1031 S. Robert St. in West St. Paul was home to the notorious Barker-Karpis gang in the 1930s. (Courtesy of Sarah Rosen)

One of the kitchens at 1031 S. Robert St. in West St. Paul. (Courtesy of Sarah Rosen)

An interior at 1031 S. Robert St. in West St. Paul. (Courtesy of Sarah Rosen)

Some of the original woodwork at 1031 S. Robert St. in West St. Paul. (Molly Guthrey / Pioneer Press)

In the basement looking up the stairs at 1031 S. Robert St. Is that a mysterious "M" on the wall? (Molly Guthrey / Pioneer Press)



The basement at 1031 S. Robert St. in West St. Paul. If you look close enough, you can see where cinder blocks allegedly were replaced because of the Barker-Karpis gang using the walls for target practice. (Molly Guthrey / Pioneer Press)

Kate "Ma" Barker, her son Fred Barker and their associate Alvin "Creepy" Karpis lived at 1031 S. Robert St. in West St. Paul for nearly 90 days back in 1932.

Kate "Ma" Barker (Associated Press)

A mugshot of Fred Barker during his time at the Kansas State Penitentiary.

Alvin "Creepy" Karpis about to enter court in St. Paul. (Minnesota Historical Society)



A wanted poster for Alvin "Creepy" Karpis and Fred Barker.

The old steps creaked as Clara Rosen descended into the basement of the empty house on Robert Street in West St. Paul.

The 10-year-old walked in and out of the shadows — past the washer and dryer, around the ancient boiler — and then shrugged.

“It’s a creepy basement,” she pronounced, “but just normal creepy.”

Or … is it?

This is 1031 S. Robert St. — better known as the house where Ma Barker and members of the notorious Barker-Karpis gang hid out for a short time in the 1930s — and it just went up for sale as a mixed-use property (commercial/residential). Clara’s mom, Sarah Rosen, is the Realtor for current owner Jeff Heroff, who is letting go of a dream with this listing.

“I grew up in West St. Paul, so I knew about the property when I was a kid,” says Heroff, a South St. Paul businessman and real estate investor who bought the house in 2005. “I knew it was where the mob guys had lived; it was the kind of thing where you say, ‘When I grow up and have my own money, I’m going to buy that place and do something with it.’ And I did. I wanted to turn it into a museum, but it never worked out.”

The house, built in 1927 as an up-and-down duplex with separate entrances, has been somewhat modified through the years — the porch was covered, the exterior was wrapped in white vinyl siding, the interior kitchens and baths were updated. It looks tidy and well-maintained, fronted by a newer retaining wall and 14 steep steps up to the front door. The building’s position on the block, perched on its own little hill on a busy stretch of road, seems an ideal lookout for Depression-era gangsters. It is situated on Robert Street between Bernard Street and Butler Avenue, across from a liquor store, next to a hair salon and near a funeral home on one end of the block and a hamburger joint on the other. Inside, it’s empty now — just another old house with hardwood floors, ceiling fans and weird little nooks and crannies.

What stories could these walls tell?

The city of West St. Paul shared some of those stories in a 2015 “Throwback Thursday” Facebook post — based on research by Doris Kelleher for the city’s centennial and titled “West St. Paul’s Most Notorious Tenants: The Quiet House on Robert — Home of Ma Barker and Her Gang.”

“It was the early 1930s,” the post begins. “Racketeers abounded throughout the United States. St. Paul was infamous as a haven for hoodlums. There seemed to be an unwritten agreement between police and those who carried machine guns. Police invited the impression that, ‘You leave us alone and we won’t bother you.’

“With this attitude taken by the cops, it is easy to see how ‘Ma’ Barker, her (son) and Alvin Karpis were able to live briefly in West St. Paul without being recognized.”

Paul Maccabee, author of “John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crooks’ Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920-1936” (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1995), spent years researching this time in Minnesota history.

