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Courtney Cooper’s book on the War on Crime, Ten Thousand Public Enemies, was still weeks away from publication when G-Men was released that April with a massive publicity campaign. The movie, starring Jimmy Cagney as a young FBI agent battling a vicious band of kidnappers modeled on Dillinger, Floyd, and Nelson, was a smash. In just days it did what reality hadn’t, enshrining Hoover as the symbolic head of the nation’s crime-fighting forces. G-Men was so successful it spawned seven more FBITHEMED movies by the end of the year, from Public Hero Number One to Let ’em Have It. Whatever qualms Hoover had about relinquishing his image-control efforts to Hollywood fell away. He sat for scores of interviews and even posed for photos with Pat O’Brian, the star of Public Enemy’s Wife. The Bureau was inundated with fan mail. Overnight, Hoover and the FBI were crowned the nation’s supreme symbols of justice and strength.

Ten Thousand Public Enemies, released that May, rode the crest of this wave onto bestseller lists. It told Hoover’s version of the War on Crime as a single seamless narrative, promoting the FBI’s clean-cut agents as the mirror image of the criminals they fought. All but forgotten in the hoopla was Hoover’s boss Homer Cummings, who had launched the War on Crime. “After 1935,” the historian Richard Gid Powers has noted, “the attorney general faded from the public’s image of federal law enforcement. Hollywood had done something Hoover would not have dared, something that Cummings could not prevent—it had turned the top G-Man into a star and it had demoted the director’s boss to an offscreen nonentity.”2

At least Cummings still had his job, which was more than Purvis could say. Purvis resigned from the Bureau that June after months of harassment from Hoover and his aides. Feted as a national hero, Purvis wrote a book, American Agent, which was published in 1936. The book, a primer on the FBI and the War on Crime, tellingly made no mention of either Hoover or Cowley. In response Hoover declared Purvis persona non grata. He began amassing scurrilous gossip on him. In time Purvis’s FBI file grew as thick as that of the criminals he had hunted.

The FBI’s rise to prominence, coming as it did on the backs of public enemies, was generally greeted with favor by the press. Only a handful of liberal organs raised red flags. In a November 1934 article entitled “The American National Police: The Dangers of Federal Crime Control,” Harper’s magazine asked the question, “How many persons know that there is at this moment a national police force, or, if they know it, realize what this implies?” Citing the new criminal-enforcement powers Congress had bestowed on the federal government at the height of the Dillinger hysteria, Harper’s opined, “Never had legislation been enacted which was more unnecessary or dangerous despite all the glowing propaganda in its favor.”3 The magazine worried about the potential for abuse. It was a concern that would not be shared by other leading voices for decades.

The pursuit of Alvin Karpis lagged that winter because the Bureau was stretched thin. Members of the Flying Squad were already furiously compiling evidence for the trial of Dock Barker and other gang members. Others were building files for the trial of Johnny Chase, who had been arrested in northern California a month after Baby Face Nelson’s death, of Louis Piquett and of those who harbored Nelson in Reno. Still more men were needed to track down the remaining members of the Barker Gang.

It was a riotous roundup. On February 6, 1935, two weeks after Karpis’s escape from Atlantic City, Volney Davis was arrested in St. Louis and packed onto a charter flight for Chicago. When the plane refueled in Yorktown, Illinois, Davis joined two agents drinking beer at a local bar. When one agent went to make a phone call, Davis smashed the other agent in the face with a beer mug, jumped out a window, and disappeared. The same day, Davis’s girlfriend, Edna Murray,