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.
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.
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.
During this time he schooled younger inmates in the ways of pickpocketing and con games[7][8][9][10] 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.
"[11] The Joplin safe house operated with no recorded interference from authorities until June 1933, when the Kansas City Massacre drew federal attention.
[12] 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.
[13] 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,"[14] the resort town of Hot Springs, Arkansas, and Kansas City, with occasional forays into Reno, Nevada[15] and St. Paul, Minnesota, where at the time of his arrest in July 1933 he was negotiating for control of a lucrative craps concession.
[7][8][9][10] In October 1966 Esther married Harvey Bailey, "dean of the American bank robbers," after a year-long courtship.
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.
Dick Galatas, owner of the White Front and "the official representative of the gangster world in Hot Springs,"[22] went directly to the police station in City Hall to the office of Dutch Akers, chief of detectives.
In Benton, Arkansas, halfway to Little Rock, the agents' car was halted by a police roadblock: "three men with rifles and sawed-off shotguns."
Miller's phone calls earlier that evening were first to John Lazia in Kansas City, then to associates in Chicago and New York and to Harry Sawyer's Green Lantern restaurant in St. Paul to try to interest the Karpis-Barker gang, but on such short notice he could find no out-of-town takers (the Barkers were occupied at the time with the Hamm kidnapping) and the Kansas City mob did not want to get involved.
At 6 a.m. June 17, Deafy Farmer drove Galatas and the aviator from the Connor Hotel in Joplin back to the airport, and returned home.
[35] Dutch Akers later told his FBI contact that as soon as Galatas reached Hot Springs "he ordered every gangster in town to leave."
When the Joplin police chief heard the news of the shootings at Union Station he immediately suspected Herb Farmer had something to do with it.
"[39] Deafy Farmer and his wife, Dick Galatas and his wife, Frances Nash, Vivian Mathias, Doc Stacci of Chicago and Fritz Mulloy of Kansas City were indicted by a federal grand jury in Kansas City on October 24, 1934, and charged with three counts of conspiracy to aid "the escape of [a federal] prisoner properly committed to the custody of the Attorney General.