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Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34
Coming in Summer 2009, the major motion picture from Universal Studios
"ludicrously entertaining" ( Time ), Public Enemies is the story of the most spectacular crime wave in American history, the two-year battle between the young J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI, and an assortment of criminals who became national icons: John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the Barkers. In an epic feat of storytelling, Burrough reveals a web of interconnections within the vast American underworld and demonstrates how Hoover's G-men secured the FBI's rise to power.
"ludicrously entertaining" ( Time ), Public Enemies is the story of the most spectacular crime wave in American history, the two-year battle between the young J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI, and an assortment of criminals who became national icons: John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the Barkers. In an epic feat of storytelling, Burrough reveals a web of interconnections within the vast American underworld and demonstrates how Hoover's G-men secured the FBI's rise to power.
592 pages, Paperback
First published July 15, 2004
About the author
Bryan Burrough
18 books447 followersBryan Burrough joined Vanity Fair in August 1992 and has been a special correspondent for the magazine since January 1995. He has reported on a wide range of topics, including the events that led to the war in Iraq, the disappearance of Natalee Holloway, and the Anthony Pellicano case. His profile subjects have included Sumner Redstone, Larry Ellison, Mike Ovitz, and Ivan Boesky.
Prior to joining Vanity Fair, Burrough was an investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal. In 1990, with Journal colleague John Heylar, he co-authored Barbarians at the Gate (HarperCollins), which was No. 1 on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for 39 weeks. Burrough's other books include Vendetta: American Express and the Smearing of Edmund Safra (HarperCollins, 1992), Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir (HarperCollins, 1998); and Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34 (Penguin Press, 2004).
Burrough is a three-time winner of the John Hancock Award for excellence in financial journalism. He lives in Summit, New Jersey with his wife Marla and their two sons.
Prior to joining Vanity Fair, Burrough was an investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal. In 1990, with Journal colleague John Heylar, he co-authored Barbarians at the Gate (HarperCollins), which was No. 1 on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for 39 weeks. Burrough's other books include Vendetta: American Express and the Smearing of Edmund Safra (HarperCollins, 1992), Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir (HarperCollins, 1998); and Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34 (Penguin Press, 2004).
Burrough is a three-time winner of the John Hancock Award for excellence in financial journalism. He lives in Summit, New Jersey with his wife Marla and their two sons.
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January 2, 2021
“Eight miles south of Gibsland, [Bonnie and Clyde] crested a rise and spotted Ivy Methvin standing beside his truck, which was jacked up in the road. Bonnie put her sandwich down, and placed it on the magazine spread across her lap. Beneath the magazine was a Colt .45. Clyde took his foot off the accelerator and let the Ford coast to a stop beside Methvin’s truck. Clyde turned his head to the right, toward Methvin and his truck, and away from the six guns that were aimed directly at his head…Just then Methvin doubled over as if in pain and stepped away. Twenty feet to Clyde’s left, hidden in the brush, Sheriff Jordan was just about to put down his gun and yell something…Clyde took his foot off the brake for a moment, and the Ford began to ease forward. The moment the car moved, Jordan’s deputy, Prentiss Oakley, fired…”
- Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the F.B.I., 1933-34
Bank robbery did not begin during the Great Depression, of course. Banks – being the places that have money – have always been targeted by thieves. Moreover, as Bryan Burrough points out in Public Enemies, the Great Depression did not represent a high-water mark of such crimes, as bank hits had actually peaked years earlier, a function of emergent technology (Thompson submachine guns, fast cars) and outdated laws (no federal statutes, no federal police force, thousands of local jurisdictions) that both favored the robber over the cop.
But it was during the Great Depression that an odd thing happened: the outlaw became a folk hero.
Then again, maybe this wasn’t so odd.
After all, the Great Depression saw a cascading failure of institutions, both private and governmental, that cast millions of people out of work, and wiped out the savings of millions more. In a wounded country starved for heroes, who cheered for an undersized horse and an underdog boxer, perhaps it made a certain sense that a self-consciously debonair criminal like John Dillinger – who was here for the bank’s money, not yours – would capture the national attention.
In Public Enemies, Burrough recounts the period from March 1933 to January 1935 when some of the most famous gangsters in American history roamed Middle America, knocking off banks, making daring escapes, and becoming fixtures in the newspapers. During this same span, there arose a counterforce, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation, soon to be known as the F.B.I. Despite starting off as a rather inept band of bunglers, led by a man more concerned with timeliness and dress codes than effectiveness, the Bureau managed to capture or kill – mostly kill – just about every crook on their most-wanted list.
Thus, in a way, Public Enemies is a tale of competing mythologies, that of the gangs, and that of the F.B.I. That Burrough is able to deconstruct both, while also providing an extraordinarily entertaining story of murder, mayhem, and car chases, is pretty amazing.
The biggest thing that jumps out at me with regard to Public Enemies is its structure. Though it covers a period of a little less than two years, it is ambitious in its scope. This book is not just about John Dillinger and the F.B.I., but encompasses the rise and fall of Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, and Al Karpis and the Karpis-Barker Gang. Though we spend a lot of time with the gangs, Burrough also covers the G-men in pursuit, such as Melvin Purvis, Samuel Cowley, and America’s most dangerous public servant, J. Edgar Hoover. Keeping tabs on this huge cast of characters, especially the cross-cutting between the movements and heists of the various gangs, all while maintaining chronological lucidity, is a rather dazzling feat of storytelling. Everything about this approach seems bound to plunge the reader – especially someone unfamiliar with this time – into hopeless confusion. Yet that never happens here. Burrough does an excellent job with datelines, a cast of characters (complete with pictures), and a separate map for each gang, all with the purpose of providing a measure of clarity.
Public Enemies is probably among the most epic true crime stories I’ve ever read. It is approximately 550-pages long (not including endnotes), and features no shortage of outsized figures. Though Burrough occasionally displays a modern historian’s tendency towards pedantic de-romancing (especially with regards to Bonnie and Clyde, even though his beef with them seems to stem more from their embrace by the 60’s counterculture), Public Enemies has no shortage of novelistic action set pieces. There are bank robberies – obviously – but also kidnappings, ambushes, chases, jail breaks, shootouts galore, and a lot of bloodshed, all described as vividly as Burrough is able. At times, it became a bit repetitive, as one bank job bleeds – often literally – into the next. At other times, though, I found myself in the book’s grip as tightly as though I were reading great fiction.
With regard to the veracity of Public Enemies, I can only say that Burrough did his homework. This book is thoroughly sourced with contemporary documentation, supplemented by some additional interviews and his in-person visits to the scenes of the crimes. Even though Burrough adheres to a narrative style, he often interjects – both in the text and in footnotes – to describe conflicts in the evidence. For instance, Burrough makes sure to mention that “the lady in red” who accompanied Dillinger on the night of his death was actually wearing orange.
Nevertheless, I feel compelled to add – since he makes a big deal about it – that Burrough relies heavily on newly accessible F.B.I. reports. This raises a couple flags with me. First, as Burrough himself demonstrates, the F.B.I. wasn’t very good at their jobs, at least at the start. They screwed up in so many basic and fundamental ways that it is hard to take them seriously. If they can’t properly surveil a suspect’s apartment, why should I believe their written reports? Second, if the F.B.I. reports were anything like the thousands of police reports I’ve read in my years as a lawyer, then they were themselves a dubious collection of hearsay, uncorroborated statements, and speculation. To treat an F.B.I. report as supporting documentation for a book is absolutely legitimate. But to act as though these reports are superior evidence, as Burrough does, feels like a mistake. However, I hasten to add that this specific slice of history is outside my usual stomping grounds, so I cannot judge the contents with even a pretense of certainty.
Beyond the heavy reliance on F.B.I. sourcing, I’m mildly disappointed in Burrough’s unwillingness to tease any lessons from the F.B.I.’s actions during this first “War on Crime.” To be sure, the need for a federal law enforcement body to catch interstate criminals is rather self-evident. Yet there were many negative consequences attendant to that body being led by J. Edgar Hoover who – more than most – resembled a bone-eating troll living under a bridge. To that end, Burrough tends to either ignore or write off the Bureau’s civil rights violations. For example, he devotes only a sentence or two to the F.B.I.’s proclivity for killing the men they were chasing in situations that felt closer to an assassination than an arrest. It would have been nice for Burrough to have drawn some connections across space and time, to observe how things both change and stay the same (this was published in 2004, as the War on Terror was really heating up, so this reticence is all the more surprising).
In many ways, Public Enemies is an origin story. Because of men like Dillinger and Nelson, and because of Hoover’s excellent public relations skills, the F.B.I. transformed from a collection of young lawyers looking for better jobs, to an omnipresent law enforcement organization that combined technological prowess with an unhesitating willingness to venture far beyond constitutional boundaries. Like all origin stories, this one is buried beneath layers of legend and received wisdom.
Perhaps the chief accomplishment of Public Enemies is that it demythologizes its subject matter without destroying it. I have read more than a few books that – in pursuit of the “true” story – have convinced me that I shouldn’t have bothered in the first place. Here, we see plainly that Dillinger was no knight errant, and Purvis no doggedly capable pursuer, but that does not make their ultimate collision any less dramatic, violent, or real.
- Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the F.B.I., 1933-34
Bank robbery did not begin during the Great Depression, of course. Banks – being the places that have money – have always been targeted by thieves. Moreover, as Bryan Burrough points out in Public Enemies, the Great Depression did not represent a high-water mark of such crimes, as bank hits had actually peaked years earlier, a function of emergent technology (Thompson submachine guns, fast cars) and outdated laws (no federal statutes, no federal police force, thousands of local jurisdictions) that both favored the robber over the cop.
But it was during the Great Depression that an odd thing happened: the outlaw became a folk hero.
Then again, maybe this wasn’t so odd.
After all, the Great Depression saw a cascading failure of institutions, both private and governmental, that cast millions of people out of work, and wiped out the savings of millions more. In a wounded country starved for heroes, who cheered for an undersized horse and an underdog boxer, perhaps it made a certain sense that a self-consciously debonair criminal like John Dillinger – who was here for the bank’s money, not yours – would capture the national attention.
In Public Enemies, Burrough recounts the period from March 1933 to January 1935 when some of the most famous gangsters in American history roamed Middle America, knocking off banks, making daring escapes, and becoming fixtures in the newspapers. During this same span, there arose a counterforce, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation, soon to be known as the F.B.I. Despite starting off as a rather inept band of bunglers, led by a man more concerned with timeliness and dress codes than effectiveness, the Bureau managed to capture or kill – mostly kill – just about every crook on their most-wanted list.
