1930s Mob Hideout House In West Saint Paul Now For Sale

WEST SAINT PAUL, MN – Are you interested in buying a piece of history? This Robert Street home is well known in the West Saint Paul area as the house where Ma Barker and the notorious Barker-Karpis gang hid out for a period in the 1930s. Kate "Ma" Barker was known to help her criminal sons. She was eventually killed in a shootout with FBI agents in the late 30s in Florida.

The Hamm Kidnapping

On a warm summer evening in 1933, William A. Hamm, Jr., President of the Theodore Hamm Brewing Company, was working at his office in Saint Paul. He had just exited the building when he was grabbed by four shadowed figures and pushed into the back of a car. What he didn't know was that he had been kidnapped by members of the Barker/Karpis gang, for a ransom of over $100,000.

Hamm was taken to Wisconsin, where he was forced to sign four ransom notes. Then he was moved to a hideout in Bensenville, Illinois, were he was held prisoner until the kidnappers had been paid. Once the money was handed over, Hamm was released near Wyoming, Minnesota. The plan was perfect and went off without a hitch...almost.

On September 6, 1933, using a then state-of-the-art technology now called latent fingerprint identification, the FBI Laboratory raised incriminating fingerprints from surfaces that couldn't be dusted for prints. Alvin Karpis, "Doc" Barker, Charles Fitzgerald, and the other members of the gang had gotten away, but they'd left their fingerprints behind—all over the ransom notes.

The Silver Nitrate Method and its application in the Hamm Kidnapping was the first time it was used successfully to extract latent prints from forensic evidence. Scientists had just thought to take advantage of the fact that unseen fingerprints contain perspiration, chock full of sodium chloride (common table salt).

By painting the evidence, in this case the ransom notes, with a silver nitrate solution, the salty perspiration reacted chemically to form silver chloride—which is white and visible to the naked eye. There they were: hard evidence that the Karpis gang was behind the kidnapping.

• Address: 1031 Robert St S, West Saint Paul, Minnesota
• Price: $147,000
• Square Feet: 1694
• Bedrooms: 3
• Bathrooms: 2 Baths
• Built: 1927
• This home is zoned for commercial on main level and residential upstairs. Great traffic/commercial business. Parking in back with drive way.

This listing originally appeared on realtor.com. For more information and photos, click here.