'Enemies' a superb tale of FBI's birth

Bryan Burrough's "Public Enemies" is chockablock with gripping murderous incidents, but none is more incredible, or catches his subject matter better, than the June 1934 shootout between the FBI and John Dillinger in Manitowish Waters, Wis.

A wild melee of flying bullets and crashing cars, it was a debacle for the poorly trained FBI, in which an agent and a civilian were killed, and the bad guys -- including Dillinger and his sometime partner, Baby Face Nelson -- got away.

Burrough, a journalist and author ("Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of R.J.R. Nabisco"), says his new book, "Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34" (Penguin Press, 570 pages, $27.95) is "the first comprehensive narrative history of the FBI's War on Crime, which lasted from 1933 to 1936."

The hunt for Dillinger, which would emerge as the most important case in the agency's history, became the centerpiece of that war, in which "one can literally see the FBI grow up. . . . Above all, this is a book about how the FBI became the FBI."

Indeed it is, and as such it is quite superb -- readable, thorough and critical -- with masses of new information from FBI files that were only opened in the late 1980s.

At the beginning of the "war," the fledgling agency, known simply as the Bureau of Investigation, was struggling to find its feet. Agents at first carried no guns, had no arrest powers and were deficient in basic police expertise. But by the end, it was coming into its own as a federal police force that fit in well with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's push to centralize many facets of American government.

At the center of it all, of course, is J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's director from 1924 until his death in 1972. Burrough does not overlook Hoover's infamous megalomania -- which led him to tell a highly misleading story of the War on Crime, one of many such falsifications down through the years. But neither does he deny his part in bringing professionalism, efficiency and control to an agency that had been kicked around as a political football with no established goals.

Six major criminal factions are involved here: Dillinger, Nelson (real name: Lester Gillis), Charles Arthur ("Pretty Boy") Floyd, the Barker-Karpis gang, Machine Gun Kelly (real name: George Barnes) and Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Though only Dillinger matches them for visibility, Bonnie and Clyde were not primary targets of the FBI.

As Burrough sees it, the War on Crime boils down to four groupings of cases: the kidnapping in July 1933 of Oklahoma City oilman Charles Urschel by Kelly (whom the author calls the most inept of the criminals); the Barker-Karpis kidnappings of banking and brewing figures Edward Bremer and William Hamm, in 1933 and 1934, in St. Paul, Minn. ("the crime capital of the Midwest"); the Dillinger manhunt; and the Kansas City Massacre of law enforcement officers on June 17, 1933, which Burrough sees as the start of the war.

"These stories," the author says, "have been bled of all reality" with the passage of time. He puts the blood right back in them, and there is plenty to go around with the numerous gory gun battles.

To anyone old enough for these names to have any resonance, the startling thing is to realize that they were all operating, not over a period of many years, but at virtually the same time. For instance, two days after Dillinger pulled a breathtakingly brazen bank job in Racine, Wis., in November 1933, there was a bullet-filled chase of Bonnie and Clyde in Texas.

Burrough does a good job of choreographing these nearly simultaneous events, but this fair-sized cast of characters crisscrossing the center of the country does grow confusing. Though each deadly spree is morbidly fascinating in its awful way, the effect after a while is somewhat like watching an extended battle scene on video: You just want to fast-forward.

Gradually, the FBI gained the upper hand, and the baddies began to fall as quickly as they rose. Burrough terms the arrest of Kelly in Memphis in September 1933 as a turning point for the FBI.

Bonnie and Clyde were brought down in the proverbial hail of bullets (at least 150 struck their car) by local police in Louisiana in May 1934. Floyd was killed while battling FBI agents and local police near East Liverpool, Ohio, in October.

Nelson died in a shootout near Barrington, Ill., in November 1934, which also took the lives of two FBI men. Nelson was always the most violent and vicious of the bunch. "At his worst," Burrough writes, "Nelson was a caricature of the public enemy, a callous, wild-eyed machine-gunner who actually laughed as he sprayed bullets toward women and children in at least two of his robberies."

The death of Dillinger, whose notoriety Nelson had always envied, is the most well-known. Betrayed by "the woman in red" (Ana Sage, who actually wore an orange skirt), he was shot to death outside the Biograph theater in Chicago the night of Sunday, July 22, 1934.

Ma Barker and her son Fred were killed in a cottage hideout at Lake Weir, Fla., in January 1935. Though Hoover wove a fanciful tale that she was the brains of the Barker-Karpis gang, she was in reality a nonentity whose only crime was living off ill-gotten gains.

The true brains behind that gang, Alvin ("Ray") Karpis, was the last to fall. Arrested in New Orleans in April 1936 (supposedly by Hoover himself), he spent the rest of his life behind bars until released and deported to his native Canada in 1969.

In a sense, he also had the last word, co-authoring, before his death in 1979, two books that debunked Hoover myths.

Roger K. Miller, a journalist for many years, is a free-lance writer and reviewer for several publications, and a frequent contributor to the Deseret Morning News.

Copyright C 2004 Deseret News Publishing Co.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.