A quick glance through the Author’s
Note at the beginning of this book quickly shows that the title of the book
Public Enemies (ISBN 978-0-141-04258-9, Penguin Books, 2005) is
erroneous. Despite the fact that the book does deal with some fairly
well-known names in the American gangster era, such as Ma Barker, Bonnie and
Clyde and John Dillinger, author Bryan Burrough states clearly, “This is the
first comprehensive narrative history of the FBI’s War on Crime, which
lasted from 1933 to 1936.” Whilst the wave of criminal behavior, which
resulted from the Great Depression in the US, and the folk-lore criminals of
the era made it necessary for there to be an FBI, this book deals more with
J. Edgar Hoover and the agents of the FBI themselves than with the criminal
Public Enemies of the time.
Whilst it is probably considered that
the FBI is an organization that has carefully orchestrated methods of
countering crime, stemming mostly from television dramas, this book will
make you think otherwise. While J. Edgar Hoover was a stickler for
punctuality, the FBI itself was chaotic and unconnected. Good information
was relayed to operatives in the field, to be ignored by those higher up the
tree.
The ineptitude of the criminals (for
example “Machine Gun” Kelly’s wife boasted that her husband was a bank
robber!) was only equaled (or even surpassed) by the ineptitude of the FBI
officers in the field. Burrough’s book certainly leaves the reader in no
doubt of that. “Losing (a criminal) was the kind of blunder the FBI made
often in 1933 as Hoover’s men learned the ins and outs of professional law
enforcement.”
Newspapers were able to show the FBI
just where many of the criminals were headed, but the law enforcement
officers were just as likely to lose the leads.
There are a few interesting
photographic plates in the center of the book allowing the reader to put a
face to the names. Ma Barker was certainly no beauty, and “Machine Gun”
Kelly does not look like the gangster one imagines with such a nickname.
It is a very informative and fast-paced
book, which has impeccable research to back up the narrative. In the
Bibliographical Essay at the back of the book, before the Bibliographical
Notes and the Index, Author Burrough states, “The primary source materials
for this book are the FBI’s files on the War on Crime’s major cases, which
have been released in bits and pieces since the mid 1980’s.” Burrough claims
that he purchased several hundred thousand pages at 10 cents a page and has
several filing cabinets full. I have no reason to doubt his claims. The book
is very well researched, and if fond memories of the Bonnie and Clyde movie
are with you, Bonnie was nowhere near as striking as Faye Dunaway, and as
Burrough states, (the movie) “has taken a shark-eyed multiple murderer and
his deluded girlfriend and transformed them into sympathetic characters,
imbuing them with a cuddly likeability they did not possess, and a cultural
significance they do not deserve.”
