J. Edgar Hoover transformed the FBI into a law and order machine

When Charles Lindbergh’s twenty-month-old son was kidnapped in 1932 and his corpse found two months later, it was considered the crime of the century. It took nearly three years before the boy’s kidnapper 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 at the time, so the organization had no jurisdiction.

Second, the FBI was so little known or thought of at the time that the Lindberghs weren’t even interested in talking to the kingpin.

“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 Overcame America’s Deadliest Public Enemies” (Dutton, November 26).

Founded in 1908, the FBI’s primary mission was to investigate corporate misconduct and fraudulent government land deals.

It was not involved in chasing bootleggers during Prohibition (the Treasury Department’s bailiwick) nor was it involved in chasing tax evaders (the Internal Revenue Service, which targeted Al Capone).

The FBI “just wasn’t a very dangerous job,” Oller writes of the agents’ workload. “Not the kind of activity that involves wielding 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 six feet tall, athletic or slim, dressed smart and behaved like gentlemen. Ideally, they would also be college educated and members of a fraternity.

The job paid extremely well during the Depression, so Hoover was able to cherry-pick applicants. However, most expected an easy desk job because they had no “idea of ​​the shoot-to-kill future that awaited them.”

“These were not hard men with years of crime fighting experience. These were almost boys,” said office assistant Doris Rogers.

In the 1930s, the FBI was changing – and Hoover was its chief change agent. After the so-called “Lindbergh Act” made kidnapping a federal crime, the FBI became more actively involved in combating violent crime. The first notable target was infamous bank robber Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd.

In 1924, Floyd robbed wage couriers of $12,000, with one of his victims describing his attacker as “with a beautiful face.”

Ultimately, Floyd was captured and imprisoned for bank robbery and escaped during a prison transfer in Kansas by jumping from a moving train.

Shortly afterwards, ‘Pretty Boy’ and an accomplice murdered two men whose wives wanted to ‘date’ the criminals.

In 1931, Floyd shot a U.S. Prohibition agent and then shot and killed a sheriff who tried to arrest him. No regret entered 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 arrest Floyd, but he remained on the run for years.

However, these were not the best of times for “Pretty Boy,” who was reportedly exhausted by life on the run.

Apparently the only way Floyd could relax was to bake cakes.

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 could write his own name “with the bullets shot from a gun.”

The man was quickly apprehended by FBI agents one morning in Memphis, where “Machine Gun” Kelly was caught half asleep in his underwear, docile after a night of heavy drinking.

During the arrest, Kelly also allegedly uttered the phrase that would embody Hoover’s FBI. “Don’t shoot, G-men!” Kelly allegedly screamed.

“It was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI’s greatest triumph yet,” Oller writes of the “Machine Gun” arrest.

But the early days of the FBI were also filled with memorable hiccups, especially during the pursuit of “Public Enemy No. 1”, John Dillinger. Dillinger was approaching thirty in 1933, but had not yet robbed a bank. He was just released from prison for “hitting an elderly grocer in the head.”

On his father’s advice, John pleaded guilty to this crime, but was subsequently sentenced to a shocking 10 to 20 years in prison. Dillinger always said that injustice sealed his fate. “I went in as a carefree boy, but came out bitter towards everything…”

In 1933, Dillinger embarked on a bank robbery unparalleled in American history. His reckless signature move was to jump the counter and make cheerful jokes, which made him fall in love with an American audience that hated banks during the Depression.

Dillinger was so romanticized that movie audiences burst into cheers whenever his face appeared on the newsreels.

Hoover made Dillinger’s arrest the FBI’s top priority, but their pursuit of the popular thief did not go smoothly.

John was apprehended in Tucson by local agents using FBI information and FBI fingerprinting techniques, but after being extradited to East Chicago he escaped from prison by wielding a wooden gun or paying off his captors.

His myth was bolstered when during that escape it was said that Dillinger sang the chorus of a popular song: “Come along, little dog, come along…”

The FBI’s search for Dillinger was hampered by numerous clues about John’s whereabouts.

One said he walked the streets of Chicago dressed as a nun, another said he was a law student at Hoover’s alma mater, George Washington University, while a vagabond on the streets of Washington DC insisted that America’s ‘Public Enemy No. 1’. in hiding in Minnesota.

Can’t find it on SS Duchess of York En route to Glasgow, Scotland, FBI agents apprehended at least one international con man wanted in London. Hoover exulted in that arrest as a way to divert attention from his organization’s failed pursuit of Dillinger.

In three weeks, John Dillinger escaped capture from the FBI four times. He watched as federal agents burst into a Chicago tavern to arrest his girlfriend, while John casually drove away from the scene having just dropped off his lover.

He was surrounded at a safe house in St. Paul, Minnesota before shooting his way out and escaping through the back door, blood seeping into the snow from a gunshot wound to his calf.

Worst of all, after the press announced that FBI agents had locked Dillinger and his gang in a lodge in Wisconsin called Little Bohemia, the federal agents ended up killing only an innocent bystander when John and his accomplices jumped out a back window to kill them. to avoid.

Carter Baum, the FBI man who killed the bystander, was so traumatized that he vowed never to fire his weapon again, which later gave him pause when he had Dillinger’s accomplice, Baby Face Nelson, in his sights. However, the murderous Nelson’s conscience did not stop him and immediately shot Baum dead.

“Little Bohemia was a debacle for the FBI unlike anything before or since,” Oller writes. “But from the ashes of the gun battle in that remote, snow-covered hideout in Wisconsin, the modern FBI was born.”

Soon the FBI would be known for always getting its man. Federal agents eventually shot Dillinger to death in the street outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater. Baby Face Nelson killed two FBI agents during a shootout in Barrington, Illinois, but the gangster himself was shot that day and was “done.” Even Pretty Boy Floyd couldn’t escape forever, as he was shot by Hoover’s G-men as he tried to flee through an Ohio cornfield.

Each of these criminals was once labeled America’s “Public Enemy No. 1,” and their downfall ultimately enhanced the FBI’s reputation so much that its agents were viewed as more heroic than the gangsters ever were.

“For Depression-era Americans, violent criminals had finally lost their romantic appeal and been replaced by the image of the incorruptible G-man.”