All Against The Law by Bill Friedman

This is the incredible story of the daring prison escapes and breathtaking fugitive runs by the Great Depressions four successive Public Enemies Number One - John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Alvin Karpis with the Barker brothers. These were the most aggressive and dangerous killers ever. When fleeing from pursuing lawmen every one of these bank robbers whiled around and floored their accelerator or ran out in the open charging their pursuers while relentlessly blasting away with machineguns. All these ferocious counterattacks made them dreadfully successful at killing the most policemen and FBI agents of any American outlaws. Against these fierce killers, Congress assigned a fledgling Federal Bureau of Investigaiton, an accounting agency of government money made up of politically-appointed accountants and attorneys with no police experience. Headed by J. Edgar Hoover, a librarian, he failed to teach his agents any of the fundamentals of police and detective work or instruct them to respect individual liberties and rights. Thus his courageous but ill-prepared early agents conducted one amateurish and failed raid after another interspersed with disastrous results for both his agents and innoccent civilian bystanders caught up in the lines of fire. Hoovers leadership and mismangement of the FBI has been thoroughly discredited by contemporary expose articles and scholarly historical biographies. This book penetrates the veil much further in presenting Hoovers underhanded, often illegal, tactics against his critics; his occasional fights to survive his malfeasance in office; and his blackmailing of errant Congressmen to further his personal political agenda, as he became an unaccountable malevolent fourth branch of the federal government totlly outside the brilliantly-conceived Constitutional checks-and-balances system. To disprove FBI target Pretty Boy Floyd was involved in the Kansas City Massacre slaughtering four lawmen, the