7 Tamm to Hoover, Sept. 24, 1934, KCM #2659.

  8 Tamm to Hoover, Sept. 25, 1934, KCM #2617.

  9 Harvey to Hoover, Sept. 26, 1934, KCM #2568.

  10 Chicago Tribune, Oct. 16, 1935.

  11 Chase statement, Jodil #5488, p. 9.

  12 Negri statement, Jodil #5271. Quotes taken from Negri article, True Detective magazine, July 1941.

  13 Tamm, memo to file, October 12, 1934, Jodil #4207.

  14 Hoover to Purvis, Sept. 13, 1934. Purvis personnel file, #291.

  15 Hoover to Tamm, 7:35 P.M., Oct. 21, 1934, KCM #2854.

  16 Hoover to Tamm, 1:00 P.M., Oct. 22, 1934, KCM #2701.

  17 Hoover to Tamm, 5:45 P.M., Oct. 22, 1934, KCM #2903.

  18 Newby memo, Oct. 24, 1934, KCM #2946.

  19 Negri article, July 1941.

  20 Chase statement, Jodil #5488.

  21 Doris Lockerman article, Chicago Tribune, Oct. 17, 1935.

  22 Tamm to Hoover, Jodil #4601.

  23 Chicago report, Jodil #5813.

  24 Hoover memo to file, Nov. 27, 1934, Jodil #4610.

  25 Hoover memo to file, Nov. 27, 1934, Jodil #4611.

  26 Chicago American, November 28, 1934.

  27 Hoover memo to file, Nov. 28, 1934, Jodil #4665.

  28 Chicago American, December 5, 1934.

  18: THE LAST MAN STANDING

  1 Tolson to Hoover, Dec. 4, 1934, BKF #3546.

  2 Years later, Karpis clearly remembered this episode and the name “Kingman” (Karpis transcripts, tape 20, page 135). Both his instincts and his memory proved excellent. A confidential report on Kingman’s trip to Havana is included in FBI files, BKF #3621.

  3 Karpis transcripts, tape 20, p. 149.

  4 Statements from all agents involved at BKF #4198.

  5 BKF #3807.

  6 BKF #3743.

  7 BKF #3771.

  8 “Barker’s Cook Remembers Day,” The Belleview (Fla.) Leader, Jan. 16, 1980; Ocala Evening Star, Jan. 16, 17, 1935; Toronto Star, Oct. 11, 1986.

  9 New York Evening Journal magazine, March 3, 1935.

  19: PAS DE DEUX

  1 Cleveland report, Sept. 5, 1936, BKF #12794.

  2 Richard Gid Powers, G-Men: Hoover’s FBI in American Popular Culture, Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.

  3 Harper’s, November 1934.

  4 Tamm to Hoover, Aug. 1, 1935, BKF #6886.

  5 Little Rock report, Oct. 17, 1935, BKF #7721.

  6 Tamm to Hoover, Feb. 4, 1936, BKF #9460.

  7 Connelley to Brantley, Feb. 17, 1936, BKF #9581.

  8 Nathan to Hoover, March 28, 1936, BKF #10245.

  9 P. E. Foxworth to Hoover, March 28, 1936, BKF #10244.

  10 Connelley to Hoover, March 30, 1936, BKF #10255.

  11 Gentry, p. 182.

  12 Ibid., pp. 184-87.

  13 Tamm to Hoover, April 26, 1936, BKF #11004.

  14 Fletcher to Connelley, April 25, 1936, BKF #11011.

  15 Tolson to Hoover, April 27, 1936, BKF #11006X.

  16 Cincinnati report, May 18, 1936, BKF #1165.

  17 Hoover gave his version of events in a phone call to headquarters the next morning. T. D. Quinn, memo to file, May 2, 1936, BKF #11099.

  18 New York Evening Journal, May 2, 1936.

  19 Chicago American, May 2, 1936.

  20 Karpis, p. 230.

  21 Ibid., p. 236. This anecdote is confirmed by a contemporary news account.

  EPILOGUE

  1 Potter, p. 4.

  2 Cited in Powers, p. 114.

  3 Sandusky Register, December 11, 1993.

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Alix, Ernest Kahlar. Ransom Kidnapping in America, 1874-1974: The Creation of a Capital Crime.

  Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University, 1978.

  Barnes, Bruce. Machine Gun Kelly: To Right a Wrong. Perris, Calif.: Tipper, 1991. (Biography by

  Kelly’s son. Excellent material on Kelly’s early years. Less reliable on his crimes.)

