed $350,000 (over $6.5 million in 2020) to his 1932 presidential campaign.7 As far as the G-men went, Karpis knew they couldn’t expect them to be as distracted and gullible as they had been during the Hamm investigation.

After weighing the pros and cons, Karpis and Fred decided “what the hell” and started planning the kidnapping of Bremer.8 In addition to themselves and Hamm veterans Doc, Ziegler, and Bolton, the team included bank robbers William “Lapland Willie” Weaver, Harry Campbell, and Volney “Curley” Davis, who had been serving a life sentence for the same murder that landed Doc in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. He was the beneficiary of one of Governor “Alfalfa Bill” Murray’s two-year “leave of absence” paroles, and hadn’t returned to prison when his time was up.9

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