The Complete Public Enemy Almanac: New Facts and Features on the People, Places, and Events of the Gangster and Outlaw Era: 1920-1940

“You can get much farther with a smile, a kind word, and a gun than you can with a smile and a kind word.” And who would know better than the source of that famous gangland quote: the Big Fellow himself, Alphonse Capone?

If there’s an answer to that question (and there isn’t), you’d find it somewhere in THE COMPLETE PUBLIC ENEMY ALMANAC: NEW FACTS AND FEATURES ON THE PEOPLE, PLACES, AND EVENTS OF THE GANGSTER AND OUTLAW ERA: 1920-1940, by two of the most respected gangster-era historians, William J. Helmer and Rick Mattix. When it comes to the truth and trivia of mobster data, if they don’t know it, it can’t be known – and if it isn’t in this book, they don’t know it.

You can find other crime histories that present short biographies of the heavy hitters in a dictionary format, but this one has that and more. Short historical essays – including an entire section on crime-prevention techniques as they developed over the years – are interspersed throughout the text, and the whole thing wraps up with a 60-page annotated and comprehensive bibliography of every significant true-crime book covering some aspect of the subject and period.

Of course, you expect to find photographs, but the ones selected by the authors are not just the same old rogues’ gallery you’ve seen before. There’s also a chronology of the years 1919-1940, and scattered throughout the text are the origins of such terms as “the real McCoy,” “X marks the spot,” and “public enemy,” which was coined by the Chicago Crime Commission (not the FBI) to help demonize Capone.

The authors go to great lengths to explain the difference between a “mobster” (Al Capone) and an “outlaw” (John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde – “regarded by other outlaws of the day as two-bit killers and robbers of gas stations and grocery stores”). The book contains a fascinating chapter made up of quotes from characters on both sides of the law. Ex-Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, who led the ambush of Bonnie and Clyde, said after the event: “I hate to pop a cap on a woman, especially when she’s sitting down.” Now that’s cold.

I particularly enjoyed the debunking of much gangster “common knowledge.” Did you know, for instance, that Capone did not plan the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre? He handed the job off to Frank Nitti, who gave it to Willie Heeney, who gave it to Fred Goetz, who was killed by Nitti five years later. Goetz had brought in a gang of special hitmen from St. Louis known as the “American Boys.”

Then there’s the famous tale of the death of Samuel “Nails” Morton, who was killed in an equestrian accident. Have you ever seen the James Cagney movie, THE PUBLIC ENEMY? That script makes use of the legend that two of Morton’s pals then executed the horse as an act of revenge. Good story. Never happened.

Here’s another one research-challenged writers love to repeat: On the “Night of the Sicilian Vespers,” a nationwide purge of old-school Mafiosi known as “Mustache Petes” took place. The legend is used as a plot point in THE GODFATHER, and it’s still regarded as fact in the FBI’s chronological history of La Cosa Nostra, but there’s no proof it ever occurred.

And then there’s the grand dame of the Depression-era outlaw gangs: Bloody Mama herself, Arizona Donnie Clark “Ma” Barker. When she was killed in an FBI attack on a Florida lake house she rented with her son Fred, J. Edgar Hoover panicked at the thought of telling America that his crack agents had just mowed down someone’s 62-year-old mother, so he concocted the story that “Ma” was the brains of the gang. Barker Gang member – and probably the smartest guy in the room – “Alvin Karpis would characterize ‘Ma’ Barker as an ignorant old hillbilly. A later member of the gang, Harvey Bailey, told a writer that ‘The old woman couldn’t plan breakfast. When we’d sit down to plan a bank job, she’d go in the other room and listen to AMOS ‘N ANDY.’”

The murder of “Big Jim” Colosimo in 1920 started the tradition of the spectacular gangster funeral. We have an image in our minds of grand mob send-offs on such a large scale, they should have been directed by Cecil B. DeMille, but some rats went into the ground essentially friendless and alone. Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll received only a penny-ante burial after he killed a child during an assassination in which his intended target escaped without a scratch. Coll was shot down in a drugstore phone booth in 1932, aged 23.

And you know what? Anna Sage, the famous “woman in red” who fingered John Dillinger, actually wore orange.

There’s just no way true crime buffs who are into Depression-era bad guys cannot have fun with this book. Even gentler types – whose souls resonate less to bullets and more to poetry – can find something to love. One newspaper columnist summed up the era’s main preoccupation this way:

“I remember, I remember
The house where I was born;
The cellar’s been rigged out complete
For making ‘brew’ and ‘corn’;
You’d hardly know the old place now.
It’s dazzling to the eye,
For father’s made a fortune
Since the Country voted Dry.”

–Doug Bentin

Buy it at Amazon.

Related posts:

1. Public Enemy
2. The Killer Book of True Crime: Incredible Stories, Facts and Trivia from the World of Murder and Mayhem
3. The Way Some People Die
4. Bob Dylan Complete Discography / The Rolling Stones Complete Discography
5. A Series of Unfortunate Events No. 1: The Bad Beginning