Further reading for Ma Barker
Ma Barker: America’s Most-Wanred Mothers by Chris Enns and Howard Kazanjian
Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI by Bryan Burrough
Secret Partners: Big Tom Brown and the Barker Gang by Tim Mahoney
Kate Barker, more popularly known as Ma Barker, was one of the classic American gangsters who operated in the American midwest during and after the time of prohibition at the head of the prolific and extremely violent Barker-Karpis Gang. during the period known as The Public Enemy period, a time during The Great Depression when newspaper headlines ran sensational stories of the last of the American outlaws and entire tabloid magazines popped up on newstands to carry stories of gangster activity and the lawmen who sought to bring them down.
Barker directed the criminal activity of her sons as early as 1910 but didn’t gain her reputation as a vicious criminal actor until the Prohibition Era and where most of her contemporaries were people who accidentally lucked into their reputations as high-flying criminal masterminds who outran any cop that came at them, Ma Baker and her gang, made up mostly of her own children, were every bit as real as the headlines made them out to be, sometimes even worse than that.
Though, not central to the forming of the FBI, Ma Barker and her gang played a large role in its founding and ultimately died by its hands when they inevitably caught up to her in Florida and put a conclusive end to her reign under a hail of. .45 caliber bullets.
Episodes: 479-481
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