Bryan Burrough

  Summit, New Jersey

  December 2003

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Federal Bureau of Investigation

  Also: Special Agents Charles Winstead, Clarence Hurt, Jerry Campbell, Tom McDade, Ray Suran, Ed Guinane. Doris Rogers, secretary.

  The St. Paul Yeggs

  Also: Vi Mathias, Frances Nash, Kathryn Kelly.

  Pretty Boy Floyd

  The Barrow Gang

  The Posse: Frank Hamer, Manny Gault, Bob Alcorn, Ted Hinton, Henderson Jordan, Prentiss Oakley.

  The Barker-Karpis Gang

  Also: Paula Harmon, Wynona Burdette, William Weaver, Charles Fitzgerald, Willie Harrison.

  The Baby Face Nelson Gang

  Also: Clarence Lieder, Jack Perkins, Jimmy Murray.

  The Dillinger Gang

  Also: Arthur O’Leary, investigator; Jimmy Probasco, safe house owner; Polly Hamilton; and Ana Sage.

  PROLOGUE

  Torremolinos, Spain

  August 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 crewcut 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-frame eyeglasses that made him look like a minor-league academic. He spent much of his time holed up in his cluttered garage apartment, watching the BBC on a flickering black-and-white television, surrounded by bottles of Jack Daniel’s and pills and his 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 a decade 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 tequilla 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, they 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 a kook. 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 ’60s, 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 an artificial world.

  At that point the old man would just shake his head. As he sprawled on his couch at nights, 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. The truth of it all seemed lost now, forgotten as totally as he was. Dillinger, Floyd, Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker: He had known them all. 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.

  1

  A PRELUDE TO WAR

  Spring 1933

  Washington, D.C. Saturday, March 4, 1933

  It was a morning as bleak as the times. Gray clouds sagged low over the city, nudged along by a north wind and gusts of rain. A hundred thousand people stood outside the Capitol, waiting. The mood in the crowd was hushed, anxious. A few pointed to the rooftops. “What are those things that look like little cages?” someone asked.

  “Machine guns,” said a woman.1

  The sense of crisis was underscored by the nervous young soldiers who stood by on street corners, fingering their rifles. “The atmosphere,” wrote Arthur Krock in the New York Times, “was comparable to that which might be found in a beleaguered capital in wartime.”

  The analogy was apt. It did feel like war. People were shell-shocked. The country they had known—the fat and happy America of the Jazz Age, of speakeasies and fun and sloe gin fizzes—had vanished, destroyed as utterly as if wiped out by an enemy’s bombs. Women who once spent their evenings dancing the Charleston now shuffled forward in breadlines, grimy and hopeless. Fathers who sank their savings in the stock market now sat in gutters, begging for change.

  A bugle called. Everywhere, heads turned. The president-elect, appearing unsteady, stepped up the maroon-carpeted ramp to the lectern. The chief justice, Charles Evan Hughes, read the oath of office.

  When he was finished, Franklin Delano Roosevelt stepped to the lectern and gripped it tightly. His face was grim. “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he intoned, “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Roosevelt looked out over the crowd. “This Nation asks for action, and action now,” he continued. “We must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline . . . I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”

  Afterward, when the president disappeared back inside the Capitol, few in the crowd felt reassured. Mention of war left many frightened. There was talk of martial law, anarchy, dictatorship. Few understood what kind of war the president intended. Anything seemed possible.

  What no one could know that morning was that one theater of the metaphoric war Roosevelt invoked would in fact involve guns and blood and death on American soil. It would be fought across a great swath of the country’s midsection, beginning at a railroad station in Kansas City before engulfing the streets of Chicago, pine-shrouded lodges in northern Wisconsin, dust-bowl farms in weary Oklahoma, and battle sites scattered from Atlantic City to Dallas, St. Paul to Florida. It would be fought not by soldiers but by another branch of the federal government, an obscure arm of the Justice Department, headed by an equally obscure bureaucrat named John Edgar Hoover, who in a span of twenty short months would rise from nowhere to hunt down a series of criminals whose exploits were to become a national soap opera, and then a legend.

