I happened to come across photos on the Internet of Johnny Depp portraying bank robber John Dillinger and Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis, the famous FBI agent who pursued Dillinger and the other bank robbers during the 1930s. The two fine actors lead the cast in an upcoming film called Public Enemies.

The film, directed by veteran crime film director Michael Mann, is based on Bryan Burrough’s excellent book Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34. I read the book with some relish a few years ago, as I’ve long been interested in the depression-era criminals and the early history of the FBI.

Like Truman Capote, who once said that if he had studied medicine with the same intensity that he had studied crime, he could have been a brain surgeon, I’ve long been a student of crime. I grew up watching cops and robbers on TV and in the movies, and I became an avid reader of crime fiction as well as crime history. As a writer I’ve covered crime for newspapers, magazines and Internet publications. In this blog I’ll write about crime in American history.

The names of criminals like John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie & Clyde are better known than most presidents’ names. Unfortunately what most people know about these criminals they’ve learned primarily from the movies. While movies can be entertaining, most of them are historically inaccurate. The movies have also glamorized the criminals.

The movies also gave us a somewhat whitewashed version of the early FBI’s role in capturing and killing the Depression-era gangsters. In films such as Jimmy Cagney’s G-Men and James Stewart’s The FBI Story we see a sanitized FBI and the stories that J. Edgar Hoover, the first and long-serving director of the FBI, wanted the public to see. (I love the two films anyway, as they are good dramas.)

Burrough’s book gives us the true story of the early FBI and the sordid story of the rural bank robbers and kidnappers that captured the public’s imagination in the 1930s, and to some extent, still does today.

After four years of research and access to FBI records made available only in the 1980s, Burrough was able to give readers a thorough, unsanitized account of the FBI’s “War on Crime” against the famous criminals.

As Burrough explains in the book, bank robbers were known as “Yeggmen,” or “Yeggs.” One influential Yegg who is not as well known as Dillinger, was Herman K. Lamm, a former German army officer known as “The Baron.” Burrough offers a brief history of Lamm, who devised the bank robbery system later used by the Dillinger gang.

You can read more on the public enemies of the 1930s and the FBI in my next blog.

Paul Davis also writes an espionage blog for GreatHistory.com. Visit his web site.

About the Author: Paul Davis has been a student of crime and espionage since he was a 12-year-old aspiring writer growing up in South Philadelphia. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy when he was 17 in 1970 and served on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War. He performed security work as a young sailor and later as a Defense Department civilian employee. As a writer he has covered crime, espionage, terrorism and the military for newspapers, magazines and Internet publications.

Related Articles Depression-Era Public Enemies vs. the FBI, Part II Due Dillinger: A Look Back at America’s Classic Bankrobber, Part I Public Enemies: The Lore and Lure of 20th-Century Outlaws Due Dillinger: A Look Back at America’s Classic Bankrobber, Part Two Agent ZigZag: The Story of One of World War II’s Most Daring Double Agents, Part III

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