See the paperback edition with notes on the new motion picture currently in production starring Johnny Depp.

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Product Description

The astonishing true story of America's first and greatest "War on Crime."

In Public Enemies, Bryan Burrough strips away a thick layer of myths put out by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI to tell the full story of the most spectacular crime wave in American history, the two-year battle between the young Hoover 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 1933, police jurisdictions ended at state lines, the FBI was in its infancy, and fast cars and machine guns were easily available. It was a great time to be a bank robber. On hand were a motley crew of criminal masterminds, sociopaths, romantics, and cretins.

Bryan Burrough has unearthed an extraordinary amount of new material on all the major figures involved -- revealing many fascinating interconnections in the vast underworld ecosystem that stretched from Texas up to Minnesota.

But the real-life connections were insignificant next to the sense of connectedness J. Edgar Hoover worked to create in the mind of the American public-using the "Great Crime Wave" to gain the position of untouchable power he would occupy for almost half a century.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #270217 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-15
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 624 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Burrough, an award-winning financial journalist and Vanity Fair special correspondent, best known for Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, switches gears to produce the definitive account of the 1930s crime wave that brought notorious criminals like John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde to America's front pages. Burrough's fascination with his subject matter stems from a family connection—his paternal grandfather manned a roadblock in Arkansas during the hunt for Bonnie and Clyde—and he successfully translates years of dogged research, which included thorough review of recently disclosed FBI files, into a graceful narrative. This true crime history appropriately balances violent shootouts and schemes for daring prison breaks with a detailed account of how the slew of robberies and headlines helped an ambitious federal bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover transform a small agency into the FBI we know today. While some of the details (e.g., that Dillinger got a traffic ticket) are trivial, this book compellingly brings back to life people and times distorted in the popular imagination by hagiographic bureau memoirs and Hollywood. Burrough's recent New York Times op-ed piece drawing parallels between the bureau's "reinvention" in the 1930s and today's reform efforts to combat the war on terror will help attract readers looking for lessons from history.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
This fascinating book tells, in detail, the events of the War on Crime waged in the years 1933 and '34. A rich and colorful cast of characters parades through the pages. On the bad guy side, we find Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd and Alvin Karpis and the Barker family. On the side of law and order, there was J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI along with local police and other officials. The battle unfolded amid an amazing epidemic of bank robberies, part of what some people saw as a great crime wave. More than anything else, it was probably the Kansas City Massacre -- a bloody incident in June 1933, which left a pile of dead detectives and law enforcement officers -- that touched off the war. This massacre shocked the country -- and the FBI -- into action.

Crime had gone interstate, which was a new problem for the forces of law and order. The automobile gave mobility and speed to gangs of bank robbers; the machine gun gave them firepower. During the Great Depression, poverty and social disorganization were eating away at the country's social fabric. Corruption corroded the heart of local law enforcement. The FBI, a relatively new organization, was weak, untrained and uncertain. Its men were, in many ways, staggeringly incompetent. But the FBI, over the course of two tumultuous years, gradually learned how to become a sleeker, more efficient instrument. Despite its bumbling and a host of false starts, by the end of the period the FBI had won the war and the "public enemies" had lost. Bonnie and Clyde died in a hail of bullets. Dillinger was cut down outside the Biograph theater in Chicago. Kelly and Nelson were also dead. So were the Barkers. Alvin Karpis was on his way to Alcatraz.

But the good guys endured a comedy of errors before all that happened. Burrough's account is peppered with tales of missed opportunities, bad detective work, poor record-keeping and all-around sloppiness. Desperate to catch John Dillinger, in March 1934 the FBI "stormed the Chicago apartment of a woman named Anne Baker," who was supposed to have harbored Dillinger following his escape from an Indiana jail earlier that month. The raid was a "debacle." In fact, the FBI had "raided the wrong address." Even worse was the raid on "Little Bohemia," where Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson were supposed to be holed up. That raid was a fiasco. All of the criminals escaped, and the FBI ended up shooting a completely innocent man.

