Doc Barker’s Last Escape As gangster era criminals went, Doc Barker wasn’t the coldest beer in the fridge. Some outright called him the dumbest. Author Tim Mahoney described him thus: “Doc was a dimwit and a drunk, but he was family and could be counted on. He was the same height as his younger brother…
George “Machine Gun” Kelly is credited with coining the term “G-Man” to describe the government men of the FBI. This has been disputed, however; some references indicate the term was used several years before Kelly’s arrest. Word origins aside, the G-Man took on a cultural significance in the 1930s that was ubiquitous. Movies, radio shows,…
Like many FBI agents of his time, E.J. Connelley worked in offices all over the country. J. Edgar Hoover liked to move his young executives around (it seemed a way to test their loyalty to the Bureau and also a way to bring consistency to field offices). Connelley’s “flying squad” cases had him crisscrossing the…
J. Edgar Hoover liked to appropriate credit when it was convenient for his purposes. The term “Public Enemy No. 1” was first used by Frank Loesch of the Chicago Crime Commission in 1930 to describe Al Capone: “I had the operating director of the Chicago Crime Commission bring before me a list of the outstanding…