Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [302]
“The story of Hoover the Hero is false,” Karpis wrote. “He didn’t lead the attack on me. He waited until he was told the coast was clear. Then he came out to reap the glory.” Hoover’s reaction to the allegation was to be expected. On a 1971 memo summarizing Karpis’s book, the last of the hundreds of comments he scribbled in the margins of reports on the War on Crime’s major figures, Hoover wrote, “Karpis or/and his coauthor must be on dope.”
FBI files, perhaps unsurprisingly, suggest Hoover’s version is closer to the truth. Both Connelley’s report on the arrest and an aide’s memo detailing a conversation with Hoover the next morning make clear that Hoover was in the raiding party, not behind the apartment building. But neither source—nor any other report in the massive Barker-Karpis file—says anything about Hoover approaching Karpis’s car, much less grabbing him by the collar.fe According to FBI files, Connelley and Clarence Hurt made the arrest, with Hoover arriving almost simultaneously in the second car. In the end it made little difference. The next day’s front-page headline in the New York Times read: KARPIS CAPTURED IN NEW ORLEANS BY HOOVER HIMSELF.ff
However it happened, Karpis and Hunter gave up with no resistance. Within minutes a crowd began to form. All around people hung out of apartment windows, trying to see what the commotion was about. None of the agents had a pair of handcuffs handy, so one took off his tie and wrapped it around Karpis’s wrists. They loaded Karpis into a Bureau car and headed to the FBI office downtown. Clarence Hurt was driving, and he got lost. “Does anyone know where the Post Office Building is?” Hurt asked at one point.
“I can tell you,” Karpis said.
“How do you know where it is?” asked Clyde Tolson, who sat in the backseat with Hoover.
“We were thinking of robbing it,” Karpis said.21
In the end, it took a circuitous twenty minutes to bring Karpis into a holding cell at the Post Office Building. It was a triumphant moment for Hoover. The odd Congressional critic aside, the Karpis arrest cemented Hoover’s position as a national hero, celebrated in newsreels, movies, and comic books. The spotlight shone only on him, not on the disgraced Melvin Purvis or the all-but-forgotten Homer Cummings, and certainly not on the dozens of anonymous FBI agents who had risked and in some cases given their lives ending the careers of John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Fred Barker, and Alvin Karpis. The FBI was now America’s preeminent national police force, the Bureau of Hoover’s dreams, a department whose unchallenged resources would make Hoover a power in American government for the next four decades. Three years after it began with the deaths of five men in a Kansas City parking lot, the War on Crime was over.fg
EPILOGUE
In the years since the War on Crime, critics have questioned almost everything about it: Was it necessary? Was it real? Were rural bank robbers the public menace the FBI said they were? A number of historians have argued that the War on Crime was little more than a public-relations ploy, a federal giant stomping out criminal insects, a dovetailing of Hoover’s ambition with the needs of the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal policies. This line of thinking suggests that the events of 1933-34 were all sound and fury, signifying nothing.
It’s certainly true it wasn’t much of a “war.” In the narrowest sense, the War on Crime constituted only four groupings of criminal cases: Machine Gun Kelly’s kidnapping of Charles Urschel, the Barker-Karpis kidnappings of Edward Bremer and William Hamm, the Dillinger manhunt, and the Kansas City massacre; there were no broader drives on the Chicago syndicate or Italian mafias, no war on counterfeiting or other crimes. Nor can one argue that the public enemies of 1933-34 could have been extinguished only by the federal government; Frank Hamer’s