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.