Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [309]
Many books were helpful in understanding Depression-era America. Among the best were The ’30s: A Time to Remember, a collection of articles edited by Don Congdon; and two books by T. H. Watkins, The Great Depression: America in the 1930s and The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America.
For background on Pretty Boy Floyd’s early career, I relied on FBI files, newspapers in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, and Michael Wallis’s outstanding The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd. Wallis enjoyed extensive access to Floyd’s family, and it shows. Curiously, he made no use of the FBI’s Kansas City Massacre file, which was released during the 1980s to a dogged Kansas City newspaper-reporter-turned-professor, Robert Unger. A book that does is Jeffrey King’s The Life and Death of Pretty Boy Floyd, which suffers from a lack of firsthand sources and feels colorless by comparison. For anyone interested in the Kansas City Massacre, I heartily recommend Unger’s The Union Station Massacre: The Original Sin of Hoover’s FBI.
The story of Bonnie and Clyde has been told in more than a dozen books. One of the best remains the first, Fugitives: The Story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, by Emma Parker and Nell Barrow Cowan. I also recommend Running with Bonnie and Clyde: The Ten Fast Years of Ralph Fults, by John Neal Phillips. Phillips did a good deal of original research for his book, including interviews with Blanche Barrow.
Background on Melvin Purvis can be found in Purvis’s FBI file, which is available via Freedom of Information Request. Purvis told a sanitized version of his life story in the book he published after leaving the FBI, American Agent. For personal detail, I am deeply indebted to Purvis’s son Alston, who is writing a biography of his father, and to Purvis’s former secretary, Doris Lockerman. The story of how Purvis was hoodwinked into arresting Roger Touhy was pieced together from FBI files, Touhy’s 1954 appeal at the Federal Archives in Chicago, and Touhy’s own book, The Stolen Years.
Details of Machine Gun Kelly’s early life can be found in multiple articles that appeared in various Memphis newspapers, and in an odd little book his son Bruce Barnes published in 1991, Machine Gun Kelly: To Right a Wrong. While accepting a number of canards his father passed on, Barnes does an admirable job of filling in gaps in Kelly’s life story. The Urschel ransom negotiations are chronicled in FBI files and in a florid 1934 book written by E. E. Kirkpatrick, Crimes’ Paradise: The Authentic Inside Story of the Urschel Kidnapping.
I found background on Baby Face Nelson’s early career in a series of 1930 and 1931 Chicago Tribune articles pointed out by that indefatigable researcher, Tom Smusyn. The first biography of Nelson, Baby Face Nelson: Portrait of a Public Enemy, written by Steven Nickel and William J. Helmer, was issued during my research. I found this a disquieting book, laden with all manner of unsourced information, including a story of Nelson meeting with Dillinger in the summer of 1933. After finding no one in the field who could substantiate these stories, I ignored them.
Conversations within the Barker Gang are derived almost exclusively from the Karpis transcripts, more than a thousand pages of unpublished interviews Karpis gave to his biographer, Bill Trent, in 1969 and 1970. Background on John Dillinger’s upbringing and early career can be found in John Toland’s Dillinger Days, as well as in contemporary newspaper and magazine articles and in Dillinger: A Short and Violent Life, by Robert Cromie and Joseph Pinkston. For the portrait of Alvin Karpis’s last years in Spain, I am grateful to Robert