Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave And The Birth Of The FBI, 1933-34 (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
Burrough, an award-winning financial journalist and Vanity Fair special correspondent, best known for Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, switches gears to produce the definitive account of the 1930s crime wave that brought notorious criminals like John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde to America's front pages. Burrough's fascination with his subject matter stems from a family connection—his paternal grandfather manned a roadblock in Arkansas during the hunt for Bonnie and Clyde—and he successfully translates years of dogged research, which included thorough review of recently disclosed FBI files, into a graceful narrative. This true crime history appropriately balances violent shootouts and schemes for daring prison breaks with a detailed account of how the slew of robberies and headlines helped an ambitious federal bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover transform a small agency into the FBI we know today. While some of the details (e.g., that Dillinger got a traffic ticket) are trivial, this book compellingly brings back to life people and times distorted in the popular imagination by hagiographic bureau memoirs and Hollywood. Burrough's recent New York Times op-ed piece drawing parallels between the bureau's "reinvention" in the 1930s and today's reform efforts to combat the war on terror will help attract readers looking for lessons from history.This fascinating book tells, in detail, the events of the War on Crime waged in the years 1933 and '34. A rich and colorful cast of characters parades through the pages. On the bad guy side, we find Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd and Alvin Karpis and the Barker family. On the side of law and order, there was J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI along with local police and other officials. The battle unfolded amid an amazing epidemic of bank robberies, part of what some people saw as a great crime wave. More than anything else, it was probably the Kansas City Massacre -- a bloody incident in June 1933, which left a pile of dead detectives and law enforcement officers -- that touched off the war. This massacre shocked the country -- and the FBI -- into action.Crime had gone interstate, which was a new problem for the forces of law and order. The automobile gave mobility and speed to gangs of bank robbers; the machine gun gave them firepower. During the Great Depression, poverty and social disorganization were eating away at the country's social fabric. Corruption corroded the heart of local law enforcement. The FBI, a relatively new organization, was weak, untrained and uncertain. Its men were, in many ways, staggeringly incompetent. But the FBI, over the course of two tumultuous years, gradually learned how to become a sleeker, more efficient instrument. Despite its bumbling and a host of false starts, by the end of the period the FBI had won the war and the "public enemies" had lost. Bonnie and Clyde died in a hail of bullets. Dillinger was cut down outside the Biograph theater in Chicago. Kelly and Nelson were also dead. So were the Barkers. Alvin Karpis was on his way to Alcatraz.But the good guys endured a comedy of errors before all that happened. Burrough's account is peppered with tales of missed opportunities, bad detective work, poor record-keeping and all-around sloppiness. Desperate to catch John Dillinger, in March 1934 the FBI "stormed the Chicago apartment of a woman named Anne Baker," who was supposed to have harbored Dillinger following his escape from an Indiana jail earlier that month. The raid was a "debacle." In fact, the FBI had "raided the wrong address." Even worse was the raid on "Little Bohemia," where Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson were supposed to be holed up. That raid was a fiasco. All of the criminals escaped, and the FBI ended up shooting a completely innocent man.The public enemies were hardly geniuses, either. They, too, had their share of ludicrous errors. For example, the Karpis-Barker gang seized a hand truck, "stacked with bulging sacks" and heavily guarded, outside the Federal Reserve Building in Chicago. The gang got away -- only to discover they had stolen not money but bags of mail. In contrast, knocking off a bank appeared to be child's play. The "public enemies" raced about the country, stealing wads of cash from banks, renting apartments, buying cars, picking up women and having a good time between jobs. They were protected by a network of supporters and hangers-on (and sometimes corrupt officials). Their insatiable greed -- and their inability to stop robbing and killing -- led to their destruction,It is a wild and amazing story, and Burrough tells it with great gusto. Truth is often not only stranger than fiction but also a lot more interesting. Burrough's research is careful and extraordinarily thorough. He debunks many of the tall tales that have accrued around these almost mythical figures. The famous woman in a red dress who betrayed John Dillinger was actually wearing an orange skirt. Machine Gun Kelly was "inept" and "never a menacing figure." Bonnie and Clyde were totally unlike the characters in the famous movie; they were "lazy drifters who murdered nearly a dozen innocent men." Most striking, perhaps, was the case of Ma Barker, grandmother and head of a family of violent crooks. That was the image. In reality, Ma Barker was a rather stupid old woman who liked to work jigsaw puzzles and had never been mastermind of anything, including crime. When she ended up with a bullet through her head, the FBI had some explaining to do. Hoover then concocted the tale of Ma Barker the master criminal, the "brains" of the gang, an evil genius who died with a machine gun in her hands, "spidery, crafty Ma Barker," whose "withered fingers" controlled the fate of her family of "desperadoes." Not a word of this was true.In a narrow sense, the War on Crime was a great success. Hoover got what he wanted; the public enemies were put out of business. And in the process he created the modern FBI. He also advocated a bigger role for the federal government in the battle against criminal elements and established a strong federal