The Tampa Tribune from Tampa, Florida • 71

1 11. mm Handyman Remembers Tumultuous Morning When Gangland Queen, Son Died in OMaivaha Gun-Ballle a 4 in ill i i-i aw" 7 ml A 7 5 i f- v. By TOM HARMON Tribune Staff Writer OKLAWAHA It was shortly before 6 o'clock on the morning of Jan. 16, 1935, when FBI men closed in on the infamous Kate (Ma) Barker and her son, Fred, in a sprawling summer house on the shore of Lake Weir. The events of that morning are still burned deep in the memory of Willie Woodbury, Negro handyman who worked for the people in the big two-story house who called themselves "Blackburn." It took a five-hour gun battle, with machine guns and tear gas, before the gangland "Ma" and Fred Barker were shot down inside the place.

The whole Oklawaha area was agog when word got out that the well-known Barkers on the FBI's "public enemy" list were fighting it out on Lake Weir. i I -V St, FBI men encircle this white house in Oklawaha on the morning of Jan. 16, 1935, battling five hours with "Ma" Barker and her son, Fred. This Tribune photo was taken that day. i WOODBURY and his wife were asleep in a nearby outbuilding when the agents started closing in from the surrounding oaks.

"Come out! Come out with your hands up!" he recalled hearing the FBI men yell towards the house. "I could hear 'em crawling around in the leaves," Woodbury said. "Then, them bullets came a-whizzin' past my head, and I was so scared my knees were knocking." SECTIOI FL0BID1 FEATURE TAMPA, FLORIDA, SUNDAY, JULY 28, 1963 SECTION Melped FEE HE'S BEEN relating the tale of that excitement-charged morning dozens of times in the intervening years, but Woodbury hasn't forgotten the details. "I thought my wife was dying, (she wasn't hit) when I pulled her under the bed with me, she was screaming so much." He first thought robbers were attacking, because all the time "Ma" Barker and her gang had posed as "rich tourists." Woodbury also thought the "G-men" were shooting at him, since he couldn't see the gang returning the fire from the main house. "When they yelled 'Come out, will ya, I thought they said 'Come out, "I come out with hands, foots and everything up.

I broke the jvindow and come out," Woodbury said. She had only two taboos liquor and women, maintaining they got in the way of efficient criminal operations. Robberies were the specialty of her boys during the early years, but as the depression deepened, she steered the gang into the field of kidnaping. KATE (MA) BARKER Queen-bec of kidnaping gang Woodbury recalls, adding "Ma" would "get mad," at them if they "drank too much or argued" among themselves. Woodbury described "Ma" as "the boss," and said "she was tough, but good." "She was awful good to me," he added.

ARDENT HUNTERS and fishermen, the gang frequently went hunting in nearby woods, always leaving one member the house. They rigged signal lights on the dock, for use when they had been fishing at night. Daily "target practice" sessions also were part of the gang's routine, Woodbury said. The Negro employe's duties required him to make frequent trips to Ocala to purchase food and whisky for the gang. He recalls most of the time he travelled alone, but on occasions when he drove "Ma" and other members of the gang into town, he was instructed to "back into a place and leave the motor running." "They wouldn't drink no water from the house.

It had to come from the filling station," Woodbury said, adding he was required to make several trips a day to supply the gang's needs. "They seemed like they was happy as a lark. They danced all day and kept the radio on all day and all night." Gang members travelled only in pairs and never all together. Woodbury "paid all the bills and for the groceries," he said. The day before the Barkers were killed, Woodbury said he had $40 left from paying the bills, which was to have been used "to fix the motor on the boat." It was mid-January of 1935.

