Public Enemies Read Online Free PDF

massive ransoms to be had, kidnappings flourished. The year 1933 brought twenty-seven major cases, more than twice the number reported in any previous year, so many that the New York Times began charting them in a periodic column. Beginning with the kidnapping of the millionaire Charles Boetscher II in Denver that February, FBI agents stormed into a half-dozen high-profile cases, for the first time finding themselves involved in solving crimes the public actually cared about.
    As Roosevelt took office that spring, kidnapping stories thronged front pages across the country. Coming on the heels of the surge in crime during the 1920s symbolized by Al Capone, these reports added fuel to the debate over the need for a federal police force. On one side were reformers who charged that municipal police were too often corrupt and ineffective, and unable to deal with increasingly mobile criminals who crossed state lines like cracks in a sidewalk. On the other side were powerful city governments, jealous of their turf, backed by congressmen who viewed federal policing as the first step toward an American Gestapo. Antifederalism still ran strong in America. There remained, especially in the South and Midwest, an undercurrent of deep mistrust toward Washington, feelings that grew as citizens came to blame politicians for the Depression. The debate intensified with Roosevelt’s election. His advisers were pushing hard for a strong central government that could revive the economy by taking control of many areas managed by state and municipal governments, including law enforcement.
    During the first hundred days of the Roosevelt administration, a period that famously saw dozens of pieces of New Deal legislation stream through Congress, the leading voice for a federal police force was a Roosevelt adviser named Louis Howe. The attorney general chosen to replace Thomas Walsh, a Connecticut attorney named Homer S. Cummings, was, perhaps unsurprisingly, possessed of similar views. That spring Howe and Cummings began discussing how best to reform the Justice Department and what role, if any, it might play in federal policing.
    For Hoover, Roosevelt’s election was an all-or-nothing proposition. Of the few pundits who took notice, most believed Hoover would be fired. Had Senator Walsh lived, he almost certainly would have been. But if he could somehow persuade the White House of his value, Hoover could see there was a chance—a remote one, to be sure—that his little bureau might serve as the centerpiece of a federal police force. A number of his government competitors had the same idea, most notably Elmer Irey, the head of the Internal Revenue Service’s aggressive investigative arm, which could boast of its 1931 toppling of Capone.
    That spring, Hoover launched a vigorous lobbying campaign to keep his job and to position himself for something more. SACs were ordered to arrange letters of support from prominent politicians. Hoover’s old boss Harlan Fiske Stone, now a Supreme Court justice, wrote Justice Felix Frankfurter, who contacted Roosevelt. Still, anti-Hoover sentiment remained widespread. One Roosevelt adviser later wrote there was “tremendous pressure on Roosevelt by various city politicians to replace Hoover with this or that police chief whom they believed would be more amenable to them for patronage.” 5
    All that spring Hoover’s future hung in the balance. Only a cynic would have pointed out the obvious. What Hoover needed was a tangible achievement, something to grab headlines, a case that would thrust him into the public spotlight and underscore the Bureau’s transformation. He was about to get it, but from a group of criminals over whose activities the FBI had absolutely no jurisdiction: bank robbers.
     
     
    The first recorded U.S. bank robbery, actually a nighttime burglary, came in 1831, when a man named Edward Smith snuck into a Wall Street bank and made off with $245,000. He was caught and sentenced to a five-year