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.
At B. 485, on the Bookazine shelves, 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.”