  When one looks back across a chasm of seventy years, through a prism of pulp fiction and bad gangster movies, there is a tendency to view the events of 1933-34 as mythic, as folkloric. To the generations of Americans raised since World War II, the identities of criminals such as Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, “Ma” Barker, John Dillinger, and Clyde Barrow are no more real than are Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones. After decades spent in the washing machine of popular culture, their stories have been bled of all reality, to an extent that few Americans today know who these people actually were, much less that they all rose to national prominence at the same time.

  They were real. A wastrel Dallas thief turned multiple murderer, Clyde Barrow was born in 1909, the same year as Barry Goldwater and Ethel Merman. Had he lived, he would have been sixty-five years old when Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974, an aging coupon-clipper, maybe, spending evenings in a Barcalounger chuckling at Archie Bunker. Baby Face Nelson’s widow died only in 1987, after years of watching her grandchildren drum their fingers to MTV. After spending twenty-five years in prison, Machine Gun Kelly’s widow died in Tulsa in 1985. There remain people alive today who crouched behind teller cages as Dillinger robbed their neighborhood bank, who watched as Bonnie and Clyde shot innocent sheriffs, who tossed baseballs with Baby Face Nelson. Kelly and Floyd gave birth to children who still tell their parents’ stories.

  They were the bogeymen for the children who have become known as The Greatest Generation. In the spring of 1933, when men like John Dillinger were ascending the national stage, a twenty-two-year-old named Ronald Reagan was broadcasting college baseball games on WHO radio in Des Moines, twenty-year-old Richard Nixon was acting in plays at Whittier College in Southern California, while a pair of third graders, James Earl Carter in Plains, Georgia, and George Herbert Walker Bush in Greenwich, Connecticut, were learning multiplication tables. At high school dances in Hoboken, New Jersey, girls were swooning to a seventeen-year-old crooner named Francis Sinatra. At a house on Judson Avenue in Evanston, Illinois, a hyperactive nine-year-old named Marlon Brando was learning to box.

  Yet as these and other members of that generation pass from the scene, it is difficult to imagine a time when name-brand outlaws stalked twentieth-century America. In a world of pocket telephones, Internet shopping, and laser-guided bombs, the notion of marauding gangs of bank robbers wreaking havoc across the country is almost too outlandish to grasp, a story one might hear of the Wild West. But it wasn’t the Wild West. It was America in 1933, eight years before Pearl Harbor, twelve years before Hiroshima, twenty-three years before Elvis, thirty-six before Woodstock. For all the surface contrasts—there was no Internet, no television, no infrared cameras or satellite imagery—America in 1933 wasn’t all that different from America today. Long-distance telephone calls were routine. So was air travel; both cops and robbers could and sometimes did fly to their jobs. The most influential publications included the New York Times and Time magazine. Men and women dressed much as they do today; the only marked difference was a preference for hats—men in sharp fedoras and jaunty straw boaters, society women in frilly lace things, ordinary girls in Gilligan hats pulled low over their bangs. Hollywood dominated mainstream culture; popular films that spring were Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein, Johnny Weismuller’s first Tarzan, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Mutiny on the Bounty topped bestseller lists. Radio was up and running, but barely half the country’s homes had a set.

  What distinguished those early months of 1933 was that so many Americans had no money to enjoy any of this. The stock market crash of 1929 had degenerated into an economic depression. Hundreds of thousands of men lost their jobs. On reflection, that spring would be seen as a low point. Muddy shantytowns spread along the Potomac River, beneath Riverside Drive in New York, and in Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco. Thousands of families, including a legion of dirty children, lived nomadic lives in railroad cars rumbling across the Midwest, lurching from town to town in search of a better life that was nowhere to be found. In Washington there were marches, some of them violent, scenes of tanks and soldiers pushing back desperate men hungering for jobs. People were angry. They blamed the government. They blamed the banks.

