HENRY ZEBROWSKI M'yeah, shee, m'yeah. We're nobodies right now, we're working our way to the top, shee. All
the finest clothes, all the finest. All the finest jewels. Gimme that Tommy Gun, shee.
BEN KISSEL That's cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I've been watching film noir movies for the past two days.
BEN KISSEL Good.
MARCUS PARKS Good.
BEN KISSEL How do you feel? Was that the era you should've been? I could have seen a Bugsy Zebrowski. I
could see it, you would have been good in that era.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is my favorite. James Cagney, this is my favorite, him going, 'Yeah you with your wishing,
huh? Well I wish you were a wishing well and I could tie a bucket to ya so you could sink.'
BEN KISSEL Wait, what? Wait a second.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a Don Rickles-
BEN KISSEL You wanna tie a bucket to me and drown me?
MARCUS PARKS Right. He's tying a bucket to the wishing well, you can't really put a wishing well inside the
bucket.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL Bugsy Zebrowski, can you translate for us?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Things change, all right. He was small and he was threatening looking.
BEN KISSEL He was scary!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was very scary, James Cagney was very scary but he was also a song and dance man.
BEN KISSEL He was, they all were.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. But it's so weird to watch all the film noir movies and understand that every Looney Tunes
character was built on them.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're all Looney Tunes characters. They all look like Dick Tracy villains as people which I
know that is what they did on purpose.
BEN KISSEL Of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Right?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But yeah, Ma Barker's movie, Ma Barker And Her Killer Brood, my favorite scene is at the very
top cause Herbert's trying to play the violin, right, and he's going (creaking sounds). He's bad
at it.
BEN KISSEL Why is Herbert trying to play the violin?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They tried to show them at the very top being like no you see they were a normal family until
Ma Barker is like, 'The violin is for limp noodles!'
BEN KISSEL Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She came in and knocks it, she destroys the violin with a karate chop in his hands. And he's
like, 'But Ma, Ma I wanna play the violin!' And she's like, 'You gotta learn how to fight, you
gotta learn how to fight.' And the father's like, 'I think it's actually normal for him to play the
violin.'
BEN KISSEL I agree.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She's like, 'That's the problem with all of you, you don't know how to fight for nothing, you
don't know how to go out and get what you want from life.'
BEN KISSEL Jeez, Ma!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And for a second I was like that's actually very motivational.
BEN KISSEL Kind of but what if he wanted to be a very fancy violinist?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Look at Tiger Woods' father.
MARCUS PARKS You always bring up Tiger Woods, it was an awful, awful childhood. Terrible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It made him an incredible golfer.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS But at what cost?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean I don't know, honestly I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS It seems fucking miserable.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You barely remember your childhood, I don't remember a single moment of my childhood.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah cause both of you blocked out your entire childhoods and it all manifests itself in horrible
ways.
BEN KISSEL Redacted.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Redacted.
BEN KISSEL Redacted. Welcome to Last Podcast on the Left everyone. I am Ben hanging out with Marcus.
MARCUS PARKS Hi hi.
BEN KISSEL And hanging out with Bugsy Zebrowski.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ah shee, it's me, shee. Going straight to the top, shee. I'm the man with breasts, I'm enjoying
myself, shee.
BEN KISSEL Yes you are a man with a solid rack. Nothing wrong with being a wet noodle, by the way.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Isn't it better to be a wet noodle than a hard, dry noodle?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Let's move on.
BEN KISSEL I'm just saying would you rather have a bag of hard noodles or a bag of wet noodles which is
called spaghetti.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI A bag of hard noodles is potential.
BEN KISSEL Soft noodles are how you eat it. Anyway what I'm trying to say is encourage your kids to be in
the arts. Okay so today's episode we are onto part three of Ma Barker and her devilish gang.
MARCUS PARKS So when we last left the Barker-Karpis gang they'd just come off a pair of disappointing
robberies that had respectfully resulted in the death of gang member Earl Christman and a
worthless haul of government checks that couldn't be cashed.
BEN KISSEL Aw man, I know we just robbed that bank but I can't help but feel a little empty inside.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. I think it's all the crime and the murder.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS As a result the gang decided to put a pause on robbery to focus on the newest criminal trend
of the early '30s.
BEN KISSEL Crypto!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No that's the newest one of the 2020s.
BEN KISSEL Oh I see.
MARCUS PARKS The newest one in the 1930s, that was the kidnapping of wealthy people and demanding
exorbitant ransoms for their return.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Get them! Get them! They're worth it!
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS Now the decision the Barker gang made to get into kidnapping just happened to coincide with
the rise of a little organization we now know as the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ugh, I felt a chill.
MARCUS PARKS Although back then they were just called the Bureau of Investigation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The Bureau! Yeah, welcome to the Bureau. And when James Cagney was in G Men it was like
oh look, the world's ultimate gangster's now a cop. And you know what he did in that?
MARCUS PARKS What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Talk just like a gangster.
BEN KISSEL Oh wow, undercover maybe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No he just didn't know how to talk any other way.
BEN KISSEL Maybe not a good actor.
MARCUS PARKS See the 1920s had been, as we discussed at length in our Bonnie & Clyde series, the golden
age of bank robbing, unparalleled in our country's history before or since. Mostly this was
because local law enforcement had pistols and Model Ts while bank robbers had V8 engines
and Tommy Guns.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's called business competition.
BEN KISSEL It is competition.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And in America you win or you die. Game of Thrones.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
MARCUS PARKS This sort of crime reached its absolute height in 1933 just as Franklin D. Roosevelt took office.
And to combat this wave the Roosevelt Administration elevated a weird little sociopath who
already wormed his way to the top of the Bureau of Investigation. That weird little worm was
J. Edgar Hoover.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI There's nothing weird about me, I'm fun and free!
BEN KISSEL I don't know, John.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Can you see my frills? They're coming over my belt.
BEN KISSEL It seems like you have a lot of hidden sexual tension which maybe comes out in aggressive
ways.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Can you say that closer to the vase, you communist?
MARCUS PARKS Now before Hoover, law enforcement in the United States was a decentralized hodgepodge of
country sheriffs and urban police departments that rarely even talked to each other, much less
worked together on cases.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They seem more like clubs.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, indeed.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. But with the emergence of increasingly mobile and heavily armed gangs like the Barkers,
a centralized, efficient, and professional federal police force became a necessary evil. Now the
push to create the FBI actually came from a close advisor of Franklin Roosevelt named Louis
Howe who is one of the unsung architects of modern America. Louis Howe is a fucking
amazing, amazing American.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's very interesting to see how many of these architects are unsung.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI In our next series we will find out a lot about how especially modern America was put together
by a bunch of people that you would never know, you don't know their names.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because they didn't want their names to be known. And then it turns out those guys are
always the worst guys.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. I can't wait for that new podcast series that we're gonna have all about unsung-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Villains of American architecture?
BEN KISSEL Yeah, unsung architects.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL That'll be exciting to really get into the world of lesser known architects.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah like the guys who make slides out of metal so that when you're a child you scald your tiny
little portly legs when you go down them in the summertime.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. The kids are always talking about their mainstream architects but it'll be really good to
put a focus on the lesser known ones.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI People love podcasts about architecture, a visual medium.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS You joke but 99% Invisible is one of the most popular podcasts that exist.
BEN KISSEL Is that all about architects?
MARCUS PARKS It's about architecture.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Holy fucking shit we're stupid.
BEN KISSEL Why would I wanna listen to that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI People love it.
BEN KISSEL I guess.
MARCUS PARKS It's actually very good.
BEN KISSEL I'm just saying I don't wake up and be like today I wanna learn about architecture. Am I in a
building? Is it collapsing? That's all I wanna know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You have Opie's haircut and you have Long John Buckingham's body.
BEN KISSEL Ooh! Lindsey Buckingham perhaps.
MARCUS PARKS No, Louis Howe was actually a very good person.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS He was one of the architects of the New Deal actually and he was one of the guys who got FDR
actually elected to higher office after FDR got polio. And also the guy who pushed Eleanor
Roosevelt into the public eye for the first time.
BEN KISSEL I thought you were gonna say into the pool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Into the pool or on the tracks, yeah.
BEN KISSEL That'd be kinda funny.
MARCUS PARKS He was very encouraging. Well Howe could see that there was a need for a federal police force
but because this was right in the middle of the Great Depression and the beginning of FDR's
first term, securing funds was gonna be a problem. So Howe tapped J. Edgar Hoover and told
him that if Hoover could provide the headlines, Howe could provide the money. Now Hoover
believed that the biggest threat to America was communists.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Always.
MARCUS PARKS But his previous Red Scare efforts had mostly been met by scandal because he'd gained a
reputation for arresting people without cause.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah it seems like this weird slippery slope, it's weird cause it's not a pattern here in America.
But arresting people for an ideology, it seems to not do a heck of a lot.
BEN KISSEL Can't do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI For a fun little idea or economic concept such as communism.
BEN KISSEL And what's more communist than a potluck every Sunday at an old church?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa.
BEN KISSEL Nice.
MARCUS PARKS Wow. So Hoover reluctantly switched his organization's focus from people like Marcus Garvey
to bank robbers, the most infamous criminals of the day. Cause that's how he's gonna get
headlines.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS But the elevation of the Bureau also coincided with the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep, the world's sexiest baby.
BEN KISSEL Well I don't know about that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The reason why they stole it, they said it was the first baby born with full C breasts and it had
to be stolen.
BEN KISSEL It belongs in a museum! The baby does, huh? Lindbergh. Isn't that a cheese? Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was a nazi.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. In 1932... Not the baby, Charles Lindbergh Sr was a nazi, the baby was not a nazi but
Charles Lindbergh was a nazi.
BEN KISSEL No, I'm pretty sure I saw that baby heil immediately.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's why the baby needed to be kidnapped.
BEN KISSEL They always starting heiling and then you have to say put that arm down!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's why we've taped the right arm of Hiro and Winnie to the sides.
BEN KISSEL Yes, our Last Podcast babies.
MARCUS PARKS Well in 1932, persons unknown kidnapped and successfully ransomed the son of famed pilot
Charles Lindbergh although the baby was killed in the process and that somewhat takes a little
of the success out of the deal. They got the money but the baby was killed with a blow to the
head, they found him decomposing on the side of the road a few days later.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Not good.
BEN KISSEL Come on, where was Casey Anthony? Come on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It sounds like they were playing hot potato.
BEN KISSEL Oh my. It's not good.
