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Please keep one thing in mind as you read: This book was not “imagined,” as with some recent popular histories. It was reported. The conversations and dialogue in this book are taken verbatim from FBI reports, the Karpis transcripts, contemporary news articles, and the memories of participants. If you’re wondering how I learned something, check the source notes. If I don’t know something, I’ll tell you. If there’s a mystery I can’t clear up—and there are a few—I’ll make that clear. Any errors are mine and mine alone. I hope you enjoy it.

Bryan Burrough

Summit, New Jersey

December 2003

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Federal Bureau of Investigation

Also: Special Agents Charles Winstead, Clarence Hurt, Jerry Campbell, Tom McDade, Ray Suran, Ed Guinane. Doris Rogers, secretary.

The St. Paul Yeggs

Also: Vi Mathias, Frances Nash, Kathryn Kelly.

Pretty Boy Floyd

The Barrow Gang

The Posse: Frank Hamer, Manny Gault, Bob Alcorn, Ted Hinton, Henderson Jordan, Prentiss Oakley.

The Barker-Karpis Gang

Also: Paula Harmon, Wynona Burdette, William Weaver, Charles Fitzgerald, Willie Harrison.

The Baby Face Nelson Gang

Also: Clarence Lieder, Jack Perkins, Jimmy Murray.

The Dillinger Gang

Also: Arthur O’Leary, investigator; Jimmy Probasco, safe house owner; Polly Hamilton; and Ana Sage.

PROLOGUE

Torremolinos, Spain

August 26, 1979

In a tourist town on the white-sun Spanish coast, an old man was passing his last years, an American grandfather with a snowy white crewcut and a glint in his turquoise eyes. At seventy he was still lean and alert, with high, slanting cheekbones, a sharp chin, and those clear-frame eyeglasses that made him look like a minor-league academic. He spent much of his time holed up in his cluttered garage apartment, watching the BBC on a flickering black-and-white television, surrounded by bottles of Jack Daniel’s and pills and his memories. If you met him down on the beach, he came across as a gentle soul with a soft laugh. Almost certainly he was the most pleasant murderer you’d ever want to meet.

It was sad, but only a little. He’d had his fun. When he’d first come to Spain a decade before, he still knew how to have a good time. There was that frowsy old divorcée from Chicago he used to see. They would go tooling around the coast in her sports car and chug tequilla and down their pills and get into these awful screaming fights.

She was gone now. So were the writers, and the documentary makers, the ones who came to hear about the old days; that crew from Canada was the worst, posing him in front of roadsters and surrounding him with actors in fedoras holding fake tommy guns. He’d done it for the money, and for his ego, which had always been considerable. Now, well, now he drank. Out in the cafés, after a few beers, when the sun began to sink down the coast, he would tell stories. The names he dropped meant little to the Spaniards. The Brits and the odd American, they thought he was nuts—an old lush mumbling in his beer.

When he said he’d been a gangster, they smiled. Sure you were, Pops. When he said he’d been Public Enemy Number One—right after John Dillinger, “Pretty Boy” Floyd, and his old protégé Baby Face Nelson—people turned away and rolled their eyes. When he said he and his confederates had single-handedly “created” J. Edgar Hoover and the modern FBI, well, then he would get bitter, and people would get up and move to another table. He was obviously a kook. How could you believe anyone who claimed he was the only man in history to have met Charles Manson, Al Capone, and Bonnie and Clyde?

Few in Torremolinos knew it was all true. In those last years at Terminal Island in the ’60s, he’d taught Manson to play the steel guitar. He’d been at Alcatraz for twenty-one damp winters before that, leaving for Leavenworth a few years before they closed the place in 1963. In fact, he was the longest-serving prisoner in the history of The