Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [16]
A moment later the two men, cash from the registers in hand, backed out onto the sidewalk, only to find that Lefty Parker had parallel-parked the car at the curb, snugly wedged between two other parked cars. As Dillinger simmered, Parker bumped the cars in front and behind several times before wheeling out and making their getaway. Dillinger had to explain to young Parker how to park a getaway car.
Still, the night wasn’t over. A half hour later Dillinger showed Parker where to pull up in front of a City Foods supermarket. Robbing the store had been Shaw’s idea. What he neglected to tell Dillinger was that he had robbed it once before. The minute the two men entered the store, guns drawn, the manager hung his head.
“Here they are again,” he said. Dillinger gave Shaw a look. “You guys have started the company collecting [our cash],” the manager said. “And the collector just left.”
There was no money in the registers. Dillinger stalked out of the store. Shaw tarried a moment to scoop up several boxes of cigarettes. The moment Dillinger slipped into the car beside him, Parker gunned the car forward, leaving Shaw behind in the store.
“Stop! Stop!” Dillinger shouted as Parker drove up the block.
Parker hit the brake and drove in reverse toward the store as Shaw, breathing heavily, ran up the street to meet them before jumping in. Parker was so rattled he ran the next stop sign. “If you can’t drive,” Dillinger said, “let the kid have the wheel!” The men drove on, aiming for Dillinger’s father’s farmhouse.
So began the criminal career of the man who would within months transform the FBI.
Near Wellington, Texas Saturday, June 10
That same Saturday night, as Dillinger returned to his father’s farmhouse, Clyde Barrow and his girlfriend Bonnie Parker were driving through the Texas Panhandle, heading to a meeting with Clyde’s brother Buck at a bridge on the Oklahoma border. With them was Clyde’s gofer, a pimply Dallas teenager named W. D. Jones. At first glance all three appeared to be children. Clyde, baby-faced and five-feet-seven, was twenty-three that evening. Bonnie was an inch under five feet, maybe ninety pounds, with yellow hair and baby-blue eyes. She was twenty-one.
Seventy years after their deaths, no Depression-era criminals loom larger in America’s consciousness than Bonnie and Clyde—thanks to the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, which portrayed Clyde as a sexually ambivalent man-child struggling to cope with a beautiful, fiery Bonnie. While entertaining, the cinematic Bonnie and Clyde were a screenwriter’s creation, a celluloid paean to 1960s-era themes of youth rebellion and antiauthoritarianism. The movie characters had little in common with their real-life counterparts, lazy drifters who murdered nearly a dozen innocent men during and between holdups.
The real Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were neither rebels nor philosophers. Vain and insecure, Clyde was a preening Dallas burglar who, a friend claimed, had been repeatedly raped in prison and would do anything to avoid going back. Bonnie was a bored waitress, a drama queen with a failed marriage who viewed Clyde as a ticket out of her humdrum existence. Crime was a kind of game to them; you can see it in the photographs they took of each other, play-acting with big guns and fat cigars. Contemporaries showed them little but contempt. One called them “just a couple of cheap filling station and car thieves,” and he was right; at a time when veteran yeggs reaped $50,000 from a single bank robbery, Bonnie and Clyde’s biggest payday was barely $3,800. They robbed far