Elementary Secondary Higher Ed Common Reads
0 0
Download high-resolution image

Public Enemies

America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34

Author Bryan Burrough
Ebook
Penguin Adult HC/TR | Penguin Books
On sale Apr 29, 2009 | 624 Pages | 9781101032749
Add to cart Add to list Exam Copies

See Additional Formats
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.
Author's Note
Cast of Characters

Prologue

  1. A Prelude to War, Spring 1933 1

  2. A Massacre by Persons Unknown, June 8 to June 15, 1933 19

  3. The College Boys Take the Field, June 17 to July 22, 1933 51

  4. The Baying of the Hounds, July 22 to August 25, 1933 71

  5. The Kid Jimmy, August 18 to September 25, 1933 98

  6. The Streets of Chicago, October 12 to November 20, 1933 135

  7. Ambushes, November 20 to December 31, 1933 162

  8. "An Attack on All We Hold Dear," January 2 to January 28, 1934 183

  9. A Star is Born, January 30 to March 2, 1934 206

  10. Dillinger and Nelson, March 3 to March 29, 1934 234

  11. Crescendo, March 30 to April 10, 1934 267

  12. Death in the North Woods, April 10 to April 23, 1934 292

  13. "And It's Death for Bonnie and Clyde," April 23 to May 23, 1934 323

  14. New Faces, May 24 to June 30, 1934 362

  15. The Woman in Orange, July 1 to July 27, 1934 388

  16. The Scramble, July 23 to September 12, 1934 417

  17. A Field in Ohio and a Highway in Illinois, September 18 to November 27, 1934 446

  18. The Last Man Standing, December 3, 1934 to January 20, 1935 484

  19. Pas de Deux, January 1935 until... 515

Epilogue 543

Bibliographical Essay 553
Notes 556
Selected Biography 567
Acknowledgements 571
Index 573

Torremolinos, SpainAugust 26, 1979

In a tourist town on the white-sun Spanish coast an old man was passing his last years, an American grandfather with a snowy white crew cut and a glint in his turquoise eyes. At seventy he was still lean and alert, with high-slanting cheekbones, a sharp chin, and those clear-framed eyeglasses that made him look like a minor-league academic. He spent much of his time holed up in his cluttered garage apartment, watching BBC footage of the Iranian hostage crisis on a flickering black-and-white television, surrounded by bottles of Jack Daniel’s and pills and memories. If you met him down on the beach, he came across as a gentle soul with a soft laugh. Almost certainly he was the most pleasant murderer you’d ever want to meet.

It was sad, but only a little. He’d had his fun. When he’d first come to Spain ten years before, he still knew how to have a good time. There was that frowsy old divorcée from Chicago he used to see. They would go tooling around the coast in her sports car and chug tequila and down their pills and get into these awful screaming fights.

She was gone now. So were the writers, and the documentary makers, the ones who came to hear about the old days; that crew from Canada was the worst, posing him in front of roadsters and surrounding him with actors in fedoras holding fake Tommy guns. He’d done it for the money and for his ego, which had always been considerable. Now, well, now he drank. Out in the cafés, after a few beers, when the sun began to sink down the coast, he would tell stories. The names he dropped meant little to the Spaniards. The Brits and the odd American thought he was nuts, an old lush mumbling in his beer.

When he said he’d been a gangster, they smiled. Sure you were, pops. When he said he’d been Public Enemy Number One—right after John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd and his old protégé Baby Face Nelson—people turned away and rolled their eyes. When he said he and his confederates had single-handedly “created” J. Edgar Hoover and the modern FBI, well, then he would get bitter and people would get up and move to another table. He was obviously unstable. How could you believe anyone who claimed he was the only man in history to have met Charles Manson, Al Capone, and Bonnie and Clyde?

Few in Torremolinos knew it was all true. In those last years at Terminal Island in the sixties he’d taught Manson to play the steel guitar. He’d been at Alcatraz for twenty-one damp winters before that, leaving for Leavenworth a few years before they closed the place in 1963. In fact, he was the longest-serving prisoner in the history of The Rock. He’d known the Birdman and that gasbag Machine Gun Kelly and he’d seen Capone collapse into one of his syphilitic seizures, flopping around on the cafeteria floor like a striped bass on a cutting board.