MARCUS PARKS But all the criminals paid attention to though was the fact that the $50,000 ransom had been
paid and the perps had gotten away with it because the guy who had been fingered for the
crime, he obviously had not done it, he was just taking the fall out of rage. So after the
Lindbergh case, kidnappings of wealthy citizens skyrocketed in the following year. 27 people
were kidnapped for ransom, 27 wealthy people by the way were kidnapped for ransom by the
end of 1933.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Damn.
BEN KISSEL (breaking news sound) Fat person alert, fat person alert. You're gonna wanna gain some
weight if you're rich.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's an old school joke.
BEN KISSEL It's so much harder to pick up a big old person.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is a John Pinette bit. I'm pretty certain this is a John Pinette bit from back in the day. RIP,
miss him very much so.
BEN KISSEL Aw, he was funny.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. I think maybe Fluffy said it, 'Being fat means you're harder to kidnap!'
BEN KISSEL Oh Fluffy, I love you Fluffy!
MARCUS PARKS Well this rash of kidnappings actually came in defiance of the Federal Kidnapping Act of 1932,
also known as the Little Lindbergh Act.
BEN KISSEL Don't you ever fucking call me that again!
MARCUS PARKS The Little Lindbergh Act made transporting a kidnapping victim across state lines a federal
crime and as it turned out, many of the people doing the kidnapping were also the same sorts
of people who robbed banks. So Hoover's mission dovetailed nicely with the emerging criminal
trends.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, it's gonna be great. It's gonna be great. I'm gonna be able to use so many goddamn
bullets and I'm gonna get some fucking names.
BEN KISSEL Mr. Hoover, you know what else is dovetailing? Your balls in those panties.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, I'm glad you noticed.
MARCUS PARKS Well basically the Federal Kidnapping Act gave the FBI its first foothold into the St. Paul
criminal scene which had previously been all but impenetrable. And it was in St. Paul that the
Barker-Karpis gang began their kidnapping career. Now after the death of Earl Christman and
the deaths of all those police officers in previous robberies, the Barker-Karpis gang and their
more connected associates began to contemplate a safer way of illegally making money.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Okay, how about this? Listen guys. What if say we got a thing where we print out t-shirts with
funny things on it, right, that says like I'm With Stupid.
BEN KISSEL Oh that's funny.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And an arrow points to the side so it's like then you're saying hey, the guys I'm standing next
to-
BEN KISSEL Is stupid!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's stupid. And this country is just chock full of fucking big ass morons.
BEN KISSEL That is ideal for how dumb everyone is in this country.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Guys?
BEN KISSEL Graphic tees!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh you're gonna stick a gun in my fucking mouth?
BEN KISSEL Whoa.
MARCUS PARKS See this was 1933, FDR's first year in office. And since Franklin D. Roosevelt had run partly on
repealing prohibition, cause you know he wanted to both create jobs in the Great Depression
and also prohibition had been a really, really, really fucking dumb idea.
BEN KISSEL It was horrible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It created the entire criminal underground of modern America.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Man I wish that I could've ran. Booze! His platform was booze!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. That's so easy!
BEN KISSEL I'll give ya booze! All right fine, you got my vote.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey, grandpa Joe, weed.
BEN KISSEL Weed!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Weed.
BEN KISSEL Weed. So easy.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah but he wasn't the first one though, it was only after Hoover had fucked everything up so
bad cause there had been a guy who ran against Hoover in 1928, his name was Smith, he was a
New Yorker. He had run on a plank of, 'Yeah, I'll bring booze back, Prohibition fucking sucks'.
But he lost because he was Catholic and the KKK were very powerful in the Democratic Party
then.
BEN KISSEL Oh, they didn't like the Catholics.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS They didn't like the Catholics. And the KKK were also one of the biggest supporters of
Prohibition. Huge supporters of it.
BEN KISSEL Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause they made money off it.
MARCUS PARKS No, it was because it was a good scapegoat for them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh those fucking pieces of shit.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah because the KKK, they were not a criminal enterprise per se, they were just murderers
and general horrible psychopaths.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They weren't the mafia, they were a group of serial killers that chose to hang out.
MARCUS PARKS Exactly.
BEN KISSEL It is important to recognize progress though as a country, we do have legal weed in many
states, that's a good thing. Criminal justice is in the right direction.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whatever, bro. Whatever. Grandpa Joe's got that big fucking pen full of the blood of Native
Americans and he could sign and just make weed free and legal.
BEN KISSEL Yes, that's true. But let's give the KKK some credit because now they do accept Catholics.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh isn't that nice? Growth and change.
BEN KISSEL That's progress. And if we don't recognize when progress is being made-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Then how will we move forward?
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Well because FDR was in office, because everyone knew Prohibition was a bad idea, every
criminal knew that the biggest cash cow of the last 13 years was about to be fucking
slaughtered. So the St. Paul goons who had made so much money on illegal liquor, they
needed a new source of revenue. And kidnapping at the very least partly covered the profits
they were all about to lose from the end of mass bootlegging.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's all business.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's so interesting to see in this world.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I know for us that's the quote unquote "most boring" of the criminal motivations is the
business motivation.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But it is really interesting to see how it's about diversifying. And that's what it's all about.
BEN KISSEL It is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're like we need to really figure out, we need to zig where other people are zagging here.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS Well the thing about Prohibition is that when Prohibition came, all of these petty criminals
that could barely rub two dimes together, they suddenly got very, very fucking rich real fast
and spend 13 years being rich off of Prohibition and all the things that came from Prohibition.
But then once Prohibition came to a close all those guys were starting to see their bottom line
dropping and they're still criminals, they didn't stop being criminals.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah! and if you've been a professional criminal for 13 years, I've been a professional
comedian for 15 years. I am incapable of doing a single other thing. I am done. I'm fucked.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No new skills are coming in.
BEN KISSEL No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm forgetting old skills, I'm forgetting parts of the comedy job that I used to be good at.
BEN KISSEL You're shedding a lot of the stuff you learned along the way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS Now the proposal for kidnapping came from Harry Sawyer, owner of the Green Lantern
Tavern, one of those guys who was about to lose money on bootlegging. He'd cooked up the
idea with casino owner Jack Peifer and corrupt St. Paul police chief Big Tom Brown who both
had a little experience in the kidnapping game.
BEN KISSEL So we've got a saloon owner, a casino owner, and a policeman.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI All of the scariest people in the world.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Funky little room that must have been.
MARCUS PARKS Two years earlier Big Tom Brown and Jack Peifer had masterminded the kidnapping of a
celebrity gangster named Leon Gleckman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Gleckman!
BEN KISSEL Gleckman!
MARCUS PARKS Who had been known as the Al Capone of St. Paul, Minnesota.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Now we don't need to go throwing names around, okay? I'm the Leon Gleckman of St. Paul!
BEN KISSEL That's right. And Al Capone of course, known as the Gleckman of Chicago.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Don't you dare say that I'm the fucking Gleckman of Chicago.
BEN KISSEL That's your Al Capone impression?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're getting there in 5 years.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. It's not bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm building it. I can't wait.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah. That's gonna be our Prohibition series. I can't fucking wait for it, it's gonna be
fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Now after the $75,000 ransom had been paid, Brown and Peifer cleverly placed the blame for
the kidnapping on a man named Frank LaPre, then they killed LaPre with three shots to the
head to make sure he couldn't disagree.
BEN KISSEL That's a great way to do it, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS It happened a lot in Prohibition times. So with past experience as a guide, Peifer tapped the
Barker-Karpis gang to kidnap William Hamm Jr, the president of Hamm's Brewing Company.
And they were gonna ask a $100,000 ransom, worth 3 million dollars in today's money.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I said this on this week's episode of Side Stories. All right, if you're a beer magnate, especially if
you're a beer magnate, if you're a podcast magnate, if you're one of these people that runs
around people, you gotta keep your head on a swivel. If you're just a normal, nice person who
is able to be kidnapped, you gotta change up the way you go places. You gotta fucking mix it
up.
BEN KISSEL Yeah well you don't have to be scared, I don't think.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You can't go to the office the same way everyday.
BEN KISSEL You can.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Again, you need to zig where other people zag. Always fucking be on the lookout!
BEN KISSEL Yeah but Henry, you're always going to the same office. So why wouldn't people just wait for
you at the office?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I go all the way around.
BEN KISSEL You can go all over the place but they just stay there.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause Fernando technically will be there to intercept and Fernando now knows, now that
Fernando is where Travis is, Travis' first job was to take a bullet for us.
BEN KISSEL You're gonna kill one of my co-hosts?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't wanna kill him!
BEN KISSEL I need the man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't want him to die!
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm sorry, Fernando.
BEN KISSEL You're gonna sacrifice one of our employees and co-hosts.
MARCUS PARKS From New York City, I apologize to you Fernando for Henry to just spring the bullet clause on
your when we were supposed to have a meeting about it.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, we were supposed to have a meeting about it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Get it in the arm. Get it in the leg.
MARCUS PARKS Now William Hamm Jr was not chosen solely because he came from a fantastically wealthy
family. Hamm, like many other brewers during Prohibition, had brewed near beer and malt
extract for homebrewing in the public eye while brewing real beer for the black market in
private.
BEN KISSEL I mean it's still Hamm's.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's the most obvious thing in the world. It's the most obvious crime in existence. Of course he
still has a brewery company and he's got all the vats and he's got all the shit. And he's like,
'Yep, I'm not making beer. Certainly not making beer here where all the beer is made.'
BEN KISSEL No, definitely not. Don't go in that room by the way, officer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're hearing all the bubbling and shit.
MARCUS PARKS What they did is they said that they were still brewing beer but they were brewing near beer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS They tried to re-market it as a health drink.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, of course it is!
MARCUS PARKS It's like drinking a loaf of bread!
BEN KISSEL I am so over it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It is, it's bad!
BEN KISSEL It's the same thing with the Heineken ads where it's like you can get pulled over now but don't
worry officer, it's not alcoholic. Meanwhile just cut to you getting your brains bashed in for
some other reason.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Your head just spiked against the fucking hood.
MARCUS PARKS Well since Hamm was running a racket selling real beer on the bootleg side, he paid one St.
Paul mob $8000 a year in protection money through a fence named Frisco Dutch to keep other
mobs from robbing his stock.
BEN KISSEL Wow, I love it.
MARCUS PARKS But once Prohibition ended, Hamm felt like he didn't need to pay protection anymore.
BEN KISSEL Okay, Mr Hamm!
MARCUS PARKS In this he was wrong.
BEN KISSEL He's the Hamm baby.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seriously, this is another Last Podcast on the Left teaching moment here. If you're currently
paying protection, if you're paying a vig to somebody, it don't end.
BEN KISSEL No, you actually have to. You are paying for them not to attack you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Not to kill you.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS But also protecting you against the other gangs but you are also paying them to not kill you.
It's kind of a double thing.
