Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [308]
Two hours south, Pretty Boy Floyd is buried in the Akins Cemetery beside his parents, in a quiet field dotted with Floyd family tombstones; there is a comforting, familial quality here, as if Floyd were welcomed back into the bosom of his kin. By contrast, Baby Face Nelson’s grave feels cold and functional. Buried beside an access road at the St. Joseph’s Cemetery in the River Grove section of Chicago, Nelson lies between his wife, Helen, and his mother, beneath a string of five identical blue-gray markers. The Gillis family tombstones have the look and feel of discarded paving stones; standing among the graves, one is distracted by the distant roar of jetliners at O’Hare International Airport a few miles north. LESTER J. GILLIS, Nelson’s marker reads. DIED NOVEMBER 27 1934. AGE 26 YEARS.
Fittingly, only Dillinger’s grave retains a dash of flair. He is buried in a meadow of thick grass in Indianapolis’s vast Crown Hill Cemetery. His tombstone, a four-foot obelisk that looms over neighboring graves, has a single word, DILLINGER, flanked on both sides by an ivylike decorative flourish. Tourists come to see it all the time. In 1991 the children of a woman named Maude A. Grubb asked the cemetery to bury her near Dillinger. She lies a hundred feet away, the words JOHN D. carved in a corner of her headstone. “They said she always had a thing about Dillinger,” a cemetery official says.
It’s a peaceful place, in the way cemeteries are. Squatting in the damp grass, surrounded by the graves of grocers, lawyers, and farmers, you hear no echoes of machine-gun fire, no ghostly screams of dying men, no reminder at all of Dillinger’s fourteen months of fame. Like his peers, Dillinger was not Indiana Jones or Luke Skywalker. He was a man, five-feet-seven, 145 pounds. It’s startling to realize he’s actually still there, just an arm’s length beneath the grass. You can sit beside Dillinger’s grave with the morbid knowledge that, given a shovel and a few hours, you could literally touch the man’s body. You won’t do that, of course. Instead you run your hand over his tombstone. It is nothing more and nothing less than polished granite—smooth, hard, cold. Real.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
The primary source materials for this book are the FBI’s files on the War on Crime’s major cases, which have been released in bits and pieces since the mid-1980s. The files themselves line a series of shelves in a basement reading room at FBI headquarters in Washington. You can leaf through them there or, if you’re hardheaded (like me), you can buy them outright, several hundred thousand pages of internal reports, telegrams, correspondence and witness statements, at a cost of ten cents per page. My copies fill a half-dozen file cabinets. I’ve cited a sampling of the documents I used for this book in the Notes. (The codes in the Notes refer to the FBI cases: “BKF” is the Bremer kidnapping file; “UF” is the Urschel kidnapping; “Jodil” is the John Dillinger file; and so on.)
The main areas where I’ve relied on published sources are the background sections on the FBI and the criminal gangs. There are several good biographies of J. Edgar Hoover. Probably the best remains Curt Gentry’s J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. Also helpful were Fred J. Cook’s The FBI Nobody Knows; Ralph de Toledano’s J. Edgar Hoover, the Man in His Time; The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI, by William Sullivan with Bill Brown; the salacious but well-researched Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, by Anthony Summers; The FBI Story: A Report to the People, by Don Whitehead; and two books