Back when I was a temp at my job, or back when I was still a clerk with less responsibility, I spent a loooot of time on Wikipedia. For some reason I spent a lot of time reading about organized crime. I think I did this because there was a lot of material and I had a lot of time to kill. I even ended up with a favorite gangster. Plus, it was all very interesting. Culturally, the gangsters of the 1920s and 1930s have always been glorified, by locals and by Hollywood. Hell, this continues to this day. John Gotti is still a hero in his old neighborhood.

So I saw Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-1934 by Bryan Burrough in the audiobook library, and I was intrigued, because while I’d read a lot about gangsters, I hadn’t read much about law enforcement. I knew that a lot of mob higher ups were hardly ever arrested or convicted and that didn’t really begin until the establishment of the RICO act and the big cases in the 1970s. And considering the kind of attention the FBI has been getting these days, I thought this might be a good time to learn more about its origins.

This all said, I found this book disappointing. I didn’t realize when I checked it out but it was an abridged production, so I didn’t get the whole book, and further, they focused a lot on the gangsters, which you expect, but I felt they left a lot out about the FBI.

Most of the book covered how the FBI came into prominence, but left out a lot of background. They made headlines by killing or capturing members of the midwest’s most notorious outlaw gangs: the Dillinger gang, the Karpis gang, the Barker gang, Baby Face Nelson’s gang, and the Barrow gang, whose most famous (and founding) members were Bonnie & Clyde Barrow. What they didn’t cover much was the origin story: that the Bureau first came into being after the assassination of President McKinley, when now President Theodore Roosevelt wanted more power to monitor “anarchists” believed to be a threat to the United States, how the Departments of Labor and Justice had been keeping records but a new government agency was formed after the assassination, how the Mann Act played into the expanding role of the agency, etc…

In the part of the book I heard, Burrough does document the early power struggle between J. Edgar Hoover and his main rival, and he does go into a lot of what drives Hoover – inferiority complex, jealousy, etc… – but there really isn’t that much about specifics of how the FBI really came to be, and only a minimal amount about the power struggles at the FBI early on until Hoover clearly grabbed power.

The portion of the book chosen to be in the audiobook was mostly the government’s pursuit of the criminal gangs across the midwest, but a lot of it I already knew. I always like hearing about John Dillinger (a bank robber and a gentleman, so the story goes), but there wasn’t much I didn’t know about him either.

Maybe what I’m really looking for is a biography on Hoover? I don’t know. I can’t recommend or not recommend Public Enemies in print. I didn’t read the whole book. I can whole heartedly not recommend the abridged audiobook version to anyone who has even a basic understanding of what went on in the midwest in 1933 and 1934. There just isn’t enough new information, and the whole thing is a waste of time if you have even rudimentary knowledge of the events of that time.

Tagged: author: bryan burrough, books: public enemies: america's greatest crime wave and the birth of the FBI, genre: non-fiction, genre: true crime