  Callahan, Clyde C., and Byron B. Jones. Heritage of an Outlaw—the Story of Frank Nash. Hobart,

  Okla.: Schoonmaker, 1979.

  Clayton, Merle. Union Station Massacre. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975. (Unreliable, but useful

  for Agent Joe Lackey’s recitation of events leading to the massacre.)

  Congdon, Don. The ’30s: A Time to Remember. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962.

  Cook, Fred J. The FBI Nobody Knows. New York: Macmillan, 1964.

  Cooper, Courtney Ryley. Ten Thousand Public Enemies. Boston: Little, Brown, 1935.

  ———. Here’s to Crime. Boston: Little Brown, 1937.

  Corey, Herbert. Farewell, Mr. Gangster! New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936.

  Cromie, Robert, and Joseph Pinkston. Dillinger: A Short and Violent Life. New York: McGraw

  Hill, 1962. (First detailed biography of Dillinger, overshadowed by Toland’s Dillinger Days.

  Largely derived from newspaper clippings.)

  de Toledano, Ralph. J. Edgar Hoover, the Man in His Time. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington

  House, 1973.

  Edge, L. L. Run the Cat Roads. New York: Dembner Books, 1981.

  Ellis, George. A Man Named Jones. New York: Signet Books, 1963.

  Fried, Albert. The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America. Revised ed. New York: Columbia

  University Press, 1993.

  Friedman, Lawrence M. Crime and Punishment in American History. New York: Basic Books,

  1993.

  Gardner, Ruth Dickerson. Lunch at Boney’s Mound: A Portrait of Family and Friends. Privately

  published, 1997. (Lovingly produced family portrait of the LaPorte-Wanetka families.)

  Gentry, Curt. J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991. (Superb

  Hoover biography.)

  Girardin, Russell G., with William Helmer. Dillinger: The Untold Story. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University, 1994. (Girardin’s manuscript, augmented by Helmer’s excellent footnotes, sheds much new light on Dillinger’s final weeks.)

  Haley, J. Evetts. Robbing Banks Was My Business. Canyon, Tex.: Palo Duro Press, 1973. (Harvey Bailey’s biography. Though Bailey’s memory is spotty in places, Haley’s book is one of only two in which Depression-era outlaws tell their side of the story.)

  Hamilton, Floyd. Public Enemy No. 1. Dallas, Tex.: Acclaimed Books/International Prison Ministry, 1978.

  Helmer, William, with Rick Mattix. Public Enemies: America’s Criminal Past, 1919-1940. (An invaluable almanac-style overview of the War on Crime and the 1920s by two leading amateur historians.)

  Hinton, Ted, with Larry Grove. Ambush: The Real Story of Bonnie and Clyde. Bryan, Tex.: Shoal Creek, 1979.

  Hoover, J. Edgar. Persons in Hiding. Boston: Little, Brown, 1938.

  Illman, Harry R. Unholy Toledo: The True Story of Detroit’s Purple-Licavoli Gang’s Take-Over of an Ohio City. San Francisco: Polemic Press, 1985.

  Jenkins, John H., and H. Gordon Frost. I’m Frank Hamer: The Life of a Texas Peace Officer.

  Austin, Tex.: Pemberton Press, 1968.

  Karpis, Alvin, with Bill Trent. The Alvin Karpis Story. New York: Coward-McCann & Geoghegan, 1971.

  Karpis, Alvin, with Robert Livesey. On the Rock. Don Mills, Ontario: Musson/General, 1980.

  King, Jeffrey S. The Life and Death of Pretty Boy Floyd. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press,

  1998.

  Kirchner, L. R. Triple Cross Fire!: J. Edgar Hoover & the Kansas City Union Station Massacre.

  Kansas City, Mo.: Janlar Books, 1993. (Avoid.)

  ———. Robbing Banks: An American History, 1831-1999. Rockville Centre, N.Y.: Sarpedon, 2000.

  Kirkpatrick, E. E. Crimes’ Paradise: The Authentic Inside Story of the Urschel Kidnapping. San

  Antonio, Tex.: Naylor, 1934.

  Kobler, John. Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone. New York: DaCapo Press, 1992.

  Larsen, Lawrence H., and Nancy J. Hulston. Pendergast! Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri

  Press, 2000.

  Louderback, Lew. The Bad Ones: Gangsters of the ’30s and Their Molls. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1968.

  Maccabee, Paul. John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crook’s Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920-1936. St. Paul, Minn.: Minnesota Historical Press, 1995. (One of the very best books on St. Paul’s role in the War on Crime, and a personal favorite.)

  Milner, E. R. The Lives and Times of Bonnie and Clyde. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996.