In his day he’d been famous. Not fifteen-minutes famous but famous-famous, New York Times-page-one-above-the-fold famous. Back before Neil Armstrong, before the Beatles, before American Bandstand, before the war, when Hitler was still a worrisome nut in a bad mustache and FDR was learning to find the White House bathrooms, he was the country’s best known yeggman. Folks today, they didn’t even know what a yegg was. Dillinger, he liked to say, he was the best of yeggs. Pretty Boy Floyd was a good yegg. Bonnie and Clyde wanted to be.

And today? Today he and all his peers were cartoon characters, caricatures in one bad gangster movie after another. You could see them on the late show doing all sorts of made-up stuff, Warren Beatty as some stammering latent homosexual Clyde Barrow, Faye Dunaway as a beautiful Bonnie Parker (now that was a stretch), Richard Dreyfuss as a chattering asshole Baby Face Nelson (okay, they got that right), Shelley Winters as a machine-gun toting Ma Barker, a young Robert De Niro as one of her sons. To him they were all ridiculous Hollywood fantasies, fictional concoctions in a made-up world.

At that point the old man would just shake his head. As he sat on his couch at night, sipping his Jack Daniel’s and popping his pills, what galled him was that it had all been real. It had all happened. Not in some fantasy world, not in the movies, but right there in the middle of the United States, in Chicago, in St. Paul, in Dallas, in Cleveland.

And the truth of it, the actual true facts, was all but lost now, forgotten as totally as he was. Dillinger, Floyd, Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker: He had known them every one. He was the last one left alive. He had even outlived Hoover himself.

Hoover.

Fucking Hoover.

He leaned over and reached for a bottle of his pills.
Copyright © 2005 by Bryan Burrough. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
© Courtesy of the author
Bryan Burrough is the author or coauthor of eight books, four of them New York Times bestsellers, including the Wall Street classic Barbarians at the Gate and Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. A longtime correspondent at Vanity Fair and now editor at large at Texas Monthly, he lives in Austin. View titles by Bryan Burrough

About

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.

Table of Contents

Author's Note
Cast of Characters

Prologue

  1. A Prelude to War, Spring 1933 1

  2. A Massacre by Persons Unknown, June 8 to June 15, 1933 19

  3. The College Boys Take the Field, June 17 to July 22, 1933 51

  4. The Baying of the Hounds, July 22 to August 25, 1933 71

  5. The Kid Jimmy, August 18 to September 25, 1933 98

  6. The Streets of Chicago, October 12 to November 20, 1933 135

  7. Ambushes, November 20 to December 31, 1933 162

  8. "An Attack on All We Hold Dear," January 2 to January 28, 1934 183

  9. A Star is Born, January 30 to March 2, 1934 206

  10. Dillinger and Nelson, March 3 to March 29, 1934 234

  11. Crescendo, March 30 to April 10, 1934 267

  12. Death in the North Woods, April 10 to April 23, 1934 292

  13. "And It's Death for Bonnie and Clyde," April 23 to May 23, 1934 323

  14. New Faces, May 24 to June 30, 1934 362

  15. The Woman in Orange, July 1 to July 27, 1934 388

  16. The Scramble, July 23 to September 12, 1934 417

  17. A Field in Ohio and a Highway in Illinois, September 18 to November 27, 1934 446

  18. The Last Man Standing, December 3, 1934 to January 20, 1935 484

  19. Pas de Deux, January 1935 until... 515

Epilogue 543

Bibliographical Essay 553
Notes 556
Selected Biography 567
Acknowledgements 571
Index 573

Excerpt

Torremolinos, SpainAugust 26, 1979

In a tourist town on the white-sun Spanish coast an old man was passing his last years, an American grandfather with a snowy white crew cut and a glint in his turquoise eyes. At seventy he was still lean and alert, with high-slanting cheekbones, a sharp chin, and those clear-framed eyeglasses that made him look like a minor-league academic. He spent much of his time holed up in his cluttered garage apartment, watching BBC footage of the Iranian hostage crisis on a flickering black-and-white television, surrounded by bottles of Jack Daniel’s and pills and memories. If you met him down on the beach, he came across as a gentle soul with a soft laugh. Almost certainly he was the most pleasant murderer you’d ever want to meet.