  As Roosevelt delivered his inaugural address that drizzly March morning, a group of government bureaucrats in dark suits listened around a radio in a third-floor office at the corner of Vermont and K Streets in downtown Washington. What they did was little known to anyone outside their families. Their supervisor was a squat, beady-eyed man, thirty-eight years old, with a flattened nose and loose bags under his eyes. His resemblance to a bulldog was much remarked upon. That morning J. Edgar Hoover was preoccupied with keeping his job.

  Today, going on four decades after his death in 1972, it’s difficult to remember a time when Hoover was not the monolithic figure whose secret files cowed American presidents, who underwrote Senator Joseph McCarthy’s star chamber, who hounded national figures as varied as Martin Luther King, Jr., Alger Hiss, and the Rosenbergs. For four decades Hoover dominated American law enforcement as no person before or since, single-handedly creating the country’s first national police force. His legacy is as complex as the man himself. Before Hoover, American law enforcement was a decentralized polyglot of county sheriffs and urban police departments too often crippled by corruption. By and large, it was Hoover who brought the level of efficiency, professionalism, and centralized control the nation knows to this day. But his accomplishments will forever be sullied by the abuses of power—rampant illegal wiretapping, break-ins, and harassment of civil rights groups—of his later years.

  Hoover’s power did not evolve slowly. It erupted during the Great Crime Wave of 1933-34. He entered this period an anonymous federal functionary, his bureau struggling to shake past scandals. In twenty months he emerged a national hero, a household name lauded in films, books, and comic strips. In six hundred days, the modern FBI was born. This book is the story of how it happened.

  That morning, Hoover was director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation. Not the Federal Bureau of Investigation; it wouldn’t get that name for another two years.a He had been in office nine years, since 1924, but he had enemies, lots of them, and Roosevelt’s men made it clear that he would probably be replaced. The final decision was to be made by the new attorney general, a confirmed Hoover-hater named Thomas Walsh. That Thursday, two days before Roosevelt’s address, Walsh, a seventy-two-year-old senator from Montana, had boarded a train from Miami to Washington with his new bride, a Cuban debutante. Friday morning Mrs. Walsh awakened aboard the train in North Carolina and found her husband dead; whispers in the capital suggested the elderly senator had expired following an athletic bout of sex.

  For Hoover the reprieve was temporary. After all he had achieved in the last nine years, it was galling to him that mere politicians held his fate; if not for him, the Bureau of Investigation might have been eliminated years before. It was an odd little outfit, “a bureaucratic bastard,” one critic called it, responsible for investigating a grab bag of federal offenses, including sedition, interstate auto theft, breakouts from federal prisons, and crime on Indian reservations. One writer termed it “an odd-job detective agency with fuzzy lines of authority and responsibility.” Hoover’s agents did not possess arrest powers; if they wanted to mount a raid, they were obliged to bring along local policemen. Nor did they carry guns. This was a policy, not a law; Hoover’s model was Scotland Yard. His men were investigators, not policemen. “Fact finders” was the word his aides used.

  The Bureau had a sordid history. Created in 1908 to investigate antitrust cases, it had devolved over the ensuing fifteen years into a nest of nepotism and corruption. By the early 1920s, its agents, scattered across fifty domestic offices, were hired mostly as favors to politicians. Its most notorious employee, a con man named Gaston Means, earned his money blackmailing congressmen, selling liquor licenses to bootleggers, and auctioning presidential pardons. In the wake of a mid-1920s Congressional investigation, the Bureau acquired the nickname “The Department of Easy Virtue.”

  The day he was promoted to clean up the Bureau in 1924, Hoover was a stoic twenty-nine-year-old government attorney who still lived with his adoring mother in the house where he was raised, a two-story stucco building at 413 Seward Square in Washington’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. He was a boyhood stutterer who overcame his disability by teaching himself to speak rapidly, in staccato bursts so fast that more than one stenographer was unable to keep up. Neat, intense, and disciplined, Hoover grew up surrounded by civil servants in the bosom of the Washington bureaucracy. There was little question that he would follow his father, a deskman at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, into government work. Hoover went to night school at George Washington University, where he joined the Kappa Alpha fraternity. Working days as a clerk at the Library of Congress, he received his bachelor of law degree in 1916 and his master’s a year later, the same year that he passed the District of Columbia bar.