Gangster Hunters: How Hoover's G-Men Vanquished America's Deadliest Public Enemies

“Oller has produced another work of dramatic reality and reading far superior to Hollywood myth and popular misunderstandings.”

The bloody war against bank robberies, kidnappings, and other crimes waged by the United States government in the 1930s is a legend, but it is not a well-known or, often, well-told story. In Gangster Hunters: How Hoover's G Men Vanquished America's Deadliest Enemies, John Oller sets out to explain this chapter in American law enforcement and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The author begins with a concise and anything-but-dry account of the background of law enforcement at the time. Readers new to the subject will find this clear account relevant as the world faces new, similar challenges to law enforcement.

Advances in economics and technology since the 1840s led to new ways and means of crime. Eventually, the United States government responded with a rise in extensive and increasingly sophisticated law enforcement, including postal inspectors, the Secret Service, Treasury agents, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Oller writes that this progress did not keep up with innovations in crime. Many “states’ righters” opposed and feared the expansion of federal power, even as vicious criminals such as Bonnie and Clyde could cross state lines to escape arrest. Some cities like Chicago and St. Paul did a profitable business as well-known refuges for criminals. Even the deaths from the Kansas City Massacre failed to bring needed change.

President Herbert Hoover did not see why the FBI should investigate kidnappings as it was already a state crime. For the same reason, the agency was “also powerless to pursue bank robberies, the number of which had mushroomed” since the Great Depression began in 1929. Treasury Department agents dealt with bootleggers and prohibition.

What became the FBI began as a small agency in the Justice Department had been used to investigate anyone who challenged that investigated a small number of usually non-violent crimes, such as sex trafficking, automobile theft, corporate crimes, and fraudulent land deals. They originally carried no guns and could make no arrests.

Expanding jurisdiction to deal with new crime situations remains controversial in law enforcement. Murder, with some exceptions, still is not a federally investigated offense, contrary to the image on television.

Most of Gangster Hunters is about agents such as John Madala and Jim Metcalfe, who used “inspired legwork” and bravery. Oller points out that they are forgotten while the vicious killers they stopped, such as the first three men given the status of Public Enemy Number 1 in the 1930s (Dillinger, Floyd, and Nelson), are legends and even folk heroes. Some of the agents gave their lives in this service.

The FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, kept the public’s attention only on himself. Melvin Purvis was the only famous agent of the 1930s, and his career differed from how he was portrayed in the press. He “couldn’t win, then or now.” “Names and deeds” of Hoover’s men, “unfamiliar to today’s Americans, deserve to be remembered alongside their boss.”

At that time, forensics was (and still is) often given too much credit in the public mind for the success of what was the agents' hard, dangerous, and monotonous work “over monstrously long, stressful hours.” Hoover promoted how he had brought science to the FBI as one of his many needed reforms.

Oller tells how this FBI, through a soap opera/genealogy-like series of bank robberies, kidnappings, and murders, began in 1933 and continued to 1936. (The FBI had joined the national war on crime in the mid-1920s.) These often-connected cases involved the infamous Kansas City Massacre, the Little Bohemia fiasco, and the famous violent death of John Dillinger.

This FBI epic illustrates the methods developed during this evolution in crime fighting, such as aircraft, recording serial numbers on ransom money, hidden microphones, and telephone records. The author digresses, but readers who appreciate the best of the reality of true crime will appreciate the color and depth of this book.

The author does not ignore the unseemly stories about Hoover and the myths of his FBI but covers them honestly. All the agents were male, usually white, and preferably young Southerners, but they owed much to efficient women clerical staff, such as Doris Hinkley in Chicago.

Oller’s writing style brings people like the infamous Ma Barker family/gang to life. Nothing in Gangster Hunters is a lengthy essay; the narrative is never slowed down by its considerable detail. Gangster Hunters may not be as thorough, organized, or technical as formal scholarship demands, but it is always entertaining and never dull.

Oller has produced another work of dramatic reality and reading that is far superior to Hollywood myth and popular misunderstanding. Gangster Hunters is a fast read with easy prose that keeps the reader hooked. This work is well-illustrated and annotated.