Public enemies, p.1
Public Enemies, page 1
Table of Contents
PENGUIN BOOKS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1 - A PRELUDE TO WAR
Chapter 2 - A MASSACRE BY PERSONS UNKNOWN
Chapter 3 - THE COLLEGE BOYS TAKE THE FIELD
Chapter 4 - THE BAYING OF THE HOUNDS
Chapter 5 - THE KID JIMMY
Chapter 6 - THE STREETS OF CHICAGO
Chapter 7 - AMBUSHES
Chapter 8 - “AN ATTACK ON ALL WE HOLD DEAR”
Chapter 9 - A STAR IS BORN
Chapter 10 - DILLINGER AND NELSON
Chapter 11 - CRESCENDO
Chapter 12 - DEATH IN THE NORTH WOODS
Chapter 13 - “AND IT’S DEATH FOR BONNIE AND CLYDE”
Chapter 14 - NEW FACES
Chapter 15 - THE WOMAN IN ORANGE
Chapter 16 - THE SCRAMBLE
Chapter 17 - A FIELD IN OHIO AND A HIGHWAY IN ILLINOIS
Chapter 18 - THE LAST MAN STANDING
Chapter 19 - PAS DE DEUX
EPILOGUE
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Acknowledgements
INDEX
Praise for Public Enemies
“Massively researched, ludicrously entertaining.”
—Time
“[A] colorful new history of the early days of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. . . . [Burrough] has written a book that brims with vivid portraiture . . . Excellent true crime.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Public Enemies [is] Bryan Burrough’s spellbinding new account of America’s first War on Crime . . . a model of narrative journalism and an often gripping read.”
—BusinessWeek
“In the telling Mr. Burrough displays a genius for historical reconstruction and an attention to detail so vivid that the reader can almost smell Bonnie and Clyde, neither of whom showed much inclination to bathe during their months sleeping in cars or open fields when they were on the run.”
—The New York Times
“Burrough’s narrative is fast-paced, his prose captivating. Drawing upon several hundred thousand FBI documents, Burrough has conducted important new research. He re-creates in vivid detail the criminals’ whereabouts, characteristics, and ignominious rise to Depression-era fame. . . . By shining a spotlight on the FBI’s birth . . . Burrough has altered our view of the early 1930s.”
—Chicago Tribune
“It is superb—readable, thorough and critical.”
—The Denver Post
“Fascinating . . . A rich and colorful cast of characters parades through the pages. . . . It is a wild and amazing story, and Burrough tells it with great gusto. Truth is often not only stranger than fiction but also a lot more interesting. Burrough’s research is careful and extraordinarily thorough. . . . Public Enemies is a significant book, and a very readable one. It is easy to toss around terms like ‘definitive,’ but this book deserves it. It is hard to imagine a more careful, complete and entrancing book on this subject, and on this era. Readers will not be disappointed.”
—The Washington Post
“[An] excellent new history [of] this country’s greatest crime wave . . . [Burrough] brings a historian’s touch to the material, exploding myths on every page. . . . Public Enemies is knockout nonfiction entertainment as well as serious history.”
—The New York Sun
“It is quite superb . . . with masses of new information.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“[An] engaging narrative . . . Burrough[’s] book will make excellent reading for fans of American history and true crime.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Gripping . . . [a] great tale.”
—New York Post
“Bryan Burrough . . . has written a gripping history of just two years . . . when some of the more notorious criminals in American history harvested banks from Texas to Minnesota. . . . Mr. Burrough delineates this era with as much punch—and much more insight—than any Warner Brothers gang-buster flick.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“Gripping . . . Burrough expertly juggles six criminal gangs at one time, show[ing] the FBI’s dramatic restructuring and captures the dark criminal days of the Depression.”
—The Star-Ledger (Newark)
“[A] ceaselessly exciting book.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“Bryan Burrough brings [these characters] roaring to life, like a getaway car speeding away after a bank robbery in his new book Public Enemies. Never before has the American past been given such an up-to-date polishing as Burrough gives a day-by-day account of a two-year period in which some outrageous and colorful desperadoes frightened and thrilled the public.”
—News-Times (Forest Grove, Oregon)
“Public Enemies is a fascinating retelling of the FBI’s famous ‘War on Crime,’ weaving the stories of these outlaw gangs with the inner workings of the FBI, the men who were determined to stop them. Thanks to thousands of pages of recently declassified government files, it is exhaustively researched but as entertaining as any page-turning crime novel. . . . Must surely rank among the definitive works on the era and its crimes.”
—Daily Southtown (Chicago)
“A 10-strike for the true crime fan.”