BEN KISSEL It's hard. Wear a wire.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. On June 15, 1933 Fred Barker and Alvin Karpis snatched William Hamm off the street
outside of his office. They put a hood on his head-
BEN KISSEL (snorting)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Very good.
BEN KISSEL That's my version of the bacon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's very good, very good.
BEN KISSEL I wasn't asked to be a ham but I am.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No this is just a normal man, this is a grownup man.
BEN KISSEL Oh this is a man, he's a human man. I thought it was more pork-related.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's just the name. He's German.
BEN KISSEL Oh I see, I get it now. Not everyone's pigs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No. Am I a pig to you?
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS They put a hood over his head, shoved him inside a black coup, and drove him to the home of
a postmaster in Bensenville, Illinois who just happened to be in on the job.
BEN KISSEL Can you stop oinking back there?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm breathing! I am breathing.
MARCUS PARKS When the car stopped, Hamm later recalled that he was gently pulled out by the icy cold small
hand of what he thinks was a woman, implicating Ma Barker.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (old lady voice) Come on, you're gonna be my new chair. Come on, get in there. I'm gonna ride
you like a seal at the circus. Come on, stinky little boy, stinky pig.
BEN KISSEL This is gross.
MARCUS PARKS But considering the small stature of the Barker boys, that tiny little hand might have also been
Fred or Doc.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It might be.
MARCUS PARKS Now early speculation printed in the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What?
MARCUS PARKS Do you know the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern?
BEN KISSEL I know Oshkosh.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Thanks dad. Okay good job, Ben. You do know Oshkosh.
BEN KISSEL Yes.
MARCUS PARKS They said that Hamm was probably being held by a gambler and liquor runner named Verne
Sankey. And on this speculation alone, police had orders to shoot Sankey on sight.
BEN KISSEL Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS Well we're at the point now in Prohibition and especially like in the war on crime and all that
where the police and federal authorities, everyone's done fucking around. So many people
have died especially in the Midwest because Chicago at this point has become an absolute
fucking murder hole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a battleground between gangsters and cops and a lot of innocent people are getting shot in
the middle of it.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And these gangsters, like the Chicago Beer Wars, we're talking hundreds of people killed,
hundreds of gang members killed.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS And innocent bystanders getting hit all the fucking time.
BEN KISSEL Dang.
MARCUS PARKS Now this confusion as to who actually did the kidnapping, that was just fine with the Barker-
Karpis gang. And the investigative waters were only muddied further by the Barker's man on
the inside, Big Tom Brown. For a share of the ransom, Big Tom kept the outlaws updated on
the activities of law enforcement and in turn misdirected authorities when they got too close
to the Barkers.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Case in point was in the delivery of the ransom. The aforementioned Shotgun George Ziegler
acted as the ransom negotiator and demanded that a Hamm's Brewery truck deliver the
money, presumably to make the vehicle easy to recognize. But using a truck meant that the
detectives could play games of their own. St. Paul detective Charles Tierney convinced
authorities to let him hide in the back of the brewery truck and pop out with a machine gun
once the kidnappers arrived. Not so he could take them alive but so he could just fucking mow
them down on sight.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah man, that's fucking brutal. That's like, 'Say hello to my little friend!' That's what every one
of these gangster movies I watched were all just people spraying everybody with Tommy Guns,
it's awesome.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS But just before the plan was put into motion, Big Tom Brown contacted the Barker-Karpis gang
and told them that the St. Paul police were basically planning to murder them at the handoff.
So the gang told the police to forget the delivery truck and instead deliver the cash in an
equally conspicuous vehicle with the doors and trunk removed so no one, armed or otherwise,
could hide inside.
BEN KISSEL Totally inconspicuous.
MARCUS PARKS No, they wanted it to be conspicuous. They wanted to see it coming a mile away.
BEN KISSEL Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But I don't know how that doesn't point to the fact that they had a man on the inside of the
police department to tell them that somebody was hiding inside of the truck.
MARCUS PARKS It was understood at this point that every gang had a man on the inside in almost every single
operation that you're ever gonna fucking do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS You just had no idea who the man on the inside was gonna be so you just kinda had to try
whatever you fucking could and hope that maybe the man on the inside wasn't in the room
when you made that plan.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well so the fucking federal investigations systems, all of them, have had to deal with this
problem since the beginning, since the very beginning of them.
MARCUS PARKS Well at this point this wasn't federal, this was still local, this was St. Paul. Because no one had
broken a federal crime yet, hey didn't know that the kidnapping victim had been taken to
Illinois so the federal government, the federal bureau couldn't come into it yet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Didn't get involved yet.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. This is still just St. Paul bumbling around, trying to take care of it themselves.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Got it.
MARCUS PARKS But while the negotiations for the new drop were being made, William Hamm's mother who
had been involved in the negotiations from the beginning-
BEN KISSEL (snorting) Hi Mrs. Hamm. Hey, Mrs. Hamm.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm just breathing, I'm just breathing.
BEN KISSEL I'm here for the massage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, okay.
MARCUS PARKS She died, Henry.
BEN KISSEL Oh she did die.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI 100 years ago! She's fucking dead.
BEN KISSEL What did she have, hoof and mouth disease?
MARCUS PARKS She collapsed from worry and died of a heart failure.
BEN KISSEL A pig's death.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, most of the time a pig's death is a fucking bolt to the back of their skull.
BEN KISSEL But they're very nervous.
MARCUS PARKS They are.
BEN KISSEL Poor pig.
MARCUS PARKS Well by June 30th the ransom was paid and Hamm was released unharmed. He told reporters
that he couldn't identify the kidnappers because they had goggles taped to his face the entire
time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They did it right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. They were however very nice and the meals, while not elaborate, were obviously well
done.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is where Ma Barker came in. Truly Ma Barker catered the criminal revolution of the 1930s.
BEN KISSEL There is something classy about treating your... Cause it's not about the victim, they don't care
about this person, they want the money.
MARCUS PARKS No, not at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Again Ma Barker was not the general, she did not make the moves, she did not raise them by
the rod in order to make criminals, she didn't train them how to be criminals.
BEN KISSEL She can't help you with insurance.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But she is fully a part of the system and she's much closer to Scorsese's mom in Goodfellas
when they're done dumping the body and she goes, 'You guys want some food?' And she goes
and she's just making everybody food. That's like what Ma Barker did.
BEN KISSEL I always thought of her more as Billy Crystal's mom in Throw Momma From The Train. Owen
loves his mom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And Mama Fratelli from The Goonies is also very much so based on Ma Barker.
BEN KISSEL That makes sense.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Same actress.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course the mother of the Beagle Brothers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yes, we've talked about it.
MARCUS PARKS Who are dogs, Barker, get it, dogs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Can you please buy a fucking clue, please?
BEN KISSEL Yep. Also The General, you missed my insurance reference.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I remember him.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well the reason why they never roughed them up is because there was no angle to
roughing them up. If you roughed up a kidnap victim and you brought them back all fucked up
then it was even more likely for the cops to come that much harder at you. Because if
someone's kidnapped for 20-30 days, they might come back and just say like please fucking
god it's over, let's just put it all behind us, I don't wanna think about it ever again. But if you're
coming back with a couple of broken limbs, you're gonna want revenge.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You'll want revenge. And it is interesting to see this is also the concept of criminal as
businessman, right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So to them they're like, 'This is business, this is what people do, we're just trying to run an
honest organization.'
BEN KISSEL Bonafide. Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You give us the money and then you get your fucking pig man back, you get him back!
BEN KISSEL You get the Hamm man back, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You shoulda let him go. It's on you.
MARCUS PARKS So once William Hamm was returned safely, the hunt to catch those responsible began and Big
Tom Brown did his best to steer the investigation away from the Barker-Karpis gang and
therefore away from himself. Investigators launched a raid on a cabin at Lake Minnetonka
seemingly chosen by Tom Brown at random. But that produced nothing more than a badly
frightened couple on vacation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's a Chevy Chase movie we haven't seen.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, leave them alone. It's a beautiful area if it was the summertime, got a nice lake out
there, a little grilling, a little barbecue, a little kissing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's fine, it's fine.
BEN KISSEL It's nice.
MARCUS PARKS J. Edgar Hoover meanwhile had his own ideas about who was behind the kidnapping but he
was also very wrong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's that goddamn Fidel Castro!
BEN KISSEL It's Fidel Castro.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's Fidel Castro!
BEN KISSEL Fidel Castro stole the Hamm baby.
MARCUS PARKS Through a top operative named Melvin Purvis-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This guy.
BEN KISSEL I've heard his name before.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He is a big deal.
BEN KISSEL Melvin Purvis. Ugh.
MARCUS PARKS Melvin Purvis, yep. Hoover put all his stock into the word of a Chicago detective named Dan
Gilbert aka Tubbo.
BEN KISSEL Guys, okay guys, I know we're passing out nicknames today. Is it possible that we can alter
mine?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Tubbo.
BEN KISSEL Oh man, I just don't want to be Tubbo anymore!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We already got Fatso, we got Blimpy, we got Dumpo.
BEN KISSEL Oh dang it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're Tubbo, all right? Nobody's got it good. Me? Look at me. They call me fucking Tiny Dick.
That's it, that's what I got.
MARCUS PARKS Well Tubbo maintained that Chicago bootlegger Roger Touhy was responsible for the
kidnapping and Big Tom did his best to encourage that line of thinking.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Every one of these characters feel like the corrupt cop from Batman 1989.
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That big fat guy, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, yeah. God...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What's his name.
MARCUS PARKS Eckhardt!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Eckhardt.
BEN KISSEL Eckhardt.
MARCUS PARKS Hey Eckhardt, think of the future!
BEN KISSEL (wheezing) He breathes like that, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Well eventually Roger Touhy and members of his gang would be arrested and charged with
the kidnapping of William Hamm but years later it was revealed that Tubbo was actually an
operative of Al Capone.
BEN KISSEL Whoa.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Why do you think he had a nickname?
BEN KISSEL Tubbo!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Here's the thing man, if a cop has a nickname, he's a gangster. Only the gangsters have
nicknames.
BEN KISSEL I guess so, good point.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Roger Touhy was another Chicago rival and Al Capone took him off the board by playing
one of his operatives. And by the way Al Capone did this from jail in Atlanta.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI With syphilis.
BEN KISSEL Look at that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Nearly deranged from syphilis.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL So that's a good reminder, get outta bed today. Al Capone did all of this with syphilis in prison.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Obviously, yeah. And always shoot the villain in the head.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. However while Roger Touhy was arrested and charged with the crime, it soon became
obvious that others were responsible even though prosecutors went ahead and pursued a
conviction against Touhy anyway. This revelation that someone else was involved had come
from a technique new to the FBI called latent fingerprint identification. And by the way at this
point the FBI didn't become the FBI until 1935 but just for simplification purposes I'm referring
to the BOI-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The group that would-
MARCUS PARKS Become the FBI.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS They're called the BOI at this point, they're not the FBI until '35 but just to make everything
simple.
