We've found America's most badass thug of the '30s. It's not Bonnie and Clyde or Johnny Dillinger or even “Ma Barker” and his douchebag sons. He's Lithuanian at all, and his parents were born in the Russian Empire.

Actually, his last name was Karpavicius. His parents were immigrants from Lithuania. But in America, such a surname sounded both exotic and difficult to pronounce. So he went down in history with a shortened surname, Karpis. And because of his perpetually grim facial expression, he was nicknamed Creepy.

The family of the future gangster was poor, so he had to earn money from childhood. But the career of a newspaper boy or a shoeshine boy did not seduce the young man, and he preferred petty theft. And then some petty thefts. In the end, Karpis ended up in a place not so remote, and there he met another similarly imprisoned man - Fred Barker.

The Barker brothers were poor as church mice, dumb as church mice, doing the same kind of petty criminal work under the supervision of their adoring mother. Mammy Barker, who the cinema and word of mouth had made the brains of the gang, was more like its mascot. This unhealthy and not very smart old woman spent more time playing solitaire than planning crimes. But when Karpis got out of prison and found the family, that's when the story of the “very” Barker gang began.

Not right away, though. At first, Fred Barker and Karpis did some burglary. All this was very unproductive, besides, in one not too beautiful moment one of them (it is believed that Fred is more likely) shot the sheriff in a small town. Eventually, the bandit friends decided there was no point in splurging for change - and started robbing banks. Everything was going well until, during another raid, one of the bandits was shot and killed. Then Karpis had a great idea, as it seemed to him, to engage in kidnapping. In general, he quickly came to the forefront of the Barker gang - he turned out to be the smartest in the team.

The first victim was brewery owner William Hamm. Times were bloodthirsty and naive - bandits stole the businessman right on the street on a clear summer day in 1933, and one showed, if I may say so, courtesies - bending the brewer to the floor of the car, he apologized and asked not to be offended. The car with the prisoner was driven as far as half a thousand kilometers, from St. Paul in Minnesota to the outskirts of Chicago. There he was locked in a room, and Karpis left beer and magazines so the hostage wouldn't get too bored. Eventually the money was handed over, the bandits managed to get away, and everything seemed to go perfectly.

Not so much. The criminals took a record one hundred thousand dollars ransom (for the U.S. 30's is great money), but then it turned out that they have to divide them as many as 14 people involved in the kidnapping, and to pay middlemen to sell tainted bills and get “clean”, in short, a huge amount of money quickly flew away. The bandits had an even more remarkable idea. They decided to attack the collectors in Chicago.

Everything went amazingly well - pointing machine guns at the guards, they took away five bags from them, threw them into the car - but on the way back they had an accident and knocked down a telephone pole. The police came to the scene of the accident, the bandits began to nail everything that moves, the queues of “tommy-guns”, shot the policeman, and one of the Barker brothers accidentally shot his finger. They stole a new car, it ran out of gas, and then the criminals seized a third one, shaking the owner out of it. Eventually, the robbery aces reached their hideout, and only then did they realize to look in the bags.

They seized 20 kilos of paper mail.

It was an epic fail. To restore their reputation and patch up the hole in their wallets, they decided to launch another kidnapping. In preparation, however, Karpis and the Barkers made another fool of themselves - they spotted a suspicious car with uniformed men not far from the apartment they were occupying and decided to shoot it up just in case. The result was something amazing - the two bandits fired a full drum of automatic rifle and several rounds of pistol ammunition at the car... only wounding the airline worker sitting inside, whose uniform was mistaken for a police uniform. The fellow airline worker sitting next to him was not injured at all.

all that was left was to do something amazing. And, admittedly, it did. This time the bandits stole banker Edward Bremer. It was truly the crime of the century.

Only it was too big. To their amazement, the bandits found out that the kidnapped man was the son of a personal friend of President Roosevelt. The money was paid and this time, and Bremer returned home alive, although slightly bruised. But an enraged Roosevelt began to demand special treatment for this gang. So the gang of Karpis and the Barkers gained all-American notoriety - and a crowd of FBI agents on their tail.

Afterward, Karpis went to a rather barbaric procedure to avoid capture. He had clandestine plastic surgery and ordered his fingerprints removed at the same time. A half-drunk doctor drugged him and did everything as ordered, but the gangster spent the next few days howling between morphine shots. The plastics, by the way, were not very good - the face remained quite recognizable.

