Free Jelly's Gold by David Housewright Page B

greetings to their neighbors.
    The house was in a decidedly residential neighborhood called MacGroveland, and the people who lived there thought of it as the intellectual and cultural center of St. Paul, largely because Macalester, St. Thomas,and St. Catherine liberal arts colleges were located within the neighborhood borders. The rest of us thought Mac-Groveland—when we thought of it at all—was a bastion of self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-gratifying tax-and-spend liberal politics. I wondered aloud if the neighbors knew the history of the nearly one-hundred-year-old house and if they would have been thrilled or appalled by it.
    “Thrilled, I think,” Nina said.
    “Really?”
    “From what you told me about that era, the hoi polloi loved these guys.”
    “I don’t know if love is the right word,” I said. “Admired, maybe, for breaking the rules and getting away with it. For a while.”
    I flicked a thumb at the three-bedroom house.
    “This is where Frank and Frances stayed the night before leaving St. Paul for Hot Springs,” I said. “No way Nash would have stashed his gold here. Certainly he wouldn’t have trusted Creepy Karpis and the others. I just wanted to see the place.”
    “Why?”
    “This is where it all started going bad, where the O’Connor System began to break apart. The system could only exist as long as the gangsters refrained from committing crimes within the city limits; it was the only way citizens could condone their presence. Except Alvin Karpis and the Barker boys, they couldn’t have cared less about the rules, and there was no Big Fellow O’Connor or Dapper Dan Hogan to keep them in line. First they kidnapped William Hamm of Hamm Beer fame and held him for one hundred thousand dollars. A lot of people helped, too, including the former chief of police, guy named Tom Brown. That went so well, they turned around and kidnapped Edward Bremer for two hundred thousand dollars.
    “Bremer—that was like kidnapping a Kennedy. His family was so wealthy, had so many ties to the community—citizens were outraged. They simply could not believe that the criminals they had welcomedas if they were long-lost relatives would turn on them. So, for the first time in decades, they overwhelmingly supported the reformers who had been fighting the system, and the reformers cleaned house, starting with the cops. It didn’t take long, either. Twenty-one indictments—some of the cops were fired, some went to jail. Brown escaped prison because the statute of limitations ran out on the crimes that they could actually prove he committed, but he was dismissed from the cops just the same. Next came the city government, and that was cleaned up, too.”
    “It’s kind of amazing to think that level of corruption existed here,” Nina said. “St. Paul is so squeaky clean now, a councilman could be disciplined for calling a campaign contributor on his office phone. That cop who was caught trying to fix a DWI for his brother-in-law, they jailed him—you’d think he was dealing drugs to grade school kids.”
    “Don’t kid yourself, Nina. Stuff still happens, only it’s well hidden now. The days when St. Paul was an open city are long, long gone.”
    1878 Jefferson Avenue
    Harry “Dutch” Sawyer had lived in a modest one-story white stucco house with tan trim that was actually smaller than the Barker-Karpis gang hideout—only about thirteen hundred square feet built on about a tenth of an acre. It was hard to imagine him using it to throw the lavish parties for underworld associates that he had been famous for.
    “I’ve seen garages bigger than this,” Nina said. “How wealthy was this guy?”
    “Pretty wealthy,” I said. “Sawyer took over most of Dapper Dan Hogan’s rackets after Hogan was killed. In fact, some people claim Sawyer was responsible for Hogan’s murder, and from the evidence I read, I’m on their side. I suppose Frank could have trusted him with the gold.”
    “What do you