Herbert Allen Farmer (March 9, 1891 – January 12, 1948), was an American criminal who, with his wife Esther, operated a safe house in southwest Missouri for underworld fugitives from the mid-1920s to 1933.
In the 1920s his farm in southwest Missouri was safe harbor for bank robbers and other criminals of the Cookson Hills region such as Harvey Bailey, Frank Nash, Wilbur Underhill, "Big Bob" Brady and the Holden-Keating Gang. In the Public Enemy era, as organized crime strengthened and expanded in the United States, the farm became part of a network of safe houses for gangsters along "the midwest crime corridor."
On June 16, 1933, Herbert and Esther Farmer were involved in the plan which set into motion the Kansas City Massacre, "a pivotal event in Depression-era crime."Barrow p. 89. With five others, they were convicted of conspiracy to free a federal prisoner, Frank Nash, in January 1935.
Life
A career grifter and gambler, Herbert Farmer was in and out of local jails in Texas, Missouri and Oklahoma for much of his youth. In about 1910 his family settled in Webb City, Missouri, a community near Joplin in the then-booming lead- and zinc-mining region known as the Tri-State district.The Tri-State mining district, also called the Joplin district after the area's largest city, spread over of southwest Missouri, northeast Oklahoma and southeast Kansas. At its peak in the 1920s it was the world's leading producer of lead and zinc. Rosner pp. 136-38. As an adult Farmer made the Joplin area his home.
In Webb City, Farmer's family became acquainted with the Barker family, and for a while Ma Barker's sons "were practically raised by Herb Farmer's mother."FBI File Part 04, pp. 96, 126. Though the Barkers left Webb City for Tulsa, Oklahoma, around 1915, Fred Barker returned often to visit the Farmers, and he and Herb Farmer remained friends, though Farmer was perhaps 13 years older. The FBI's official summary of the Karpis-Barker gang's career stated, "It is safe to assume that Fred Barker received considerable education in the school of crime from Farmer,"FBI File 7-576. and later an agent noted that "Barker and Karpis are known to be henchmen (especially Barker) of Herbert A. Farmer."Part 12 p. 80.
In 1916 Farmer began serving a five-year sentence for assault with intent to kill in the rehabilitation-oriented Oklahoma State Reformatory, but in a few months he was transferred to the state penitentiary. During this time he schooled younger inmates in the ways of pickpocketing and con gamesKing pp. 98, 111-112, 114, 124, 199.Newton pp. 101-02.Wellman pp. 337, 339.Burrough pp. 34, 43, 47, 53-55, 60, 110, 146. and in the penitentiary made friends with veteran bank and train robber Jelly Nash. He served less than two years and upon his release headed west, adding to his record more arrests for assault, larceny and swindling in Colorado, California, Utah and Texas.
In about 1927 he and his wife bought a farm of roughly south of Joplin, Missouri. Farmer's farm was not only a safe place to "cool off," it was "one of the best underworld postal offices in the country."King p. 114. The Joplin safe house operated with no recorded interference from authorities until June 1933, when the Kansas City Massacre drew federal attention.
When Fred Barker or his partner Alvin Karpis shot to death a county sheriff in West Plains, Missouri, in December 1931, Barker took Karpis, as well as his mother and her boyfriend, across the state to Herb Farmer's place.FBI File 7-576. Farmer sent them on to Harry Sawyer in St. Paul, Minnesota. They thrived in the northern reaches of the country for about four years. When Farmer was indicted on conspiracy charges in 1934, the gang gave him $2500 of the Hamm kidnapping ransom to help pay his legal expenses.Burrough pp. 109-10. However, during questioning in respect to that crime Farmer, unprodded, twice slyly wondered aloud if Fred Barker might have been involved in the Union Station killings.
Farmer made his official living in the hotels and gambling halls of two nearby "safe cities,"Alvin Karpis wrote, "[Safe cities] were places where the fix was in from top to bottom, and guys like me could relax." Maccabee p. 60. "Once a criminal with local connections made it inside one of these cities he was home free. He was 'on base' and could not be 'tagged' by the authorities." Wallis p. 171. Other midwestern cities where the fix was firmly in were St. Paul, Detroit, Cicero, Illinois and Toledo, Ohio. Maccabee p. 60. the resort town of Hot Springs, Arkansas, and Kansas City, with occasional forays into Reno, NevadaIn Reno the midwest gangsters "had good contacts with the political bosses." FBI File 7-576 p. and St. Paul, Minnesota, where at the time of his arrest in July 1933 he was negotiating for control of a lucrative craps concession. Though Hot Springs chief of detectives Dutch Akers knew Farmer to be "the number 1 man for the [St. Paul-Kansas City-Hot Springs] gang organization at Joplin,"FBI File 62-28915, Part 10, p. 50. and though six months before his arrest for obstruction of justice in the Kansas City Massacre case he "took an old man and his wife from Hot Springs to Reno, where he cleaned them for $50,000 in the race track con,"FBI File 62-28915, Part 04, p. 88. when he was arrested he was trading chickens and butter for groceries and he alone of the conspiracy defendants could not make bond.FBI File 62-28915, Part 13, pp. 134-5; Part 70, p. 143.