BEN KISSEL We'll just call it the FBI.
MARCUS PARKS Well basically latent fingerprints are fingerprint impressions left on objects from the scene of
the crime which while not obvious at first become clear after chemical powders are applied,
that's where the whole dusting for fingerprints thing comes from.
BEN KISSEL Oh!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS And when the Hamm ransom notes were dusted they found not Roger Touhy's fingerprints but
Alvin Karpis and Doc Barker's.
BEN KISSEL And also Tubbo, come over here and look at this. That look like barbecue sauce to you?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Let me just (gnawing sounds).
BEN KISSEL Man you ate the fucking evidence, Tubbo!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly I need to eat before coming to crime scenes.
BEN KISSEL Please!
MARCUS PARKS Well incidentally while Touhy and his men were acquitted of the Hamm kidnapping they were
found guilty of abducting a market speculator named John Factor for $70,000. And Touhy
quote unquote "committed suicide" in his cell by necktie hanging courtesy of Al Capone.
BEN KISSEL Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Jail cells are not the safe place you'd think they'd be.
BEN KISSEL I don't think they are, no. When did you ever think that they were?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know actually.
BEN KISSEL No, very dangerous.
MARCUS PARKS No, jails, prisons seems like the most dangerous places. In town the most dangerous place is
usually jail or prison.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. I wanna be at the comic book shop.
BEN KISSEL Yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I wanna be at the barbecue restaurant.
BEN KISSEL Ooh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Now while kidnapping was easier and just as profitable as bank robbing it was also extremely
time consuming. Getting the ransom usually took 20-30 days, maybe more, not to mention the
fact that it was nowhere near as exciting as shoving a gun in a stranger's face and fleeing from
the cops afterward.
BEN KISSEL No, you're really just getting paid to babysit.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Technically it's like investing in good stocks. You're just sitting there and you gotta wait, you
just gotta wait.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, just gotta let it mature. So the Barker-Karpis gang temporarily returned to their original
vocation. In September of 1933 the Barker-Karpis gang robbed two Railway Express employees
and escaped with two cash boxes containing somewhere between $60,000-$100,000.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Woo!
BEN KISSEL Damn.
MARCUS PARKS And look at that, man. Cause that's the thing, out of the Hamm kidnapping they only got a
fraction of that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Big Tom Brown got a cut. Who else?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Everybody who's anybody.
MARCUS PARKS The owner of the Green Lantern Tavern got a cut.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The whole line, the whole fucking enterprise gets a cut.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. I think there was like 9 or 10 people involved beginning to end, I think the Barker-Karpis
gang came away with like $7800 each.
BEN KISSEL Oh my goodness. There's no money in that at all then.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Very little.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah and it also took a month. But hey man, you're robbing a fucking Railway Express
employee, you can make $100,000 in about 15 minutes.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Two days later they robbed a bank in Wisconsin for $43,000.
BEN KISSEL Oh hey, can you not?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Perfect.
BEN KISSEL That's my impression of the bank teller.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Perfect. Hey now.
BEN KISSEL Can you not?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey. Can you not?
BEN KISSEL What if we don't and say we did?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey.
MARCUS PARKS Now those two robberies had gone smoothly but if you rob enough banks, something is gonna
go wrong eventually.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS And sometimes what goes wrong is entirely your fault.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, you're a criminal.
MARCUS PARKS By your fault I mean you just fuck up and you fuck up bad.
BEN KISSEL Oh Jesus.
MARCUS PARKS This one here, this one's a real dumb dumb robbery.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You can't always be perfect.
BEN KISSEL No.
MARCUS PARKS In 1933 the Barker-Karpis gang robbed a train station in south St. Paul, bending the no crime in
city limits rule. And things went very south very quickly all due to mistakes made by the gang.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Mercury's in retrograde.
BEN KISSEL Is that what they said?
MARCUS PARKS At about 9 in the morning the Barker-Karpis gang waited in a black sedan at a railway depot in
south St. Paul. There was a couple of messengers arriving with bags of cash for delivery to the
Stockyards National Bank and with those messengers were a couple of police escorts.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
MARCUS PARKS So as the bagmen along with the police entered the railway depot offices, Doc Barker jumped
out of the gang's car and pointed a sawed-off shotgun at officer Leo Pavlak. Meanwhile
another gang member named Chuck Fitzgerald also leapt out and aimed a pistol at one of the
messengers. Things at this point were under control if a little tense but when another officer
named John Yeaman unexpectedly entered the scene after his coffee break-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh god.
MARCUS PARKS A jumpy Barker gang member named Bill Weaver drew his shotgun from the backseat of the
Barker sedan and shot Yeaman in the head.
BEN KISSEL Oh jeez.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is such a scene from a movie cause it's the guy coming back, cause you know beforehand
it's them rolling in just being like, 'I'm gonna go get some coffee'. And they're all like, 'No man,
you're supposed to have gotten coffee earlier.' And he's like, 'It's my break, gimme a break, I'm
new here.' And then he goes and he gets the coffee and he's just being like, 'Me and my best
girl are getting married on Friday.' And the guy's like, 'Yeah you got the look os a married man.'
And he's like, 'See you soon!' And then he goes back over there and gets his head just fucking
exploded.
MARCUS PARKS Now Doc Barker assumed that the shot had come from the police so he called Officer Pavlak a
dirty rat son of a bitch-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Dirty rat son of a bitch!
MARCUS PARKS And pulled the trigger, nearly decapitating Pavlak with the sawed-off. Fred Barker then also
opened fire cause he assumed a firefight with the cops had begun and he hit Yeaman again in
the head and the chest, finishing him off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'll get this guy on the ground.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, thank you.
MARCUS PARKS Completely losing the plot, Fred then just started spinning around in a circle, firing his pistol at
anything he could fucking see.
BEN KISSEL That's what Fred does.
MARCUS PARKS And he accidentally hit fellow gang member Chuck Fitzgerald. Chuck Fitzgerald yelled:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI "I'm hit!"
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS And Doc assumed Chuck had been hit by the cops so Doc pulled two .45s and started firing
bullets into the post office across the street. And then finally he grabbed the messengers'
moneybags and drove off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI See this is why we train our soldiers for so long so they become machines, they become killing
machines so that they can just learn how to do it.
BEN KISSEL Not a bullet sprinkler?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because I do feel like if you put me in a combat situation right now, at first it'd be kinda
interesting but eventually I would be the guy in a circle going, 'They're everywhere! Charlies
everywhere!' And them being like, 'Vietnam was 50 years ago!'
BEN KISSEL I don't know, I actually think with your ability to transform you would do very well. I can see
you just landing in Syria and just immediately having a deli cart.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I definitely wouldn't just lay down and wait for someone to just send me back. I literally would
just lay down and be like, 'You can arrest me. Literally just put me in military jail, I'm not going
out there.'
BEN KISSEL Oh no, they'll do things with ya.
MARCUS PARKS Now the Barkers came away from this robbery believing that they'd just survived another
nasty gunfight with the cops but when the story was reported later the Barker-Karpis gang
discovered that they'd only been battling each other.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh my god.
BEN KISSEL They are dumb people.
MARCUS PARKS Not a single shot had been fired by the cops, it was all the Barker-Karpis gang.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Is there a more appropriate way of describing the American people on Twitter than this
moment where they all think they're all fighting outside sources but everybody's just fighting
themselves?
BEN KISSEL Fighting each other over bullshit.
MARCUS PARKS Shooting themselves, yeah.
BEN KISSEL All right, great.
MARCUS PARKS Well meanwhile the FBI was getting more aggressive in its newly christened war on crime.
Hoover was pushing his agents to learn the strategies and tactics of gunplay which of course
resulted in more civilian injuries and deaths but also made the FBI more dangerous to tangle
with. Perhaps the new aggressiveness on the part of the FBI was why the paranoia of the
Barker-Karpis gang spread from Alvin Karpis and infected the rest of the crew.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly it sounds like they're finally learning how to be professional criminals when they start
to look at him cause Karpis this whole time has been like, (creepy voice) 'I told you we gotta
plan more.'
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And they're all used to flipping out and now he's like now we really have to figure out how do
we thread this needle. Because how long have they been active at this point?
MARCUS PARKS 5 years. Or 4 years. Yeah, they've been together 4, maybe 5 years. Somewhere inbetween.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. So they're out of criminal college and they're supposed to be in criminal private sector.
BEN KISSEL You gotta do a post-game review and maybe you need a tendency breaker.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, you need to debrief.
BEN KISSEL So you gotta say guys, that last time when we shot each other, we gotta learn from that.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I call this an 'aha' moment.
BEN KISSEL Aha.
MARCUS PARKS Now notice Alvin Karpis was not on that raid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well one day Doc Barker and Alvin Karpis were driving in the Chevy when they noticed
they were being followed by a car that they thought contained two police officers. So Doc and
Alvin turned down an alley to trick the car into following them somewhat out of the way,
somewhere quiet. Once they were in a tight spot, Karpis stepped out of his car holding a
Tommy Gun loaded with a 50 bullet drum while Doc pulled out his .45. And both men opened
fire on the car behind them until the guns were emptied of bullets.
BEN KISSEL My name is Hubert, I'm your neighbor, that's why I was following behind you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seriously.
MARCUS PARKS Well as it turned out, the person following them was not a police officer but was rather a
Northwestern Airline employee named Roy McCord who thought that Karpis and Doc were a
roving pair of peeping toms.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're looking at me shit?! Hey, are you the guys looking at me shit?!
BEN KISSEL So they both thought, they were like, 'They're the cops!' And then the fake cops or the people
who weren't cops were like, 'Those are peepers!'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, they're peepers.
MARCUS PARKS Everyone was wrong.
BEN KISSEL Everyone assumed that everyone is disgusting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I guess follow the peeper is a fun game you can play in 1930s.
BEN KISSEL I guess so, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS So after the disaster at the railway station, the Barker-Karpis gang decided to return to the
much less exciting game of kidnapping and plans were made to abduct corrupt St. Paul bank
president Edward Bremer, mentioned before as a source of money laundering. See Edward
Bremer was the son of Adolph Bremer, owner of Schmidt Beer Brewing as well as the nephew
of Otto Bremer, chairman of American National Bank. The Bremers were rich as fuck.
BEN KISSEL Seems like it.