  Newton, Willis, and Joe Newton, with Claude Stanush and David Middleton. The Newton Boys: Portrait of an Outlaw Gang. Austin, Tex.: State House, 1994.

  Nickel, Steven, and William J. Helmer. Baby Face Nelson: Portrait of a Public Enemy. Nashville: Cumberland House, 2002.

  Owens, Ron. Oklahoma Justice: The Oklahoma City Police: A Century of Gunfighters, Gangsters

  and Terrorists. Paducah, Ky.: Turner Publishing, 1995.

  Parker, Emma, and Nell Barrow Cowan, with Jan Fortune. Fugitives: The Story of Clyde Barrow

  and Bonnie Parker. Dallas, Tex.: Ranger Press, 1934. Reprinted by Signet, 1968. (Still one of

  the two best books on Bonnie and Clyde, told by Clyde’s sister and Bonnie’s mother.)

  Peterson, Virgil W. Barbarians in Our Midst. Boston: Little, Brown, 1952.

  Phillips, John Neal. Running with Bonnie and Clyde: The Ten Fast Years of Ralph Fults. Norman,

  Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. (Excellent book, much of it told by Clyde’s

  onetime partner Ralph Fults.)

  Potter, Claire Bond. War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men, and the Politics of Mass Culture. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998. (Outstanding academic analysis of the War on Crime period.)

  Poulsen, Ellen. Don’t Call Us Molls: Women of the John Dillinger Gang. Little Neck, N.Y.: Clinton

  Cook Publishing, 2002.

  Powers, Richard Gid. G-Men: Hoover’s FBI in American Popular Culture. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.

  ———. Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: Free Press, 1987.

  Purvis, Melvin. American Agent. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1936.

  Quimby, Myron. The Devil’s Emissaries. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1969.

  Reddig, William M. Tom’s Town: Kansas City and the Pendergast Legend. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott,

  1947.

  Ruth, David E. Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918-1934. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

  Sanborn, Debra. The Barrow Gang’s Visit to Dexter. Dexter, Iowa: Bob Weesner, 1976.

  Simmons, Lee. Assignment Huntsville: Memoirs of a Texas Prison Officer. Austin, Tex.: University

  of Texas, 1957.

  Steele, Phillip W., with Marie Barrow Scoma. The Family Story of Bonnie and Clyde. Gretna, La.: Pelican, 2000.

  Sullivan, William, with Bill Brown. The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979.

  Summers, Anthony. Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Son, 1993.

  Swierczynski, Duane. This Here’s a Stick-Up: The Big Bad Book of American Bank Robbery. Indianapolis,

  Ind.: Alpha Books, 2002.

  Toland, John. Dillinger Days. New York: Random House, 1963.

  Touhy, Roger, with Ray Brennan. The Stolen Years. Cleveland, Ohio: Pennington, 1959.

  Treherne, John. The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde. New York: Stein & Day, 1984.

  Unger, Robert. The Union Station Massacre: The Original Sin of Hoover’s FBI. Kansas City, Mo.:

  Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1997. (Definitive.)

  Wallis, Michael. The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd. New York: St. Martin’s, 1992. (Excellent

  biography, with full cooperation of Floyd family.)

  Watkins, T. H. The Great Depression: America in the 1930s. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993.

  ———. The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America. New York:

  Henry Holt, 1999.

  Webb, Walter Prescott. The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935.

  Whitehead, Don. The FBI Story: A Report to the People. New York: Random House, 1956.

  Winter, Robert. Mean Men: The Sons of Ma Barker. Danbury, Conn.: Rutledge Books, 2000.

  (Unusual if well-researched book on the Barker family in the pre-War on Crime period.)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For forty years much of the new material uncovered on the War on Crime period has been unearthed by a dedicated band of amateur historians, many of whom provided tremendous help to me during my four years of research. Probably no one person has amassed more information on Depression-era outlaws than Rick Mattix of Bussey, Iowa, who opened his files to me and was always there to answer a thorny question. Thomas Smusyn, who knows more about John Dillinger than any man alive, was an expert guide through Dillinger’s old Chicago haunts.

  I am deeply indebted to Paul Maccabee, whose history of the St. Paul underworld, John Dillinger Slept Here, is one of the finest books produced on the War on Crime period; to Robert Unger, who knows more about the Kansas City Massacre than anyone; to Bill Helmer, the dean of Dillinger historians; to Bob Bates in Oregon; to Curt Gentry, whose J. Edgar Hoover biography remains the finest in or out of print; and to Richard Jones in Oklahoma City, who allowed me to borrow from his great trove of 1930s-era detective magazines.

