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Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 Paperback – April 29, 2009

by Bryan Burrough (Author)

4.5 743 ratings

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Coming in Summer 2009, the major motion picture from Universal Studios

"ludicrously entertaining" (Time), Public Enemies is the story of the most spectacular crime wave in American history, the two-year battle between the young J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI, and an assortment of criminals who became national icons: John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the Barkers. In an epic feat of storytelling, Burrough reveals a web of interconnections within the vast American underworld and demonstrates how Hoover's G-men secured the FBI's rise to power.

Print length

624 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Books
Publication date

April 29, 2009
Reading age

18 years and up
Dimensions

5.5 x 1.05 x 8.5 inches
ISBN-10

0143115863
ISBN-13

978-0143115861
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Editorial Reviews

Review

" [A] riveting true-crime tale . . . fascinating . . . the real story, it turns out, is much better than the Hollywood version."
-The Wall Street Journal

"A rollicking yarn whose prose bounces across the page like a getaway car through a wheat field."
-Newsweek

"An amazingly detailed true-life thriller that puts us on a stakeout alongside the feds, inside the banks while bullets fly, and inevitably, next to the criminals' bloody corpses."
-Entertainment Weekly

About the Author

Bryan Burrough is a special correspondent at Vanity Fair and the author of three previous books. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, he is a three-time winner of the John Hancock Award for excellence in financial journalism. Burrough lives in Summit, New Jersey, with his wife and their two sons.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Torremolinos, SpainAugust 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 crew cut 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-framed eyeglasses that made him look like a minor-league academic. He spent much of his time holed up in his cluttered garage apartment, watching BBC footage of the Iranian hostage crisis on a flickering black-and-white television, surrounded by bottles of Jack Daniel’s and pills and 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 ten years 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 tequila 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 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 unstable. 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 sixties 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 a made-up world.

At that point the old man would just shake his head. As he sat on his couch at night, 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.

And the truth of it, the actual true facts, was all but lost now, forgotten as totally as he was. Dillinger, Floyd, Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker: He had known them every one. 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.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Media Tie In, Reprint edition (April 29, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 624 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0143115863
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143115861
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.3 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.05 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #993,440 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #760 in Law Enforcement (Books)
- #979 in Law Enforcement Politics
- #1,430 in Organized Crime True Accounts

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Bryan Burrough

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Bryan Burrough is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the author of three previous books.

Photo by Udaymanju239 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Emreadsnstuff

Fantastic. What a well researched book. RECOMMEND.

Reviewed in the United States on August 10, 2023

Verified Purchase

Wow. I thought I knew so much about these "public enemies", and their escapades. I did know quite a bit, but what I DIDN'T know, well, wow.
My father is a retired homicide detective. I'm the only girl in a house full of brothers and their friends. For some reason, my brothers didn't seem very interested or impressed regarding what our father did.
On the other hand, I was constantly asking him questions. I remember seeing him take his suit jacket off and there was a gun in a shoulder holster!
Anyway, I ALWAYS was suspicious about John Dillenger's death and how he was finally caught. It makes me furious when I see movies showing him being betrayed by some " woman in red."
I won't ruin anything for anyone who chooses to read this book, but if ××I×× was surprised about so many things, I have a feeling others will be as well.
Lastly, WHY THAT BONEHEAD MELVIN PURVIS WAS NOT FIRED I WILL NEVER KNOW. He was a menace who was responsible for innocent people dying.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Jim Lester

Another fine book by Bryan Burrough

Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2018

Verified Purchase

This is a well-written and well-researched history of America's "War on Crime" in the early 1930s. Throughout the book, Burrough debunks some of the lingering myths about the bank robbers and the FBI agents that brought them to justice during the era. He includes detailed sections on the criminal exploits of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly and Alvin Karpis. The major thesis of the book is that the events surrounding the apprehension of these criminals led to the creation of the modern FBI. For better or worse. it's an engaging read and I would highly recommend the book to anyone interested in true crime sagas or American history in general.

6 people found this helpful

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Clinton Enlow

Public Enemies

Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2009

Verified Purchase

Public Enemies by Bryan Burroghs triumphs by simply being everything you needed to know on the subject of the birth of the FBI and its war on crime, mainly the groups of outlaws who made a short lived career of robbing banks throughout the United States during the Depression. Truthfully thats almost all you would need to know as for a history book this is one of the most detailed non-fiction accounts I've read in a while. I'll admit that I was interested in the book because of the movie but the book as it is epic in scope starting from an event termed the Kansas City Massacre where agents and police were killed along with a mobster three unknown killers were hired to rescue. From this tragedy J. Edgar Hoover staged a publicity campaign to enhance his fledgling organization of the FBI. Everything from that lead to Hoover bringing Melvin Purvis to head a fight against bank robbers like John Dillinger and kidnappers like the Barker family and Machine Gun Kellly. Bonnie and Clyde are included in the book even though they don't figure in the war on crime as they didn't rate heavy on Hoovers scales and would end up being pursued to the end by Texas Rangers who to Hoovers ire would offer to kill John Dillinger for the government. Really though for a history book it goes beyond detailed with every crime Dillinger ever commited to the problems arising between Hoover and Purvis, whom Burrogh intimates achieved his position because of a possible attraction on the Directors part. The book is long with passages of dialogue that reads like recollections transcribed by the author. There are dozens of poscripts with further information on every page giving details like Police who believed the FBI executed Pretty Boy Floyd to bio's on lesser agents who take part in major events of the war on crime. In the end Burrogh deftly discusses what effects if any Hoovers war on crime had on the FBI or crime in general, gives the fates of major players in the story and how they ended their lives and describes sites as they exist today from graves of the Barker family to the places where Kate and Fred Barker and Bonnie and Clyde were gunned down.
If I had any complaint to the book I guess it would be that as a whole its a bit dry which does make the book somewhat hard to finish. Still as far as books go its an amazing detailed account on a bygone era in time. If the subject suits your interest its definitely worth reading in my opinion

2 people found this helpful

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Chad Stephens

Five.