He says that after the Barker-Karpis gang shot and killed a sheriff in Missouri, they were advised by criminal connections to head toward the light — the light of the Green Lantern Saloon in St. Paul. In those days, the saloon was run by Harry Sawyer, a powerful bootlegger who provided protection as well as a speakeasy for the gang to hang out and enjoy liquor as well as fried pork sandwiches. Just a few miles away from that St. Paul speakeasy was the duplex on Robert Street — a newer home at the time, built just five years earlier.

“The Barker-Karpis gang and their contemporaries, the Dillinger gang, who were there roughly at the same time, they stayed at really nice homes in the area, including around Grand Avenue and Crocus Hill,” says Maccabee. “A whole mess of gangsters lived in those areas; they weren’t slums. Because — they had the money to spend.”

Not that the duplex stood out.

Related Articles Bonnie Blodgett: Winter here is too much for Mirror Bush, but not for Golden Prince, in case you were wondering

Take advantage of nature’s jewels with these fresh tomato recipes

Minnesota’s newest invasive species: destructive ‘jumping worms’

Bonnie Blodgett: Slow down, summer, there’s still so much to do. Such as teaching the creeper to climb somewhere new. “It’s very nondescript,” says Maccabee. “There’s nothing memorable about it — except its history.”

The gang from Oklahoma reportedly moved into the duplex on Feb. 1, 1932.

Times were tough — 1932 was one of the worst years of the Great Depression, the year that Franklin D. Roosevelt was voted into the presidency and Herbert Hoover was voted out; the radio was playing “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If it Ain’t Got that Swing)”; Prohibition was still the law of the land, but only for another year.

The new tenants on Robert included Ma Barker — born Arizona Clark, later known as Kate; the 58-year-old was reportedly accompanied by her bulldog as well as her boyfriend, Arthur Dunlop, a ne’er-do-well who was 73 at the time; their gangster entourage — originally from Missouri — included her son Fred Barker, 30, and their associate, Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, a 24-year-old career criminal from Topeka, Kan., who had first made Fred’s acquaintance while behind bars at the Kansas State Penitentiary, where the Barker boy was serving time for a bank burglary.

“The Hannegraf family rented 1031 to Ma Barker, not knowing that these were the most wanted criminals in America,” Maccabee says.

Times were apparently not so tough for these neighbors, especially for Ma, according to former Pioneer Press employee Tim Mahoney, author of “Secret Partners: Big Tom Brown and the Barker Gang” (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2013).

“For much of her life,” Mahoney wrote, “she had endured dirt-floor poverty. … She wore beautiful clothing now. The icebox was crammed with good food. This house in West St. Paul had coal heat, running water, a warm bathroom and electric lighting. Her menfolk chauffeured her in a fancy new Buick.”

Maccabee’s book is also filled with delicious details of the gang’s 85 days spent in this “parody of domesticity,” details culled from a variety of sources, including FBI files and personal interviews.

“The gang had moved into Grandma Helen Hannegraf’s rental home. … They claimed to be musicians in a local orchestra and carried black violin cases to prove it,” Maccabee wrote. The “musicians” were accompanied by Ma. Writes Maccabee: “They called her Mrs. Anderson or Ma, and she was often seen walking her bulldog down Robert Street.”

These “speakeasy musicians,” as Mahoney describes them, didn’t keep to themselves; in fact, they were neighborly — or, “encouraged” to be neighborly by the Minnesota grandma who was their landlord.

“While they were living in the Hannegraf home, the gang drove Helen Hannegraf’s granddaughter Marian to Catholic school in the rumble seat of their car,” Maccabee wrote. “When it was time to pick up the children after school, Hannegraf would snare one of her boarders and insist that the gangsters drive her grandchildren home.

“Marian Johnson remembered the Barker-Karpis gang as ‘the nicest people,’ ” wrote Maccabee. ” ‘We’d hurry home from St. Matthew’s School because if we got home early, we could walk Mrs. Barker’s curly-haired dog. Whoever got there first, you’d get a nickel or a candy bar!’ ”

But they couldn’t completely hide their gangster lifestyle.