MARCUS PARKS The ransom this time was doubled to $200,000.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI At this point we gotta make our money.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're gonna put all this time in.
MARCUS PARKS On January 17, 1934, Bremer dropped off his daughter at school and was driving away when
Alvin Karpis appeared at his driver side window at a stop sign and shoved a gun in Bremer's
face, telling him to move over or die. And as Karpis opened the door and Bremer slid over, Doc
Barker leaned into the passenger side and knocked Bremer out with the butt of his .45.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Does that really happen? Can you really knock somebody out like that? I see it in movies but I
don't know if it's really possible, I didn't know if it was possible to pop a guy in the head and
then he falls over.
BEN KISSEL Hold on a second, I have this new gun that I just bought, let me check it out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa, cool gun!
MARCUS PARKS It's actually much harder to knock somebody out completely, it's harder than you think it is. If
someone has been knocked out by getting hit in the head you've probably damaged their
brain.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, they go in a coma.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. There is a very, very strong impulse in humans even after you get knocked out. That's
why people are usually like, 'Why don't they just stay dead?' Because instinct kicks in, survival
instinct kicks in and you're just like, 'I gotta get outta here.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah man, yeah. That's me, bro. I keep coming, dude. I keep on coming, bro.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS He probably wasn't knocked out as much as he was severely disoriented.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Stunned.
MARCUS PARKS And stunned, yeah. So Doc again taped a pair of goggles to Bremer's face and then placed a
gag in his mouth and secured it with a piece of rope. And while all this was happening,
motorists behind them just honked their horns at what they thought was nothing more than
an annoying delay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep.
BEN KISSEL Wow. Honk, honk.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's a very poignant honk, honk.
MARCUS PARKS Well once Bremer regained consciousness he was forced to sign three pre-written ransom
notes that could be sent to his father. They then abandoned Bremer's car for the police to find
later, covered in Bremer's blood so everyone would get nice and worried.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Let's put some shit in there as well.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, why not?
MARCUS PARKS Now Bremer was taken again across state lines to a hideout in Illinois just like Hamm was. But
Alvin said that Bremer was quote "a pain in the ass".
BEN KISSEL What?
MARCUS PARKS Demanding a drink the moment they stopped his bleeding.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I want some water!
BEN KISSEL You're a fucking victim right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I want some water!
BEN KISSEL You don't get anything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Today is my day. I'm the main character today.
BEN KISSEL Why did we steal this entitled little bitch?
MARCUS PARKS And he insisted over and over again that his father would never pay $200,000.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Jokes on you, he'd rather me dead.
BEN KISSEL That's actually really sad man, I didn't realize being wealthy was so-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, I'm glad he hates me!
BEN KISSEL Yeah?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I pissed in his car once.
BEN KISSEL You pissed in his car?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL As a baby or...?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, it was last week.
BEN KISSEL It's was last week. Yeah, maybe you are-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause I needed candy.
BEN KISSEL You needed candy so you pissed in your dad's car. Why did we kidnap you? Why?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What are you gonna do? Take care of me, I'm your baby now!
BEN KISSEL Dang it, man. This sucks.
MARCUS PARKS Now when Bremer's abandoned, bloodstained car was found, the media concluded that
Bremer had been murdered and dumped. But because kidnapping had become such an
epidemic, the Bremer family was flooded with fake ransom notes all claiming to have
kidnapped their son.
BEN KISSEL You could just see the cheese doodle residue. Henry, I think I got it, bro. Listen, we didn't even
kidnap.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wait, let me see that, bro. (gnawing sounds)
BEN KISSEL Tubbo! You ate the fucking fake ransom note, bro!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I gotta eat before.
BEN KISSEL You have to eat.
MARCUS PARKS On the third day after the kidnapping though the real perpetrators of the crime placed a fairly
standard ransom note in a bottom and tossed it into the window of a long time friend of the
Bremer family named Dr. H. T. Nipper.
BEN KISSEL Ah there you go, that's fun.
MARCUS PARKS But since there had been so many fakes, the first note wasn't taken seriously. So a day or two
later the Barker-Karpis gang slipped a somewhat more forceful follow up under Dr. Nipper's
door.
BEN KISSEL Dr. Nipper, we have this person...for realsies! For realsies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's how you know. For serial.
BEN KISSEL For serial. Please demand that on my 1934 bingo card.
MARCUS PARKS This is what that note said:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI "If Bremer don't get back to his family, he has you to thank. First of all, all coppers must be
pulled off. Second, the dough must be ready. Third, we must have a new signal. When you're
ready to meet our terms, place an NRA sticker in the center of each of your office windows.
We'll know if the coppers are pulled or not. Remain at your office daily from now until 8pm.
Have the dough ready and where you can get it within 30 minutes. You will be instructed how
to deliver it. The money must not be had as it will be examined before Bremer is released.
We'll try to be ready for any trickery if attempted. This is positively our last attempt. Don't
duck it."
BEN KISSEL It sounds kinda scary but then also kinda fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, cause coppers.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And so since this note had more of an air of authenticity it was taken seriously and 20
days after Bremer was kidnapped, the $200,000 ransom was delivered to a spot in Farmington,
Minnesota. The next night Bremer was released into the middle of the street in Rochester,
Minnesota and told to count to 15 before finally removing the goggles that had been almost
constantly taped to his face for three weeks.
BEN KISSEL Now just a quick question, did you want me to count down to 1 or count up to 15?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I gotta count out loud. 1. 2. Can I now? Can I now?
BEN KISSEL I'm so fucking happy to be rid of this piece of shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm the baby!
BEN KISSEL You're not the baby.
MARCUS PARKS They actually scared him a little bit, they dropped him off and he started counting to 15 and
once he got to about 7 they said, 'We're still here, start again.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, nice.
BEN KISSEL Well technically that means I'll be counting to 30.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You said 15.
BEN KISSEL You said 15, that's 30.
MARCUS PARKS Now the FBI was very interested in what sort of information Bremer could remember about
the kidnappers but all he could give was a clear memory of a piece of wallpaper he briefly saw
and a vague memory of an older woman maybe saying:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Now you're thinking, boys. Now you're thinking. Now you're using your noodle.
BEN KISSEL Yeah it seems like they did something real stupid, but yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah now you're thinking, taping the goggles to his face.
BEN KISSEL That's smart.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Now go in an pull his pants down, show me his balls.
BEN KISSEL Oh wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Come on, let me sit on him.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS And once the money was collected the gang split the earnings and scattered. Shotgun George
Ziegler on the other hand was the only member of the gang who couldn't keep his fucking
mouth shut.
BEN KISSEL Just shut up, there's so many other things to talk about than the felony you just committed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But how does everybody know that you did the cool job of doing these felonies if you don't tell
people that you're the one who did it?
BEN KISSEL Ego.
MARCUS PARKS Totally.
BEN KISSEL Ego.
MARCUS PARKS Well after telling many of his associates in Chicago that he'd been involved in the Bremer
kidnapping, Shotgun George was gunned down outside a restaurant in Cicero and his body was
left in the street until the next day. Karpis later claimed that the kidnapping syndicate was
responsible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think Capone was responsible. I think there's a lot of people that could have been there to
fucking kill him.
MARCUS PARKS Well nothing happened in Cicero without Capone's say so. So that meant that maybe Capone
had something to do with the Bremer kidnapping, at the very least had a little bit of his finger
in the pie. Because after all he was taken in Chicago and I think Karpis said that Capone told
them if you're in Illinois, you're paying rent.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yes, that makes total sense because he was like that and they did have a quote unquote
"good relationship" with him.
MARCUS PARKS They did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Which means you give him the vig. And I just think Capone, any heist of this size at this time
period in the middle corridor of America, Capone had to at least have heard about it or he
would want to shut it down.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
MARCUS PARKS Now by 1933 high profile kidnappings, murders, and bank robberies were just as prevalent as
ever if not more so. Therefore the FBI were under a lot of pressure to have any sort of success
in their so-called war on crime. They'd actually given it a name, it was now called the great
crime wave of 1933 and 1934.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Public enemy era.
MARCUS PARKS But the Barker-Karpis gang, Pretty Boy Floyd, and John Dillinger were all still at large and
Bonnie and Clyde, yeah they'd been killed but they'd been killed in an operation led by a
former Texas Ranger, Frank Hamer. And that had absolutely nothing to do with the FBI.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That was one man's vendetta.
MARCUS PARKS And concerning Dillinger, the FBI had also completely botched a raid on the Dillinger gang in
Wisconsin at the Little Bohemia Lounge.
BEN KISSEL Oh yes, whenever I think of Wisconsin I think Little Bohemia.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Always.
MARCUS PARKS Well at the restaurant of the Little Bohemia Lounge, the FBI had killed one innocent civilian
customer who was only there for the Sunday dollar dinner special.
BEN KISSEL Oh no! And you know that was bad but great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was just thick.
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And they wounded two other civilians. And it was one of those jitters things where these
people were leaving the restaurant, there was like 75 people there that night, they were
leaving the restaurant, the FBI was out there waiting for the Dillinger gang, they told the car to
stop, the car didn't stop, so the FBI fucking opened fire and killed someone instantly and
wounded the other two. Had nothing to do with it.
BEN KISSEL It's just cause they were in Wisconsin, you know they had a couple Manhattans at dinner, it
was like, 'Honey we are drunk.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We better drive home now.
BEN KISSEL We better drive home.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because we wanna get the full drunk on the road.
BEN KISSEL Oh man.
MARCUS PARKS And the FBI also lost an agent to boot. But worst of all they hadn't captured even one member
of the Dillinger gang.
BEN KISSEL Come on!
MARCUS PARKS They caught one guy's wife and a couple of girlfriends and they convicted all of them on
harboring charges but all those ladies were released on parole soon after. And for this shit,
Hoover almost lost his job.
BEN KISSEL That would have been good.
MARCUS PARKS That would have been great. But he barely managed to hold on. Now even though the FBI was
not even coming close to doing the job they'd been hired to do, Alvin Karpis was just as
cautious and paranoid as ever and this general mood was starting to rub off on Fred Barker.
BEN KISSEL Do you think if Hoover was ever upset and then someone was like, 'Hey, J. Don't get your
panties in a bunch!' And then he was just like, 'How'd they know?'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think yes. I think it might have come from that.
MARCUS PARKS You know why he went ad J. Edgar Hoover?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Why?
MARCUS PARKS Because around that time there was a guy somewhere in America that had been convicted of
writing $600 in bad checks.
BEN KISSEL Fake checks, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS And his name was John Edgar Hoover. And J. Edgar Hoover didn't wanna get confused with the
criminal John Edgar Hoover.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm the head of the FBI.
