Categories: uncategorized
Tags: Dillinger, Baby Faced Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie & Clyde, Barker Gang, J Edgar Hoover, Melvin Purvis
Date: 21 July 2009 17:54:55
I am currently reading the book on which the film is set. It is not a novel but a factual aacount of the War on Crime in the early 1930's. Until I read this I didn't realise that all those gangsters I grew up watching in films and reading about were not just contemparies but many actually knew each other or robbed together.
Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, Baby Faced Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly and the Barker family were all robbing banks throughout the mid West at the same time. They all appeared and disappeared in the same short time period from 1932-35.
This is also the era that saw the FBI come into being and many of the stories about their victories turn out to be myths spread J Edgar Hoover. The BI (before they became Federalised) were a bunch of amateurs who made many mistakes in their pursuit of these gangsters.
These were not "gangsters" in the sense of "The Mob" or "The Outfit" but people who chose to rob banks and kidnap people. In fact the Mob or the Outfit actually helped to hunt down and kill those people who brought "the heat" onto their operations.
My favourite mythbuster was finding out that the "Man Who Got Dillinger", Melvin Purvis, was actually an incompetent, racist prat - the last part is odd thing to say seeing as most such Southern Gentlemen would now be considered to be racist today.
The other myth that was busted was finding out that Ma Barker was not the leader of the Barker Gang but an innocent victim when the FBI killed her when they arrested her son Fred in Florida.
I can't wait to read the other half of the book now.
*** Smudgie it wasn't Swine Flu nor an attack of the more deadly Man Flu.