When Charles Lindbergh’s 20-month-old son was kidnapped in 1932 and his body was found two months later, it was considered the crime of the century. It took almost three years before the boy’s kidnapper was caught, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation had nothing to do with the investigation or the arrest, for two reasons.
First, kidnapping was not a federal crime at the time, so the organization had no jurisdiction.
Second, in those days the FBI was so little known or so little thought of that the Lindberghs weren’t even interested in talking to its head.
“Charles and Ann Morrow Lindbergh, the baby’s parents, even refused [FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover’s offer to meet,” writes John Oller in “Gangster Hunters: How Hoover’s G-men Defeated America’s Deadliest Public Enemies” (Dutton, Nov. 26).
Founded in 1908, the FBI’s original mission was to investigate corporate wrongdoing and fraudulent government land deals.
It wasn’t involved in the pursuit of thieves during Prohibition (the Treasury Department user) nor in the pursuit of tax evaders (the Internal Revenue Service, which secured Al Capone).
The FBI “just wasn’t a very dangerous job,” Oller writes of the agents’ workload. “Not the kind of activities that required the use of a deadly weapon.”
After the 29-year-old Hoover became director in 1924, he insisted that the FBI recruit only certain types of agents.
He wanted loyal and morally upright, all-American men at least 7 feet tall, athletic or slim, comfortable, smart, who behaved like gentlemen. Ideally, they would also be college educated and fraternity members.
The job paid extremely well during the Depression, so Hoover had his pick of applicants. However, most expected an easy desk job to push the cards, having no “thought of the future that awaited the shot to kill”.
“These were not strong men with years of experience in fighting crime. These were almost boys,” said office assistant Doris Rogers.
By the 1930s the FBI was changing—and Hoover was its chief agent of change. After the so-called “Lindbergh Act” made kidnapping a federal offense, the FBI became more actively involved in fighting violent crime. Her first high-profile target was notorious bank robber Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd.
In 1924 Floyd robbed payroll couriers of $12,000, with one of his victims describing his assailant as “having a beautiful face”.
Eventually caught and imprisoned for bank robbery, Floyd escaped during a transfer to a Kansas prison by jumping from a moving train.
Soon after, “Pretty Boy” and an accomplice killed two men whose wives the criminals wanted to “date.”
In 1931, Floyd shot a US Prohibition agent, then shot and killed a sheriff trying to arrest him. Repentance did not enter his mind. “It was him or me, so I let him take it,” “Pretty Boy” said of the slain sheriff.
Hoover desperately wanted his FBI to catch Floyd, but he remained helpless for years.
However, it was not the best of times for Pretty Boy, who was said to be exhausted from life on the run.
Apparently, the only way Floyd could relax was by baking pies.
An early crime-fighting success for the FBI came in 1933 when an informant fixed the kidnapping of oil magnate (and friend of FDR) Charles Urschel on a George Kelly.
Kelly was said to be able to write his name “with bullets fired from a gun”.
Soon the man was caught by FBI agents one morning in Memphis, where “Matrelozi” Kelly was caught half-asleep in his underwear, overcome by a drunken night.
During the arrest, Kelly may have even uttered the phrase that would come to epitomize Hoover’s FBI. “Don’t shoot, G-men!” Kelly was known to scream.
“It was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI’s greatest triumph to date,” Oller writes of the Machine Gun arrest.
But the FBI’s early days were also filled with memorable mayhem, none more so than during its pursuit of “Public Enemy No. 1”, John Dillinger. Dillinger was approaching his 30s in 1933, but had yet to rob a bank, just then he was released from prison for “hitting an elderly salesman on the head.”
On his father’s advice, John pleaded guilty to that crime, but was later sentenced to a shocking 10-20 years in prison. Dillinger always said that injustice sealed his fate. “I went in a carefree boy, but I came out bitter about everything…”
In 1933 Dillinger began a bank robbery unparalleled in American history. His signature move was to drop counters and make hilarious jokes, endearing him to a bank-hating American public during the Depression.
Dillinger was so romanticized that movie audiences erupted into cheers when his face appeared on newsreels.
Hoover made Dillinger’s arrest a top priority for the FBI, but their pursuit of the popular thief did not go well.
John was caught in Tucson by local cops using FBI information and FBI fingerprinting techniques, but after being extradited to East Chicago, he escaped jail by either carrying a wooden gun or paying off his captors. .
His myth was extinguished when it was said that during that escape Dillinger sang the chorus of a popular song, “Git along, doggie small, git along…”
The FBI’s pursuit of Dillinger was hampered by countless clues to John’s whereabouts.
One said he was walking the streets of Chicago dressed as a nun, another that he was a law student at Hoover’s George Washington University, while a fool on the streets of Washington, DC, insisted “Public Enemy No. 1” was in hiding. in Minnesota.
Failure to locate it on SS Duchess of York en route to Glasgow, Scotland, FBI agents at least picked up an international crook wanted in London. Hoover called for that arrest as a way to take the focus off his organization’s failed prosecution of Dillinger.
In three weeks, John Dillinger eluded the FBI four times. He watched as federal agents swarmed into a Chicago tavern to arrest his girlfriend, while Johnny smartly left the scene having just gotten off his assailant.
He was surrounded in a St. Paul, safe house in Minnesota before shooting and fleeing out the back door, blood seeping into the snow from a bullet wound in his calf.
Worst of all, after the press announced that FBI agents had cornered Dillinger and his gang at a lodge in Wisconsin called Little Bohemia, the federal agents ended up killing only one innocent bystander while John and his associates jumped the gun. back window to escape them.
Carter Baum, the FBI man who killed the bystander was so traumatized that he vowed never to fire his gun again, which made him stop later when he laid eyes on Dillinger’s associate, Baby Face Nelson. However, Nelson’s killer conscience didn’t slow him down, immediately shooting Baum to death.
“Little Bohemia was a debacle for the FBI like none before or since,” Oller writes. “But out of the ashes of the skirmishes in that remote snow-covered retreat in Wisconsin, the modern FBI was born.”
Soon the FBI would be known for finding its man. Federal agents eventually shot Dillinger to death in the street outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater. Baby Face Nelson killed 2 FBI agents in a shootout in Barrington, Ill, but the gangster was shot in the gut that day and “got away”. Even Pretty Boy Floyd couldn’t escape forever, being shot by Hoover’s G-men as he tried to escape through an Ohio cornfield.
Each of those criminals was at one time labeled “Public Enemy No. 1,” with their deaths eventually enhancing the FBI’s reputation so much that its agents came to be seen as more heroic than the gangsters they once were.
“For Depression-era Americans, violent criminals had finally lost their romantic appeal, replaced by the image of the incorruptible G-man.”
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