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 for the boy’s kidnapper to be caught, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation had nothing to do with the investigation or arrest for two reasons.
First, kidnapping was not a federal crime at the time so the organization had no jurisdiction.
Second, the FBI was so little known or thought about in those days that the Lindbergh family had no interest in even talking to its head.
“The child’s parents, Charles and Ann Morrow Lindbergh, also declined [FBI Director J. Edgar] “Offer to meet from Hoover,” writes John Oller “Gangster Hunters: How Hoover’s G-Men Defeated America’s Deadliest Public Enemies” (Dutton, 26 November).
Established in 1908, the FBI’s initial mission was to investigate corporate wrongdoing and fraudulent government land deals.
It was not involved in pursuing bootleggers during Prohibition (Treasury Department bailout) nor tax evaders (the Internal Revenue Service, which convicted Al Capone).
“The FBI was not a very dangerous job,” Oller writes of the agents’ workload. “Not activities that require the firing 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 all American men to be loyal and morally upright, at least 5-foot-7 in height, athletic or slim, smart dressers who looked like gentlemen. Ideally, they will be college-educated and also members of a fraternity.
The job paid very well during the Depression, so Hoover had his pick of applicants. Although most expected an easy desk job pushing papers, they “had no inkling of the shoot-to-kill future that awaited them.”
“These were not hardened men with years of crime fighting experience. It was almost boys,” said office assistant Doris Rogers.
By the 1930s the FBI was changing – and Hoover was its chief change agent. After the so-called “Lindbergh Law” made kidnapping a federal crime, the FBI became more actively involved in fighting violent crimes. Its first high-profile target was the notorious bank robber, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd.
In 1924, after Floyd robbed a payroll courier of $12,000, one of his victims described his attacker as “the one with the pretty face.”
Eventually caught and imprisoned for bank robbery, Floyd escaped by jumping from a moving train during a prison transfer in Kansas.
Soon afterwards “Pretty Boy” and one of his associates murdered two men whose wives the criminals wanted to “date”.
In 1931, Floyd shot a US Prohibition agent, then shot and killed a sheriff who was trying to arrest him. Remorse did not come to his mind. “It was either him or me, so I let him have it,” “Pretty Boy” said of the slain sheriff.
Hoover desperately wanted his FBI to capture Floyd, but he remained in police custody for years.
However, those were not the best of times for “Pretty Boy”, it is said that he was tired of the hectic life.
Apparently, the only way Floyd could relax was to bake pies.
An early crime-fighting success for the FBI came in 1933 when an informant accused George Kelly of kidnapping oil magnate (and FDR friend) Charles Urschel.
It is said that Kelly was able to write his name “with bullets fired from a gun”.
The man was promptly captured by FBI agents one morning in Memphis, where “Machine Gun” Kelly was caught half-asleep in his underwear due to a night of heavy drinking.
During the arrest, Kelly may also have uttered the phrase that would symbolize Hoover’s FBI. “Don’t shoot, G-men!” Kelly was known for yelling.
“This was the greatest victory ever for J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI,” Oller writes of the “Machine Gun” arrest.
But the FBI’s early days were also filled with memorable spectacle, none more so than during the search for “Public Enemy No. 1” John Dillinger. In 1933, Dillinger was in his 30s but had not yet robbed a bank, when he was released from prison for “blogging an elderly grocer’s head.”
Following his father’s advice, John pleads guilty to the crime but is then sentenced to a shocking 10–20 years’ imprisonment. Dillinger always said that injustice sealed his fate. “I went in as a carefree boy, but came out bitter toward everything…”
In 1933, Dillinger began a string of bank robberies unmatched in American history. His flamboyant signature move was to jump over counters and make witty quips, which endeared him to the American public who hated banks during the recession.
Dillinger was such a romantic that movie audiences would jump with joy whenever his face appeared in a newsreel.
Hoover made the arrest of Dillinger the FBI’s top priority, but their search for the popular thief did not proceed quickly enough.
John was caught in Tucson by local police using FBI information and FBI fingerprinting techniques, but after being extradited to East Chicago he escaped from jail either by brandishing a wooden gun or by paying off his captors.
His myth was debunked when it was said that during his escape Dillinger sang the chorus of a popular song, “Git Along, Little Doggie, Git Along…”
The FBI’s search for Dillinger was hampered by numerous clues regarding John’s whereabouts.
One said he was roaming the streets of Chicago disguised as a nun, another said he was a law student at Hoover’s alma mater, George Washington University, while a man on the streets of Washington, D.C. insisted that He was America’s “Public Enemy No. 1”. Hiding in Minnesota.
Failing to find him on the SS Duchess of York FBI agents heading to Glasgow, Scotland, have captured at least one international thief wanted in London by the collar. Hoover discussed that arrest to divert attention from his organization’s failed search for Dillinger.
John Dillinger escaped from the FBI four times in three weeks. He watched as federal agents burst into a Chicago tavern to arrest his girlfriend, with John casually walking away from the scene after dropping his lover off.
He was surrounded in a safe house in St. Paul, Minnesota, blood from the bullet wound seeping into the snow and reaching his shin, before he was shot and fled out the back door.
Worst of all, when the press announced that FBI agents had cornered Dillinger and his gang at a Wisconsin lodge called Little Bohemia, the federal agents simply murdered an innocent bystander as John and his companions tried to escape them. Had jumped out of the back window.
Carter Baum, the FBI man who killed the bystander, was so traumatized that he vowed never to fire his weapon again, which he later had to stop when he laid eyes on Dillinger’s partner, Baby Face Nelson. Laid. However, Nelson’s killer conscience did not slow him down, he immediately shot Baum.
“Little Bohemia was a debacle for the FBI like no other before or since,” writes Oller. “But from the ashes of a shootout at a remote snow-covered Wisconsin base, the modern FBI was born.”
Soon the FBI would be known for always getting its man. Federal agents eventually shot Dillinger to death on the street outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago. Baby Face Nelson killed 2 FBI agents in a shootout in Barrington, Illinois, but that day the gangster shot himself and was “terminated”. Even Pretty Boy Floyd couldn’t escape forever, gunned down by Hoover’s G-Men as he tried to flee an Ohio corn field.
Each of those criminals was at one time labeled America’s “Public Enemy No. 1”, their demise ultimately improving the FBI’s reputation so much that its agents came to be seen as more heroic than earlier gangsters.
“For Depression-era Americans, violent criminals eventually lost their romantic appeal, replaced by the image of the indestructible G-Man.”
