Tom Brown (police officer)

rdf:langString Tom Brown (police officer)

rdf:langString Tom Brown

rdf:langString Tom Brown

rdf:langString Thomas Archibald Brown

rdf:langString Brown

rdf:langString Police corruption, kidnapping, extortion, murder

rdf:langString Police officer

rdf:langString Thomas Archibald Brown (February 7, 1889 – January 5, 1959 Ely, Minnesota), known as "Big Tom", was the mobbed-up police chief of St. Paul, Minnesota during the Great Depression. A native of West Virginia, Brown arrived in the Twin Cities in 1910 and joined the St. Paul Police Department in 1914. At the time, the Department already had an unenviable reputation. Around 1900, Police Chief had developed the so-called "O'Connor system" in which fugitives from other jurisdictions were immune to arrest and extradition so long as they kept a low profile and committed no violent crimes while hiding in St. Paul. Upon becoming Police Chief in June 1930, however, Big Tom Brown refused to obey or enforce the O'Connor System's traditional ban on unnecessary violence. His alliance with both the Dillinger and Barker-Karpis Gangs accordingly resulted in some of the most infamously violent crimes of the Depression era and unintentionally aided in the rise of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and it's Director J. Edgar Hoover. Through the FBI's influence, Brown's many felonies were publicly exposed during a Civil Service Board hearing and he was finally dismissed from the police force. He was never indicted, however, or prosecuted for his many capital crimes and died, a free man, in Ely, Minnesota in 1959.

rdf:langString Thomas Archibald Brown