Reviewed in the United States on October 4, 2023

Verified Purchase

Outlaws/gangsters of the 1930s.

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Amazon Customer

Feels like I'm right there!

Reviewed in the United States on January 31, 2012

Verified Purchase

When I watch an "historical" movie I then like to do some reading about the subject to find out how accurate the movie really is and to learn more about the events. I got this book to follow-up to the movie "Public Enemies". This is not simply a matter of the book being better than the movie, this book is like watching a movie, a very well done movie. Burroughs does such a fabulous job of portraying the "cops and robbers" and their molls and support systems that I feel like I'm right there in their Michigan lake cottages or their dust bowl hideouts. I can feel the heat, the cold, smell the stockyards in Kansas City, hear the bullets whizzing, everything! This is one of the most descriptive books I have ever read. I simply cannot put it down. And even though I actually know what the outcomes will be for all of these criminals and the FBI who tracked them, I STILL want to read ever word to find out "what's going to happen next". I think telling the story chronologically, rather than doing one criminal's story first than the next's, contributes to the real world feeling of this book. The reader is moving through time with these people, as it is happening, and feels like part of it. Got to go, have to keep reading!!!

7 people found this helpful

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Neill W. McArthur, Jr.

Depression Era Crimes, Crime fighting and Bureaucracy Revisited.

Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2014

Verified Purchase

This was a great history of the depression era bank robber gangs. It related the crime wave committed by six of the gangs, from their beginnings to their unhappy ends. It also reported on the growth of the Bureau of Investigation, in the Justice Department, into the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as the mercurial relationship of J. Edgar Hoover with respect to the Bureau and its field agents. This relationship was reflected in fits of rage for agent mistakes and actual jealousy for agent success and media attention. With respect to the desperadoes and the law enforcement personnel, there were a lot of names to keep straight, and reading this book on Kindle, made it difficult to go back and refresh memory with respect to identities of the dramatis personae. I think this book would appeal to persons interested in the depression and crime history.

2 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Guido Valobra De Giovanni

Biased. Outdared.

Reviewed in Italy on December 26, 2019

Verified Purchase

Rightist biased rhetoric. Not a pleasant reading.

Edlund

Easily the most engaging and enjoyable book to date about ...

Reviewed in Canada on September 12, 2017

Verified Purchase

Easily the most engaging and enjoyable book to date about the 1933-34 crime wave that gripped America. Focuses both on the men (and women) who committed the crimes and the men who solved them.

One person found this helpful

Bhavya

A VERY GREAT NOVEL DEPICTING THE BIRTH OF CRIME AND LAW & ...

Reviewed in India on June 5, 2015

Verified Purchase

A VERY GREAT NOVEL DEPICTING THE BIRTH OF CRIME AND LAW & ORDER IN USA IN EARLY ERAS

One person found this helpful

HuddyBolly

Written as history, not pulp fiction. Thoroughly researched. Non stop mayhem.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 10, 2010

Verified Purchase

Contrary to the observations of the Johns, Skyline & Fitzpatrick above; I find the chronological sequencing of the story to be one of it's greatest strengths. (Albeit that I had the advantage of reading it straight through over a two day period whilst laid up in bed! Even though, concentration IS required )
The author rightfully credits those who have gone over the same ground before,but without the benefit of the now opened FBI records.
It transpires that he began where I did back in the 60's with John Toland's excellent 'Dillinger Days'(now once again available on Amazon).
Toland devoted individual chapters, in sequence,to each of the gangs.
But this method tends to obscure the fact that it was all happening over the same short period of time.
Burrough's chronological description of events shows the reality of how intertwined the gangs and their crime wave really were.
'Public Enemies' is extremely well written, with maps of the salient areas of the USA included to show how widespread the gangs roamed over the American landscape during those bloody two years.
Photographs of all the gang members, and many of their accomplices are included, but in the paperback edition these are thumbnail sized only. A 16 page selection of larger photographs is also included, showing photos of many of the events referred to, as covered by the voracious American news media of the day.
Hoover and his FBI come out of the story with very little credit, and their own,(finally) revealed records are generally reponsible for this. Little wonder then that they were suppressed for so long.

Another previously unmentioned aspect of the book is the wonderful sense of time and place; early 1930s America, that the author evokes. This is history at it's best.
To anyone with an interest in this subject, I would recommend this book as the best available.

I also recommend Toland's 'Dillinger Days'. Toland was an eminent historian and writer. His work covered mainly US political and military history,and 'Dillinger Days'was written with the same attention to detail, but in 1963, without the benefit of the FBI files. Still a great book.
I doubt that the film of 'Public Enemies', even with Depp et al will be convincing.
The book is the real deal.

14 people found this helpful

Nagarajan Sekar

One Star

Reviewed in India on February 13, 2015

Verified Purchase

The quality of the book is very poor. It looked liked a used one.

One person found this helpful

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FREE delivery: Wednesday, March 20

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