Thus, in a way, Public Enemies is a tale of competing mythologies, that of the gangs, and that of the F.B.I. That Burrough is able to deconstruct both, while also providing an extraordinarily entertaining story of murder, mayhem, and car chases, is pretty amazing.
The biggest thing that jumps out at me with regard to Public Enemies is its structure. Though it covers a period of a little less than two years, it is ambitious in its scope. This book is not just about John Dillinger and the F.B.I., but encompasses the rise and fall of Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, and Al Karpis and the Karpis-Barker Gang. Though we spend a lot of time with the gangs, Burrough also covers the G-men in pursuit, such as Melvin Purvis, Samuel Cowley, and America’s most dangerous public servant, J. Edgar Hoover. Keeping tabs on this huge cast of characters, especially the cross-cutting between the movements and heists of the various gangs, all while maintaining chronological lucidity, is a rather dazzling feat of storytelling. Everything about this approach seems bound to plunge the reader – especially someone unfamiliar with this time – into hopeless confusion. Yet that never happens here. Burrough does an excellent job with datelines, a cast of characters (complete with pictures), and a separate map for each gang, all with the purpose of providing a measure of clarity.
Public Enemies is probably among the most epic true crime stories I’ve ever read. It is approximately 550-pages long (not including endnotes), and features no shortage of outsized figures. Though Burrough occasionally displays a modern historian’s tendency towards pedantic de-romancing (especially with regards to Bonnie and Clyde, even though his beef with them seems to stem more from their embrace by the 60’s counterculture), Public Enemies has no shortage of novelistic action set pieces. There are bank robberies – obviously – but also kidnappings, ambushes, chases, jail breaks, shootouts galore, and a lot of bloodshed, all described as vividly as Burrough is able. At times, it became a bit repetitive, as one bank job bleeds – often literally – into the next. At other times, though, I found myself in the book’s grip as tightly as though I were reading great fiction.
With regard to the veracity of Public Enemies, I can only say that Burrough did his homework. This book is thoroughly sourced with contemporary documentation, supplemented by some additional interviews and his in-person visits to the scenes of the crimes. Even though Burrough adheres to a narrative style, he often interjects – both in the text and in footnotes – to describe conflicts in the evidence. For instance, Burrough makes sure to mention that “the lady in red” who accompanied Dillinger on the night of his death was actually wearing orange.
Nevertheless, I feel compelled to add – since he makes a big deal about it – that Burrough relies heavily on newly accessible F.B.I. reports. This raises a couple flags with me. First, as Burrough himself demonstrates, the F.B.I. wasn’t very good at their jobs, at least at the start. They screwed up in so many basic and fundamental ways that it is hard to take them seriously. If they can’t properly surveil a suspect’s apartment, why should I believe their written reports? Second, if the F.B.I. reports were anything like the thousands of police reports I’ve read in my years as a lawyer, then they were themselves a dubious collection of hearsay, uncorroborated statements, and speculation. To treat an F.B.I. report as supporting documentation for a book is absolutely legitimate. But to act as though these reports are superior evidence, as Burrough does, feels like a mistake. However, I hasten to add that this specific slice of history is outside my usual stomping grounds, so I cannot judge the contents with even a pretense of certainty.
Beyond the heavy reliance on F.B.I. sourcing, I’m mildly disappointed in Burrough’s unwillingness to tease any lessons from the F.B.I.’s actions during this first “War on Crime.” To be sure, the need for a federal law enforcement body to catch interstate criminals is rather self-evident. Yet there were many negative consequences attendant to that body being led by J. Edgar Hoover who – more than most – resembled a bone-eating troll living under a bridge. To that end, Burrough tends to either ignore or write off the Bureau’s civil rights violations. For example, he devotes only a sentence or two to the F.B.I.’s proclivity for killing the men they were chasing in situations that felt closer to an assassination than an arrest. It would have been nice for Burrough to have drawn some connections across space and time, to observe how things both change and stay the same (this was published in 2004, as the War on Terror was really heating up, so this reticence is all the more surprising).
In many ways, Public Enemies is an origin story. Because of men like Dillinger and Nelson, and because of Hoover’s excellent public relations skills, the F.B.I. transformed from a collection of young lawyers looking for better jobs, to an omnipresent law enforcement organization that combined technological prowess with an unhesitating willingness to venture far beyond constitutional boundaries. Like all origin stories, this one is buried beneath layers of legend and received wisdom.
Perhaps the chief accomplishment of Public Enemies is that it demythologizes its subject matter without destroying it. I have read more than a few books that – in pursuit of the “true” story – have convinced me that I shouldn’t have bothered in the first place. Here, we see plainly that Dillinger was no knight errant, and Purvis no doggedly capable pursuer, but that does not make their ultimate collision any less dramatic, violent, or real.
September 19, 2013
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.
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.
March 22, 2022
This book was recommended to me on here by several friends. It is basically a narrative of the crime wave of 1933-1934. It traces, to the extent possible, the criminal acts of Bonnie and Clyde, Lester Gillis (aka Babyface Nelson), The Barker/Karpis gang, consisting of Alvin Karpis (whom I've already written a review about his book "My 25 years on the Rock). Karpis was teamed with brothers Fred and Doc Barker, their criminal acts supposedly orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover (more on that later). It also features accounts of Oklahoma outlaw Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd and gives short shrift to Machine Gun Kelly, who, according to Burrough, was a mediocre criminal. The gangster most discussed is John Dillinger. The book also explains how this crime wave, descending on the country like a locust plague, led to the formation of the FBI and federal statutes criminalizing crimes that involved moving from one state to another while perpetrating a crime. I believe the Mann Act, forbidding the transport of women across state lines for criminal activities, had already made this particular offense a federal violation.
As an aside, from accounts I've previously read, the Mann Act was created to ensnare the scofflaw heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson, who happened to be black, dated and married white women. Johnson lived in Chicago and made occasional trips to Indiana--so the government was hoping he would make more trips and once he had done this he was charged and convicted in absentia for this outrageous offense--tried in absentia because he had fled the USA after fleeing the country.
The crimes these gangs committed ranged from kidnapping wealthy scions to bank robbery, murder of police officers and civilians while perpetrating said crimes and various and sundry offenses like carjacking, auto theft, arson and burglary.
"Public Enemies" has already been thoroughly reviewed so my review will feature takeaways from my reading of the book:
--Bonnie and Clyde--Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were both Dallas natives and at the start of 1933 they specialized in robbing gas stations and stores and were not on the same level as the Barker/Karpis gang or John Dillinger. They were romanticized in the 1967 movie (Bonnie and Clyde), as played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Author Bryan Burrough usually presents accounts of heinous crimes and outlaws with a "just the facts" sort of approach. He doesn't pass judgment on Dillinger, Karpis, Ma Barker, etc. With Bonnie and Clyde, however, he seems to have a real distaste. Comparing the later glorified depiction of Bonnie and Clyde in the eponymous movie and in American popular culture, Burrough avers:
"there was nothing romantic about Bonnie and Clyde in these tales, nothing free or rebellious or heartwarming. They were murderers, modern-day bogeymen whose approach could mean only death."
To be continued
As an aside, from accounts I've previously read, the Mann Act was created to ensnare the scofflaw heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson, who happened to be black, dated and married white women. Johnson lived in Chicago and made occasional trips to Indiana--so the government was hoping he would make more trips and once he had done this he was charged and convicted in absentia for this outrageous offense--tried in absentia because he had fled the USA after fleeing the country.
The crimes these gangs committed ranged from kidnapping wealthy scions to bank robbery, murder of police officers and civilians while perpetrating said crimes and various and sundry offenses like carjacking, auto theft, arson and burglary.
"Public Enemies" has already been thoroughly reviewed so my review will feature takeaways from my reading of the book:
--Bonnie and Clyde--Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were both Dallas natives and at the start of 1933 they specialized in robbing gas stations and stores and were not on the same level as the Barker/Karpis gang or John Dillinger. They were romanticized in the 1967 movie (Bonnie and Clyde), as played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Author Bryan Burrough usually presents accounts of heinous crimes and outlaws with a "just the facts" sort of approach. He doesn't pass judgment on Dillinger, Karpis, Ma Barker, etc. With Bonnie and Clyde, however, he seems to have a real distaste. Comparing the later glorified depiction of Bonnie and Clyde in the eponymous movie and in American popular culture, Burrough avers:
"there was nothing romantic about Bonnie and Clyde in these tales, nothing free or rebellious or heartwarming. They were murderers, modern-day bogeymen whose approach could mean only death."
To be continued
August 28, 2011
Most Filipinos still look up to America as their savior. This was rooted on the fact that the US was the one that liberated the Philippines from the Japanese during World War II. The US granted the Philippines its post-war independence on July 4, 1946 in the Treaty of Manila. However, the military bases treaty was rejected by the Philippine Senate in September 1991 and so the dreams of many young men to have a chance to join the US navy just ceased. My brother was one of those who were fortunate to get the nod of the navy screening officers in July 2006, six months after the 1986 EDSA revolution.
We grew up loving everything American. I still remember that during the 70’s and early 80’s, we used to eat California apples and oranges only during Christmas. My grandmother’s third husband served in the Fil-Am military during the war so she was allowed to go inside the military bases. Part of her visits to the bases was to purchase PX goods (means import-restricted grocery items) from the bases’ commissary stores. I used to look forward to those trips to the bases because those were the only times I could have some Pringles, marshmallow, corned beef and other imported goods that were not available outside the military bases.
Part of that love for everything American was not only limited to their grocery items. We also imbibed their culture: music, fashion, books and even films. Even up to now, we flock to the bookstores during the release of famous American books or still stay tuned to National Book Awards or Pulitzer and buy and read their nominated and winning books. We still look at the list of New York Times Bestsellers that one of the bookstore chains in the country visibly posts in their outlets. We still watch Oscar-award nominated and winning movies.
Oh I loved Hollywood. Watching the Oscars used to be the most-awaited annual event for me while growing up. This includes watching everything they create including gangster films. In 1967, for example, Warner Bros., Seven Arts’ Bonnie and Clyde was one the 5 nominated films for the Best Picture then a couple of years after, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid also got the jurors’ nod. Of course, the 70’s was dominated by the Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather's first two parts and was capped by the final part sometime in the early 80’s. The three parts of the series made a record in the Oscars as the only trilogy that each part was nominated in the Oscar Best Picture award. Only the first two won.
I loved those gangster films. I still vividly remember how Bonnie and Clyde looked like in that movie and the final scene before they died. I enjoyed and held my breath while watching Butch and his partner got cornered and died. I watched countless times the Godfather series then I bought their copies in all formats: Beta, VHS, VCD, DVD and last year, Blu-Ray.
