Crimes and Misdemeanors

By Lev Grossman Sunday, July 11, 2004
    • At 7:15 on the morning of June 17, 1933, seven men — local cops and federal agents — were loading a bank robber named Frank Nash into a car in Kansas City, Mo. Suddenly a voice barked, "Let 'em have it!" and the group was engulfed by a storm of bullets. When the shooting stopped, somebody said, "Everyone's dead in here."

    They weren't quite, but five of them were, including Nash. According to Bryan Burrough's massively researched, ludicrously entertaining Public Enemies (Penguin Press; 592 pages), the Kansas City Massacre, as it came to be called, jump-started a national anticrime campaign that turned a governmental backwater called the Bureau of Investigations (the Federal came later) into the modern FBI. The killings also inaugurated a rollicking two-year carnival of bank robberies and kidnappings carried out by men like "Baby Face" Nelson and "Machine Gun" Kelly, men whose nicknames ring a bell but who, it turns out, we never really knew at all.


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    The challenge Burrough faces in writing about people like Nelson and Kelly is that they've gone thin and stiff with age. "After decades spent in the washing machine of popular culture," Burrough writes, "their stories have been bled of all reality." Burrough strips the comic-book glamour off those cardboard villains and gives them back their grit and power to shock. We learn that Nelson was a tiny blond sociopath whose viciousness frightened even his pals. "Pretty Boy" Floyd — Charley to his friends — was a Dust Bowl farm boy. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow come off as greedy, murderous children, not the doomed lovers of the movies. "Machine Gun" Kelly, despite his badass nickname, puked from nerves before his heists.

    Bank robbing wasn't an exact science in 1933, and watching the bad guys figure it out as they go along makes for nonstop comedy. They flood their engines, shoot themselves, crash their cars and steal sacks of mail instead of money. Once, John Dillinger discovered that his wheelman had parallel parked the getaway car; he had to make an Austin Powers — style multipoint turn before he could peel out. The G-men weren't much better. The FBI was staffed by bumbling college kids and led by a raccoon-eyed, sexually ambiguous desk jockey named J. Edgar Hoover, who at the time had never even made an arrest. But celebrity gangsters create a need for a national police force, and the FBI was the government's answer.

    Dillinger is the only one whose tremendous charisma survives Burrough's research intact. Smart, good-natured and media savvy, he had a genius for improvisational humor. When a cop walked into a bank mid-robbery, Dillinger greeted him with a hearty "Come right in and join us!" He was also as tough as nails. In one harrowing scene, he undergoes amateur plastic surgery to alter his appearance (tragically, they filled in his dashing cleft chin). As for his colleagues — alas, the truth about "Pretty Boy" Floyd isn't pretty at all. But it's a whole lot of fun. By Lev Grossman