"SOME OF THE MOST ENTERTAINING RESEARCH I'VE EVER DONE": CROOKED'S DIETRICH KALTEIS

Dietrich Katleis keeps the prose flying like bullets in from a Tommy gun is Crooked as he follows the exploits of Alvin Karpis and Fred Barker who ran one of the most successful robbery/kidnapping gangs in the thirties. Kalties gives and authentic feel of the period and the many tight situations the Alkviin Karpis gang found themselves in. Mr. Kalteis took some time to enlighten The Hard Word on his book and the gang.

SCOTT MONTGOMERY: What drew you to the Barker-Karpis Gang for a book?

DIETRICH KALTEIS: I was doing research for another book, Call Down the Thunder, when I first stumbled onto Alvin Karpis and his life of crime and his connection to the Barkers. I went on to read his memoir On the Rock, about his twenty-five years in Alcatraz, and it led me to other books like Public Enemies about him and the Barkers and other criminals of the ‘30s. When I decided to write Crooked, I also sourced a slew of archived newspapers and records from the era, and what I unearthed turned out to be some of the most entertaining research I’ve ever read.

S.M. What surprised you most about them in the research you did?

D.K.: One of the things that surprised me was that Karpis was Canadian, born in Montreal. Another thing was that Kate “Ma” Barker wasn’t the mastermind behind the gang as she had been portrayed by J Edgar Hoover and by Shelley Winters in the movie  Bloody Mama. Bank robber Harvey Bailey observed in his own autobiography that “Ma couldn’t plan breakfast.”

S.M.: What did you want to get across to the reader about the period?

D.K.: I wanted to give an accurate account of the times and the hardships that folks had to face back then. After the stock market crash of ’29, the‘30s got off to a rocky start. With the Great Depression came bank runs, a decline in industrial production, and unemployment and poverty ran high and widespread. Crops failed across the Central U.S. as the Dust Bowl forced hundreds of thousands of farmers and migrants to go west in hopes of finding work. The times didn’t excuse the gang’s crimes, but it does shed light on why Karpis and the Barkers did what they did.

S.M.: You pull off a great magic trick of keeping up with Alvin and Fred while always reminding us of their ruthless sociopaths. How did you pull that off?

D.K.: As mentioned, I didn’t set out to to make excuses for what they did or to turn them into sympathetic characters. Back at that time, many bank robbers came into the public eye and received Robin Hood treatment from the general public, seen more as celebrities than criminals. Some folks

saw robbing banks as simply stealing back from a corrupt system. Banks after all were responsible for foreclosing on their neighbors’ properties in those very lean times.

S.M.: I got the feeling that most of the plot really happened. What did you have to fictionalize the most?

D.K.: From the research, I became familiar and got to know each of the characters before I started putting the story together and that made writing their dialogue smooth and easy. Most of their interactions are pure fiction, but the storyline does stay true to the sequence of actual events.

S.M.: You drop us into the robberies and shootouts with an intense fel. Can you talk about constructing those passages?

D,K.: It’s about starting a scene as the action unfolds and ending it as soon as possible after it’s done. That keeps the pace rolling. I also think it’s good to slow the pace here and there before ramping things up again. And a little levity goes a long way too. For example, there’s a scene where a gun salesman makes an appointment to show a local sheriff and his deputy the latest in crime-fighting weaponry in a boardroom of the Fairbury, Nebraska city hall. The salesman senses a sale as he takes the Tommy guns out of their velvet cases, getting ready to demonstrate them. At that moment, an alarm sounds as Karpis and the Barkers are robbing the First National Bank right across the street. Both the salesman and the lawmen see it as the perfect opportunity to demonstrate the wares, and the three of them load up and charge from the building and hurry across to the bank.

S.M.: What do you think allowed The Alvin Karpis gang to have a longer run than most of their contemporaries?

D.K.: Fred Hunter, one of the gang members, called Karpis “super smart.” Alvin also had a photographic memory and knew to keep moving using various aliases, going from one hideout to the next, city to city, always keeping one step ahead of the law. Gang members also came and went like

through a revolving door, and Karpis had a network of criminal connections all over the States. Back in the 30s, technology to fight crime was still in its infancy, and the FBI was largely at the mercy of

public citizens for leads and information, a lot of which sent agents down blind alleys or arriving a day too late. Karpis had a very long run and ended up being the last of the FBI’s Public Enemies Number One, a list that included John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson, all having been hunted down and killed before him, leaving Karpis the last man standing.