Acclaimed Vanity Fair contributor Bryan Burrough brings to life the most spectacular crime wave in American history: the two-year battle between J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the Barkers.

In 1933, police jurisdictions ended at state lines, the FBI was in its infancy, the highway system was spreading, fast cars and machine guns were easily available, and a good number of the thirteen million Americans who were out of work blamed the Great Depression on the banks. In short, it was a wonderful time to be a bank robber. On hand to take full advantage was a motley assortment of criminal masterminds, sociopaths, romantics, and cretins, some of whom, with a little help from J. Edgar Hoover, were to become some of the most famous criminals in American history.

Bryan Burrough's grandfather once set up roadblocks in Alma, Arkansas, to capture Bonnie and Clyde. He didn't catch them. Burrough was suckled on stories of the crime wave, and now, after years of work, he succeeds where his grandfather failed, capturing the stories of Bonnie and Clyde, Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and the rest of the FBI's nemeses, weaving them into a single enthralling account. For more than forty years, the great John Toland's Dillinger Days has stood as the only book that provides the entire big picture of this fabled moment in American history. But an extraordinary amount of new material has come to light during those forty years, a good deal of it unearthed by Burrough in the course of his own research, and Public Enemies reveals the extent to which Toland and others were fed the story the FBI wanted them to tell. The circles in which the "public enemies" moved overlapped in countless fascinating ways, large and small, as Burrough details. The actual connections are one thing; but quite another is the sense of connectedness Hoover created in the American public's mind for his own purposes. Using the tools of an increasingly powerful mass media, Hoover waged an unprecedented propaganda campaign, working the press, creating "America's Most Wanted" list, and marketing the mystique of the heroic "G-men" that successfully obscured an appalling catalog of professional ineptitude. When the FBI gunned down John Dillinger outside a Chicago movie theater in the summer of 1934, Hoover's ascent to unchecked power was largely complete.

Both a hugely satisfying entertainment and a groundbreaking work with powerful echoes in today's news, Public Enemies is the definitive history of America's first War on Crime.

"Burrough, an award-winning financial journalist and Vanity Fair special correspondent, best known for Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, switches gears to produce the definitive account of the 1930s crime wave that brought notorious criminals like John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde to America's front pages. Burrough's fascination with his subject matter stems from a family connection — his paternal grandfather manned a roadblock in Arkansas during the hunt for Bonnie and Clyde — and he successfully translates years of dogged research, which included thorough review of recently disclosed FBI files, into a graceful narrative. This true crime history appropriately balances violent shootouts and schemes for daring prison breaks with a detailed account of how the slew of robberies and headlines helped an ambitious federal bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover transform a small agency into the FBI we know today. While some of the details (e.g., that Dillinger got a traffic ticket) are trivial, this book compellingly brings back to life people and times distorted in the popular imagination by hagiographic bureau memoirs and Hollywood. Burrough's recent New York Times op-ed piece drawing parallels between the bureau's 'reinvention' in the 1930s and today's reform efforts to combat the war on terror will help attract readers looking for lessons from history. Agent, Andrew Wylie. 6-city author tour. (July 22)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Burrough (a special correspondent for Vanity Fair) examines the stories of John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, the Barker-Karpis Gang, Machine Gun Kelly, and Bonnie and Clyde as a single narrative history of the FBI's "War on Crime" from 1933 to 1936. His examination of the recently release FBI files reveals a story vastly different from the largely mythical narrative promoted by J. Edgar Hoover or the romantic portrayals of the gangs by Hollywood. For Burrough, the story is about the bureaucratic evolution of the FBI from a bungling group of amateurs to a professional crime-fighting organization and his central aim is to reclaim the history for the individual agents involved.
Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

"A rollicking, rat-a-tat ride....Iconoclastic and fascinating. A genuine treat for true-crime buffs, and for anyone interested in the New Deal era." Kirkus Reviews

"Public Enemies is a fabulous read....Great reporting and lots of new information. I loved it." James B. Stewart

"Burrough has captured the vivid details of outlaw life on the run....I couldn't put this book down." Dominick Dunne

"Fantastic....Bryan Burrough has pieced together one of the great American stories, and tells it like gangbusters." David Von Drehle

"[S]uperb — readable, thorough, and critical." Denver Post

"Burrough...has written a book that brims with vivid portraiture....Public Enemies is excellent true crime with all the strengths and limitations this implies." Mark Costello, The New York Times Book Review

Both a hugely satisfying entertainment and a groundbreaking work with powerful echoes in today's news, Burrough's account of America's greatest crime wave and the birth of the FBI is the definitive history of America's first war on crime.

Bryan Burrough is the coauthor of Barbarians at the Gate and the author of Dragonfly and Vendetta. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair.

Author's Note
Cast of Characters
Prologue
A Prelude to War, Spring 1933 1
A Massacre by Persons Unknown, June 8 to June 15, 1933 19
The College Boys Take the Field, June 17 to July 22, 1933 51
The Baying of the Hounds, July 22 to August 25, 1933 71
The Kid Jimmy, August 18 to September 25, 1933 98
The Streets of Chicago, October 12 to November 20, 1933 135
Ambushes, November 20 to December 31, 1933 162
"An Attack on All We Hold Dear," January 2 to January 28, 1934 183
A Star is Born, January 30 to March 2, 1934 206
Dillinger and Nelson, March 3 to March 29, 1934 234
Crescendo, March 30 to April 10, 1934 267
Death in the North Woods, April 10 to April 23, 1934 292
"And It's Death for Bonnie and Clyde," April 23 to May 23, 1934 323
New Faces, May 24 to June 30, 1934 362
The Woman in Orange, July 1 to July 27, 1934 388
The Scramble, July 23 to September 12, 1934 417
A Field in Ohio and a Highway in Illinois, September 18 to November 27, 1934 446
The Last Man Standing, December 3, 1934 to January 20, 1935 484
Pas de Deux, January 1935 until... 515
Epilogue 543
Bibliographical Essay 553
Notes 556
Selected Biography 567
Acknowledgements 571
Index 573