Early Life
Karpis was born to Lithuanian immigrants named John and Anna Karpowicz in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and was raised in Topeka, Kansas. He started in crime at about age 10, selling pornography and running around with gamblers, bootleggers, and pimps. In 1926, he was sentenced to 10 years at the State Industrial Reformatory in Hutchinson, Kansas for an attempted burglary. He escaped with another inmate Lawrence De Vol and went on a year-long crime spree, interrupted briefly while he lived with his parents after De Vol was arrested. After moving to Kansas City, Missouri, he was caught stealing a car and sent back to the Reformatory. Transferred to the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, he met Fred Barker, who was in prison for bank burglary. Barker was one of the notorious members of the "Bloody Barkers", as the newspapers of the time had called them. The Barker family included the brothers Herman, Lloyd, Arthur or "Doc", and Fred, the sons of Ma Barker. Growing up impoverished in a sharecropping family, all the boys soon turned into hardened criminals, robbing banks and killing without provocation. Doc was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1920 after murdering a night watchman. Herman committed suicide on August 29, 1927, after being badly injured in a shootout with police in Wichita, Kansas following the robbery of the Newton Ice Plant in Newton, Kansas with Charles Stalcup and Porter Meeks. Lloyd was sentenced to 25 years in 1922, for mail theft and released in 1938; he was a US Army Cook at a POW camp and then was murdered by his wife in 1949. Ma did her part to help her sons. "Ma" Barker was not herself a criminal, but did nevertheless badger parole boards, wardens, and governors for the release of her boys when they were incarcerated. After Alvin was released in 1931, he joined up with Fred Barker in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and they soon put together the Karpis-Barker gang.
Read more about this topic: Alvin Karpis
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