This book, Public Enemies chronicles the founding and the rise to power of the most-admired and most-feared (by the criminals) organization in the US – the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation). No history of FBI, of course, can be said without mentioning its first director, J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972). He was appointed in 1924 to head the Bureau of Investigation and he founded FBI in 1935. He was still its chief when he died in 1972. He had some excesses and it is for this reason why FBI directors now are limited to 10-year terms.
We all know about the Depression Era in the 30’s. We were shocked to read about this – in relation the the Dust Bowl - in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March and Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust. The characters in those works suffered a lot because of poverty: lack of job, lack of food. Some resourceful elements in the society, on the other hand, did not wait for them to die hungry. Pretty Boy Floyd (1904-1934), an American bank robber, was said to be have only been a victim of hard times. The Depression era gave birth not only to Floyd but to a flurry of criminal gangs carrying out large numbers of bank robberies especially in the Midwest. They outran and outsmarted the FBI organization, while in its infantile stage, by having superior firepower and fast getaway cars. For example, the book says that Bonnie was not good in handling guns, what made him escape the police each time was his excellent driving skills. Alvin “Creepy” Karvis (1907-1979) known for his alliance with Barker Gang and his being the last public enemy to be taken.
However, the most prolific of them all, based on this book’s narration, was John Dillinger (1903-1934). He crossed states (that made his crimes, federal). He was charged for a murder of a police office but was not convicted. He was jailed twice but escaped twice too. He and his partner, Baby Face Nelson (1908-1934) are on the centerfold in this book and I could not help myself be in awe and admire the clever moves and thinking of this duo.
I know that doing those crimes is unlawful and not worthy of admiration. However, the little boy inside my old man’s body still sometimes craves for fast-paced car chase, ear-shattering bombs, body-pulverizing armalite shootings and blood-splattering murders. Then having those well-made films really completes the picture of this boyhood fantasy because they appear more sincere than the computer-enhanced camera tricks that we see in action films nowadays.
Filipinos had neither Dust Bowl nor Depression Era in its history (because we are always depressed). However, we also had gangster movies like Nardong Putik, Waway, Boy Pana, Totoy Bato and Totoy Mola ha ha. I wish somebody make an indie film that will include all those boyhood crime heroes and let them kill each other carambola style.
We grew up loving everything American. I still remember that during the 70’s and early 80’s, we used to eat California apples and oranges only during Christmas. My grandmother’s third husband served in the Fil-Am military during the war so she was allowed to go inside the military bases. Part of her visits to the bases was to purchase PX goods (means import-restricted grocery items) from the bases’ commissary stores. I used to look forward to those trips to the bases because those were the only times I could have some Pringles, marshmallow, corned beef and other imported goods that were not available outside the military bases.
Part of that love for everything American was not only limited to their grocery items. We also imbibed their culture: music, fashion, books and even films. Even up to now, we flock to the bookstores during the release of famous American books or still stay tuned to National Book Awards or Pulitzer and buy and read their nominated and winning books. We still look at the list of New York Times Bestsellers that one of the bookstore chains in the country visibly posts in their outlets. We still watch Oscar-award nominated and winning movies.
Oh I loved Hollywood. Watching the Oscars used to be the most-awaited annual event for me while growing up. This includes watching everything they create including gangster films. In 1967, for example, Warner Bros., Seven Arts’ Bonnie and Clyde was one the 5 nominated films for the Best Picture then a couple of years after, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid also got the jurors’ nod. Of course, the 70’s was dominated by the Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather's first two parts and was capped by the final part sometime in the early 80’s. The three parts of the series made a record in the Oscars as the only trilogy that each part was nominated in the Oscar Best Picture award. Only the first two won.
I loved those gangster films. I still vividly remember how Bonnie and Clyde looked like in that movie and the final scene before they died. I enjoyed and held my breath while watching Butch and his partner got cornered and died. I watched countless times the Godfather series then I bought their copies in all formats: Beta, VHS, VCD, DVD and last year, Blu-Ray.
This book, Public Enemies chronicles the founding and the rise to power of the most-admired and most-feared (by the criminals) organization in the US – the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation). No history of FBI, of course, can be said without mentioning its first director, J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972). He was appointed in 1924 to head the Bureau of Investigation and he founded FBI in 1935. He was still its chief when he died in 1972. He had some excesses and it is for this reason why FBI directors now are limited to 10-year terms.
We all know about the Depression Era in the 30’s. We were shocked to read about this – in relation the the Dust Bowl - in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March and Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust. The characters in those works suffered a lot because of poverty: lack of job, lack of food. Some resourceful elements in the society, on the other hand, did not wait for them to die hungry. Pretty Boy Floyd (1904-1934), an American bank robber, was said to be have only been a victim of hard times. The Depression era gave birth not only to Floyd but to a flurry of criminal gangs carrying out large numbers of bank robberies especially in the Midwest. They outran and outsmarted the FBI organization, while in its infantile stage, by having superior firepower and fast getaway cars. For example, the book says that Bonnie was not good in handling guns, what made him escape the police each time was his excellent driving skills. Alvin “Creepy” Karvis (1907-1979) known for his alliance with Barker Gang and his being the last public enemy to be taken.
However, the most prolific of them all, based on this book’s narration, was John Dillinger (1903-1934). He crossed states (that made his crimes, federal). He was charged for a murder of a police office but was not convicted. He was jailed twice but escaped twice too. He and his partner, Baby Face Nelson (1908-1934) are on the centerfold in this book and I could not help myself be in awe and admire the clever moves and thinking of this duo.
I know that doing those crimes is unlawful and not worthy of admiration. However, the little boy inside my old man’s body still sometimes craves for fast-paced car chase, ear-shattering bombs, body-pulverizing armalite shootings and blood-splattering murders. Then having those well-made films really completes the picture of this boyhood fantasy because they appear more sincere than the computer-enhanced camera tricks that we see in action films nowadays.
Filipinos had neither Dust Bowl nor Depression Era in its history (because we are always depressed). However, we also had gangster movies like Nardong Putik, Waway, Boy Pana, Totoy Bato and Totoy Mola ha ha. I wish somebody make an indie film that will include all those boyhood crime heroes and let them kill each other carambola style.
April 13, 2017
I made Hoover's reputation as a fearless lawman. It's a reputation he doesn't deserve...I made that son of a bitch
Alvin Karpis
Forget about all the hollywood versions of these characters you've ever seen. They're all romanticized and lead the viewer from the real facts of those years of 1934 and 1935. As a matter of fact, Bonnie and Clyde were practically unknown until the 1967 movie made legends of the two.
Public Enemies is a detailed account about the birth of the FBI and their birth pangs during their 'War On Crime' experience in bringing down the likes of John Dillinger, Prettyboy Floyd, George 'Machinegun' Kelly, Baby Face Nelson and the Karpis-Barker gang.
Burrough did a fabulous job giving a detailed account of the outlaws with all their members and accomplices, as well as a play by play chronological description of those years from the Kansas City Massacre to the arrest of Alvin Karpis.
What stood out to me throughout the ordeal was the ineptitude and corruption of the police force and the FBI. I'm not sure who was worse, the gangs or the government? I guess much hasn't changed in all these years!
This is a very detailed book so it can be a bit tough to trudge through in places, but for an accurate account of the true story, you won't find a better resource than this one.
January 20, 2019
A 550 page book that reads fast. Highly recommended. Really enjoyed how he painted the outlaws and the law in their true colors. The FBI and the local law enforcement are inept and/or corrupt in the beginning but the FBI gets better after many failed "battles" and real losses. The outlaws are not very bright for the most part but clever in many ways. Also lucky. Hollywood did a real disservice with the movie Bonnie and Clyde. These two were not in any way romantic or admirable, as they were portrayed in the movie. It was surprising how short the time was from beginning to end of the gangs and "public enemies". One thing missing is a good explanation of the general society and why some of the outlaws were seen as heroic. 4 Stars
May 15, 2017
A well researched account of the crime wave that swept across the Midwestern United States in the early years of the Great Depression. In my opinion interesting for it's look at the last gasp of the colorful, daring, individualistic, outlaw criminal class.
By the early 1930's the world was changing. For better or worse the United States Federal government was becoming more centralized and beginning to control greater resources - quickly surpassing what state and local governments could call on. The population was becoming more regulated (income tax, social security,voter registration rolls, driver licenses), connected (telephones, automobiles, telegraphs, radio) and urban.
The 19th century was fading away and the fast moving motor bandits ,like Dillinger, were actually artifacts from the previous century. They had a brief, but glorious comeback in the late Twenties and early Thirties for a number of reasons. Technology (automobiles & automatic weapons) gave them the ability to move rapidly and overwhelm the poorly equipped/trained/paid police officers of that time. The laws restricted the ability of the various state and local police agencies to pursue across different jurisdictional boundaries and ,with the onset of the Depression, they found many sympathizers within the population who would aid them. Oh and organized crime also allowed them access to it's considerable resources.
More than a blow by blow account of the F.B.I.'s pursuit of the motor bandits Bryan Burrough provides a look at a transitional time in America's past. Now it's true that change is always happening, but there are moments in history when the changes are almost quantum leaps and the Great Depression was one of those moments.
In the early thirties Americans were becoming used to being part of a bigger, centrally organized society. It had been happening since the Civil War, but it accelerated with World War One and then the New Deal under F.D.R. made it essential. It was vital that Americans felt like they could look to the Federal government for many different things. The maintenance of law and order was one of the biggies. The bandits were too popular with many in the population. They were making a laughing stock of the police and undermining the authority of the government. The New Deal required people to believe in the competence of the government and it's employees. The bandits had to be brought down.. Hoover wanted the job and it was handed to him and his F.B.I.
Burrough provides a blow by blow account and at times it gets rather dry, but I like the fact that he also shows a pivotal time in the United States and writes about the changes.He did not set out to provide a pulp-fiction account. He didn't write and episode for Gangbusters. As a police officer I could see the beginning of modern law enforcement as I read the book. It's a shaky start and at times the F.B.I.'s actions are bungling and frustrating. It was a very steep learning curve and the agents were starting with no foundation under their feet. But through luck (some of it dumb), hard work, the growing realization that they had greater resources and figuring out how to employ those resources (to include passing Federal laws which resulted in the Mob cutting them off from assistance) ,and the bandits eventually making too many mistakes, the Bureau and different police agencies got most of the bandits.
