Tim Mahoney - Secret partners: Big Tom Brown and the Barker gang

Tom Brown, in a photo retouched for use in the Pioneer Press , about 1934.

The Barker gangs stalwarts, Fred Barker and Alvin Karpis, led a bumbling band of hillbilly burglars until they moved to St. Paul during Browns tenure as police chief. In the Ozarks, My life in crime was minor league stuff, admitted Karpis. But under the protection of Tom Brown, and the tutelage of St. Pauls master criminals, his gang evolved into notorious and feared public enemies. Soon Karpis was pulling his first genuine major league stickup, at a Minneapolis bank.

Barker gangster Volney Davis confessed to the FBI that without the protection of Tom Brown, the gang would have all been caught in St. Paul. Edna Murray, the Kissing Bandit, told the FBI that if not for Tom Brown and James Crumley of the St. Paul police, the gangs most infamous crime could not have been successfully accomplished and certain members of this [Barker] mob would have been in jail a long time ago.

Had the Barker gang never come under Browns protection, Ma Barker might have died lonesome in the Ozarks, an impoverished, obscure widow. Her son Fred and his pal Karpis would likely have been executed in Missouri before the nation knew who they were. The vicious killer Doc Barker would have remained in prison until he was an old man. At least seven murders and two grievous woundings might never have happened.

But Browns dark influence spread beyond the Barker gang. If not for the corrupt police force that crystallized during Browns tenure, the legend of John Dillinger might have ended on an Easter weekend in a snowy St. Paul parking lot. The Lady in Red would have been just another immigrant with visa troubles. No trap would have been set for Dillinger outside the Biograph theater. Newsreel hero Melvin Purvis might have retired as just another FBI functionary. Little Bohemia would be just another rustic Wisconsin resort, and not the site of a legendary FBI fiasco.

Many of Tom Browns fellow gangsters were shot dead, while others were locked up in Leavenworth or Alcatraz. But Brown proved to be the Houdini of gangster-cops. He outsmarted J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, retiring to collect his police pension and run a tavern in the north country. Despite all the blood on his conscience, all the families whose lives he devastated, and all the dark money he collected, he never spent a night behind bars.

Police corruption in St. Paul didnt start with Tom Brown. The so-called OConnor System had been the rule for decades before he became chief.

While the modern Twin Cities may be known for civility and culture, at the dawn of the twentieth century they were wild boomtowns. Fortunes were made in railroads, timber, grain, and iron ore. Minneapolis was born at the Falls of St. Anthony, which provided hydropower for mills and factories. Grain and lumber mills arose at the falls, but steamboats could not reach them; the river was too shallow. So the last navigable landing on the Mississippi developed into a separate city. Everything and everyone that steamed upriver had to transfer to the rails at St. Paul. As America moved west, the river port of St. Paul prospered.

St. Pauls Seven Corners in the 1930s, looking east along Seventh Street.

Americans and foreigners alike bundled up against the frosty climate and came seeking their fortunes. The inevitable gambling dens, saloons, and brothels followed. The city fathers, having no objection to a good time, appointed a police chief known for his tolerance of vice.

He was John J. OConnor, and he built a corrupt machine that eventually bore his name. OConnor was police chief for most of the years between 1900 and 1920. His father, an Irish immigrant, was a St. Paul ward heeler. His brother Richard, the Cardinal, rose to be a top Democrat whose byzantine connections snaked all the way to Tammany Hall.

The Cardinal understood that Americans were hypocrites who publicly deplored vices they secretly enjoyed. This notion figured into the economics of St. Paul: The small town merchant was snowed in all winter, Richard OConnor wrote, and in the spring when he came to town to buy his stock of merchandise, he was hungry for a good time, which consisted of drinking good whiskey and playing around with the girls in the sporting houses.