Another Guess Who? With Kevin

In April 1936, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was called to testify before a Senate committee.

The courage of one of the Bureau’s men was indirectly impugned; the G-man in question, during his years of service, had never made an arrest.

Director Hoover did not like cowards. And for the United States Senate to question the bravery of any Bureau agent was a reflection on the entire agency.

To ignore the implication would be a blot on the Bureau.

So, the Director elected instead to send the agent whose courage had been questioned — to send that fellow on the next most dangerous mission, wherever it occurred.

He did not have long to wait.

It was to be an historic confrontation — with the nations’s most cold-blooded killer, the successor to John Dillinger: Montreal born Alvin Karpis, Public Enemy Number One.

That was the hood this FBI man would have to capture.

The badman’s whereabouts were learned. New Orleans. A small apartment building a half mile from the business district.

May 1. The dead of night. FBI men surrounded the apartment, waited. And leading the squad, taking the heat, out in front where the first bullets might fly, was the G-man whose courage had been publicly questioned only two weeks before.

Karpis and two other gang members, unaware of their surveillance, emerged from the building, headed for their car.

HALT! FBI!

But neither Karpis nor the others moved for a gun, nor tried to run. They froze. In fact, Karpis himself, who had once boasted that he would never be taken alive, was most frightened of all.

Said the agent in charge of the capture, the FBI man who had never made an arrest:

“We took him without firing a shot. That marked him as a dirty yellow rat. He was scared to death when we closed in on him. He shook all over — his voice, his hands, his knees.”

The apprehension of Alvin Karpis — in both senses of the word — made front pages coast to coast. One G-man in particular was hailed as a hero. And from that day on, no one — neither the public nor the Senate nor the FBI director Hoover himself — ever questioned that agent’s bravery.

A week later, this same G-man went to Toledo in Ohio and captured Harry Campbell, a Karpis accomplice. And when at last that agent returned to Washington, it was concluded that he had proved himself; he could get back to his desk where he belonged.

Director Hoover could not have been happier, nor more proud.

And with good reason . . .

For the forty-one-year-old FBI man whose courage was in question and whose test was comprised of two dangerous missions — was himself the director of the Federal bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover.

And now you know THE REST OF THE STORY.