OCKLAWAHA -- As FBI agents approached the cottage where Ma Barker and her son, Freddie, were holed up, bullets started flying out the window. The G-men returned fire, stopping only when their ammunition ran low.
After a four-hour standoff, the agents entered the house and found both Barkers dead with Ma still clutching a Thompson submachine gun and a rifle.
The 1935 shootout that killed two of the great figures of the gangster era will be re-enacted Saturday in what has become an annual Marion County tradition.
"Your heart starts beating pretty fast when the FBI agents come to the door," said Doug Turner, a Marion County businessman who repeats his role as Fred Barker in the re-enactment. "It makes you wonder what they felt when the gun battle started."
Organizers say the purpose is not to honor Ma Barker or her sons, who along with gangster Alvin Karpis were responsible for a wave of murders, police killings, robberies and kidnappings in the Midwest in the 1920s and 1930s.
"We're not commemorating Ma or Fred Barker. We're commemorating law enforcement," said Jim Buchanan, treasurer of the Lake Weir Chamber of Commerce, which sponsors the reenactment.
The reenactment, which will be repeated three times during the day, was revived in 1985 on the 50th anniversary of the shootout. Attracting several thousand people a year, it is one of the highlights in Ocklawaha, a tiny hamlet about 50 miles northwest of Orlando. Before 1985, it had been held sporadically.
Ma Barker will be played by Turner's sister, Cathy Stock, and the FBI agents will be played by Marion County Sheriff's deputies.
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FILE--Cathy Stock, left, and her brother Doug Turner of Ocklawaha pose together as Ma Barker and her son Fred during the Ma Barker Shootout re-enactment in Ocklawaha, Saturday Jan. 15, 2000.
The Associated Press
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"This was the event that started the beginning of the end of the last gangsters of the gangster era," said Keith Kohl, the editor of the history magazine "Historic Florida," who will lecture at the reenactment.
"This event put Ocklawaha in the national headlines for a couple of days," he said.
As the core of the Barker-Karpis Gang, Kate "Ma" Barker and her four sons -- Herman, Lloyd, Arthur and Freddie -- became notorious. They were most famous for kidnapping and holding for a $200,000 ransom a scion of the Hamm's Brewery fortune, William Hamm Jr. They also kidnapped and held for a $200,000 ransom Edward Bremer, a wealthy Minnesota banker.
Pop culture has portrayed Ma Barker, who was 63 when she died, as the ruthless mastermind of her sons' crimes. But some biographers believe she never participated in any robberies or other crimes and no member of the gang ever named her as their leader.
If she was guilty of any crimes, it was harboring and turning a blind eye to her sons' crimes, according to Rick Mattix and William J. Helmer in their book, "The Public Enemies Almanac."
"She was simply unable to see any wrong in anything they did, or she tended to excuse their crimes as the result of persecution by the law," they wrote.