Burrough shows what law enforcement is about. Much of it is tedious, boring and requires a slavish attention to detail. Occasionally it is broken up by moments of violence and terror and humor. It's a well written account. It isn't sensationalized, it isn't a character assassination of J. Edgar Hoover and it isn't a fluff piece. It's solid, well-researched and intelligently written.
By the early 1930's the world was changing. For better or worse the United States Federal government was becoming more centralized and beginning to control greater resources - quickly surpassing what state and local governments could call on. The population was becoming more regulated (income tax, social security,voter registration rolls, driver licenses), connected (telephones, automobiles, telegraphs, radio) and urban.
The 19th century was fading away and the fast moving motor bandits ,like Dillinger, were actually artifacts from the previous century. They had a brief, but glorious comeback in the late Twenties and early Thirties for a number of reasons. Technology (automobiles & automatic weapons) gave them the ability to move rapidly and overwhelm the poorly equipped/trained/paid police officers of that time. The laws restricted the ability of the various state and local police agencies to pursue across different jurisdictional boundaries and ,with the onset of the Depression, they found many sympathizers within the population who would aid them. Oh and organized crime also allowed them access to it's considerable resources.
More than a blow by blow account of the F.B.I.'s pursuit of the motor bandits Bryan Burrough provides a look at a transitional time in America's past. Now it's true that change is always happening, but there are moments in history when the changes are almost quantum leaps and the Great Depression was one of those moments.
In the early thirties Americans were becoming used to being part of a bigger, centrally organized society. It had been happening since the Civil War, but it accelerated with World War One and then the New Deal under F.D.R. made it essential. It was vital that Americans felt like they could look to the Federal government for many different things. The maintenance of law and order was one of the biggies. The bandits were too popular with many in the population. They were making a laughing stock of the police and undermining the authority of the government. The New Deal required people to believe in the competence of the government and it's employees. The bandits had to be brought down.. Hoover wanted the job and it was handed to him and his F.B.I.
Burrough provides a blow by blow account and at times it gets rather dry, but I like the fact that he also shows a pivotal time in the United States and writes about the changes.He did not set out to provide a pulp-fiction account. He didn't write and episode for Gangbusters. As a police officer I could see the beginning of modern law enforcement as I read the book. It's a shaky start and at times the F.B.I.'s actions are bungling and frustrating. It was a very steep learning curve and the agents were starting with no foundation under their feet. But through luck (some of it dumb), hard work, the growing realization that they had greater resources and figuring out how to employ those resources (to include passing Federal laws which resulted in the Mob cutting them off from assistance) ,and the bandits eventually making too many mistakes, the Bureau and different police agencies got most of the bandits.
Burrough shows what law enforcement is about. Much of it is tedious, boring and requires a slavish attention to detail. Occasionally it is broken up by moments of violence and terror and humor. It's a well written account. It isn't sensationalized, it isn't a character assassination of J. Edgar Hoover and it isn't a fluff piece. It's solid, well-researched and intelligently written.
July 31, 2011
This book was a major disappointment. The best thing about it is that it has clearly been well researched. The problem is that the author seems more interested in proving the extent of his research than telling a good story. A lot of the footnotes give biographical detail of people who are only mentioned once in the story. This lack of focus really harms what should be a pacy and exhilirating read.
Ultimately, the author seems to want to cover the war on crime in a scholarly fashion. If he had chosen to write this in a more "pulp" manner, this would have been a much better book. Instead, he has taken a story of gangsters and bank robbers and gunfights and managed to do what should have been impossible - he has made it boring.
Ultimately, the author seems to want to cover the war on crime in a scholarly fashion. If he had chosen to write this in a more "pulp" manner, this would have been a much better book. Instead, he has taken a story of gangsters and bank robbers and gunfights and managed to do what should have been impossible - he has made it boring.
August 11, 2012
It's a tired cliché to say the book's better than the movie, but here it's far truer than usual.
Michael Mann's "Public Enemies" was one of our best director's worst movies. On paper, it looked like a great combination; he likes cops and criminals, and his criminals tend to be too cool for neckties, as was Dillinger. But the movie unexpectedly fell victim to his strange obsession with shooting things on digital video. Perhaps his intent was to give it a gritty you-are-there feel, but while that works with some film techniques and some historical eras, this combination simply failed, and it ended up looking like a cheesy History Channel documentary. (The all-important illusion, whereby a great movie can make you forget you're watching a movie, failed; a little part of my brain kept saying, "Hey, they didn't have digital video in the 30s!" I never for a moment felt like I was watching John Dillinger, but remained conscious instead of the fact that I was watching Michael Mann shooting Johnny Depp playing Dillinger. The only things I liked were that a close personal friend had a prominent role as an extra, and that they shot on location in Chicago and dressed up the place where Dillinger was shot in 1930s facades, so I had the chance to go there and set my camera on sepia and take pictures of myself with the Biograph Theater in the background and tell people I'd been on a time-travel vacation. I digress.)
ANYWAY, yet another failing of the movie--and to be fair to Mr. Mann, one that may have been unavoidable unless he'd stretched this into a miniseries--was that it only paid attention to the relatively well-known story of Dillinger's life and death, ignoring the other gripping stories that were simultaneously captivating a Depression-weary nation and turning a once-insignificant branch of the Justice Department into a powerful national police force. For Brian Burrough's book gives us not just Dillinger, but four other narratives--Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the Barkers.
Only the first of those is well-remembered these days, and that only as a Hollywood-ized glamorization of a couple whose story, not very well known before the Warren Beatty film, provided a nearly blank canvas for some ambitious screenwriters to paint an early-30s story in late-60s colors. But all five of these threads tied together over the course of a remarkable two-year period in the 1930s, collectively leading to the federalization of American law enforcement. Indeed, Dillinger et. al. did for this sphere of life what the Federal Reserve did for banking--take an area of public policy out of the hands of possibly crooked local authorities and place it in the hands of possibly incompetent national ones. Arguably this was as necessary in this sphere as it was in the other; certainly motorized travel had revolutionized the ability of criminals to commit a crime in one jurisdiction and flee to another--or across the country, for that matter--before anyone knew what had happened. Still, with J. Edgar Hoover placing a premium on smarts, neatness, and obedience and neglecting, you know, actual law enforcement skills, the agents under his purview missed many opportunities and made many catastrophic mistakes before these criminals were brought to bay. (A prime culprit is Melvin Purvis, the G-Man who, as legend has it, successfully led the Dillinger pursuit--and who in reality missed many prime opportunities to capture Dillinger before being quietly relieved of his leadership position prior to Dillinger's demise.)
Burrough spends just enough time looking at the big picture to render some perspective; he places far more of an emphasis on the nitty gritty, the detailed minutiae of the cases in question. This gives the book heft, and like any heavy object, there's a certain amount of inertia to it; the beginning chapters are so full of introductions and lead-ins to a variety of complicated cases and personalities that it makes for slow reading. (Also, he's too honest a writer and reporter to pretend he knows the truth in those cases where there's conflicting credible evidence.) But his honesty, diligence and hard work in turn sets up some great set pieces once the book gets moving; the chapter on the bloody and disastrous raid on Dillinger's temporary hideout at the Little Bohemia cabins in Northern Wisconsin makes for an incredibly taut read, and the chapter which wraps up the stories of Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson is one of the most gripping pieces of nonfiction I've ever read; indeed, I plowed through the last 150 pages of the book in a single day.
As gripping as this book is in the end, though, perhaps its most important virtue is the slower parts, for these make it a definitive narrative of J. Edgar Hoover's War on Crime. Unlike the public enemies in question--and the lawmen who used their stories to gain power and prestige, and the mythmakers who sold redacted versions of those stories to the public--"Public Enemies" doesn't hold us hostage and feed us a limited set of facts. Burrough puts everything out there, the romantic and the sordid, the heroic and the ugly. His intent, it seems, isn't to undermine this breathless and compelling narrative, but to flesh it out properly, to tell it without sacrificing its factual integrity--in short, to get as close as possible to the unknowable truth. The truth shall set you free, it is said--and fortunately it makes for a great book, too.
Michael Mann's "Public Enemies" was one of our best director's worst movies. On paper, it looked like a great combination; he likes cops and criminals, and his criminals tend to be too cool for neckties, as was Dillinger. But the movie unexpectedly fell victim to his strange obsession with shooting things on digital video. Perhaps his intent was to give it a gritty you-are-there feel, but while that works with some film techniques and some historical eras, this combination simply failed, and it ended up looking like a cheesy History Channel documentary. (The all-important illusion, whereby a great movie can make you forget you're watching a movie, failed; a little part of my brain kept saying, "Hey, they didn't have digital video in the 30s!" I never for a moment felt like I was watching John Dillinger, but remained conscious instead of the fact that I was watching Michael Mann shooting Johnny Depp playing Dillinger. The only things I liked were that a close personal friend had a prominent role as an extra, and that they shot on location in Chicago and dressed up the place where Dillinger was shot in 1930s facades, so I had the chance to go there and set my camera on sepia and take pictures of myself with the Biograph Theater in the background and tell people I'd been on a time-travel vacation. I digress.)
ANYWAY, yet another failing of the movie--and to be fair to Mr. Mann, one that may have been unavoidable unless he'd stretched this into a miniseries--was that it only paid attention to the relatively well-known story of Dillinger's life and death, ignoring the other gripping stories that were simultaneously captivating a Depression-weary nation and turning a once-insignificant branch of the Justice Department into a powerful national police force. For Brian Burrough's book gives us not just Dillinger, but four other narratives--Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the Barkers.
Only the first of those is well-remembered these days, and that only as a Hollywood-ized glamorization of a couple whose story, not very well known before the Warren Beatty film, provided a nearly blank canvas for some ambitious screenwriters to paint an early-30s story in late-60s colors. But all five of these threads tied together over the course of a remarkable two-year period in the 1930s, collectively leading to the federalization of American law enforcement. Indeed, Dillinger et. al. did for this sphere of life what the Federal Reserve did for banking--take an area of public policy out of the hands of possibly crooked local authorities and place it in the hands of possibly incompetent national ones. Arguably this was as necessary in this sphere as it was in the other; certainly motorized travel had revolutionized the ability of criminals to commit a crime in one jurisdiction and flee to another--or across the country, for that matter--before anyone knew what had happened. Still, with J. Edgar Hoover placing a premium on smarts, neatness, and obedience and neglecting, you know, actual law enforcement skills, the agents under his purview missed many opportunities and made many catastrophic mistakes before these criminals were brought to bay. (A prime culprit is Melvin Purvis, the G-Man who, as legend has it, successfully led the Dillinger pursuit--and who in reality missed many prime opportunities to capture Dillinger before being quietly relieved of his leadership position prior to Dillinger's demise.)