agency to carry on that war.Still, Hoover's legacy was a dubious one. His agency improved its skill while gaining a great deal of power that it often abused. Those abuses took various forms, such as "vigorous physical interviews" that we might call gross brutality. As the power of the FBI and its director became "absolute," the agency, according to Burrough, was itself "corrupted absolutely." The Bureau still "wrestles with" its mixed record to this day. As for the public enemies, they were really only bit-players in the drama of high crime. As Burrough points out, law enforcement launched no "broader drives on the Chicago Syndicate or Italian Mafias, no war on counterfeiting or other crimes." Nor was there any attack on the rot and corruption of the cities, on the crooked sheriffs and police lieutenants and the vast interconnections between the agencies of organized crime. Dillinger, the Barkers and the others were, in fact, disorganized crime. They robbed and they killed, but they did not, in the main, threaten the fabric of society, the texture of local and state government or the integrity of law enforcement.Public Enemies is a significant book, and a very readable one. It is easy to toss around terms like "definitive," but this book deserves it. It is hard to imagine a more careful, complete and entrancing book on this subject, and on this era. Readers will not be disappointed.
The Kansas City Massacre occurred over 75 years ago, but you can still go to the renovated Union Station and see chips in the front of the building that were supposedly made by some of the bullets flying around that day. If you buy into the premise of Public Enemies, this is where the modern FBI was born. I like to imagine that years later, J. Edgar Hoover slipped into town late one night, put on one his best evening gowns and burnt some old illegal wire tap tapes on this spot as an offering to the fates that turned him from a fussy minor bureaucrat into one of the of the most powerful men in America.In June of 1933, an escaped convict named Frank Nash had been captured in Hot Springs, Arkansas, by a couple of agents of the then mostly unknown Bureau of Investigation. They brought him by train to K.C.’s Union Station, where they met members of the local police who were going to help drive him back to Leavenworth. As they got into the cars, they were attacked by armed men trying to free Nash. After a brief but intense gunfight, two feds and two of the KCPD men were dead, several others were wounded, and Nash was also killed in the carnage. All of the attackers managed to escape.The event occurred as a new wave of armed robbers had been rampaging across the Midwest. John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, Babyface Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelley and the Barker gang were making headlines with high profile kidnappings or by pulling a robbery in one area, then using fast cars and new automatic weapons to outrace and outgun the local law enforcement. Once in another county or state, they were very unlikely to ever be captured.With Roosevelt’s administration rolling out his New Deal and looking for ways to boost federal power, Attorney General Homer Cummings declared a war on crime and pushed for a federal police force. (Ironically, it was a liberal public policy that gave power to Hoover, who would then spend most of his career investigating and persecuting harmless leftist groups while ignoring the growth of the Mafia.) The K.C. Massacre gave Hoover’s small Bureau of Investigation their chance to be that national police force when the KC cops, in an effort to pin all the blame for the massacre on the feds, gave them total responsibility for solving the case despite the fact that murdering a federal agent wasn’t even a federal crime then so they technically had no jurisdiction.Hoover’s clean cut college boys were initially no match for the criminals. FBI agents weren’t officially allowed to carry weapons until after the massacre and most of its employees were college graduates looking for a job during the Great Depression and hadn’t signed up to be gun men. They made a lot of mistakes and missed a lot of arrest opportunities while a whole lotta money got stolen and many people were killed as the feds worked through their growing pains. After all the prominent criminals had been captured or killed (many without Bureau involvement), it was the movie industry that embraced the ‘G-Men’ and turned them and Hoover into American heroes. Burroughs has obviously done a lot or research, and I think this book has to be one of the most accurate and thorough accounts of the Depression-era crime wave that swept the country. It’s filled with amazing stories and anecdotes and does a lot to try and break up the myths of the era. For example, Ma Barker was not the leader of the Barker gang. She was a cranky old lady who happened to get shot and killed while the FBI tried to bring in one of her boys. Hoover declared her the brains of the operation to deflect criticism about why an unarmed old woman got killed by his agents.The only flaw in the book isn’t Burroughs’ fault. It’s just that history got repetitive. The criminals rob banks. The inept FBI can’t catch them. The criminals rob more banks. FBI still can’t catch them. Rinse and repeat. So while I got a little bored with some sections, it was only because Burroughs did such a great job of documenting all the history of it. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the true-crime of this era.*I’m going to digress a moment about the movie version of this book. I enjoyed the movie and thought Johnny Depp did a great job as Dillinger. However, I find it kind of sad that a book that prides itself on historical accuracy and debunking many of the myths that the movies gave us about these people was itself turned into a movie that was wildly inaccurate and tries to create a whole new set of legends. It’s extra funny when you read about how incompetent Melvin Purvis actually was and how he was turned into a hero by the media after Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd were killed. This infuriated Hoover, and led him to trash Purvis’s career. In the film, Christian Bale plays Purvis as the straight arrow hero who personally kills Pretty Boy Floyd and Babyface Nelson. Hoover has to be spinning in his grave.
