The House on South Robert Street

South Robert Street did not look like the setting of a famous crime story. It was the kind of street where people lived their lives, kept to themselves, and passed by without thinking anything was out of the ordinary. A rented house there could have looked normal from the outside. That was exactly what made it useful.

In 1932, the Ma Barker gang rented a house at 1031 South Robert Street in West St. Paul and posed as a family of speakeasy musicians. From the street, that did not sound dangerous. It sounded almost plain. A family. Music. A place to stay. The kind of story a neighbor might accept without asking too many questions.

At that time, St. Paul had a reputation as a place where criminals could lie low. The danger was there, but mostly it was hiding quietly, somehow learning how to look like it belonged.

That is part of what makes Ma Barker so hard to forget. Most people picture a gangster story as men in suits, guns, robberies, noise, and a chase. But Ma changes that picture. She brings something that should feel safe into a story that is not safe at all.

And Ma didn’t just stay home in her rocking chair. She traveled with the gang, making it look like a mother out with her sons. She made it all seem normal. A mother with her sons is one of the most familiar images there is. The gang could hide behind that image in a way guns and stolen cars never could.

The gang was tied to robberies, kidnappings, and killings across the 1930s. But before a gang becomes famous, it still has to live somewhere. It still has to sleep somewhere. It still has to find a way to exist without being seen for what it was: hidden brutality

They protected that secret fiercely. Ma’s boyfriend, Arthur Dunlop, found out the hard way when he talked too much and ended up dead near a lake in Wisconsin, naked, and with a bullet in his head.

That is why the house on South Robert Street matters. It was not a giant hideout in the woods or some fortress for gangsters. The gang used fake names. The home itself may have been its best disguise. It looked like a home that held a family. And a home is where people are supposed to feel safe, not where they expect violence to be hiding.

The brutality extended beyond the home. For average Americans, these were hard times. During the Great Depression, one would be happy to just have a job. Oscar Erickson was one of those people. He had been unemployed and had just landed a job selling wreaths. During a historically cold December, the gang dropped its harmless disguise. They were not musicians. They were violent criminals out to rob a bank. After killing two police officers, they fled through the frozen conditions where they eventually came upon Oscar and shot and killed the newly employed wreath salesman near the same neighborhood where the previous silence and mirage had helped keep the gang hidden.

The gang was now on the run, and in January 1935, Ma Barker and her son Fred were killed in a shootout with FBI agents at a cottage in Florida. After that, the story only grew. J. Edgar Hoover saw the stark contrast between how the gang had been living and its criminal reality and used it to capture America’s imagination as part of his campaign with the FBI. The media amplified its impact and America couldn’t get enough of this sensationalized story of a gun-slinging mother and her family. Nearly one hundred years later, this story of a seemingly normal family with a brutal secret has been sensationalized in books and movies, and it continues to capture the imagination.

Historians still disagree about how central her role really was, even though her legend became much larger than life. In the gangster era, danger in St. Paul did not always look like gunmen and getaways. Sometimes it looked like neighbors, rented homes, and a mother sitting quietly in the middle of it all.

The Crime Boss Daniel Hogan

Daniel “Danny” Hogan was one of the most powerful organized crime figures in Minnesota in the
early 1900s. He was a St. Paul crime boss born in 1882. During the era of Prohibition, when
such criminal activity was flourishing all over the United States, Hogan dominated the city’s
illegal gambling and bootlegging operations and St. Paul became a prominent organized crime
center.
Another of the many connections to Hogan was the “O’Connor Layover Agreement” which was
a municipal system that allowed locals to continue their crime wave, while also allowing visiting
criminals a safe place to layover. The O’Connor Layover Agreement was a system worked out
between police and local criminal outfits whereby visiting criminals would register with the St.
Paul Police Department and agree to carry out no criminal acts in St. Paul. St. Paul was often
the “layover” on the way to more active crime centers, and because of the agreement there was
little chance of trouble in St. Paul, even for those traveling to other cities to commit crime. This
agreement made St. Paul a household name across the country with criminal organizations.
His organized crime figure was a member of the national outlaw gang led by John Henry. His
activities with Hogan’s group contributed to the rise of what was later called the Minnesota
Mafia, a crime syndicate that dominated organized crime in Minneapolis-St. Paul in the early

and mid-20th centuries. A prominent figure in Minnesota crime, he dominated the state’s
gambling operations and was closely associated with other outlaws.
Danny Hogan was killed when a car bomb exploded in front of his apartment building in St. Paul
in 1928. The powerful device killed Hogan immediately in one of the earliest car-bomb
assassinations in American crime history. No one was ever arrested or charged in Hogan’s
death and his killer was never identified.
Johnny Toole’s protégé and close friend, Danny Hogan, is now considered by many to be
Minnesota’s most well-known gangster. Hogan and the structure he and Johnny created to carry
out his and their friends illicit activities ,contributed a great deal to the development of
organized crime in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Check-In for the Wanted

The Saint Paul Hotel is a famous landmark across from the courthouse in downtown St. Paul where justice is served. On a chilly evening, the bright lights of the lobby blinked welcoming guests to plush beds and fine dining. Yet, in that crowded place, people were plotting against others who were staying nearby.

Some were business guests who had flown across the country for conferences and meetings with their clients. One had arrived from out of the country. Others were here for romantic getaways. What did they have in common? They had no idea that they were targets.

During the early 1930s, John Dillinger and other gangsters passed through the city of St. Paul, attracted by the town’s underworld motto: “Stay as long as you wish, just don’t get caught committing a crime within city limits.” The Saint Paul Hotel became the perfect place for these men to hide out and they frequently arrived in town, checked into rooms and held meetings. The men even knew exactly who to avoid when hiding out, as St. Paul police would help them avoid federal agents if they stayed on good behavior, but alert federal agents if the gangsters committed a crime in the town limits.

All these high-stakes land-jamborees and deal sessions were going down inside the hotel, in secret rooms strewn with cigars and hushed tones. Meanwhile, outside, judges and attorneys were working hard to sentence rogues and lock up bad guys. Little did they know, a figure like Dillinger was sitting across the street at that very moment.

Both justice and crime coexisted at The Saint Paul Hotel. On one side of the hallway were men and women who served as custodians of the law. On the other, men and women who hoped to avoid it entirely. And separating the two was a single corridor, and a feeling of uneasiness that lingered throughout the hall.