Burrough spends just enough time looking at the big picture to render some perspective; he places far more of an emphasis on the nitty gritty, the detailed minutiae of the cases in question. This gives the book heft, and like any heavy object, there's a certain amount of inertia to it; the beginning chapters are so full of introductions and lead-ins to a variety of complicated cases and personalities that it makes for slow reading. (Also, he's too honest a writer and reporter to pretend he knows the truth in those cases where there's conflicting credible evidence.) But his honesty, diligence and hard work in turn sets up some great set pieces once the book gets moving; the chapter on the bloody and disastrous raid on Dillinger's temporary hideout at the Little Bohemia cabins in Northern Wisconsin makes for an incredibly taut read, and the chapter which wraps up the stories of Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson is one of the most gripping pieces of nonfiction I've ever read; indeed, I plowed through the last 150 pages of the book in a single day.
As gripping as this book is in the end, though, perhaps its most important virtue is the slower parts, for these make it a definitive narrative of J. Edgar Hoover's War on Crime. Unlike the public enemies in question--and the lawmen who used their stories to gain power and prestige, and the mythmakers who sold redacted versions of those stories to the public--"Public Enemies" doesn't hold us hostage and feed us a limited set of facts. Burrough puts everything out there, the romantic and the sordid, the heroic and the ugly. His intent, it seems, isn't to undermine this breathless and compelling narrative, but to flesh it out properly, to tell it without sacrificing its factual integrity--in short, to get as close as possible to the unknowable truth. The truth shall set you free, it is said--and fortunately it makes for a great book, too.
May 6, 2019
4.5 rounded up . A good read . Very well researched .
January 3, 2019
So much gangsta crime the year this book covers! I had no idea. The country was in the grip of the Great Depression and these various criminals took matters into their own hands to seek money and fame across American. Hoover was on the case and his newly assigned G men were a tad Keystone for awhile. This is the story
August 3, 2009
This is a fascinating book. I learned more than I thought possible about early outlaws, such as John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, and the Barker Gang. I also learned how the FBI's pursuit of these gangs--beginning with one disastrous error after another--helped "make" the agency what it is today.
Some interesting contextual factors. Many of the "outlaws" examined were of relatively little moment compared with the gangs, the Mafia, and so on. Bonnie and Clyde, for instance, were scarcely known by the public at large.
The FBI, before the events of 1933-1936, was a kind of backwater agency, without a clearly defined mission. There was even talk, with Franklin Roosevelt's election, that the agency's head, J. Edgar Hoover, would be removed. After an effort to bring a criminal to justice, the "Kansas City Massacre" occurred, in which the FBI's effort failed, Hoover began to consider a more active role in criminal investigation and action, focusing on well know gangs and criminals (with much focus on the gangs mentioned earlier).
The book itself is almost like a slow dance, going back and forth (in largely chronological sequence) between the different gangs and the FBI. We see the robberies and murders carried out by the gangs (varying from the psychopathic Machine Gun Kelly to the more "urbane" [if one can use such a term:] John Dillinger). We see the relationships among gang members (sometimes moving from one gang to another), the development and ending of relationships with women, and the mythology (Ma Barker was not anything like a criminal mastermind, and Bonnie and Clyde were looked at as minor leaguers).
The FBI part of the story began with them as clueless about how to operate in the field (they were weak in understanding the use of guns before the campaign against the gangs began); they were inept on the simplest elements of sleuthing (including observation of suspects, how to surround "bad guys" so that they could not escape, an appalling lack of follow up on some terrific leads). Early on? "Amateur hour."
But the FBI learned and began to reel the gangs and their members in. . . .
A fascinating book. If you are interested in the era, the gangs, and the role of the FBI, this will be a fine read.
Some interesting contextual factors. Many of the "outlaws" examined were of relatively little moment compared with the gangs, the Mafia, and so on. Bonnie and Clyde, for instance, were scarcely known by the public at large.
The FBI, before the events of 1933-1936, was a kind of backwater agency, without a clearly defined mission. There was even talk, with Franklin Roosevelt's election, that the agency's head, J. Edgar Hoover, would be removed. After an effort to bring a criminal to justice, the "Kansas City Massacre" occurred, in which the FBI's effort failed, Hoover began to consider a more active role in criminal investigation and action, focusing on well know gangs and criminals (with much focus on the gangs mentioned earlier).
The book itself is almost like a slow dance, going back and forth (in largely chronological sequence) between the different gangs and the FBI. We see the robberies and murders carried out by the gangs (varying from the psychopathic Machine Gun Kelly to the more "urbane" [if one can use such a term:] John Dillinger). We see the relationships among gang members (sometimes moving from one gang to another), the development and ending of relationships with women, and the mythology (Ma Barker was not anything like a criminal mastermind, and Bonnie and Clyde were looked at as minor leaguers).
The FBI part of the story began with them as clueless about how to operate in the field (they were weak in understanding the use of guns before the campaign against the gangs began); they were inept on the simplest elements of sleuthing (including observation of suspects, how to surround "bad guys" so that they could not escape, an appalling lack of follow up on some terrific leads). Early on? "Amateur hour."
But the FBI learned and began to reel the gangs and their members in. . . .
A fascinating book. If you are interested in the era, the gangs, and the role of the FBI, this will be a fine read.
July 2, 2021
Okay but spread too thin. It was hard to get focused when the author kept jumping from Dillinger to Bonnie and Clyde to Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd. The most interesting part of the book is that it reveals so much about the FBI, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Bureau made an endless series of costly mistakes and Director Hoover blatantly lied to the press whenever it suited his purposes. Of course things in government are very different today!
August 4, 2011
An in-depth look at a two-year period when Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Ma Barker's Gang, and Machine Gun Kelly were all active. This book tells the parallel stories of this group of criminals and the FBI.
At this time, the fledgling FBI was essentially a group of lawyers, modeled after Scotland Yard, and had to work hard to catch up to the guns and cars these bank robbers were using. Predictably, J. Edgar Hoover comes off as a publicity-hungry fool who used the crime wave to help himself politically but couldn't have run a hot dog stand. The foibles of the FBI are laid bare here - not just bad luck but sheer incompetence and lack of creativity.
Of the criminals, the author is clearly enamored of Dillinger and spends a good part of the book detailing his exploits during this time. Bonnie and Clyde were apparently failures as bank robbers; it was only the movie in the 60s that gave them any cultural cache. Ma Barker was a criminal mastermind only in Hoover's head. A little known (to me) criminal named Alvin Karpis is portrayed here as a smart fascinating character.
Overall, this was long, well-researched, and gripping. Burroughs has written one of those non-fiction books that feels like a great novel.
At this time, the fledgling FBI was essentially a group of lawyers, modeled after Scotland Yard, and had to work hard to catch up to the guns and cars these bank robbers were using. Predictably, J. Edgar Hoover comes off as a publicity-hungry fool who used the crime wave to help himself politically but couldn't have run a hot dog stand. The foibles of the FBI are laid bare here - not just bad luck but sheer incompetence and lack of creativity.
Of the criminals, the author is clearly enamored of Dillinger and spends a good part of the book detailing his exploits during this time. Bonnie and Clyde were apparently failures as bank robbers; it was only the movie in the 60s that gave them any cultural cache. Ma Barker was a criminal mastermind only in Hoover's head. A little known (to me) criminal named Alvin Karpis is portrayed here as a smart fascinating character.
Overall, this was long, well-researched, and gripping. Burroughs has written one of those non-fiction books that feels like a great novel.
April 7, 2024
Really enjoyed reading about the gangsters of the 30’s and 40’s. Language like “ you better scram” and “coppers” made me laugh and was refreshing. Some gang members would throw up before robbing a bank. Most gangsters were well dressed always in suits, ties and hats. The FBI was created in the 30’s and the requirements for being hired were: well dressed, polite and a college graduate. Let’s just say the FBI was ill equipped to capture gangsters.
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August 3, 2009HARD PRINT http://www.theleadmiamibeach.com/2009...
Public Enemies
The Film Opens This Weekend, But Have You Read the Book?
By John Hood
It’s unlikely that even the most holed-up prison escapee hasn’t heard that Michael Mann’s rip-roaring Public Enemies opened all over the country this week. I mean, this flick has more hype behind it than any ten Britney Spears records combined. It’s undoubtedly a whole lot better for you too. And if you can’t cotton to the idea of Johnny Depp playing John Dillinger in a movie made by the same cat who directed Heat, well, you best stop reading here.
Me? I’ll be the best-informed fan-boy at the screening. Why? Because I’ve been reading the source material, that’s why. And it is dynamite.
Yep, before there was the star-studded motion picture, there was Bryan Burrough’s badass book, Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 (Penguin, $16). It’s a bullet-riddled read, with a line-up of many of the most famous names in American crimedom, and it works not just as history, but as myth-buster, revealing the real down low on a very low down breed.
Take Bonnie and Clyde. Unlike the glam duo in the 1967 blockbuster motion picture, “the real Bonnie and Clyde were neither rebels nor philosophers,” they were “lazy drifters who murdered a dozen innocent men during and between hold-ups.” Bonnie was a blue-eyed runt, “an inch under five feet,” prone to histrionics, and “an avid reader of detective and movie magazines.” Clyde was “vain and preening,” and, according to a friend, “had been repeatedly raped in prison and would do anything to avoid going back.” And if that meant senseless murder, so be it.
They were also incompetent criminals and “their contemporaries showed them little but contempt.” “At a time when veteran yeggs reaped $50,000 from a single bank robbery, Bonnie and Clyde’s biggest take was barely $3,800.” In fact, “they robbed more gas stations and drugstores than banks.”
But the ineptness wasn’t limited to Bonnie and Clyde; their gang was pretty doltish too. So were a few other fabled names. And Burrough explicitly lists ‘em all:
One of Clyde’s sidekicks lets a farmer escape from the house they’re holed up in. Blanche Barrow tells the pharmacist which Motor Court she’s staying in when she goes for Bonnie’s bandages. Machine Gun Kelly, whose chronic vomiting before every bank robbery incites his colleagues to ditch him, floods the engine of his car when he gets in to drive to a ransom drop.
At the time, the FBI weren’t much better, coming off more akin to the Keystone Kops than anything Efram Zimbalist Jr. would portray in the classic ‘60s TV show. One agent checks for phone records by mail, and wastes precious days; another agent ignores a crucial tip from a colleague, and lets the bad guys get away; and the one copy of an outlaw’s only photo gets borrowed and never returned. To make matters worse, back in early ’33 the FBI agents weren’t even armed and had to call-on the local law to arrest whoever it was they were after.