MARCUS PARKS So he changed it to J. Edgar Hoover. That's how fucking weird this guy was.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Well looking to avoid future entanglements with the FBI in at least the investigative realm,
Alvin Karpis and Fred Barker began floating inquiries as to how they could get their fingerprints
altered or removed altogether.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is fucking sweet.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Not as easy as you might think it is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I bet it's very traumatic to the body.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL It seems like it would be. Although also, put them on a hotplate. Would they burn off?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You'll see. They come back.
BEN KISSEL Okay. They come back.
MARCUS PARKS They come back. Well eventually Fred and Doc were given then name of an underworld doctor
named Dr. Joseph Moran who had already been to prison for performing illegal abortions and
was now a surgeon for hire amongst criminals on par with the doctor in the 1989 Batman
movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is an example of why people don't trust doctors and shit. This is one of those guys who's
like yeah, I'll fucking do anything for money. I'll do anything for money which means I'll also
experiment with 1930s plastic surgery on you to figure out what we can do. That was an
unpioneered area of medicine at the time and he really was kinda digging in and just figuring
shit out on these guys.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS So when Fred and Alvin arrived at Moran's office, Moran began by wrapping rubber bands
around the first joints on Fred's fingers.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS He then mixed a batch of antiseptic liquid and swabbed it over his fingerprints.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's so it's clean.
MARCUS PARKS And when Barker's fingers started going a little bit numb, Moran injected each finger with
cocaine to numb them more.
BEN KISSEL And why is this happening again, doctor?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You'll see. Oh, you'll see.
BEN KISSEL Okay, okay.
MARCUS PARKS Having done that, Moran slowly began to whittle the meat off the end of Barker's fingers as if
he was sharpening a pencil.
BEN KISSEL I mean to be fair, that's how you do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah I guess.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah!
BEN KISSEL I don't know how else to get rid of fingerprints.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cover it with glue.
BEN KISSEL Gloves would have been a smart idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Gloves.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah and this is after 10 fingertips of cocaine, so this guy is jacked.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fuck yeah, man! Fuck yeah, dude! Come on, man! Give me the scalpel! Give me the fucking
scalpel!
MARCUS PARKS But after 10 minutes of slicing Moran wrapped the fingers in bandages and gave Barker a shot
of morphine, telling him that he was quote "gonna start hurting in a few hours".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL I am hurting now.
MARCUS PARKS Now Moran did the same to Alvin Karpis. With Alvin Moran also added facial surgery.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS He told Karpis, 'Hey your face is kinda lopsided. I can straighten that up for you, if you want.'
BEN KISSEL What the fuck did you just tell me? I'm a gangster, you're gonna tell me my face is lopsided?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (creepy voice) Hey I wonder how I got the name fucking Creepy, yeah of course my fucking
face is lopsided. Seena Ghaznavi's brother is a plastic surgeon.
BEN KISSEL Yes he is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And he does say stuff like this where he goes, 'I could fix that.' He grabs a chunk of meat on
your face, he's like, 'We can get rid of this.' And just being like no, it's there.
BEN KISSEL I thought I needed that.
MARCUS PARKS So Moran shot Karpis' face full of cocaine, that was the only anesthetic he had, just shooting
cocaine in people. And he made incisions on Karpis' face that kinda sorta hid his facial scars
but didn't really do much else. He was still very much Old Creepy.
BEN KISSEL Seems like he gave him different scars.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah man, this is all like Dahmer experimentation.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well afterward both Fred Barker and Alvin Karpis were in so much pain, mostly from
having every finger on their hands mutilated, they fell in and out of consciousness for three full
days.
BEN KISSEL Okay. It may be all the cocaine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, yeah. I think I'd need a break.
BEN KISSEL Going up and down. Yeah, take a breather. I'm gonna need a Kit Kat after that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Well like George Ziegler, Dr. Moran just couldn't keep his goddamn mouth shut.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey man!
BEN KISSEL What are you bragging about?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Who's gonna know?
BEN KISSEL You're an unlicensed doctor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You wanna hear how fucking crazy I am? I cut the fingerprints off of Creepy Karpis last night,
you fucking piece of shit.
BEN KISSEL Jeez.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You pay for pizza!
BEN KISSEL Patient-client privilege, doc.
MARCUS PARKS He was telling sex workers that he was a very important guy in the Chicago underworld. I'm a
very important man.
BEN KISSEL Okay. Please take a shower before you come and have sex with me. Thank you.
MARCUS PARKS So Karpis and Barker shot him in the head and dumped his ass in a hole in Michigan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep.
BEN KISSEL That escalated quickly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh also this is for the fucking fingerprints!
BEN KISSEL Yeah, that escalated very quickly. Also again, just tell them about the invention of gloves.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well speaking of the fingerprints, other sources say, specifically the FBI said that Dr.
Moran's corpse was not dumped in a hole but that it actually washed up on the shores of Lake
Erie a year later missing its hands and feet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, dude.
BEN KISSEL Oh they got revenge!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, they did. I think that he legitimately... Karpis would do shit like this. They were very
violent. Very violent.
BEN KISSEL That's why we are covering them.
MARCUS PARKS Unfortunately for Fred and Karpis however, they'd gone through all that pain for nothing. The
damage had already been done. In February of 1934 FBI agents traced money from the Bremer
kidnapping to a gas station and from there they found a gas canister that had been used to
refuel the car that had kidnapped Bremer.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS And on that gas canister were the fingerprints of Doc Barker. And with that the FBI had enough
evidence to fully pursue the Barker-Karpis gang wherever they went because it was now a
federal matter. Now the Barker brothers and Ma had been keeping low profiles in Chicago
since the ransom for Edward Bremer had been paid. To fill their days the Barkers sometimes
went to the movies and much to their surprise they were soon seeing their own faces on the
screen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's fun!
BEN KISSEL Was this fun or was that a fucking waking nightmare?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Probably a little of both.
BEN KISSEL Cause I would be like oh, we're on the big screen now, okay.
MARCUS PARKS In April of 1934, Ma, Fred, and Alvin went to the pictures and caught a universal international
newsreel featuring an update on the FBI's war against crime. And amongst the pictures of
America's public enemies including John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson, were Alvin Karpis and
Fred Barker.
BEN KISSEL It's just nice to be recognized, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS And from what Karpis later wrote, when the lights went on in the theater, Ma just smiled at
Fred and Alvin with the first real confirmation that her boys were more than just ordinary
crooks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (old lady voice) You did good, sons. You did good.
BEN KISSEL We did?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (old lady voice) Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah cause that's the funny thing about it, they said when the lights went up, cause it ends
with "one of them could be sitting next to you right now".
BEN KISSEL I highly doubt that. Oh my fucking lord.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (giggling)
MARCUS PARKS Yeah and everyone giggled. Is it you? Is it you? They were fucking there, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's awesome.
BEN KISSEL Jeez. That's creepy, dude.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's fun.
BEN KISSEL That is scary.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. But while the Barker-Karpis gang were doing their best to avoid police detention, their
girlfriends were not showing the same caution. One evening the main squeezes of Fred, Doc,
and Alvin had a bit too much to drink and caused a disruption at the local tavern.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh my god, it's like what Wendy does. Wendy starts a fight and then she's just like oh don't
worry, my father will fix it.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, I'm sure.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. The disturbance drew the attention of the police and one of the girlfriends floated the
names of a gang member or two that she might be involved with and implied that the officers
lives might be in danger if they don't let the girls go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
MARCUS PARKS The girls were arrested.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL Great.
MARCUS PARKS And this disturbance marked the beginning of the end of the Barker-Karpis gang. Now while
the rest of the gang fled to Chicago and other places down south, Doc Barker refused to leave
his girlfriend. As a result, on January 8, 1935 Doc became the first of the Barker-Karpis gang to
go down for his crimes since they had officially formed 5 years before.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Federal agents raided Doc's apartment and found not only money from the Bremer ransom
but an arsenal of weapons including two pistols, two automatic rifles, one .351 rifle with a
front machine gun grip, a shotgun, and enough ammunition to take on half the FBI himself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is my collection, see? All this here, this is just about me celebrating the history of guns,
see?
BEN KISSEL Well those are new guns.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, but that's the idea. Contemporary museum of guns. That is what this is, it's not a
stockpile, it's just a pile.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS After they arrested Doc, the FBI then found a clue as to where their investigation should take
them next. It was a postcard from Ocala, Florida.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Not Ocala, no! Why would you go to Ocala?
BEN KISSEL I've heard that name way too much.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Love you, Florida. Ocala's the worst place in the world.
BEN KISSEL Why?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's very bad.
BEN KISSEL They don't have an Applebee's?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's all they have, no. You know Applebee's is not as good as it used to be, Kissel. You know
that.
BEN KISSEL I know. Well they all started fucking having the same kitchen and all the same recipes and the
same food!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So you immediately went from celebrating to denigrating. You're a flip-flopper which is why
eventually you're gonna go back to the senate.
MARCUS PARKS I'm on Ben's side here, he accessed his memories of how good Applebee's used to be first and
then once you actually pointed out his folly, he was big enough to say that he would change
his mind. You say flip-flopping, I'd say that's a good American.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Certainly big enough. Oh no, his tears! His tears!
BEN KISSEL You swiftboat me, man? You're trying to swiftboat me, bro?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No man, you ain't got Kerry's face.
MARCUS PARKS Well even though names hadn't been cited in this postcard, it became obvious that Ma Barker
and Fred Barker had fled to Ocala.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (old lady voice) Love, your mother.
BEN KISSEL Oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think this is from your mother.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
BEN KISSEL I love that they did what all of our parents did or at least mine which is they went to Florida.
What do you do?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They went to Florida! Honestly what are you gonna do? Ma Barker needed to be... You look at
her.
BEN KISSEL She's a Florida gal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Especially West Coast Florida, Gulf Coast Florida? She's got Sarasota written all over her.
MARCUS PARKS Now by 1934 Bonnie & Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, and John Dillinger were all dead. So the FBI
and J. Edgar Hoover were able to concentrate the full force of their organization on capturing
or killing the remaining members of the Barker-Karpis gang. The first to go down was Russell
Gibson who'd taken part in the Bremer kidnapping. Federal agents surrounded his building and
hurled tear gas into his apartment before opening fire. Gibson tried running out, firing his
pistol, but his gun jammed and agents filled him full of lead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (machine gun sounds)
BEN KISSEL Don't worry, in 55 years we're gonna use the same technique in Waco, Texas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa! That easy.
MARCUS PARKS Next was gang member William Harrison, apparently named after the president.
BEN KISSEL Didn't he die in like 17 days or something?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, William Henry Harrison, he died in 30 days.
