Alvin Karpis

#1 Tries Harder When You're #2

If we're glorifying criminals we might as well glorify this man, Alvin Karpis. Dubbed "Public Enemy #1" by J. Edgar Hoover, Alvin was actually more the #2 Public Enemy #1. Premiere honors in that category must go to John Dillinger.

Alvin (with the aid of professional writers) wrote two books about his 1) life on the run and 2) life in Alcatraz. The books read well and credible, and his description of his twenty-five years on Alcatraz agrees more or less with what other inmates and guards have described. Alvin in the books is (naturally) a stand-up guy, never toadying up to the cops and never going back on his word.

At the same time some of his episodes may not stand up to closer scrunity. He told of how when he embarked on the Alcatraz dock, the families of the guards were watching from their apartments higher up on the island. One kid yelled that there was Public Enemy #1 and asked his dad for a gun to shoot him. That a kid would really recognize Alvin is a bit far fetched and it is definitely known (as told by a former resident of the island) that the children were instructed to behave courteously and not be rude to the inmates in the extremely unlikely event they had any first hand dealings with them.

It's now known that Alvin's capture in 1936 was not the single handed tour-de-force by J. Edgar Hoover of popular legend. But Alvin's description where Edgar is practically cowering around the corner of a building while the agents take him into custody is probably stretching it a bit the other way. The most accurate version is certainly the report written by FBI agent E. J. Connelley. According to that version the field agents move in just as Alvin is settling behind the wheel of his car, and in a millisecond Alvin found himself staring into about five gun barrels. Edgar was present, but not in the forefront. It's been said that Edgar himself never claimed he single handedly captured Alvin, and added that yes, he led the raid, but it was a "we" thing, he said, not an "I" thing. That may be true enough, but the fairy-tale account in the Jimmy Stewart movie, "The FBI Story" where Edgar walks up and arrests Alvin - singlehandedly and alone - was filmed with Hoover's knowledge and cooperation.

On Alcatraz if Alvin was not a model prisoner - he was known to make bootleg booze while working in the kitchen - neither was he a particular troublemaker. He was transferred to McNeil island in 1962 and was finally paroled in 1969. He died in 1979, most likely - despite claims of foul play or suicide - from natural causes.

Unlike Willie "The Actor" Sutton, Alvin never repented his life of crime. While on the lam during the Great Depression, he remembered seeing the migrant workers in their camps. Pitying their squalor, he said he was always happy he had his nice well-paying job as a bank robber and kidnapper to fall back on.

Alvin's final 10 years were spent in ease and comfort, first in Canada and then in Spain. In addition to the income from the books, he was supported by a series of young, pretty, and wealthy girlfriends. Despite the third of a century he spent in prison, he felt crime had indeed paid and fairly well at that.

References

Public Enemy Number One: The Alvin Karpis Story by Alvin Karpis Alvin Karpis and Bill Trent, McClelland and Stewart Ltd., 1971.

On the Rock, Alvin Karpis and Robert Livesey, Beaufort Books (1980)

Although the books were actually written by two separate authors, the virtual identical style is a good indication the writers pretty much let Alvin speak for himself. Called the most intelligent of the Gangster Era criminal, interviews with Alvin seem to bear this out. You see a surprisingly mild mannered and gentlemanly looking man giving thoughtful and intelligent answers.

"Alvin Karpis: Pursuit of the Last Public Enemy" By Richard Kudish, TruTV Crime Library

A good and objective account of Alvin's life which sorts out the variant versions of his capture.

That said, when first created, the Crime Library was one of the best sites on the web for true crime buffs or anyone else. However, when bought by (then) CourtTV, it was a classic case how a corporate owner of a site can - and usually does - completely ruin a website: horribly formatted pages with huge ads right in the middle of the text and irritating flashing animated ads making reading the text virtually impossible. Worse, they had some "pay per view" articles which is probably the greatest way to drive viewers from your site.

However, it seems some sanity has returned, and the renamed TruTV company has returned to a more legible format where at least the ads (although - bleah - animated) are at the periphery of the text. As far as a quick perusal of the site revealed, it seems they've at least dropped their pay-per-view schtick. Even the New York Times tried that for their archived articles, but evidently realized pay-per-article is not the best business model for modern day internet surfers, and they made many of their articles available for free. About the only place that pay as you go seems to work is for technical journals where the articles would have been ordered as hard copies anyway and probably would be paid for by a company library.