  Dawn Trent, the widow of Bill Trent, Alvin Karpis’s ghostwriter, kindly lent me thousands of pages of interview transcripts that her husband made with Karpis in the late 1960s; these transcripts are a source of much new information on the period. A former FBI archivist, Susan Rosenthal, provided files on former FBI agents. Thanks as well to historians Glenn Jordan in Monroe, Louisiana; Arch McKinney in East Chicago; Robert Beresford in Wellesville, Ohio; Clyde Woolridge in McAlester, Oklahoma; and Orville Albritton and Bobbie McClain in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

  A huge thank-you to the staff at The Grapevine in Quantico, Virginia, who allowed me to spend three days wading through back issues, and to the wonderful archivists at FBI headquarters in Washington. Thanks, too, to the children and extended families of the many FBI men and prosecutors who fought the War on Crime, including Alston Purvis, Melvin Purvis’s son; Samuel Cowley, Jr.; Doris Lockerman; Jared McDade in Ossining, New York; John Davis Rorer; Kristina Metcalfe, daughter of James Metcalfe; Werner Hanni, Jr.; Frazier Reams, Jr.; and the families of John Welles, Jay Newman, John Madala, and Hugh Clegg.

  Thanks to the staff at the Chicago Public Library; the Chicago Historical Society; the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul; the Oklahoma Historical Society; the Missouri Historical Society; the J. Evetts Haley Museum in Midland, Texas; the Red River Historical Museum in Sherman, Texas; and the Hot Springs Historical Society in Hot Springs, Arkansas; the federal archives in College Park, Maryland, and Chicago, and Kansas City; as well as the Ohio public libraries in Cleveland, Akron, Toledo, Bluffton, Lima, and Dayton; the Indiana public libraries in Muncie, Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, Crown Point, East Chicago, Gary, Peru, Hammond, and Terre Haute; the Texas public libraries in Dallas, Fort Worth, Coleman, Waco, Austin, Houston, San Marcos, and San Antonio; the Iowa public libraries in Des Moines and Mason City; the Missouri public libraries in Kansas City, Joplin, and Springfield; the New Jersey public libraries in Summit, Maplewood, Newark, and Atlantic City; the Florida public libraries in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Ocala, Orlando, and Daytona Beach; the Arkansas public libraries in Little Rock and Hot Springs; the public library in Memphis; the Georgia public library in Albany; and the Wisconsin public libraries in Lake Geneva and Elkhorn.

  I could not have attempted this book were it not for the patience of Vanity Fair’s editor, Graydon Carter, who looked the other way when I should have been writing stories for him. Anna Bakolas was a terrific researcher in the early months of this project. Marla Burrough, Doug Stumpf, Steve Swartz, and Jordan Glatt gave invaluable reviews of the manuscript. An-drew Wylie and Jeffrey Posternak at the Wylie Agency remain the best literary agents in the business. This project began as a television miniseries for the Home Box Office network; only after research began did I realize I loved it all too much not to write a book. Thanks to Brian Siberell for guiding me through Hollywood.

  At Penguin Press, Scott Moyers always believed in this project and gave terrific advice in winnowing the final manuscript. His trusty assistant, Sophie Fels, kept the trains running on time. Melissa Goldstein ransacked archives across the country to gather the photographs. Thanks as well to my parents, Mac and Mary Burrough, in Temple, Texas, who are never too busy to listen. And as always, my greatest thanks goes to my family, Marla, Griffin, and Dane, who never complain about all the long hours Daddy spends alone in his office.

  INDEX

  Adams, Joe

  Akers, Herbert “Dutch”

  Akers, Mrs. Walter

  Akers, Walter Lynne

  Akron Beacon-Journal

  Alcorn, Bob

  in Bonnie and Clyde ambush

  Bonnie and Clyde pursued by

  Alderton, Harold

  Aldredge, W. J.

  Allison, Leo J.

  Al Spencer Gang

  Alt, Rudolph

  Ambush (Hinton)

  American Agent (Purvis)

  American Bank and Trust robbery

  American Express Company

  American Legion

  American Magazine

  American National Bank robbery

  “American National Police, The: The Dangers of Federal Crime Control” (Harper’s)

  Anderson, Esther

  Anderson, Harold

  Anderson, Joe

  Angus, Bert

  Angus, Ted

  Argosy

  Arkansas Gazette

  Arnold, Flossie Mae

  Arnold, Geralene

  Arnold, Luther

  Artery, John

  Assignment Huntsville (Simmons) 22n

  Associated Press

  Atlantic City shoot-out

  Auerbach, Joseph

  Backman, Sally

  Baczo, George