Then it happened. Four lawmen were gunned down in broad daylight during an inept attempt to free long-time Barker Gang confederate Frank Nash, still considered the most successful bank robber in U.S. history. It was a bold and bloody move, and gave Hoover the ammunition he needed to start arming his agents and beefing up the Bureau so that they could really fight the “War on Crime.”
That incident was called The Kansas City Massacre. And it remains a pivotal point in the lives of the bad guys, who’d all go on to suffer its wrath, as well as the Bureau, who used it as a pretext for a nationwide police force. From that crime on it became a federal offense to kidnap, cross state lines while committing crimes, and to kill a federal agent.
And it marks the beginning of the end to a primarily Midwestern crime spree that included not only “Machine Gun” Kelly, Frank Nash, the Barker Family and Bonnie and Clyde, but “Baby Face” Nelson, “Pretty Boy” Floyd and, of course, John Dillinger, perhaps the most truly glamorous of that era’s legion of bad guys and certainly deserving of the major amount of ink he gets here.
Burrough, the scribe behind Barbarians at the Gate and a special correspondent at Vanity Fair, is so thorough a reporter he even gets the titles of the pieces a Kansas City hotel lobby pianist plays as an FBI agent and an Oklahoma City oil man wait for word from a kidnapper. He also gets the sweep of things, how a legendary legion of gun-toting low-lifes wreaked havoc throughout the nation’s midsection and a pansy-panted D.C. bureaucrat assembled a government cadre to put ‘em all down.
No punches are pulled, no holds are barred, and no detail goes uncovered. This is crime writing at its finest, an action-packed tell-all that leaves you reeling. And if the flick provides even an echo of this book’s bang, it’s gonna knock you on your ass.
Public Enemies
The Film Opens This Weekend, But Have You Read the Book?
By John Hood
It’s unlikely that even the most holed-up prison escapee hasn’t heard that Michael Mann’s rip-roaring Public Enemies opened all over the country this week. I mean, this flick has more hype behind it than any ten Britney Spears records combined. It’s undoubtedly a whole lot better for you too. And if you can’t cotton to the idea of Johnny Depp playing John Dillinger in a movie made by the same cat who directed Heat, well, you best stop reading here.
Me? I’ll be the best-informed fan-boy at the screening. Why? Because I’ve been reading the source material, that’s why. And it is dynamite.
Yep, before there was the star-studded motion picture, there was Bryan Burrough’s badass book, Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 (Penguin, $16). It’s a bullet-riddled read, with a line-up of many of the most famous names in American crimedom, and it works not just as history, but as myth-buster, revealing the real down low on a very low down breed.
Take Bonnie and Clyde. Unlike the glam duo in the 1967 blockbuster motion picture, “the real Bonnie and Clyde were neither rebels nor philosophers,” they were “lazy drifters who murdered a dozen innocent men during and between hold-ups.” Bonnie was a blue-eyed runt, “an inch under five feet,” prone to histrionics, and “an avid reader of detective and movie magazines.” Clyde was “vain and preening,” and, according to a friend, “had been repeatedly raped in prison and would do anything to avoid going back.” And if that meant senseless murder, so be it.
They were also incompetent criminals and “their contemporaries showed them little but contempt.” “At a time when veteran yeggs reaped $50,000 from a single bank robbery, Bonnie and Clyde’s biggest take was barely $3,800.” In fact, “they robbed more gas stations and drugstores than banks.”
But the ineptness wasn’t limited to Bonnie and Clyde; their gang was pretty doltish too. So were a few other fabled names. And Burrough explicitly lists ‘em all:
One of Clyde’s sidekicks lets a farmer escape from the house they’re holed up in. Blanche Barrow tells the pharmacist which Motor Court she’s staying in when she goes for Bonnie’s bandages. Machine Gun Kelly, whose chronic vomiting before every bank robbery incites his colleagues to ditch him, floods the engine of his car when he gets in to drive to a ransom drop.
At the time, the FBI weren’t much better, coming off more akin to the Keystone Kops than anything Efram Zimbalist Jr. would portray in the classic ‘60s TV show. One agent checks for phone records by mail, and wastes precious days; another agent ignores a crucial tip from a colleague, and lets the bad guys get away; and the one copy of an outlaw’s only photo gets borrowed and never returned. To make matters worse, back in early ’33 the FBI agents weren’t even armed and had to call-on the local law to arrest whoever it was they were after.
Then it happened. Four lawmen were gunned down in broad daylight during an inept attempt to free long-time Barker Gang confederate Frank Nash, still considered the most successful bank robber in U.S. history. It was a bold and bloody move, and gave Hoover the ammunition he needed to start arming his agents and beefing up the Bureau so that they could really fight the “War on Crime.”
That incident was called The Kansas City Massacre. And it remains a pivotal point in the lives of the bad guys, who’d all go on to suffer its wrath, as well as the Bureau, who used it as a pretext for a nationwide police force. From that crime on it became a federal offense to kidnap, cross state lines while committing crimes, and to kill a federal agent.
And it marks the beginning of the end to a primarily Midwestern crime spree that included not only “Machine Gun” Kelly, Frank Nash, the Barker Family and Bonnie and Clyde, but “Baby Face” Nelson, “Pretty Boy” Floyd and, of course, John Dillinger, perhaps the most truly glamorous of that era’s legion of bad guys and certainly deserving of the major amount of ink he gets here.
Burrough, the scribe behind Barbarians at the Gate and a special correspondent at Vanity Fair, is so thorough a reporter he even gets the titles of the pieces a Kansas City hotel lobby pianist plays as an FBI agent and an Oklahoma City oil man wait for word from a kidnapper. He also gets the sweep of things, how a legendary legion of gun-toting low-lifes wreaked havoc throughout the nation’s midsection and a pansy-panted D.C. bureaucrat assembled a government cadre to put ‘em all down.
No punches are pulled, no holds are barred, and no detail goes uncovered. This is crime writing at its finest, an action-packed tell-all that leaves you reeling. And if the flick provides even an echo of this book’s bang, it’s gonna knock you on your ass.
April 25, 2009
Pulp history
I always wanted to be a G-man.
Burrough's treatment of 1930s crime is only a few generations away from the books I devoured as a kid. Books chock full of hoods, coppers, molls and bullets. Mel Purvis bringing down Dillinger & and Ma Barker dying with a machine gun in her hands.
Public Enemies and the books I used to read have the same source - the FBI itself.
The key difference is that while my childhood books relied on the FBI's PR wing, Burroughs relies on internal FBI reports that were only declassified in the last few decades.
Needless to say, the internal reports are nothing like the idealized history I know.
Ma Barker did not die with a machine gun in her hands, and Mel Purvis wasn't much of a sleuth.
Burrough supplements his FBI sources with manuscripts and interviews, and he says all the right things in the first few pages. If he does not know something (he writes in the intro) - he will say so.
The omniscient tone of the narrative suggests there is little Burrough does not know. He takes you into the private meetings of G-men and criminals - into alleyways and roadhouses. He weaves the stories of multiple gangs together over a more or less continuous timeline. This makes for a great story, but also helps you appreciate how many of these underworld figures rose and fell in less than two years.
Burrough clearly enjoys demolishing established myths of the gangland era. There are no shortages of targets.
Burrough singles out Bonnie & Clyde for a particularly vehement takedown. Absent the movie, he claims, these two nobodys would have faded into the ignominy they so richly deserved.
Public Enemies does one thing better than any other book I've read on this subject: it makes you appreciate the how different the 1930s were. Seven decades ago, a fast car would allow criminals to escape police – and the outcome of a shootout between the police and trapped gangsters was often in doubt. To the modern mind, these ideas make no sense - but a few chapters into Public Enemies, they start to sink in. It was an entirely different world then - and those differences spawned criminals who in turn spawned a national police force that struggled (mostly against its own incompetence) to bring them down.
Great stuff.
I always wanted to be a G-man.
Burrough's treatment of 1930s crime is only a few generations away from the books I devoured as a kid. Books chock full of hoods, coppers, molls and bullets. Mel Purvis bringing down Dillinger & and Ma Barker dying with a machine gun in her hands.
Public Enemies and the books I used to read have the same source - the FBI itself.
The key difference is that while my childhood books relied on the FBI's PR wing, Burroughs relies on internal FBI reports that were only declassified in the last few decades.
Needless to say, the internal reports are nothing like the idealized history I know.
Ma Barker did not die with a machine gun in her hands, and Mel Purvis wasn't much of a sleuth.
Burrough supplements his FBI sources with manuscripts and interviews, and he says all the right things in the first few pages. If he does not know something (he writes in the intro) - he will say so.
The omniscient tone of the narrative suggests there is little Burrough does not know. He takes you into the private meetings of G-men and criminals - into alleyways and roadhouses. He weaves the stories of multiple gangs together over a more or less continuous timeline. This makes for a great story, but also helps you appreciate how many of these underworld figures rose and fell in less than two years.
Burrough clearly enjoys demolishing established myths of the gangland era. There are no shortages of targets.
Burrough singles out Bonnie & Clyde for a particularly vehement takedown. Absent the movie, he claims, these two nobodys would have faded into the ignominy they so richly deserved.
Public Enemies does one thing better than any other book I've read on this subject: it makes you appreciate the how different the 1930s were. Seven decades ago, a fast car would allow criminals to escape police – and the outcome of a shootout between the police and trapped gangsters was often in doubt. To the modern mind, these ideas make no sense - but a few chapters into Public Enemies, they start to sink in. It was an entirely different world then - and those differences spawned criminals who in turn spawned a national police force that struggled (mostly against its own incompetence) to bring them down.
Great stuff.
December 31, 2015
This book covers events from the Kansas City Massacre (June 17, 1933) to the arrest of Alvin Karpis (June 1, 1935): the rise of J. Edgar Hoover and the downfalls of the Barkers and Alvin Karpis; Pretty Boy Floyd; Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker; John Dillinger; and Baby Face Nelson. And all the astounding clusterfucks that took place along the way. The book is both lively and informative, and Burrough does his best to give both sides of the story, discussing the FBI as much as the criminals.