BEN KISSEL Best president we ever had.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly every president should have that timeline.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
MARCUS PARKS But when they found William Harrison just after they killed Russell Gibson, all that was left was
a charred corpse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS Because Doc Barker had probably killed him and burned his body to keep him quiet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI See what I mean? Then he's very quiet.
BEN KISSEL I guess.
MARCUS PARKS Now Ma, Fred, and Alvin had been staying in Lake Weir in Florida under the name of Blackburn
but they had not kept a low profile.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (old lady voice) You guys, we're Disney people now!
BEN KISSEL You're Disney people now?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (old lady voice) We're Disney people, we're Disney kids.
BEN KISSEL You wanna go to Epcot, Ma?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (old lady voice) Yeah, we're going to Epcot.
BEN KISSEL I just feel like their personalities, they could not be hid under a bushel, could they?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's hard. No, they're peacocks.
BEN KISSEL They are peacocks.
MARCUS PARKS From what residents of Lake Weird said, the people they knew as the Blackburns paid for
everything in large bills and wouldn't take change.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Here you go. It's like a $1000 bill. Keep the change.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. For the Wrigley's Gum? It's actually a lot of work for me to do this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (old lady voice) Oh yeah you just keep the change for yourself. And honestly all those stains on
it, that's jelly.
BEN KISSEL You want me to keep the change. Okay thank you, Ma Barker?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (old lady voice) No.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (old lady voice) Mother Blackburn.
MARCUS PARKS One time a local barber said that three of these Blackburns got haircuts and they tipped him
$50. You know how much that is today? It's like going to the barbershop and tipping $1200.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Kissel's done it.
BEN KISSEL Holy! Not that much! No. That's a lot.
MARCUS PARKS What finally caught the attention of the agents however was the fact that Fred and Alvin had
been seen piloting a boat on the lake, pulling a live pig behind them so they could lure out an
alligator named Old Joe and shoot him to death with their machine guns.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is the movie I wanna see. This is the movie. I feel like there's a slice of life movie about the
Barker-Karpis gang in Florida and them just being like, 'We gotta get that gator. We've gotta
get him, he's out there, he's tutting us. We gotta get him.'
BEN KISSEL I just feel bad for the poor (snorting) the little piggy. He's just like Babe in Florida.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah I mean you should kill him first, you shouldn't fucking drown a live pig.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They were having fun.
MARCUS PARKS Well this just shows who they are, they are adrenaline junkies at this point. They have to do
something but they know they can't rob banks. So the best idea they could come up with is
baiting an alligator named Old Joe so they can kill it with their machine guns.
BEN KISSEL Yeah I like the concept to some degree but I feel like maybe they were too kind to kill the pig.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's interesting.
BEN KISSEL I mean it had to die but...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just the idea of all of all these Florida people, cause it's a mixture of people coming from Cuba
and all these places, very Florida people. And then them looking on the lake at these men in
full suits with Tommy Guns on a thing with a pig struggling in the water being like, 'We're
gonna get the gator! We're gonna get that gator!'
BEN KISSEL (snorting)
MARCUS PARKS With this the agents are like yeah, the Barkers are at Lake Weir. That's exactly where they are.
By the time agents arrived at Lake Weir on January 16th, Alvin Karpis and many of the other
gang members had left but Ma and Fred Barker had stayed behind. But accounts vary as to
whether anyone stayed behind with them. I couldn't really figure out whether it was just the
two of them or like one other guy or two other guys. But what we do know is that at 5:30am,
FBI agents knocked on the door and announced themselves as Department of Justice men and
demanded that the Barkers come quietly. After some time the FBI claimed that they heard Ma
Barker yell:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (old lady voice) "All right, go ahead!"
MARCUS PARKS Now the FBI claimed that they took this as a sign that the Barkers were surrendering. But
suddenly Fred appeared in one of the windows firing a machine gun all while Ma yelled:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (old lady voice) "Let 'em have it! Let 'em have it!"
BEN KISSEL Mother of the year.
MARCUS PARKS The ensuing gun fight continued for hours, long enough for a crowd to gather outside. But at
noon the gunfire inside the house ceased.
BEN KISSEL You're gonna wanna stand right here, this is still within bullet range so you might actually get
shot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That is kinda interesting. You're gonna wanna wear a poncho.
BEN KISSEL It is nice. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS When agents edged inside the house they said they found Ma Barker with her arm around her
youngest boy, both of them dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is I think how my mom used 'we'll die'. You know in her head she's just being like, (Henry's
mother's voice) 'That's what they'll do, Henry Thomas. The police will put us down because
they'll never understand our Zebrowski way of love.'
MARCUS PARKS Fred had been shot 11 times before he went down but Ma had been killed by just one shot to
the head. It was reported that her pudgy hands still clasped an empty machine gun, implying
that she'd participated in the gunfight. But that's just what the FBI wanted people to believe.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh, are they lying?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I know, I can't believe we'd ever accuse them.
BEN KISSEL No way.
MARCUS PARKS No. Ma Barker probably never yelled 'get 'em', Ma Barker definitely never fired a machine gun,
and there were some very good reasons why the FBI wanted people to believe this to be true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS See much of the general public was clamoring for the death or capture of Fred Barker, so there
weren't really any problems with the FBI shooting him 11 times.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, they loved it.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS The problem the FBI had was that they'd just blown the head off an old lady with no criminal
record. And after the disaster of the aforementioned Little Bohemia raid in which one innocent
civilian was killed, Hoover knew he would probably lose his job if the press turned negative.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Put a fucking gun in her hands! Put a gun in her hands!
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS So Hoover took the offensive, taking advantage of the fact that out of all the public enemies
out there, Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, people knew the least about the
Barker-Karpis gang. People pretty much just knew their names and that was it. And remember
that was by design of the Barker-Karpis gang.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, cause they were genuinely, honestly in terms of all of the criminals that we have covered
on Last Podcast on the Left, they are actually some of the most higher functioning in terms of
understanding what they needed to do, understanding the idea of we can't always be
bragging, especially the Barker boys, specifically the Barker boys and Karpis.
BEN KISSEL No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause it seemed like they always were very tight-lipped.
MARCUS PARKS Always.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And it was the ancillary guys, it was all the other people that would join up that always would
talk in the gang. Those guys knew how to be criminals.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well J. Edgar Hoover very quickly announced that Ma Barker had been the brains of the
operation the entire time, a criminal mastermind who had planned everything from escape
routes to kidnapping targets and had done it all with a cigar chomped between her teeth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She probably had a cigar.
BEN KISSEL Maybe.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah?
BEN KISSEL Although I don't know if she did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She might've liked a cigar.
BEN KISSEL I could see her being a fancy lady.
MARCUS PARKS And the public, trusting as they were, they bought it. Because it was such a compelling tale,
the newspapers in collaboration with the FBI, they created a new Ma Barker that was far more
dangerous and capable than the simple, horny, fiddle-playing dullard that she'd really been.
She was an accomplice at best.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She was the cook!
BEN KISSEL Wow, so they gave her the Manson treatment to some degree.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI A little bit, yes. They painted her as far more of a villain than she would be because yeah,
again, they killed an old lady. But still she was there, she was an accessory, she definitely
helped.
BEN KISSEL A supportive mother.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She was the mascot.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, exactly. Well one story called her the deadly spider woman, writing that quote, "the
withered fingers of spidery, crafty Ma Barker, like satanic tentacles, controlled the schemes on
which dangled the faint of desperados.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cool!
BEN KISSEL I mean I don't know, I think she's a little chubbier than that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, she's just there.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Well once the narrative was established, Hoover doubled down, saying that the Barker-Karpis
gang were the smartest outlaws he'd ever encountered. And in that he was telling the truth.
But he also said that Ma Barker was the smartest of them all, so smart that they never got
anything on her which is why she was never mentioned in a single FBI file until she was killed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ma Barker was The Riddler.
BEN KISSEL Interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep, it was her. She's definitely like, (old lady voice) 'Tricksies, tricksies.' Meanwhile the whole
time she's just pining for fucking dick.
BEN KISSEL That's The Riddle, 'trickies, tricksies.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know, that's Ma Barker doing it. But she was hounding for dick and she liked dresses.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. She's allowed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She's like the rest of us.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. She liked being somebody and she liked that her boys were somebody.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Status.
MARCUS PARKS And she liked going to Al Capone's house, she liked hanging out with Pretty Boy Floyd.
BEN KISSEL Must've been fricking awesome, dude.
MARCUS PARKS Well I guess they didn't hang out with Pretty Boy Floyd but she loved hanging out with Baby
Face Nelson. She loved it.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Natalie and I were talking last night about this idea of status in America and how important it
is, economic status and what it does. Some people are willing to do whatever it takes to not
backslide. So this is the type of thing, they made a very good living being criminals and at some
point you just don't want to give it up, no matter what. This is who we are now, this is our role,
we'd rather die than give it up.
BEN KISSEL American royalty perhaps. True crime royalty anyway.
MARCUS PARKS The Ma Barker story also gave J. Edgar Hoover the opportunity to trot out one of his favorite
lines. He said that the Barker story proved that the root causes of crime were not poverty or
economic disparity but the widespread deterioration of family values.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fuck you! Fuck you!
BEN KISSEL Let me just adjust adjust my girdle. You ever get a dingleberry stuck in one of your panties?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The nicest part of him was the panties.
BEN KISSEL I know! It was the only thing that made him human.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. That was the best part of him.
BEN KISSEL But the sad thing is that also made him horrible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Of course, that's the problem! Cause he made it illegal to wear panties.
BEN KISSEL Exactly.
MARCUS PARKS Well it made him a hypocrite and isn't that the worst crime of all?
BEN KISSEL It truly is the worst!
MARCUS PARKS Meanwhile the FBI still had one more big fish to catch if they wanted to wrap up their war on
crime. And that fish was Alvin Karpis. The manhunt however was said to have an air of lethargy
and anticlimax. All of the biggest villains were dead, the Barkers were dead, Pretty Boy Floyd
was dead, Bonnie & Clyde were dead, and agents were none too keen on risking their lives in a
war that had already been won.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Especially with the fucking master of them, like one of the best criminals of the time period.
BEN KISSEL It's like jerking off alone in the bathroom after the orgy. It was a lot of good times there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But now it's time to come and see the glaring light of reality and go home.
MARCUS PARKS And so Alvin Karpis was public enemy #1 for an entire year, fleeing from city to city, hijacking
cars, hiding in brothels, and stealing payrolls when he could. Finally though the FBI caught up
to Karpis in New Orleans in the Spring of 1936. On May 2nd a raiding party surrounded the
house where Karpis was known to be staying. But Karpis and his cohorts were actually out at
the grocery store, satisfying a sudden craving they'd just gotten for strawberries.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I kinda want some strawberries. It's the antioxidants.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, okay.