It was sad, but only a little. He’d had his fun. When he’d first come to Spain ten years before, he still knew how to have a good time. There was that frowsy old divorcée from Chicago he used to see. They would go tooling around the coast in her sports car and chug tequila and down their pills and get into these awful screaming fights.

She was gone now. So were the writers, and the documentary makers, the ones who came to hear about the old days; that crew from Canada was the worst, posing him in front of roadsters and surrounding him with actors in fedoras holding fake Tommy guns. He’d done it for the money and for his ego, which had always been considerable. Now, well, now he drank. Out in the cafés, after a few beers, when the sun began to sink down the coast, he would tell stories. The names he dropped meant little to the Spaniards. The Brits and the odd American thought he was nuts, an old lush mumbling in his beer.

When he said he’d been a gangster, they smiled. Sure you were, pops. When he said he’d been Public Enemy Number One—right after John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd and his old protégé Baby Face Nelson—people turned away and rolled their eyes. When he said he and his confederates had single-handedly “created” J. Edgar Hoover and the modern FBI, well, then he would get bitter and people would get up and move to another table. He was obviously unstable. How could you believe anyone who claimed he was the only man in history to have met Charles Manson, Al Capone, and Bonnie and Clyde?

Few in Torremolinos knew it was all true. In those last years at Terminal Island in the sixties he’d taught Manson to play the steel guitar. He’d been at Alcatraz for twenty-one damp winters before that, leaving for Leavenworth a few years before they closed the place in 1963. In fact, he was the longest-serving prisoner in the history of The Rock. He’d known the Birdman and that gasbag Machine Gun Kelly and he’d seen Capone collapse into one of his syphilitic seizures, flopping around on the cafeteria floor like a striped bass on a cutting board.

In his day he’d been famous. Not fifteen-minutes famous but famous-famous, New York Times-page-one-above-the-fold famous. Back before Neil Armstrong, before the Beatles, before American Bandstand, before the war, when Hitler was still a worrisome nut in a bad mustache and FDR was learning to find the White House bathrooms, he was the country’s best known yeggman. Folks today, they didn’t even know what a yegg was. Dillinger, he liked to say, he was the best of yeggs. Pretty Boy Floyd was a good yegg. Bonnie and Clyde wanted to be.

And today? Today he and all his peers were cartoon characters, caricatures in one bad gangster movie after another. You could see them on the late show doing all sorts of made-up stuff, Warren Beatty as some stammering latent homosexual Clyde Barrow, Faye Dunaway as a beautiful Bonnie Parker (now that was a stretch), Richard Dreyfuss as a chattering asshole Baby Face Nelson (okay, they got that right), Shelley Winters as a machine-gun toting Ma Barker, a young Robert De Niro as one of her sons. To him they were all ridiculous Hollywood fantasies, fictional concoctions in a made-up world.

At that point the old man would just shake his head. As he sat on his couch at night, sipping his Jack Daniel’s and popping his pills, what galled him was that it had all been real. It had all happened. Not in some fantasy world, not in the movies, but right there in the middle of the United States, in Chicago, in St. Paul, in Dallas, in Cleveland.

And the truth of it, the actual true facts, was all but lost now, forgotten as totally as he was. Dillinger, Floyd, Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker: He had known them every one. He was the last one left alive. He had even outlived Hoover himself.

Hoover.

Fucking Hoover.

He leaned over and reached for a bottle of his pills.
Copyright © 2005 by Bryan Burrough. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

© Courtesy of the author
Bryan Burrough is the author or coauthor of eight books, four of them New York Times bestsellers, including the Wall Street classic Barbarians at the Gate and Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. A longtime correspondent at Vanity Fair and now editor at large at Texas Monthly, he lives in Austin. View titles by Bryan Burrough

Additional formats

  • Public Enemies
    Public Enemies
    America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34
    Bryan Burrough
    9780143035374
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jun 28, 2005
  • Public Enemies
    Public Enemies
    America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34
    Bryan Burrough
    9780143035374
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jun 28, 2005

Other Books by this Author

Related Articles

Subscribe

Penguin Random House Higher Education

© 2025 Penguin Random House

Back to Top
0
    • 0
    Wish List (0)