When Charles Lindbergh’s 20-month-old son was kidnapped in 1932 and his corpse was found two months later, it was considered the crime of the century. It took nearly three years before the boy’s abductor was 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 back then so the organization had no jurisdiction.
Second, in those days the FBI was so little known or thought of that the Lindberghs weren’t even interested in talking to its headman.
“Charles and Ann Morrow Lindbergh, the baby’s parents, even declined [FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover’s offer to meet,” John Oller writes in “Gangster Hunters: How Hoover’s G-men Vanquished America’s Deadliest Public Enemies” (Dutton, Nov. 26).
Founded in 1908, the FBI’s initial mission was to investigate corporate wrongdoing and fraudulent government land deals.
It wasn’t involved in chasing bootleggers during Prohibition (the bailiwick of the Treasury Department) nor pursuing tax evaders (the Internal Revenue Service, who collared Al Capone).
The FBI “just wasn’t a very dangerous job,” Oller writes of the agents’ workloads. “Not the sort of activities that required wielding a lethal weapon.”
After the 29-year-old Hoover became director in 1924 he insisted the FBI recruit only certain types of agents.
He wanted loyal and morally upright, all-American men at least 5-foot-7 in stature, athletic or slim, smart dressers who comported themselves like gentlemen. Ideally, they would be college-educated and fraternity members, too.
The job paid exceedingly well during the Depression, so Hoover had his pick of applicants. Most expected an easy desk job pushing papers though, having no “inkling of the shoot-to-kill future which awaited them.”
“These were not hard men with years of crime-fighting experience. These were almost boys,” office assistant Doris Rogers said.
By the 1930s the FBI was changing — and Hoover was its key change agent. After the so-called “Lindbergh Law” made kidnapping a federal offense, 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 Floyd robbed payroll couriers of $12,000, with one of his victims describing his assailant as “having a pretty face.”
Eventually caught and imprisoned for bank robbery, Floyd escaped during a prison transfer in Kansas by leaping out of a moving train.
Shortly thereafter “Pretty Boy” and an accomplice murdered two men whose wives the criminals wanted to “date.”
In 1931, Floyd gunned down a U.S. Prohibition agent, then shot and killed a sheriff trying to arrest him. Remorse didn’t enter 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 apprehend Floyd, but he remained on the lam for years.
They weren’t the best times for “Pretty Boy” though, said to be exhausted by life on the run.
Apparently, the only way Floyd could relax was by baking pies.
An early success for the crime-fighting FBI came in 1933 when an informant pinned the kidnapping of oil magnate (and FDR friend) Charles Urschel on one George Kelly.
Kelly was said to be able to write his own name “with the bullets discharged from a gun.”
Quickly the man was apprehended by FBI agents one morning in Memphis, where “Machine Gun” Kelly was caught half-asleep in his underwear, docile from a night of heavy drinking.
During the arrest, Kelly might’ve also uttered the phrase that would come to epitomize Hoover’s FBI. “Don’t shoot, G-men!” Kelly was reputed to have hollered.
“It was the greatest triumph of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to date,” Oller writes of “Machine Gun’s” arrest.
But the FBI’s early days were filled with memorable snafus, too, none more than during its pursuit of “Public Enemy No. 1,” John Dillinger. Dillinger was approaching 30 in 1933 but hadn’t yet robbed a bank, just then being released from prison for “bashing an elderly grocer on the head.”
Per his father’s advice, John pleaded guilty to that crime but was then sentenced to a shocking 10-20-year term. Dillinger always said that injustice sealed his fate. “I went in a carefree boy, but came out bitter towards everything…”
In 1933 Dillinger began a bank robbery spree unrivaled in American history. His swashbuckling signature move was to jump counters and make jaunty quips, enamoring him to an American public who hated banks during the Depression.
So romanticized was Dillinger that movie audiences would burst into cheers when his face appeared in newsreels.
Hoover made Dillinger’s arrest the FBI’s top priority, but their pursuit of the popular thief didn’t go swimmingly.
John was apprehended in Tucson by local cops using FBI information and FBI fingerprinting techniques, but after being extradited to East Chicago he escaped prison either by wielding a wooden gun or paying off his captors.
His myth was burnished when it was said during that escape Dillinger sang the chorus of a popular song, “Git along, little doggie, git along…”
The FBI’s pursuit of Dillinger was hampered by innumerable leads about 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 alma mater, George Washington University, while a bum on the Washington, DC, streets insisted America’s “Public Enemy No. 1” was hiding in Minnesota.
Failing to find him on the SS Duchess of York bound for Glasgow, Scotland, FBI agents at least collared an international con man wanted in London. Hoover crowed about that arrest as a way to take the focus off his organization’s failed pursuit of Dillinger.
In three weeks John Dillinger escaped FBI capture four times. He watched as federal agents swarmed into a tavern in Chicago to arrest his girlfriend, John driving nonchalantly away from the scene after just having dropped his paramour off.
He was surrounded at a St. Paul, Minnesota safe house before shooting his way out and escaping through the back door, blood seeping into the snow from a bullet wound to his calf.
Worst of all, after the press announced that FBI agents had Dillinger and his gang penned in at a Wisconsin lodge called Little Bohemia, the federal agents ended up killing only an innocent bystander as John and accomplices jumped out a back window to elude them.
Carter Baum, the FBI man who killed the bystander was so traumatized he vowed never to fire his weapon again, which made him pause later when he had Dillinger’s accomplice, Baby Face Nelson, in his sights. The murderous Nelson’s conscience didn’t slow him down though, immediately shooting Baum dead.
“Little Bohemia was a debacle for the FBI like none before or since,” Oller writes. “But out of the ashes of the firefights at that remote snow-covered Wisconsin hideaway, the modern FBI was born.”
Soon the FBI would be known for always getting its man. Federal agents ultimately shot Dillinger dead on the street outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater. Baby Face Nelson killed 2 FBI agents in a shoot-out in Barrington, Ill, but the gangster was gut-shot himself that day and was “done for.” Even Pretty Boy Floyd couldn’t escape forever, being shot down by Hoover’s G-men as he tried to flee through an Ohio cornfield.
Each of those criminals had at one time been labeled America’s “Public Enemy No. 1,” with their demises ultimately improving the reputation of the FBI so much that its agents began to be viewed more heroically than the gangsters once were.
“For Depression-era Americans, violent criminals had finally lost their romantic appeal, replaced by the image of the incorruptible G-man.”