—Booklist
“A rollicking, rat-a-tat ride . . . Iconoclastic and fascinating. A genuine treat for true-crime buffs.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“The definitive account of the 1930s crime wave that brought notorious criminals like John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde to America’s front pages. . . . [Burrough] successfully translates years of dogged research . . . into a graceful narrative. . . . This book compellingly brings back to life people and times distorted in popular imagination by hagiographic bureau memoirs and Hollywood.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
PENGUIN BOOKS
PUBLIC ENEMIES
Bryan Burrough is a special correspondent at Vanity Fair and the author of numerous bestselling books, including Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco (with John Helyar), Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34, and The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes. A former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, he is a three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award for Excellence in Financial Journalism. He lives in Summit, New Jersey, with his wife Marla and their two sons.
AMERICA’S
GREATEST
CRIME WAVE
and the
BIRTH of
the FBI ,
1933 - 34
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First published in the United States of America by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2004
Published in Penguin Books 2005
This edition published in Penguin Books 2009
Copyright © Bryan Burrough, 2004
All rights reserved
Photograph Credits
AP/Wide World Photos: Insert pages 1, 2, 3 (top and bottom right), 6 (bottom),
7 (top), 8 (bottom), 9 (top), 10, 11, 12 (top and bottom), 16 (bottom).
Mansell/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images: Insert page 3 (bottom left).
Bowersock Collection, Kansas City Museum/Union Station, Kansas City, Missouri:
Insert pages 4 (top), 14 (top).
© Bettmann/Corbis: Insert pages 4 (bottom), 6 (top), 9 (bottom), 13, 15.
Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division, Dallas Public Library: Insert page 5 (top and bottom).
New York Daily News: Insert page 7 (bottom right).
Minneapolis Historical society: Insert page 8 (top).
Federal Bureau of Investigation: Insert pages 7 (bottom left), 14 (bottom), 16 (top).
eISBN : 978-1-101-03274-9
eISBN : 978-1-101-03274-9
1. Crime—United States—History—20th century. 2. Criminals—United States—History—20th century.
3. United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation—History. I. Title.
HV6783.B85 2004
364.973’09’043—dc22 2004044315
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For Marla, Griffin, and Dane
“The Unit”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Never before have I enjoyed researching and writing anything as much as I did the book you hold in your hands. If you derive half the pleasure from reading it as I did from creating it, I will be thrilled.
This is a book I always suspected I would attempt someday. The first stories I can remember hearing as a boy, the stories that made me want to become a writer, were tales my grandfather told of Bonnie and Clyde. As a young deputy in northwest Arkansas, John Vernon Burrough manned roadblocks set up to apprehend the couple. In his later years he was mayor of Alma, Arkansas, a town where Clyde Barrow was blamed for the murder of one of his predecessors. My grandfather’s stories sounded like tales out of the Wild West; I could hardly grasp the fact that these events had occurred barely forty years earlier. I grew up in the 1970s, and the formative events of my youth were the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the Iranian hostage crisis. I couldn’t believe America had changed that much in a single lifetime.
Later, I learned that Clyde Barrow had murdered the great-uncle of one of my boyhood friends in my hometown of Temple, Texas, and my interest grew. Stricken with insomnia late one night in 1997, I found myself watching a cable-television documentary on Ma Barker. I wondered whether the Barker Gang had been in operation before or after Bonnie and Clyde. I walked upstairs to my office and hopped on the Internet, ran a search, and was surprised to find that both gangs had been at large in the years 1933 and 1934. My curiosity aroused, I checked John Dillinger: 1933 and 1934. Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly: all 1933 or 1934. This was my introduction to the War on Crime.
I picked up John Toland’s 1963 book, Dillinger Days, a biography that deals glancingly with Dillinger’s criminal contemporaries. I searched for a comprehensive history of the FBI’s fight against Dillinger and his peers, and I was surprised to find there wasn’t one. Any number of books had been published on the individual outlaws themselves, but, to my mind, no one had tackled the whole story. Then I learned that the FBI files on all these cases had been released only in the late 1980s. That’s when I decided to write this book.
This, then, is the first comprehensive narrative history of the FBI’s War on Crime, which lasted from 1933 to 1936, a period that saw the rise and fall of six major criminal factions: those of John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, the Barker-Karpis Gang, Machine Gun Kelly, and Bonnie and Clyde. It is a big, sprawling story, with gunfights and investigations in dozens of American cities involving literally hundreds of major and minor players, including an army of FBI agents, sheriffs, and policemen. On the following pages you’ll find a cast of characters to help you keep everyone straight.