The public enemies were hardly geniuses, either. They, too, had their share of ludicrous errors. For example, the Karpis-Barker gang seized a hand truck, "stacked with bulging sacks" and heavily guarded, outside the Federal Reserve Building in Chicago. The gang got away -- only to discover they had stolen not money but bags of mail. In contrast, knocking off a bank appeared to be child's play. The "public enemies" raced about the country, stealing wads of cash from banks, renting apartments, buying cars, picking up women and having a good time between jobs. They were protected by a network of supporters and hangers-on (and sometimes corrupt officials). Their insatiable greed -- and their inability to stop robbing and killing -- led to their destruction,

It is a wild and amazing story, and Burrough tells it with great gusto. Truth is often not only stranger than fiction but also a lot more interesting. Burrough's research is careful and extraordinarily thorough. He debunks many of the tall tales that have accrued around these almost mythical figures. The famous woman in a red dress who betrayed John Dillinger was actually wearing an orange skirt. Machine Gun Kelly was "inept" and "never a menacing figure." Bonnie and Clyde were totally unlike the characters in the famous movie; they were "lazy drifters who murdered nearly a dozen innocent men." Most striking, perhaps, was the case of Ma Barker, grandmother and head of a family of violent crooks. That was the image. In reality, Ma Barker was a rather stupid old woman who liked to work jigsaw puzzles and had never been mastermind of anything, including crime. When she ended up with a bullet through her head, the FBI had some explaining to do. Hoover then concocted the tale of Ma Barker the master criminal, the "brains" of the gang, an evil genius who died with a machine gun in her hands, "spidery, crafty Ma Barker," whose "withered fingers" controlled the fate of her family of "desperadoes." Not a word of this was true.

In a narrow sense, the War on Crime was a great success. Hoover got what he wanted; the public enemies were put out of business. And in the process he created the modern FBI. He also advocated a bigger role for the federal government in the battle against criminal elements and established a strong federal agency to carry on that war.

Still, Hoover's legacy was a dubious one. His agency improved its skill while gaining a great deal of power that it often abused. Those abuses took various forms, such as "vigorous physical interviews" that we might call gross brutality. As the power of the FBI and its director became "absolute," the agency, according to Burrough, was itself "corrupted absolutely." The Bureau still "wrestles with" its mixed record to this day. As for the public enemies, they were really only bit-players in the drama of high crime. As Burrough points out, law enforcement launched no "broader drives on the Chicago Syndicate or Italian Mafias, no war on counterfeiting or other crimes." Nor was there any attack on the rot and corruption of the cities, on the crooked sheriffs and police lieutenants and the vast interconnections between the agencies of organized crime. Dillinger, the Barkers and the others were, in fact, disorganized crime. They robbed and they killed, but they did not, in the main, threaten the fabric of society, the texture of local and state government or the integrity of law enforcement.

Public Enemies is a significant book, and a very readable one. It is easy to toss around terms like "definitive," but this book deserves it. It is hard to imagine a more careful, complete and entrancing book on this subject, and on this era. Readers will not be disappointed.

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From AudioFile
Campbell Scott's careful reading effectively documents the fledgling FBI's handling of the 1933-34 crime wave, which brought great public recognition to the organization and established J. Edgar Hoover as the nation's #1 law enforcer, a position he maintained for over forty years. Many of the criminals Burrough portrays--Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, and Pretty Boy Floyd--became household names. Their deeds, while occasionally comic, were mostly cruel, bloody, and deadly. The bitter reality of the Depression era is movingly depicted as both Hoover and the mythic character of the FBI he created are soundly debunked. L.C. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

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Customer Reviews

Awesome
A very interesting book. Let's you know exactly what happens back in the old days. Good reading.

Get ready to ride along with the gangster bank robbers in their old Fords and Hudsons!
For history buffs, this is a find! I could not put this book down! WoW, loaded, just packed with information on the PUBLIC ENEMIES! With all the fuss now, with Johnny Depp starring in Public Enemies, based on this book, I am sure this will be THE book everyone will have to read. The movie is coming out in 2009. Filmed in the Midwest; Wisconsin, Indiana, etc, and even at Little Bohemia, in Northern Wisconsin, where the Feds goofed up bigtime and J.Edgar Hoover covered, or at least tried to cover up their blunder, when innocent citizens were gunned down, instead of the "gangstas". You will love this, you won't want the book to end, it covers all of them, Johhny Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Ma Barker and her gang, Machine Gun Kelly. It's all here, and of course, Bonnie and Clyde. You will be right at the scenes, even when they met their bloody early demise, and most of them went out shooting their tommy guns. The author did a magnificent job of researching his subjects. You won't be disappointed spending a weekend reading this one!

Debunking the Myths
This is what good history books should be all about. Mr. Burrough's engaging retelling of the overly romanticized, Depression-era criminals and exposing Hoover's public relations spin for personal gain was very effect. Historians that capably dissect events from the past help us to understand how today's events are also manipulated for political and philosophical gain. As trite as it may sound, history does repeat itself. Mr. Burrough's book is well written and kept me entertained and informed throughout. Thoroughly enjoyable.