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Eventually Karpis found their old protector, the vice boss Joe Roscoe, who arranged for them to stay in Edith Barry’s whorehouse on the edge of downtown. The FBI was right behind. Police found the abandoned getaway car that morning at 5:30 and identified it four hours later. Even before the car was found, agents guessed Karpis was heading to his old haunts in Cleveland or Toledo. The Flying Squad was scattered between Chicago and Florida, and Connelley could spare only two men. The Cleveland and Detroit offices didn’t have the manpower or the mission to physically search for Karpis, so they got to work establishing surveillance and phone taps on the Harvard Club in Cleveland, and in Toledo at the Casino Club and Joe Roscoe’s home. Within days an informant confirmed that Karpis had returned to Toledo.

The Detroit SAC, William Larson, begged for more men. Hoover asked for more proof Karpis was in the area. Larson came up with only raw intelligence, nothing concrete. Still, on the night of February 1, Connelley arrived to lead a raid on a cottage owned by Bert Angus. There was no sign of Karpis. In the ensuing days the tone of FBI memoranda suggests Hoover’s enthusiasm for pursuing Karpis had ebbed. After all, he was the last major figure of the War on Crime still at large. He had stumbled onto police in Atlantic City. It was only a matter of time, Hoover wagered, before it happened again.

Karpis, meanwhile, was safely hidden in an upstairs room at Edith Barry’s brothel. He had escaped the FBI’s dragnet for now, but the world around him was changing, and Karpis knew it.

The killings of Fred and Ma Barker marked the end of the active phase of the War on Crime, and as such presented an opportunity for the nation to appraise what the FBI had wrought. After all it had achieved, one might presume Hoover and his “G-men” were acclaimed national treasures. At least initially, they weren’t. What glory flowed to the FBI that winter flowed largely to one man, Melvin Purvis, whose tenuous position inside the Bureau was lost on the public; a magazine poll that winter named Purvis the seventh-most-respected person in the country.

If that galled Hoover, he wasn’t yet in a position to change it. Historians make much of the FBI’s vaunted public-relations apparatus, which at its height in the mid-1930s churned out a blizzard of Bureau-sponsored comic strips, newspaper articles, and books, but that winter it remained in its infancy. During the War on Crime, Hoover did surprisingly little public-relations work. The decision to publicly promote the FBI, in fact, had not been Hoover’s; it was Homer Cummings’s. In August 1933, at a time Cummings was attempting to publicize the War on Crime, he had met with the Washington columnist Drew Pearson, asking how best to broadcast his message. Pearson and others suggested playing up the FBI, and Cummings hired a Brooklyn newspaperman named Henry Suydam to do just that.

Suydam, in turn, brought in a flamboyant freelancer named Courtney Ryley Cooper, a specialist in pulp crime stories. In a series of sixteen articles in American Magazine beginning in late 1933, Cooper placed Hoover at the nexus of the War on Crime, describing him in one article as “the master detective who simply does not conform to any picture of the average crime chaser.” Hoover liked Cooper’s articles so much they began collaborating on a book. Cooper was given a desk at headquarters and widespread access to agents and their reports.

It wasn’t Hoover or even Courtney Cooper, however, who created the G-man legend. It was Hollywood. Just days after the Barker killings, word reached Hoover that Warner Brothers was developing a script called G-Men. The studio billed it as “The First Great Story of the Men Who Waged America’s War on Crime.” Neither Hoover nor Homer Cummings was wild about the idea. Cummings actually issued a statement refuting the studio’s claim that the film was an official record of the War on Crime. Inside the