Complexity is one reason authors have tended to focus their books on a single public enemy. Yet these six story lines truly comprise a single narrative, the unifying element being the involvement of the FBI. The Bureau told a sanitized version of the War on Crime story in several books, beginning with the lurid Ten Thousand Public Enemies in 1935 and culminating with Don Whitehead’s The FBI Story in 1956. These books are, at best, incomplete; at worst, misleading. They were the stories J. Edgar Hoover wanted told, not the ones that actually happened.
For years the principal obstacle to an objective narrative was the FBI’s penchant for secrecy; Hoover was unwilling to share information with anyone interested in telling the whole truth. This helps explain why, as large as these criminals loom in American legend, there are surprisingly few credible books about them. For twenty-five years the stories of the Depression-era outlaws remained the province of newspaper reporters and pulp writers, many of whom weren’t above concocting dramatic scenes and imaginative dialogue. Not till the late 1950s, with the popularity of The Untouchables television show, did serious authors begin to approach the subject of the War on Crime. Dillinger and Floyd have since attracted multiple biographers. Bonnie and Clyde, buoyed by the popularity of the 1967 movie, have garnered a half-dozen books. The first biography of Machine Gun Kelly didn’t appear until 2003.
By far the best of these books is Dillinger Days. Writing thirty years after the events told, Toland was able to interview a number of participants, including several former FBI agents. While he accepts an FBI canard or two—most notably the myth of Ma Barker’s criminal genius—his remains the book by which all others must be measured. What makes a fresh look at the War on Crime possible is the release of the FBI’s files. Prodded by local historians, such as Robert Unger in Kansas City and Paul Maccabee in St. Paul, the Bureau has now made public all its files on Dillinger, Floyd, Nelson, the Barker Gang, Machine Gun Kelly, and the Kansas City Massacre. Taken together, they comprise nearly one million pages of daily reports, telegrams, and correspondence, as well as hundreds of statements taken from witnesses and participants, everyone from Dillinger’s sister to Nelson’s tailor.
As one might expect, the files are a trove of new information. There are dozens of never-before-seen statements from the criminals and their gun molls, an unpublished autobiographical essay from Kathryn Kelly, disclosure of the bribes that freed Dock Barker from prison, as well as confirmation of an overlooked Dillinger robbery two months before his death. For all this, the FBI files shed the most penetrating light on the FBI itself. They vividly chronicle the Bureau’s evolution from an overmatched band of amateurish agents without firearms or law-enforcement experience into the professional crime-fighting machine of lore—a story Hoover was never eager to have told. In the early months of the War on Crime, we see Hoover’s men botching stakeouts, losing suspects, forgetting orders, and repeatedly arresting the wrong men—their mistakes would be comical if not for the price paid by the innocent. But deep amid the thicket of reports and correspondence, many of them festooned with Hoover’s tart, handwritten comments, one can literally see the FBI grow up. The agents learn how to use guns, establish professional methods, and recruit informants. Above all, this is a book about how the FBI became the FBI.
The files allowed me to pursue one of my central aims: to reclaim the War on Crime for the lawmen who fought it. Men like Charles Winstead and Clarence Hurt, the two agents who killed Dillinger, have long remained anonymous, even as movies are made about the murderers they hunted. The FBI wanted it that way. Critics say this was because Hoover wanted the glory for himself, which may be true. But keeping agents anonymous also fueled Hoover’s institutional aims, fostered teamwork, and allowed agents to slip into undercover assignments. For the first time, the FBI files allow us to understand which agents did what, and who screwed up when. By and large, it is not a pretty story; one can understand why Hoover wanted the files kept secret.
Over the course of four years of research, I was able to augment the stories from FBI files with much new information uncovered in the last forty years. A manuscript discovered in 1989 by two intrepid Dillinger buffs, William Helmer and Thomas Smusyn, shines new light on Dillinger’s final weeks. Another valuable resource was two thousand pages of unpublished interview transcripts that Alvin Karpis of the Barker Gang gave before his death. Several FBI agents also wrote unpublished manuscripts I was able to review. I’ve listed all my sources of information in notes at the back of the book.
Please keep one thing in mind as you read: This book was not “imagined,” as with some recent popular histories. It was reported. The conversations and dialogue in this book are taken verbatim from FBI reports, the Karpis transcripts, contemporary news articles, and the memories of participants. If you’re wondering how I learned something, check the source notes. If I don’t know something, I’ll tell you. If there’s a mystery I can’t clear up—and there are a few—I’ll make that clear. Any errors are mine and mine alone. I hope you enjoy it.