The United States was still ensnarled in the Great Depression, with millions of unemployed wondering whether Franklin Roosevelt would find an alphabetical agency to solve their plight, Bruno Richard Hauptmann was fighting for his life in the "trial of the century" in New Jersey. The German carpenter stolidly maintained his innocence in the kidnaping of infant Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. Amelia Earhart had just completed a solo flight from Honolulu to Oakland, and Louisiana's Huey Long was getting threatening letters in his mail. In Tampa, a "W'alkathon" plodded along hour after hour, with radio broadcasts from the scene, until it was declared a "sanitary menace" by the State Health Department.

Tickets were almost sold out for the upcoming heavyweight fight of Max Baer and Tony Cancela at Benjamin Field here. JAN. 17, 1934, Banker Edward George Bremer of St. Paul was abducted after dropping his 8-year-old daughter at private school. He was held prisoner for three weeks while members of the Barker gang negotiated for $200,000 in ransom money.

The money was eventually turned over, after the family followed complicated instructions of dropping a satchel on a lonely road after getting a signal from four headlights. Alvin Karpis was implicated in the case through a traced flashlight, so the pressure built up on the gang of 13 which had accumulated some $500,000 in various THERE NEVER was a more surprised group of lawmen, Woodbury said, when he came "flying" out of the window. So concerned were they with dodging lead from the main house, they had given the small guest house in which he and his wife lived only a cursory inspection. Since both were asleep, the officers had overlooked them. "They started asking me all kinds of questions," Woodbury said, but he still thought "they was robbers." THE FIVE-HOUR gun battle at Lake Weir culminated the long struggle against the kidnap gangs of the early '30s.

The Tribune's Bill Abbott reported from the scene that thousands of shots were fired by FBI agents wielding machine guns and tear-gas throwers. Windows of the house were shattered soon after the ambuscade started, and bits of brick were flying from the chimney. The 60-year-old "Ma" and her son, Fred, returned fire from upstairs windows, until eventually the gas and bullets took their toll. WITH ALL these events preoccupying the public mind, it was still a shock when Floridians learned that Kate (Ma) Barker and her youngest son, Freddie, had fought it out to the end, south of Ocala. For most of the bizarre kidnapirigs and bank robberies of the--early '30s had been confined to the Midwest and 6eemed rather distant.

Even more surprising was the fact that the Barker gang bad been hidden out in the big house on Lake Weir for two months with some of the most notorious crooks in the country popping in and out. Alvin Karpis was somewhere in the state, too, but eluded ambush in the FBI encirclement on Lake Weir. WELL-CONCEALED by a grove of thick-bowled big oak trees and underbrush, federal, state and local law enforcement officers continued to fire into the house where "Ma" and her son Fred were "holed up." W7hile an ever-growing crowd of local residents gathered at the scene to watch the shoot-out, federal officers "grilled" Woodbury as to the strength of the gang. "The G-men shot and shot, but they didn't know whether they was dead or not," Woodbury said. "I figgered they was dead," he nodded sagely.

When there was no return gunfire for a half-hour, the BI men forced Willie Woodbury to go inside to see whether the Barkers were dead or merely wounded. "They're all dead," he called out from an upstairs window. WOODBURY soon got a chance to find out firsthand, when, towards 11 o'clock, federal officers instructed him to enter the house to see if any of the gang was still alive. "I was a little shaky, going up there, just like I was going to fix breakfast for them," he remembered. "I called to them every step and I broke the door in to get in the house," he said.

UNKNOWN to the public, another Barker son, Dock, had been captured by FBI agents a week previously as he came out of a Chicago apartment. A map found in his possession had a penciled circle around Lake Weir. The other members of the gang, including an ex-golf pro, were also nabbed. According to John Toland in his book "The Dillinger Days," the trail to Florida was heated up by an alligator named Old Joe. The golf pro knew that "Ma's" hangout was on a lake Inhabited by the alligator.