He does, however, have biases. He likes Alvin Karpis and John Dillinger, is essentially uninterested in Pretty Boy Floyd, and is weirdly contemptuous of Barrow and Parker. (He always calls them "Bonnie and Clyde," whereas the other criminals get the respect of being called by their surnames (except as necessary to distinguish between Fred and Dock Barker). Burrough does not, for instance, call John Dillinger "John" or "Johnnie" in his exposition. And he condemns Barrow and Parker with a viciousness that no one else in the book gets:
Art [the 1967 movie] has now done for Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow something they could never achieve in life: it has taken a shark-eyed multiple murderer and his deluded girlfriend and transformed them into sympathetic characters, imbuing them with a cuddly likeability they did not possess, and a cultural significance they do not deserve. (Burrough 361)
Now, I'm not saying that Burrough is wrong about Barrow and Parker. But I don't see how they're any worse than Dillinger, Karpis, Floyd, or Nelson (especially Nelson, whom Burrough frankly describes as a psychopath). All of them left a trail of bodies behind them, even Dillinger, whom Burrough comes perilously close to valorizing. Burrough is contemptuous of Barrow because he never made it as a bank robber, but the thing this book makes clear is that all of these notorious criminal masterminds botched jobs, escaped through pure luck time and again, and in the end died cruelly pathetic deaths.
Overall, this book does an excellent job of showing the astonishing confluence of bank robbers and G-men, each playing into the other's hands, in 1933 and 1934. You just have to be aware that Burrough is not impartial, because he won't tell you so himself.
He does, however, have biases. He likes Alvin Karpis and John Dillinger, is essentially uninterested in Pretty Boy Floyd, and is weirdly contemptuous of Barrow and Parker. (He always calls them "Bonnie and Clyde," whereas the other criminals get the respect of being called by their surnames (except as necessary to distinguish between Fred and Dock Barker). Burrough does not, for instance, call John Dillinger "John" or "Johnnie" in his exposition. And he condemns Barrow and Parker with a viciousness that no one else in the book gets:
Art [the 1967 movie] has now done for Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow something they could never achieve in life: it has taken a shark-eyed multiple murderer and his deluded girlfriend and transformed them into sympathetic characters, imbuing them with a cuddly likeability they did not possess, and a cultural significance they do not deserve. (Burrough 361)
Now, I'm not saying that Burrough is wrong about Barrow and Parker. But I don't see how they're any worse than Dillinger, Karpis, Floyd, or Nelson (especially Nelson, whom Burrough frankly describes as a psychopath). All of them left a trail of bodies behind them, even Dillinger, whom Burrough comes perilously close to valorizing. Burrough is contemptuous of Barrow because he never made it as a bank robber, but the thing this book makes clear is that all of these notorious criminal masterminds botched jobs, escaped through pure luck time and again, and in the end died cruelly pathetic deaths.
Overall, this book does an excellent job of showing the astonishing confluence of bank robbers and G-men, each playing into the other's hands, in 1933 and 1934. You just have to be aware that Burrough is not impartial, because he won't tell you so himself.
July 7, 2026
The FBI was started in 1908 to deal with antitrust cases, and was just small potatoes at that time, loaded with corrupt employees. Hoover was brought in to clean it up, which he did, by getting rid of the corrupt guys and replacing them with clean-cut college grads. Except, he wouldn't let them carry guns and they had no training. The Bureau grew exponentially and came to national recognition after the Kansas City Massacre at Union Station, when Hoover mounted the "war on crime." The early days read like the Keystone Cops. The agents had no idea how to deal with criminal investigations, failed to follow up on leads, lost suspects right and left, and were getting murdered by the crooks (which led to Hoover changing his mind about the guns -- although they had no training in how to use them.) In one case, the agents "had now fired on at least five different cars and people, and no one had a clue who a single one of the targets actually was." Innocent people fell victim more than once. The wrong apartments were raided; suspects were found and then lost. One agent had his car stolen from in front of his house.
A complicating factor for the young agents was that the general public romanticized the criminals, especially the charming Dillinger. During newsreels in movie theaters, theater owners found Dillinger was drawing more applause than either FDR or Charles Lindbergh. Bonnie and Clyde weren't all that well known at the time. They only rose to popular attention after the 1967 movie. Another complicating factor was rampant corruption in local and state police departments, whose officers were giving tips to the criminals so they could evade the law. Really enjoyed the read.
A complicating factor for the young agents was that the general public romanticized the criminals, especially the charming Dillinger. During newsreels in movie theaters, theater owners found Dillinger was drawing more applause than either FDR or Charles Lindbergh. Bonnie and Clyde weren't all that well known at the time. They only rose to popular attention after the 1967 movie. Another complicating factor was rampant corruption in local and state police departments, whose officers were giving tips to the criminals so they could evade the law. Really enjoyed the read.
April 30, 2024
Bryan Burrough's saga of the early 1930s crime wave is riveting as it moves back and forth between desperate criminals and the agents of the emerging FBI. Besides the more familiar names—John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Ma Barker, Bonnie and Clyde, J. Edgar Hoover, and Melvin Purvis—there is a massive cast of characters that is sometimes challenging to follow. But clearly, they were all essential to the story.
It was impressive the way that Burrough humanized the packs of criminals that terrorized banks and law enforcement in those days. Yes, they were without conscience and happy to shoot anyone wearing a badge, but they also often treated civilians with kindness, took vacations, and sometimes longed for quieter lives.
It's a long book, but I was fascinated by the stories that took place only twenty years before I was born. I've never met a famous criminal, but if I did, I'd rather it be John Dillinger than Baby Face Nelson. Heck, I'd take Dillinger over Hoover.
It was impressive the way that Burrough humanized the packs of criminals that terrorized banks and law enforcement in those days. Yes, they were without conscience and happy to shoot anyone wearing a badge, but they also often treated civilians with kindness, took vacations, and sometimes longed for quieter lives.
It's a long book, but I was fascinated by the stories that took place only twenty years before I was born. I've never met a famous criminal, but if I did, I'd rather it be John Dillinger than Baby Face Nelson. Heck, I'd take Dillinger over Hoover.
August 22, 2019
I learned a lot about the major criminals in the early 1930s. The author did an excellent job of investigating quite a number of different criminals. These criminals included Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, pretty boy Floyd, and baby face Nelson.
A description of each of their dastardly deeds, timing, and ultimate downfall, are included in this book.
I enjoyed it immensely. Additionally, this was at a time when the Federal Bureau of investigation was just forming. That organization was integral in solving a lot of these crimes. In addition, J. Edgar Hoover was the first leader of the FBI. Solving these crimes led to his being viewed quite favorably for many years..
A description of each of their dastardly deeds, timing, and ultimate downfall, are included in this book.
I enjoyed it immensely. Additionally, this was at a time when the Federal Bureau of investigation was just forming. That organization was integral in solving a lot of these crimes. In addition, J. Edgar Hoover was the first leader of the FBI. Solving these crimes led to his being viewed quite favorably for many years..
March 30, 2012
I used to view the 1930’s yeggs (bank robbers) through rose tinted glasses – romanticising the Robin Hood perception of these infamous criminals. Under false pretence, this group of violent, uncompassionate individuals became core to pulp culture and held in an esteem to which they shouldn’t have been regarded. Truth be told, the Dillinger, Barker, Barrow, and Baby Face Nelson gangs were thieving murderous connivers whose sole purpose of existence was to terrorise law enforcement and civilians alike. Burrough, through extensive research, does a great job at spotlighting these criminals for what they were and provides readers with enough fact to distil the Hollywood fiction.
In terms of the content itself, the depiction of a blundering FBI was at times repetitive and added the element of inexperience into the mix. Hoover’s ‘War on Crime’ didn’t start out with hardened professionals tracking professional criminals – it evolved to that point, thus casting a shadow on the elusive criminal who was seemingly always a step ahead – more often than not, the gangs got lucky. It was interesting to read of his obsession with Dillinger and need to justify his position by documenting arrests himself. The inter office bickering and outside perception of the FBI and its intended purpose was an eye opener and a highly interesting read.
Overall, this is a sophisticated, well documented and thoroughly researched piece of fact finding which at times reads as smoothly as genre fiction. 4 stars.
In terms of the content itself, the depiction of a blundering FBI was at times repetitive and added the element of inexperience into the mix. Hoover’s ‘War on Crime’ didn’t start out with hardened professionals tracking professional criminals – it evolved to that point, thus casting a shadow on the elusive criminal who was seemingly always a step ahead – more often than not, the gangs got lucky. It was interesting to read of his obsession with Dillinger and need to justify his position by documenting arrests himself. The inter office bickering and outside perception of the FBI and its intended purpose was an eye opener and a highly interesting read.
Overall, this is a sophisticated, well documented and thoroughly researched piece of fact finding which at times reads as smoothly as genre fiction. 4 stars.
September 11, 2015
Bryan Burrough’s book about the depression era outlaws of the US was far more interesting to me than the film it spawned (although it’s amusing that the book criticises previous films which built fantasy on the fact, and the film went and did exactly that). The narrative follows all the name crooks of the 1933/34 wave: Dillinger, Baby-Face Nelson, Pretty-Boy Floyd, Machine-Gun Kelly, The Barker-Karpis Gang and Bonnie & Clyde. It works hard to create the world they operated in and the circumstances which created them, so that they become fully-fledged and the reader gets a real sense of character. (The cast is so large that the personae dramatis are listed in the front – a la Tolstoy).
Clearly the author would rather not be writing about Bonnie & Clyde, as their exploits are small-fry compared to everybody else, but because of that movie it is unavoidable. But they are given full attention, even if at points you wish you could hurry on back to find out what Dillinger is up to.
Of course the stories would only be half told if the FBI wasn’t covered as well, and it’s fair to say this book does not cover them with glory. They were after all a young department prone to frequent, and often baffling, mistakes. To Burrough’s credit though, he restrains himself from bringing up the more lurid stories that have recently attached themselves to Hoover.
This is grade A history – populist to be sure, but immensely readable and brilliantly put together.
Clearly the author would rather not be writing about Bonnie & Clyde, as their exploits are small-fry compared to everybody else, but because of that movie it is unavoidable. But they are given full attention, even if at points you wish you could hurry on back to find out what Dillinger is up to.
Of course the stories would only be half told if the FBI wasn’t covered as well, and it’s fair to say this book does not cover them with glory. They were after all a young department prone to frequent, and often baffling, mistakes. To Burrough’s credit though, he restrains himself from bringing up the more lurid stories that have recently attached themselves to Hoover.
This is grade A history – populist to be sure, but immensely readable and brilliantly put together.
August 31, 2025
I was surprised to learn that most early FBI agents, including Hoover himself, were lawyers with no policing experience who had to learn on the job, and often outsourced the investigative work to local police forces.
I was also struck by the violent ends that the vast majority of Hoover’s public enemies faced. Instead of being arrested and imprisoned, most were killed by the FBI, as were a few civilians. It’s surprising that with as controversial a reputation as the FBI has, especially when it comes to its treatment of civil rights figures, this early brutality isn’t a bigger black mark on its reputation.
