Public Enemies (3 page)

PROLOGUE

Torremolinos, Spain
August 26, 1979

 

In a tourist town on the white-sun Spanish coast, an old man was passing his last years, an American grandfather with a snowy white crewcut and a glint in his turquoise eyes. At seventy he was still lean and alert, with high, slanting cheekbones, a sharp chin, and those clear-frame eyeglasses that made him look like a minor-league academic. He spent much of his time holed up in his cluttered garage apartment, watching the BBC on a flickering black-and-white television, surrounded by bottles of Jack Daniel’s and pills and his memories. If you met him down on the beach, he came across as a gentle soul with a soft laugh. Almost certainly he was the most pleasant murderer you’d ever want to meet.

It was sad, but only a little. He’d had his fun. When he’d first come to Spain a decade before, he still knew how to have a good time. There was that frowsy old divorcée from Chicago he used to see. They would go tooling around the coast in her sports car and chug tequilla and down their pills and get into these awful screaming fights.

She was gone now. So were the writers, and the documentary makers, the ones who came to hear about the old days; that crew from Canada was the worst, posing him in front of roadsters and surrounding him with actors in fedoras holding fake tommy guns. He’d done it for the money, and for his ego, which had always been considerable. Now, well, now he drank. Out in the cafés, after a few beers, when the sun began to sink down the coast, he would tell stories. The names he dropped meant little to the Spaniards. The Brits and the odd American, they thought he was nuts—an old lush mumbling in his beer.

When he said he’d been a gangster, they smiled.
Sure you were, Pops.
When he said he’d been Public Enemy Number One—right after John Dillinger, “Pretty Boy” Floyd, and his old protégé Baby Face Nelson—people turned away and rolled their eyes. When he said he and his confederates had single-handedly “created” J. Edgar Hoover and the modern FBI, well, then he would get bitter, and people would get up and move to another table. He was obviously a kook. How could you believe anyone who claimed he was the only man in history to have met Charles Manson, Al Capone, and Bonnie and Clyde?

Few in Torremolinos knew it was all true. In those last years at Terminal Island in the ’60s, he’d taught Manson to play the steel guitar. He’d been at Alcatraz for twenty-one damp winters before that, leaving for Leavenworth a few years before they closed the place in 1963. In fact, he was the longest-serving prisoner in the history of The Rock. He’d known the Birdman and that gasbag Machine Gun Kelly, and he’d seen Capone collapse into one of his syphilitic seizures, flopping around on the cafeteria floor like a striped bass on a cutting board.

In his day he’d been famous. Not “fifteen minutes” famous, but
famous
famous,
New York Times-
page one-above the fold famous. Back before Neil Armstrong, before the Beatles, before
American Bandstand,
before the war, when Hitler was still a worrisome nut in a bad mustache and FDR was learning to find the White House bathrooms, he was the country’s best-known yeggman. Folks today, they didn’t even know what a yegg was. Dillinger, he liked to say, he was the best of yeggs. Pretty Boy Floyd was a good yegg. Bonnie and Clyde wanted to be.

And today? Today he and all his peers were cartoon characters, caricatures in one bad gangster movie after another. You could see them on the late show doing all sorts of made-up stuff—Warren Beatty as some stammering latent-homosexual Clyde Barrow, Faye Dunaway as a beautiful Bonnie Parker (now
that
was a stretch), Richard Dreyfuss as a chattering asshole Baby Face Nelson (okay, they got
that
right), Shelley Winters as a machine gun-toting Ma Barker, a young Robert De Niro as one of her sons. To him they were all ridiculous Hollywood fantasies, fictional concoctions in an artificial world.

At that point the old man would just shake his head. As he sprawled on his couch at nights, sipping his Jack Daniel’s and popping his pills, what galled him was that it had all been
real.
It had all
happened.
Not in some fantasy world, not in the movies, but right there in the middle of the United States—in Chicago, in St. Paul, in Dallas, in Cleveland. The truth of it all seemed lost now, forgotten as totally as he was. Dillinger, Floyd, Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker: He had known them all. He was the last one left alive. He had even outlived Hoover himself.

Hoover.

He leaned over and reached for a bottle of his pills.

 

It was a morning as bleak as the times. Gray clouds sagged low over the city, nudged along by a north wind and gusts of rain. A hundred thousand people stood outside the Capitol, waiting. The mood in the crowd was hushed, anxious. A few pointed to the rooftops. “What are those things that look like little cages?” someone asked.

“Machine guns,” said a woman.
¹

The sense of crisis was underscored by the nervous young soldiers who stood by on street corners, fingering their rifles. “The atmosphere,” wrote Arthur Krock in the
New York Times,
“was comparable to that which might be found in a beleaguered capital in wartime.”

The analogy was apt. It did feel like war. People were shell-shocked. The country they had known—the fat and happy America of the Jazz Age, of speakeasies and fun and sloe gin fizzes—had vanished, destroyed as utterly as if wiped out by an enemy’s bombs. Women who once spent their evenings dancing the Charleston now shuffled forward in breadlines, grimy and hopeless. Fathers who sank their savings in the stock market now sat in gutters, begging for change.

A bugle called. Everywhere, heads turned. The president-elect, appearing unsteady, stepped up the maroon-carpeted ramp to the lectern. The chief justice, Charles Evan Hughes, read the oath of office.

When he was finished, Franklin Delano Roosevelt stepped to the lectern and gripped it tightly. His face was grim. “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he intoned, “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Roosevelt looked out over the crowd. “This Nation asks for action, and action now,” he continued. “We must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline . . . I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”

Afterward, when the president disappeared back inside the Capitol, few in the crowd felt reassured. Mention of war left many frightened. There was talk of martial law, anarchy, dictatorship. Few understood what kind of war the president intended. Anything seemed possible.