MARCUS PARKS When they returned however, Karpis felt that something was off. And when he rolled down his
car window, an agent recognized him and raced to his car to block Karpis in. According to J.
Edgar Hoover, Hoover himself then jumped out of his car and rushed to Karpis, grabbing him
by the collar before Karpis could reach for his gun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure, yeah.
BEN KISSEL No he didn't.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI All 5'3", 190 pounds.
BEN KISSEL No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI J. Edgar Hoover definitely did it.
BEN KISSEL Definitely not.
MARCUS PARKS Actually J. Edgar Hoover was almost exactly your size.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey man, leader size.
BEN KISSEL Scary, scary person size.
MARCUS PARKS Isn't it funny how when I say he's your size all of a sudden he switches to being a leader?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's leader size.
BEN KISSEL Like your L. Ron Hubbard love affair.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL Anyone that looks like you, you like.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The body of a philosopher king.
BEN KISSEL J. Edgar Hoover!
MARCUS PARKS But according to Alvin Karpis who I'm actually much more inclined to trust, J. Edgar Hoover
was nowhere to be found the actual moment of Karpis' arrest and only swooped in to reap the
glory after the coast was clear.
BEN KISSEL Of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI My job is to organize, okay. I oversee.
BEN KISSEL God you're gonna ruin this whole country, you know that right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Mm-hmm, yes.
BEN KISSEL Thank you.
MARCUS PARKS Nevertheless the New York Times front page headline the next day said, "Karpis Captured in
New Orleans by Hoover Himself".
BEN KISSEL Fucking bullshit. It was easier to escape back then, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sorta.
BEN KISSEL Why didn't they just go to the middle of nowhere? Why didn't they just go to South Carolina in
the woods?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is a time period where there's also very few methods of communication, so your face has
been blasted the only place where people see mass communication, in the movie theater. And
a lot of people knew you.
BEN KISSEL I just feel like they could've hid. But whatever.
MARCUS PARKS You can but it's also do you wanna live that life? Do you really want to just go in the Ozarks?
BEN KISSEL I yearn for everyday to be just disconnected. It sounds really refreshing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You can do it but also you'd get bored and commit a crime.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Now after a short stay in Leavenworth, Doc Barker was sent to Alcatraz.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Alcatraz! Hey did you know-
BEN KISSEL Don't even do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Did you know-
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, I know.
BEN KISSEL Don't even do it, it's been ruined.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No I can't, it's already been ruined. I can't now. I'll wait til later. It's gonna come back, don't
worry about it.
MARCUS PARKS It'll come back around, we just gotta let it rest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Let it sit, let it rest.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Well eventually-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (muttering) It means pelican.
MARCUS PARKS What did you say?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It means pelican. Let's just move on. I had to say it. Just move on.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Well, Doc Barker, if you listened to our Alcatraz series, you know that he was killed in an
escape attempt many years later. And if you wanna hear that full story, please go listen to our
series on Alcatraz Penitentiary. As far as the fates of Ma and Fred Barker went, they were
subjected to a final indignity after death. For 8 months their bullet-ridden bodies were iced
and put on display in Florida as a tourist attraction.
BEN KISSEL Jeez.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But Marcus, wait a second. Why true crime now?
BEN KISSEL Why true crime now?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI People are so obsessed with true crime now. Why now?
MARCUS PARKS Why is it? Why now?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Why now?
BEN KISSEL Obviously it is because of the plaque that says look at these two dumb bastards, we killed
them. But there is also something kinda nice in memorial, to be frozen in time for 8 months.
MARCUS PARKS They were not frozen in time, they just decomposed slower.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL That's a fun day in Florida.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is how criminals should be treated. I honestly think that this is exactly how it should be
done. Manson was wrong. When that hot chick told him and he flipped out saying, (Manson
voice) 'You're not gonna use my body for your sideshow, I'm not a sideshow!' You literally are
a sideshow, Charles Manson.
BEN KISSEL You are.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They should've chucked your body all over this fucking country, we would've opened for him!
BEN KISSEL Yeah, seriously.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. The Ed Gein Death Truck should still be on display.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. COVID casualty, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Well partly these bodies were made a tourist attraction because they could be. Nobody
wanted to claim the bodies after the media firestorm mythologized Ma Barker.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS Mostly though this was another FBI plot. The FBI wanted the bodies of Ma and Fred Barker on
display because they thought that maybe it would lure the remaining Barker-Karpis gang
members out of hiding.
BEN KISSEL Also hear me out, let's put a wick in their shoes, right, call them a shoe bomber. And then
every time you go to the fucking airport they'll take off their goddamn shoes just to feel like a
bunch of assholes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Dude, wait until next week. They had a lot of crackpot ideas inside of the US government.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Eventually though George Barker, Ma's estranged husband and father of all three Barker boys,
arranged for the transportation of the bodies of Ma and Fred to Oklahoma for burial and both
were laid to rest in Welch beside the eldest Barker, Herman.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS I actually looked up their graves on findagrave.com, you know it.
BEN KISSEL Most people look for love on the internet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's where you find love, you find it at the grave.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, you do. Herman actually got a really nice headstone. It says Barker, it says Herman, it's
very much in the 1920s style. But with Ma and Fred they just put them in the ground and you
can tell years later someone just paid for a single marble block that just said "Kate 'Ma' Barker
and Fred Barker" cause I think they were tired of people asking in Welch, where is it, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, where is it.
MARCUS PARKS As far as Alvin Karpis went, he was sent to Alcatraz as well and spent 25 years as a
troublemaker, earning write-ups for fighting, refusing to work, possession of contraband, and
insolence to officers. In 1969 though Alvin Karpis was paroled and deported to his native
Canada. He soon moved to Spain where he wrote two completely unrepentant
autobiographies and died happy in 1972 as the last surviving member of the infamous Barker-
Karpis gang.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Concerning J. Edgar Hoover, the end of the Barker-Karpis gang's reign gave him the final push
he needed to make the FBI legitimate in the public eye. His powers after Alvin Karpis was
captured were broadened and he was therefore able to refocus the FBI from the waste of time
that was bank robbery to Hoover's true passion: communist subversion. And that my friends
will segue nicely into the gigantic series we have planned next week when we once again go
wide on all platforms.
BEN KISSEL Woo!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You heard it here first, crime doesn't pay. But it does for a while and then you just kinda have
to get out before you get murdered.
BEN KISSEL You have to get out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But just know that for a while crime does pay.
BEN KISSEL It doesn't pay much though, 'Freakonomics', that book, it's an old book now but they broke
down crime and it doesn't really pay that much.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
BEN KISSEL So you should just go get a job too.
MARCUS PARKS Well crime pays as much as the entertainment industry pays. Most people don't make any
money in the entertainment industry but man if you do, boy you're doing good. Crime's the
same way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Some people can do really well, we have discovered the way to make middle class
entertainment work, I don't know how. But literally it is interesting to see the fact that you put
all of these extra hours into becoming a comedian or an entertainer, it's the same thing as a
criminal where it's hard work to organize all of this bullshit.
BEN KISSEL What is it Malcolm Gladwell?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Malcolm Gladwell.
BEN KISSEL Yeah his podcast, speaking of podcasts, I listen to it. He talks...real slow...like all slow...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't like him.
BEN KISSEL I don't know. But anyway what is it 10,000 hours you gotta do?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, whatever. He just made shit up.
BEN KISSEL Well yeah, that's what all of us do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah but he definitely just made shit up.
BEN KISSEL People think he's smart but also unattractive but also kind of attractive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He just named a number.
BEN KISSEL He's skinny, so people think he's smart but if he was fat people would think he's not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Interesting.
BEN KISSEL Okay everyone, well thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's really interesting, yeah. I like the look on Marcus' face.
MARCUS PARKS I don't know if that's true. Many fat men are smart.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Stanton Friedman.
BEN KISSEL Stanton Friedman wasn't that fat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was that smart.
BEN KISSEL Wait, what?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Who else is big and smart?
BEN KISSEL None. Who?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, fucking Normal Mailer was fat, he was considered very smart.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's bad now though. He's kinda always been bad.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He shot somebody.
BEN KISSEL I don't know what the rules are when it comes to weight.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No but he shot somebody.
BEN KISSEL I don't know what's going on. All right everyone, well thank you so much for listening. As
Marcus said, we can't wait to be wide on all the platforms and we really hope that we are
making Neil Young happy because we don't want the rage of Neil Young.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause I can hear that choo choo (chugging train sound). Cause Neil Young's gonna send his
trains after Spotify, you gotta be really careful if you're on Spotify right now. So next time, just
so you know. Soul Plumber #4 is a go.
BEN KISSEL It's out there.
MARCUS PARKS It's out there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think we got 3 weeks til the next one, it's out there, go and get it. If they don't get you your
copy of Soul Plumber, just throw a trash can through the front of the comic book store.
BEN KISSEL Don't do that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Civil disobedience, make them give it to you.
MARCUS PARKS Satire. Do not attack your local comic book store, they're run by very hardworking people that
are trying to live their dream, do not throw a trash can through their window.
BEN KISSEL They're not loaded with cash, they're not loaded with money.
MARCUS PARKS No, not at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's not about stealing the money, it's about getting the comic book. You gotta get the comic
book no matter what like your life depends on it.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Well if you're in West Texas and you want a copy, be sure to go to Star Books & Comics, they
got plenty there. If you're in Greenpoint, if you're here in New York, go to Action City Comics,
they've got all of the issues there, so go and check them out. Go support those fine stores.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, sure.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We got the coffee, get some Mothman Coffee, it's very good. Spring-Heel'd Jack, I'm honestly
full of it right now, I don't know if you could tell.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, you want people to vandalize people for them too?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean it just helps move coffee.
BEN KISSEL Does it? All right everyone, thank you all so much for supporting all the weird little ventures
we're getting into. Also on a totally opposite level than coffee is weed, so we have that and
we're gonna be getting into the flower soon because we're adults, goddamnit. We want our
joints.
MARCUS PARKS Interesting, this study that I just found, it's very provocative, it said that larger people have less
gray and white matter in the brain and that's why they make bad food choices.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What? You telling me I'm stupid?
BEN KISSEL What? Wow. Your brain is literally baloney! That's what baloney is! All right everyone, thank
you all for listening, hope you're doing well out there. Hail yourselves!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hail Satan.
MARCUS PARKS Hail Gein!
BEN KISSEL Megustalations. We'll see you on the road, can't wait to be in Richmond, Washington, and
Philadelphia.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Philadelphia! I can't wait to get some of that Philadelphia fever!
BEN KISSEL Woo!