The other problem was how to attach the ransom somehow. The numbers of the banknotes were, of course, well known to the police, and an attempt to sell the huge amount of cash somewhere else would have been instantly noticed. In the end, the raiders managed to almost lose the bills altogether, when the ransom bags accidentally got water in them - at some point the safe house of Karpis and Barkers was full of dried bills hanging everywhere. Money laundering has never looked so literal.

The money had managed to be slipped to the mob in several batches, but the police and FBI were still on the trail. Karpis would have been happy to settle down somewhere and do something more legitimate than kidnapping and bank raids - but the constant running around and trying to get a foothold in a new place took a cloud of funds. Karpis decided to break away from the Barker gang - and rightly so. Soon Mamasha and one of her last surviving sons were rounded up and shot in the cottage. That's when, incidentally, the legend of the sinister Mamasha was born. FBI chief Edgar Hoover was loved, to put it mildly, not all newspapermen, and he did not want to explain why killed generally harmless Shapoklyak. Therefore, Hoover began to self-consciously tell how it is she, the sinister Ma, directed the will of the gang. Well, and there already pulled up movie directors, the band Boney M., and as the crown of all - cartoonists “Duck Tales”. After that, Ma Barker was firmly established in the legendary era of gangsters as an evil genius.

The Barker Gang had been defeated, but its real think tank was awake and on the loose.

By this point, the Lithuanian remained the last gangster celebrity. Other famous gangs were crushed one by one. Dillinger was dead, Bonnie and Clyde had been ambushed, and Karpis was still running around the United States and even beyond. Magazines with pictures of the bandits were everywhere. Even in Cuba, where he was trying to hide, he was once shown a picture - say, if we didn't know that you were such a nice guy, we would have thought that this bandit is you. And one day he was incredibly lucky - he found himself in the same elevator with an FBI agent - but was never recognized.

The bandit realized that the situation for him was worse than ever. The FBI had gained skills, experience, and had snapped up almost all the notable raiding gangs. Karpis himself had become a celebrity, but he wasn't very happy about it. He was now number one on the list of “public enemies” - to the exclusion of all others. But he couldn't stop.

Karpis, like almost all criminals of his type, had one acute disadvantage - they categorically did not know how to handle money. A major raid on a bank could bring the bandits more than an ordinary clerk, let alone a laborer, would earn for decades. The money could be used to buy a small gas station, a bar or a drugstore and live the rest of his days in peace and prosperity... but the bucks, which were literally obtained by sweat and blood, were spent on pleasant worldly nonsense and escaping from the once again sitting on the tail of the chase. So Karpis continued his forays time after time.

In April, 1935, he and a couple of new associates robbed a mail van with paychecks for steel mill workers. Then a mail train. But the noose was tightening. Here, a descendant of Lithuanian immigrants was to play a surprising role in the life of one of Prohibition's iconic characters. Edgar Hoover.

To say that the press had mixed feelings about Hoover is to say nothing. The head of the FBI was accused of incompetence, corruption, political ambition, homosexual relations with employees, anything. The stupidest of these claims was his failure to personally participate in the capture of key criminals. For a man of his rank, this is a ridiculous charge, but Hoover felt that he still needed to participate in the capture of at least one real public enemy. So upon receiving word that Karpis had been found, Hoover immediately flew to New Orleans and joined the capture team.

Although Hoover later colorfully described how he personally seized Karpis by grabbing him by the scruff of the neck - but this he made up to fend off pesky reporters. In reality, two agents pointed guns at Karpis and he didn't fight back. And then Hoover showed up. The agents forgot to bring handcuffs, so “Public Enemy No. 1” tied his hands with a tie. The last act of this comedy took place when Karpis was taken to the local FBI office. The agent behind the wheel got lost and started asking where the post office was.

- I can show you,” Karpis said.

- How do you know where it is?

- We were just about to rob it.

Karpis was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was imprisoned - mostly in the famous Alcatraz - until January 1969. He then managed to get an early release. He later lived in Spain, wrote memoirs, and gave interviews. It was a living relic, a criminal of some ancient era, reaching the times of hippies, Vietnam, space exploration and Brezhnev's kisses. Speaking of hippies. Toward the end of his incarceration, Karpis socialized with a convict whose name said nothing to anyone at the time. Karpis gave him guitar lessons, and the young man was a capable student. His name was Charlie Manson.