It seems Fred Barker and Alvin Karpis had tried to lure the big 'gator by towing a live pig behind their motor boat as bait. They had tried to shoot the alligator with machine guns! FOLLOWING the ffun battle, federal officers surveying the bullet-riddled house estimated some 600 pounds of lead had been fired into the building. The only objects in the house not struck by bullets were "a bathtub and a china closet," Woodbury recalled. One bullet "stuck in a box of candy." He kept" the bullet, until it was misplaced several years ago. WHILE HE did not profit financially from his two-month employment by the Barker gang, Woodbury contends it paid off from a "moral" standpoint.

"It pays not to lie," he said, referring to his experience with the FBI, which had Woodbury subpoenaed into federal court in Miami several times in the years following the Barker gang's demise, to "put the finger on" known and suspected underworld characters who visited the house on Lake Weir from time to time. "When they (FBI agents) first come back to talk to me they asked did I remember seeing so-and-so at the house, and I says sho', I remembers him and told them a lot of stuff I didn't know nothin' 'bout." After he was summoned to court as a witness, Woodbury said he had difficulty picking out the men he supposedly saw at the house. "I didn't tell no lies, after that," he added. THE BIG white house had been an arsenal, stocked with two machine-guns, two shotguns, three automatic pistols, a rifle, and three bullet-proof vests. Tribune reporter Abbott said there were violin cases strewn about, as well.

They had been used for carrying machine-guns. A machine gun was still clutched by the dead "Ma" Barker. A .45 pistol was found near Fred Barker, who had 11 machine gun slugs in his shoulders and three in the head. "Ma" Barker died barefooted, wearing a house-dress, Abbott wrote. More than $14,000 in cash was found in the house on Lake Weir.

A year later, J. Edgar Hoover wrote in a magazine article that "Ma" Barker was "the most vicious, dangerous, and resourceful criminal brain" he had yet tangled with more dangerous than Dillinger and Baby-Face Nelson. "MA" BARKER came from the Ozarks and had four sons all of whom were lawbreakers by the time they reached manhood. They grew up in Tulsa, taking part in night robberies with a group called the Central Park Gang. The mother began offering canny suggestions and eventually gained the reputation in underworld circles as being the queen bee for a crime ring that began spreading out.

FRED BARKER, who had been firing from behind his metal bunk on the screened-in porch of the house, "shot a long time," before he crawled back into the house, where he died, Woodbury said. "I tracked Fred by the blood trail," which led "up the stairs" to the second floor, Woodbury continued. When he reached the second floor, where "Ma" had positioned herself during the battle, Woodbury said he found Fred clothed and "laying on the skin of a deer he had killed in the forest." "Ma" who "had a hole in her face" beside the nose had Fred resting in her lap. "She had cotton in her hand, pluggin' up Fred's holes" and "she was cold, when I got there," Woodbury said. TODAY, at 55, Woodbury has his own lawn-trimming business.

When he isn't working around the neighborhood, he can be found sitting on his front porch, surrounded by a pack of nondescript but well-fed dogs and, like as not several neighbors who've dropped in to be with him when he relives the most exciting day in his life. THE DAY before the gun battle, the cook-handyman said he observed Fred Barker "acting kinda funny" and he "didn't look right all mornin'." He remembers the sun setting the night before "like a streak of fire, like I never seen before." "Fred had a little cold, and I fixed him a gin rickey." When he went to bed that night, he slept with all his clothing, after carrying his bed out onto the porch. "Fred felt his death," Woodbury said. -JLf 1 I illHill I i I I mi hi nmrnvmrni j.i.i.hi in ri i I I THE 55-YEAR-OLD Woodbury, a young man of 26 when he was hired by the Barkers to cook and run errands, was witness to a steady stream of "public enemies" who would visit the house at Lake Weir at all hours of the day and night. "They never stayed long," he said of shadowy underworld characters such as Alvin Karpis, George Summers, alias "Harry Campbell" and others, all of whom called her "boys." "She always said -'My boys are good A.

4 Tear-gas projectiles arc shown after the battle on the shores of Lake Weir. Bulletholes speckled the wood where FBI machine-guns aimed at the Barker pair. v'l.