At times I found my attention wandering because there were so many characters and timelines to keep track of, but the threads of the story that focused on the history and development of the FBI were pretty interesting, and I liked the last few chapters that woven everything together by detailing how each of the public enemies was eventually brought down.
I was also struck by the violent ends that the vast majority of Hoover’s public enemies faced. Instead of being arrested and imprisoned, most were killed by the FBI, as were a few civilians. It’s surprising that with as controversial a reputation as the FBI has, especially when it comes to its treatment of civil rights figures, this early brutality isn’t a bigger black mark on its reputation.
At times I found my attention wandering because there were so many characters and timelines to keep track of, but the threads of the story that focused on the history and development of the FBI were pretty interesting, and I liked the last few chapters that woven everything together by detailing how each of the public enemies was eventually brought down.
May 18, 2020
In Public Enemies, bestselling author Bryan Burrough strips away the thick layer of myths put out by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to tell the full story—for the first time—of the most spectacular crime wave in American history, the two-year battle between the young Hoover and the assortment of criminals who became national icons: John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the Barkers. In an epic feat of storytelling and drawing on a remarkable amount of newly available material on all the major figures involved, Burrough reveals a web of interconnections within the vast American underworld and demonstrates how Hoover’s G-men overcame their early fumbles to secure the FBI’s rise to power.
June 24, 2024
"America's Greatest Crime Wave" says the title; "Ludicrously entertaining" says the front cover jacket blurb. Let's see.
Inspired by recently reading Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, I sought out this book to learn more about Bonnie and Clyde's contemporaries - John Dillinger, Baby-Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Ma Barker, and Machine Gun Kelly. These were all names I grew up with as all were made infamous, more or less, by the popular media.
Burrough delivers on all of these purveyors of crime in the first half of the 1930s. (Note, Ma Barker was a creature of Hoover, she was the mother of the Barker brothers who along with Alvin Karpis pulled off kidnappings and bank robberies. Ma Barker herself was just an old woman who did jigsaw puzzles and complained a lot when her boys weren't around).
The book is lengthy and it makes an interesting, though confusing narrative choice. Burroughs tells the story chronologically, month-by-month skipping across sub-chapters from one gang to the next and back. As these were gangs consisting of several members, assorted girlfriends, and even more assorted criminal enablers (cops, mechanics, doctors, tavern keepers, go-fers, etc), it got confusing to the reader whether the Fred referred to in some subchapter was a Barker brother or was an old prison acquaintance who provided a hide-out room.
The author's theory of the case as it were is that the confluence of all this brazen gang activity sparked the emergence of the FBI as a national police force and thus the story has to be told chronologically. Yet, the organizational changes forced on the FBI by their initial haplessness don't quite get the prominence that a chronological narrative demands. Yes, as the reader hops around from one stakeout, robbery, escape, or kidnapping, we learn of changes made in the FBI but sort of obliquely, not backed up by details.
By way of analogy, it would be like a story of how World War II gave birth to the modern intelligence state by citing code breaking victories leading to Axis defeats without ever really telling the story of how the codes were broken, the resources assembled to break the codes, and the apparatus set up to distribute the sensitive information.
The reader learns that the FBI got better but not really how and why they got better.
But, for the reader, that's neither here nor there as the story unfolds particularly as it focuses on John Dillinger. Here the narrative gets tighter as there was less hopscotching around between different gangs. Nelson and Dillinger intersect. There were exciting moments when law enforcement closed in on Dillinger yet let him escape due to ineptness.
The book made me think about the nature of crime 1930s style versus now. For the most part, there are no criminals today who capture the popular imagination, sticking it to the man (banks) who were foreclosing on family farms and small businesses. Equally, there are no law enforcement agents who make headlines in their pursuit of said gangs (e.g. Melvin Purvis in his pursuit of Dillinger). Bank robberies and kidnappings are less prominent now than then. Today's criminals conduct financial crime electronically whereas the 1930s were a cash society. I have to go back to JP Getty III and Patty Hearst to remember any high-profile kidnappings that captured the public's attention. Law enforcement today has way better communications than then, where surveillance would be interrupted trying to find a telephone.
Burrough includes Bonnie and Clyde solely for the marquee value and that they were contemporaries of the others. The FBI played little role in their demise. Burrough ignores organized crime except in so far as how organized crime wanted nothing to do with the gangsters who could bring unwanted attention upon the "syndicate". Any FBI attention spent on organized crime is omitted from this book.
Like Bonnie and Clyde, Dillinger, Nelson, Barker-Karpis, and Floyd spend an awful lot of time on the road evading law enforcement. Sleeping in cars, crashing in seedy apartments, stopping for a few nights in roadside tourist camps, and visiting their families seems part-and-parcel of a gangster's life. Somehow or another they could get word to each other for rendezvous.
The gangs had little compunction about killing police and G-men but generally didn't harm civilians. That said, civilians were frequent recipients of stray ricochets from the Thompson sub-machine guns used by the gangs and law enforcement. In the 1930s, there was a strange fascination with flocking to the scene of a bank robbery, standing outside as hostages were marched out and ducking for cover as trigger-happy cops and yeggs fired at each other. Hostages were made to stand on running boards of the escape car (can't do that today!)
Gangsters liked to take vacations (Florida, Hot Springs AR, and Nevada to mention a few). Local police forces were often corrupt with detectives assigned to a kidnapping feeding information back to the kidnappers, then later turning on the kidnappers to share in the reward money. Lots of drunkard gang members and gang doctors. The girlfriends were often young (under 18), extremely loyal to their man (and the loyalty went both ways). Hard men and hard women.
So, why read this book? For the same reason I did - to learn about these 1930s household names who still linger in the popular imagination. To put yourself back in time at the start of the FDR administration; to understand the roots of the FBI.
Multiple photos and a map highlighting key points in the story
Inspired by recently reading Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, I sought out this book to learn more about Bonnie and Clyde's contemporaries - John Dillinger, Baby-Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Ma Barker, and Machine Gun Kelly. These were all names I grew up with as all were made infamous, more or less, by the popular media.
Burrough delivers on all of these purveyors of crime in the first half of the 1930s. (Note, Ma Barker was a creature of Hoover, she was the mother of the Barker brothers who along with Alvin Karpis pulled off kidnappings and bank robberies. Ma Barker herself was just an old woman who did jigsaw puzzles and complained a lot when her boys weren't around).
The book is lengthy and it makes an interesting, though confusing narrative choice. Burroughs tells the story chronologically, month-by-month skipping across sub-chapters from one gang to the next and back. As these were gangs consisting of several members, assorted girlfriends, and even more assorted criminal enablers (cops, mechanics, doctors, tavern keepers, go-fers, etc), it got confusing to the reader whether the Fred referred to in some subchapter was a Barker brother or was an old prison acquaintance who provided a hide-out room.
The author's theory of the case as it were is that the confluence of all this brazen gang activity sparked the emergence of the FBI as a national police force and thus the story has to be told chronologically. Yet, the organizational changes forced on the FBI by their initial haplessness don't quite get the prominence that a chronological narrative demands. Yes, as the reader hops around from one stakeout, robbery, escape, or kidnapping, we learn of changes made in the FBI but sort of obliquely, not backed up by details.
By way of analogy, it would be like a story of how World War II gave birth to the modern intelligence state by citing code breaking victories leading to Axis defeats without ever really telling the story of how the codes were broken, the resources assembled to break the codes, and the apparatus set up to distribute the sensitive information.
The reader learns that the FBI got better but not really how and why they got better.
But, for the reader, that's neither here nor there as the story unfolds particularly as it focuses on John Dillinger. Here the narrative gets tighter as there was less hopscotching around between different gangs. Nelson and Dillinger intersect. There were exciting moments when law enforcement closed in on Dillinger yet let him escape due to ineptness.
The book made me think about the nature of crime 1930s style versus now. For the most part, there are no criminals today who capture the popular imagination, sticking it to the man (banks) who were foreclosing on family farms and small businesses. Equally, there are no law enforcement agents who make headlines in their pursuit of said gangs (e.g. Melvin Purvis in his pursuit of Dillinger). Bank robberies and kidnappings are less prominent now than then. Today's criminals conduct financial crime electronically whereas the 1930s were a cash society. I have to go back to JP Getty III and Patty Hearst to remember any high-profile kidnappings that captured the public's attention. Law enforcement today has way better communications than then, where surveillance would be interrupted trying to find a telephone.
Burrough includes Bonnie and Clyde solely for the marquee value and that they were contemporaries of the others. The FBI played little role in their demise. Burrough ignores organized crime except in so far as how organized crime wanted nothing to do with the gangsters who could bring unwanted attention upon the "syndicate". Any FBI attention spent on organized crime is omitted from this book.
Like Bonnie and Clyde, Dillinger, Nelson, Barker-Karpis, and Floyd spend an awful lot of time on the road evading law enforcement. Sleeping in cars, crashing in seedy apartments, stopping for a few nights in roadside tourist camps, and visiting their families seems part-and-parcel of a gangster's life. Somehow or another they could get word to each other for rendezvous.
The gangs had little compunction about killing police and G-men but generally didn't harm civilians. That said, civilians were frequent recipients of stray ricochets from the Thompson sub-machine guns used by the gangs and law enforcement. In the 1930s, there was a strange fascination with flocking to the scene of a bank robbery, standing outside as hostages were marched out and ducking for cover as trigger-happy cops and yeggs fired at each other. Hostages were made to stand on running boards of the escape car (can't do that today!)
Gangsters liked to take vacations (Florida, Hot Springs AR, and Nevada to mention a few). Local police forces were often corrupt with detectives assigned to a kidnapping feeding information back to the kidnappers, then later turning on the kidnappers to share in the reward money. Lots of drunkard gang members and gang doctors. The girlfriends were often young (under 18), extremely loyal to their man (and the loyalty went both ways). Hard men and hard women.
So, why read this book? For the same reason I did - to learn about these 1930s household names who still linger in the popular imagination. To put yourself back in time at the start of the FDR administration; to understand the roots of the FBI.
Multiple photos and a map highlighting key points in the story
July 24, 2024
This was a re-read for me, i love this period of time in American criminal history and Burrough does a great job of giving the reader an accurate portrayal of what life was like for the various public enemy #1s of the era. A must read for the criminal history buffs. Will probably read it again at some point.
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April 13, 2017Enjoyed this years ago! Haven't been updating although I keep thinking I will. Mostly I lurk and watch what all my friends here are reading. Committed to making a better go of this resource so that others can track the good (and avoid the bad) stuff.
January 19, 2017
Utterly fascinating!
August 3, 2019
Was able to watch part of the filming as they took over our town for a month.
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