What do You think about Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave And The Birth Of The FBI, 1933-34 (2005)?
It is probably a year or two now since revelations about the private life of J Edgar Hoover emerged, and there was much made of his private life with allegations of cross dressing, and his relationship with a fellow member of the FBI. When reading this book, it takes some getting used to, describing events of eighty and more years ago at the start of the organisation. This said, the book gives a great description of the times, and events that gave rise to the creation of the FBI, and their early results, which could be described as patchy of their ‘war on crime’. It is probably known by most people with any sort of interest in this period that Hoover had zero policing experience, but this didn’t stop him from becoming the head of the organisation without, it seems, much opposition. It could be that wiser heads realised the enormity of the task he had set himself, and filed it in the ‘too difficult’ drawer. The book covers the investigation into, subsequent arrests of and, most frequently, deaths of the enemies in this war – names familiar to anyone of a certain age – John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde being perhaps the best known and others less so. The FBI was to have powers, and responsibility, to bring these gangs to justice. They faced a number of challenges, to say the least, in this task. In addition to the gangs being highly mobile, with a large network of associates, family members and supporters, the size and nature of the area they worked in and the press following the FBI’s every step the main one is common to most struggling organisations – the staff. In the main, they were men who had never faced a criminal of any kind, let alone those as ready to use deadly force as they were chasing and who knew precious little about the real business of catching such desperadoes – tactics, planning, intelligence gathering and analysis and having a network of snitches. Their problems were only increased by the existing police in the states and towns they went to – as well as being uncertain and mistrustful of the FBI, it will be no surprise to readers that corruption was to say the least an issue in several places. Through the research of the author, we are taken into the everyday world of the gangs – who seem as disorganised and dysfunctional as the people chasing them, in fact the only people who seem to be making a success of these times were, surprise surprise the lawyers, fences and money launderers. Hoover seems to spend a great deal of time firing off memos criticising his band of investigators, and being wise after the event and I got the impression that while the FBI did get better as the book went along, the main problem was that the gangs got worse. No spoilers, but everyone mentioned in the book dies eventually – the gangs are either arrested, killed, or get away with it and the FBI go on to become an organisation that we all have heard of – and may have our own opinion of already. This book, although very entertaining and absorbing, is unlikely to change it.
—Colin
LIke my friend Laura Kelly, here on Goodreads, I picked this up on the local YMCA bookshelf. As I am researching the background of the 1930s for a possible book about gangsters, I gobbled this up. It's too long, with too much information we -- or at least I -- don't really need. But the section about John Dillinger was especially fascinating. As was the careful recounting of how new and bumbling the FBI was as this wave of mid-Western bank robberies captured the attention of the country in the mid-1930s. Boy, people really hated banks in the Great Depression. As a Texas friend told me: Bonnie and Clyde were seen as local heroes.
—Kate Buford
I recommend this book.It is an enjoyable read for any adult or young adult. In particular it is of interest to readers of suspense, true crime, American History, the Great Depression/Dust Bowl, and the forming of the FBI. The writing is very good. The reader feels immersed in the worlds of John Nash, Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and the Barker Gang.The research is airtight. The author retells significant events (the Kansas City Massacre, the Hunt for John Dillinger,etc.) with atmospheric precision. Flaws include : though the author presents no moral judgement (which I like) he does pass judgement on Bonnie and Clyde, at the end of their story. It is forgivable as the two outlaws were responsible for the death of one of the author's older relatives. As an editor I would have omitted this personal judgement as it is out of place, out of form for the whole book.I would have liked more about the FBI, I would have liked to have seen more of the FBI's success and innovation (forensics, fingerprinting)however the reader is more often presented with the FBI's incredulous bungling.There are not many well written true crime books. Yet this book is among them. At times, the reader is in Dillinger's Getaway Car. Running through the piney woods of St. Paul. Listening in on the last conversation with Bonnie Parker and her mother. These are the histories that fill this book: the criminals, their MO and their humanity.Not recommended for anyone sensitive to violence.
—Sonja
