In Brief
The Landmark Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, was the federal courthouse where Prohibition-era gangsters were sentenced. It rents those halls for weddings now, and the story goes that one convicted fixer, Jack Peifer, still turns up at the parties.
The Full Story
The Landmark Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, rents out its restored halls for weddings and galas, and the story attached to the place is that one of the men sentenced inside it keeps showing up at the parties. They call him Jack Peifer.
The building opened in 1902 as the federal post office and courthouse, a castle of pink St. Cloud granite with conical turrets and a clock tower. In the 1930s its courtrooms did the era's grim work. St. Paul ran on a corrupt arrangement called the O'Connor Layover Agreement, which let criminals live in the city as long as they kept their crimes elsewhere, and it turned the place into a gangster haven. The Barker-Karpis gang washed up there. When the trials came, the defendants filed through this courthouse: Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, "Doc" Barker, John Dillinger's girlfriend Evelyn Frechette.
Jack Peifer ran the Hollyhocks Club, a high-end gambling parlor on Mississippi River Boulevard where patrons dined before heading upstairs for craps, blackjack, and roulette. He helped engineer the 1933 kidnapping of brewing heir William Hamm Jr. for a $100,000 ransom, and he was convicted of the conspiracy and sentenced to 30 years. On July 31, 1936, after a judge denied his motion for a new trial, Peifer pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, swallowed a capsule of potassium cyanide, and was dead within two hours in a jail cell. A witness in the courtroom said he saw a small white object between Peifer's fingers. Ghost-tour tellings soften the facts and say he hanged himself in this building; the newspaper record says cyanide, and not here.
The courthouse closed, was nearly torn down, and a citizens' committee saved it. It reopened in 1978 as an arts center owned by Ramsey County. The trials moved out and the weddings moved in.
Peifer, the story goes, stayed. Staff and ghost-tour tellings put him on the third floor, favoring the women's restroom, where women say they feel a presence that sometimes seems to touch them. Bottles of alcohol go missing or tip over at events, and people say he has turned up uninvited in photographs from the parties. Cleaning crews report figures on the upper promenade who drift to the grand winding staircase and start down, and never reach the bottom. An antique elevator is said to descend on its own, showing an empty cage. Building staff tell of voices in the old judges' chambers, then find the offices empty and locked.
The building where gangsters were sentenced now rents its halls for the happiest day of strangers' lives. The convicted man, by every telling, never checked out.