“When Marian’s 10-year-old cousin Bernice brought some doughnuts over to the Barker boys, they asked her to wait while they gathered up a half-dozen candy bars for her in return. Bernice noticed shotgun shells scattered across a couch. Whenever Dunlop walked Ma Barker’s dog behind the Robert Street homes, he kept one hand plunged into his pocket, presumably on a gun.”

When they weren’t driving the neighbor kids to and from school, the gang was busy planning and executing the robbery of Minneapolis’ Northwestern National Bank and Trust on March 29, 1932, according to Maccabee. Later, Karpis said: “Back at the house we’d rented in St. Paul, the five of us counted out the money. It added up to more loot than I’d ever seen in my life — over $75,000 in paper money, another $6,500 in coins and $185,000 in bonds.”

The gang’s time on Robert ended abruptly April 25, 1932, thanks to Nick Hannegraf, their landlord’s son: “Hannegraf was closing up his Drover’s Tavern on South St. Paul’s Concord Street on April 25, 1932. It was 1 a.m. on a Monday night, Hannegraf’s time to escape into the pages of True Detective,” Maccabee wrote. In this issue of True Detective Mysteries, there was a story about the Barker-Karpis gang, with photos. The magazine was offering substantial reward money for the apprehension of each suspect ($1,200 in total, according to Mahoney, which would be the equivalent of a year’s pay at the South St. Paul stockyards). By 2 a.m., Hannegraf had driven over to Robert Street and woken up his mother, Helen. When he showed her the photos in the magazine, she reportedly replied, “Nick, those are the boys next door!” Hannegraf then drove to the central police station in St. Paul, where he told the police what he knew.

There would be no justice in St. Paul, however, not on this day.

Since there was some kind of police-gangster “agreement” at the time, the tenants at 1031 Robert were tipped off to the pending raid.

The law didn’t head over to the house until about 11 a.m. April 25. Mahoney’s book includes the testimony of Det. Fred Raasch:

” ‘When we arrived at the house,’ the doors were open, a radio was playing and the house appeared as if it had been hurriedly vacated,’ Raasch reported. ‘Coffee was burning in a pot on the stove. Some hats were still there and in searching the place we found some shotgun shells and a box of .380 automatic shells.’ Clothing left hanging in the closets had the labels deliberately cut off. The cops also found a fur coat left by the Barker lady. But the Barkers and their bulldog were gone.”

The gang has been gone a long time now — 85 years — but the house where they lived is still a stop on the St. Paul Gangster Tour.

“We pause across the street,” says Donna Bremer, an owner of the tour company, “so people can take pictures.”

After several years, though, current owner Heroff says he has grown tired of dealing with the bureaucratic red tape of the house, the street and the city when it comes to turning part of 1031 Robert into a museum.

“Maybe some historian will have better luck than me,” he says.

John LeMay grew up in the duplex: “We moved in there 1942 or 1943, and I lived there until I went into the service in 1958,” says LeMay. “We heard all kinds of local stories — one of them being that, if you look down in the basement, if you looked real close, you could see where the cinderblocks were replaced after the gang had used the basement wall for target practice.”

The only thing practiced at this place in recent years is insurance — 1031 was home to an insurance business for a long time.

FYI

Address: 1031 S. Robert St., West St. Paul

Zoning: Mixed use (commercial/residential)

Price: $147,000

The property: The house was built in 1927 as a duplex — one unit downstairs, another unit upstairs. The listing notes that the “buyer to verify ordinances & building uses permits before buying. Sold as-is. Great traffic/commercial business. Parking in back w/drive way.”

The history: Members of the Barker-Karpis gang rented this duplex from a local family, living here from Feb. 1, 1932, to April 25, 1932. Learn more about this era in two books published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press, “Secret Partners: Big Tom Brown and the Barker Gang” by former Pioneer Press employee Tim Mahoney (2013) and “John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crooks’ Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920-1936” by Paul Maccabee (1995).

The tour: This property is a stop on the St. Paul Gangster Tour. Info at Wabashastreetcaves.com.

The listing: View the property at http://tinyurl.com/mdhjwae or contact Sarah Rosen, Realtor, at 651-276-7244 or sarahrosen@kw.com.