Farmer was indeed almost completely deaf. In the 1934 conspiracy trial all of the defendants took the stand, except Farmer; he was so deaf, his wife said, that questioning him would be useless. In 1933 he was described to the FBI as "a very dangerous man, a killer, and his best known line is the con game.... his favorite weapon being the knife."FBI File 62-28915, Part 04, pp. 88-9.
Farmer served two years in Alcatraz for his participation in the conspiracy to free Jelly Nash. After his release he returned to Missouri. He and Esther sold the farm and moved into Joplin, where they lived until his death on January 12, 1948.
In October 1966 Esther married Harvey Bailey, "dean of the American bank robbers," after a year-long courtship. She died in 1981.
Role in the Kansas City Massacre conspiracy
Background Federal agents had been on the trail of Jelly NashHe was nicknamed "Jelly" because he was a safe-blowing expert, FBI File Part 09, p. 51; "jelly" was jelly powder, an explosive made by combining nitroglycerin and colloidion cotton, which mixture resembled calf's-foot jelly. for three years, since his escape from the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1930. At noon on June 16, 1933, Nash was finishing a beer inside the White Front cigar store and pool hall on the main street of Hot Springs, Arkansas when two special agents of the Department of Justice and the police chief of McAlester, Oklahoma, grabbed him, hustled him into a waiting car and drove away. Their goal was to get Nash from Hot Springs back to Leavenworth to finish his sentence for armed robbery.
Dick Galatas, owner of the White Front and "the official representative of the gangster world in Hot Springs,""[Galatas]... gets orders from the head of a big criminal organization in Chicago... it is Galatas's duty to arrange for and afford protection for gangsters sent to Hot Springs to cool off or for other purposes." Galatas was the "boss of a slot machine racket" in Hot Springs, in partnership with the mayor. FBI File 62-28915, Part 02, p. 101; Part 04, pp. 85-90. went directly to the police station in City Hall to the office of Dutch Akers, chief of detectives. Dutch Akers was deeply entangled with the racketeering operations of Hot Springs and at the same time was an informant for the FBI. It was he who, that morning, had notified his FBI contact that Nash was in Hot Springs and at the White Front.FBI File Part 10 p. 91. Akers specifically asked that agents apprehend Nash anywhere but the White Front. Akers began calling every police station between Hot Springs and Little Rock to report that a visiting businessman named George Miller—the name Nash went by around townNash had been putting together an identity as George W. Miller of Chicago for a year. He had grown a mustache and wore a toupee and glasses, and had had plastic surgery to change the shape of his nose. He and Frances had married a few weeks before, under the name Miller, and he had acquired a forged union card and Masonic lodge card to use as identification. FBI File 62-28915, Part 06. At their conspiracy trial the defendants protested that they had known the couple only as the Millers, and Galatas said that getting Mrs. Miller to Joplin was only a sympathetic gesture to try to aid the family of a brother Mason. King p. 113.—had been kidnapped. He and Galatas left the police station around 1 p.m. and Galatas went to collect Jelly Nash's wife Frances.
In Benton, Arkansas, halfway to Little Rock, the agents' car was halted by a police roadblock: "three men with rifles and sawed-off shotguns." They were stopped again at the edge of Little Rock by "two police cars with riot guns."FBI File 62-28915, Part 03, p. 9. The agents and Nash were aware that the stops were delay tactics. "I hope we make it out of this state alive," Nash said, cryptically.Though speculation arose that the true purpose of the Kansas City Massacre had been to get rid of Jelly Nash, most FBI informants were of the opinion that his death was accidental. One pointed out that Nash "was in good standing with all the big shots, if they had wanted to put him on the spot they would have done it before he was arrested in [Hot Springs]. It was accidental that he was killed while they were trying to liberate him." FBI File 62-28915, Part 03.
At 2:34 p.m., from Galatas's house in Hot Springs, Chief Akers called the Little Rock police station. The officer in charge explained that there had been no kidnapping, that a fugitive was simply being returned to prison. The officer told Akers that the car had turned west at Little Rock, onto "the Joplin road."FBI File 62-28915, Part 13 p. 60; Part 11, p. 70. Until then Akers and Galatas had not been certain who had taken Nash, or where they were going.
Galatas had brought Frances Nash to a neighbor's house to make phone calls. At 2:50 p.m., at Galatas's direction Mrs Nash called nightclub owner Louis "Doc" Stacci in Chicago. Stacci's subsequent phone calls to Fritz Mulloy, a friend of Verne Miller's in Kansas City, drew Miller into the plan to free Nash. Mrs Nash called Esther Farmer in Joplin.
Thirty minutes west of Little Rock the agents stopped in the town of Conway and called Ralph Colvin, the special agent in charge in Oklahoma City who had given the go-ahead to apprehend Nash, and let him know they were being tracked. Colvin told them to proceed to Fort Smith and call again from there. The agents had left the Little Rock officers "with the impression that we were proceeding to Joplin, Mo., but at a given point we left the Joplin road and dropped into Fort Smith."FBI File 62-28915, Part 03, p. 14.
Galatas and Frances Nash hired an airplane to fly Frances and her young daughter to Joplin. Mrs. Nash was afraid to fly in the Ryan B-1 monoplane. Galatas tried to calm her fears by telling her it was just like The Spirit of St. Louis, but she insisted he come with her. They arrived in late afternoon, at 6:20 p.m. Farmer met them and drove them to his farm.FBI File 62-28915, pp. 93-5.