Public Enemies

The Film Opens This Weekend, But Have You Read the Book?

By John Hood

It’s unlikely that even the most holed-up prison escapee hasn’t heard that Michael Mann’s rip-roaring Public Enemies opened all over the country this week. I mean, this flick has more hype behind it than any ten Britney Spears records combined. It’s undoubtedly a whole lot better for you too. And if you can’t cotton to the idea of Johnny Depp playing John Dillinger in a movie made by the same cat who directed Heat, well, you best stop reading here.

Me? I’ll be the best-informed fan-boy at the screening. Why? Because I’ve been reading the source material, that’s why. And it is dynamite.

Yep, before there was the star-studded motion picture, there was Bryan Burrough’s badass book, Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 (Penguin, $16). It’s a bullet-riddled read, with a line-up of many of the most famous names in American crimedom, and it works not just as history, but as myth-buster, revealing the real down low on a very low down breed.   

Take Bonnie and Clyde. Unlike the glam duo in the 1967 blockbuster motion picture, “the real Bonnie and Clyde were neither rebels nor philosophers,” they were “lazy drifters who murdered a dozen innocent men during and between hold-ups.” Bonnie was a blue-eyed runt, “an inch under five feet,” prone to histrionics, and “an avid reader of detective and movie magazines.” Clyde was “vain and preening,” and, according to a friend, “had been repeatedly raped in prison and would do anything to avoid going back.” And if that meant senseless murder, so be it.

They were also incompetent criminals and “their contemporaries showed them little but contempt.” “At a time when veteran yeggs reaped $50,000 from a single bank robbery, Bonnie and Clyde’s biggest take was barely $3,800.” In fact, “they robbed more gas stations and drugstores than banks.”  

But the ineptness wasn’t limited to Bonnie and Clyde; their gang was pretty doltish too. So were a few other fabled names. And Burrough explicitly lists ‘em all:

One of Clyde’s sidekicks lets a farmer escape from the house they’re holed up in. Blanche Barrow tells the pharmacist which Motor Court she’s staying in when she goes for Bonnie’s bandages. Machine Gun Kelly, whose chronic vomiting before every bank robbery incites his colleagues to ditch him, floods the engine of his car when he gets in to drive to a ransom drop.

At the time, the FBI weren’t much better, coming off more akin to the Keystone Kops than anything Efram Zimbalist Jr. would portray in the classic ‘60s TV show. One agent checks for phone records by mail, and wastes precious days; another agent ignores a crucial tip from a colleague, and lets the bad guys get away; and the one copy of an outlaw’s only photo gets borrowed and never returned. To make matters worse, back in early ’33 the FBI agents weren’t even armed and had to call-on the local law to arrest whoever it was they were after.

Then it happened. Four lawmen were gunned down in broad daylight during an inept attempt to free long-time Barker Gang confederate Frank Nash, still considered the most successful bank robber in U.S. history. It was a bold and bloody move, and gave Hoover the ammunition he needed to start arming his agents and beefing up the Bureau so that they could really fight the “War on Crime.”

That incident was called The Kansas City Massacre. And it remains a pivotal point in the lives of the bad guys, who’d all go on to suffer its wrath, as well as the Bureau, who used it as a pretext for a nationwide police force. From that crime on it became a federal offense to kidnap, cross state lines while committing crimes, and to kill a federal agent.

And it marks the beginning of the end to a primarily Midwestern crime spree that included not only “Machine Gun” Kelly, Frank Nash, the Barker Family and Bonnie and Clyde, but “Baby Face” Nelson, “Pretty Boy” Floyd and, of course, John Dillinger, perhaps the most truly glamorous of that era’s legion of bad guys and certainly deserving of the major amount of ink he gets here.

Burrough, the scribe behind Barbarians at the Gate and a special correspondent at Vanity Fair, is so thorough a reporter he even gets the titles of the pieces a Kansas City hotel lobby pianist plays as an FBI agent and an Oklahoma City oil man wait for word from a kidnapper. He also gets the sweep of things, how a legendary legion of gun-toting low-lifes wreaked havoc throughout the nation’s midsection and a pansy-panted D.C. bureaucrat assembled a government cadre to put ‘em all down.

No punches are pulled, no holds are barred, and no detail goes uncovered. This is crime writing at its finest, an action-packed tell-all that leaves you reeling. And if the flick provides even an echo of this book’s bang, it’s gonna knock you on your ass.

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