• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Material in the latter half of this book is drawn almost exclusively from FBI files. A prominent exception is material drawn from Dillinger: The Untold Story, by Russell Girardin, with Bill Helmer. I strongly recommend this book. Most of the conversations Dillinger had with Louis Piquett and Art O’Leary were drawn from Girardin’s long-lost manuscript.

I reserve the final mentions for my two favorite books on Depression-era outlaws. I kept both on my desk at all times. One is Paul Maccabee’s John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crook’s Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920-1936. This is local history at its very best, and a must-read for anyone interested in the War on Crime period. The other is probably the most comprehensive reference available, Public Enemies: America’s Criminal Past, 1919-1940, by Bill Helmer and Rick Mattix. These two men probably know more about Depression-era outlaws than anyone alive, and they have poured their passion into this fine book.

NOTES

1: A PRELUDE TO WAR

1 Cited in The Crisis of the Old Order, by Arthur Schlesinger, Houghton Mifflin, 1957.

2 Cited in J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, by Curt Gentry, W. W. Norton, 1991.

3 Clegg quoted in The Mississippi Oral History Program, volume XCIX, 1977.

4 Memo, Nathan to Hoover, June 24, 1932. 67-822-148.

5 Moley cited in Gentry, pp. 159-60.

6 War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men and the Politics of Mass Culture, Claire Bond Potter, Rutgers University Press, 1998, p. 68.

7 Potter, p. 62.

2: A MASSACRE BY PERSONS UNKNOWN

1 “The Fugitives (renamed The True Story of Bonnie and Clyde), Signet Paperback Edition, 1968, pp. 52-54.

2 Ibid, p. 64.

3 Karpis, p. 84.

3: THE COLLEGE BOYS TAKE THE FIELD

Epigraphs taken from The Union Station Massacre, Robert Unger, Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1997, p. 13.

1 Harvey memo, Feb. 15, 1935, KCM #3570.

2 Miller’s visit to the Davis apartment is confirmed in FBI records. The Bureau’s source was Edna Murray. The only detailed version of events is one Murray wrote in a four-part series of articles in Startling Detective Adventures magazine beginning in August 1936.

3 This is courtesy of the memory of former agent James J. Metcalfe, who told the story to his daughter Krista Metcalfe.

4 Unger, Union Station Massacre, p. 13.

5 Missouri State Trooper Magazine, Capt. E. M. Raub, August 24, 2000.

6 Allanna Nash article, July 18, 1976.

7 Muncie Sunday Star, July 16, 1933; Muncie Evening Press, July 15, 1933.

8 Muncie Evening Press, July 17, 1933.

9 Muncie Evening Press, July 17 and 18, 1933; Muncie Morning Star, July 18 and 19, 1933.

10 Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J.Edgar Hoover, Anthony Summers, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993, pp. 67-72.

11 Chicago Tribune, July 25, 1933.

12 Hoover to Purvis, July 26, 1933, Hamm kidnap file #67.

13 USA ex rel. Roger Touhy v. Joseph E. Ragen, U.S. District Court, No. Dist. of Illinois. Eastern Division No. 48 C 448, Opinion of Court.

14 There are many versions of the scene on the Urschels’ sunporch that evening. None of them vary in any substantive way. Probably the most detailed, on which this account is based, was written by Harrison Moreland in True Detective Mysteries, March 1934. Though none of his material is attributed, Moreland’s facts mirror those in FBI files, and it’s clear he interviewed many, if not all, of the principal players.

15 This glimpse of Bates and Kelly is taken from an odd, privately published 1991 book, Machine Gun Kelly: To Right a Wrong, Tipper Publications. The book was written by Kelly’s son, Bruce Barnes, a California lighting designer who as a young man was able to interview his infamous father about his crimes. Barnes’s book deals mostly with Kelly’s precriminal life, when he was married to his first wife, Barnes’s mother. Of the stories Kelly tells of his crimes, a number are demonstrably false. But many others, including this one, are surprisingly close to versions found in FBI files.

16 Ellis,