In an interview on The FBI and Crime

With your next book, Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough, you say it is better to read the book than see the movie. I have seen the movie and I loved it, so why should I bother reading the book?

Well, I have nothing against the movie – it was great. But it really just focuses on the arch villain John Dillinger and the FBI man Melvin Purvis dynamic with very little else. And they are great characters so it makes sense to do it that way. But the book really accomplishes, better than any other book or movie I have seen, a good look at that violent fantastic gangster era in the 1930s. And the book doesn’t just focus on Dillinger, but on all the players: Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde. It was a really, really Wild West period for the United States, mainly out in the mid west in places like Chicago. 

A big part of the book is the birth of the FBI – how did that come about?

Banks were being robbed, people were being killed, there was a lot of violence. The people in the US finally said, who is going to stop it. The State Police couldn’t because once the gangsters moved across their state lines they have no jurisdiction. So the FBI finally came to the forefront and took control of the situation. And after, frankly, a lot of failures and shoot-outs and problems the bureau finally came into its own.

How did they manage that?

Well, when that era started, FBI agents didn’t even carry guns so it was very difficult to go up against the fire power that these gangs had. So they had to be trained in weaponry. Their mentality had to change and the bureau had to transform itself from working run-of-the-mill, low-level violence cases to dealing with what the most violent criminals that the country had to offer at that time.

What kind of a legacy did they leave for the modern-day FBI?

Everyone has a special appreciation for that era. Everyone knows those gangsters by name. It’s when the bureau gelled and became an institution that really had to be reckoned with. Where we train new recruits for the FBI in Virginia, we have an area called Hogan’s Alley. It is like a fake town where our agents can train and be somewhere that is as close to real life as possible before they go out on the street. In part of that town there is a movie theatre which is the one copied in the Public Enemies film when Dillinger gets killed at the end coming out of the movie theatre.