An article on the FBI’s ‘Public Enemy’ and ‘Most Wanted’ lists and how they have mirrored American society down the years.

Published in the ‘Mesrine’ issue of Little White Lies.

 

America’s Most Wanted

Crime and criminals have always fascinated the American public, from the gunslingers of the Wild West to the drug tzars of the Eighties; from the glamour of the Mafia to the mental squalor of serial killers like Ted Bundy. Whether or not you subscribe to the shop-worn adage that a society gets the criminals that it deserves, self-reliance, rebelliousness and the thrill of the chase are central to the entrepreneurial spirit of America, and the extraordinary developments and dizzying pace of the American Twentieth Century dictated crimes and criminals that were undoubtedly shaped by their place and time.

Since 1908 it has been the task of the FBI to investigate and apprehend many of these men and women. Though American legal jurisdiction can be something of a snake pit, the Federal Bureau of Investigations is undoubtedly the big gun of US law enforcement. Originally born out of the need to regulate interstate commerce, the Bureau soon became America’s national police force, with the jurisdiction to cross city, county and state lines while pursuing it’s remit to investigate violations of Federal law (later, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, expanded to include chasing down all manner of bank-robbers, bootleggers and jail breakers). Though hardly without it’s critics over the years, the FBI has had remarkable success in capturing the felons and fugitives that have attained the status of ‘Public Enemies’ or, later, made their ‘Ten Most Wanted’ list: men and women who mirror their times to an often eerie degree.

 

“About the time we can make the ends meet, somebody moves the ends.” Herbert Hoover, US President 1929-33

The Twentieth Century brought with it a new kind of criminal. The gangs of the Wild West were succeeded back East by gangs of a far more organised nature, and the advent of the motorcar meant that even the old school criminals that remained were far more mobile. Michael Willrich, Associate Professor of History at Brandeis University explains the public appeal of this new element. “In 1930 the Chicago Crime Commission published a list of the city's ‘Public Enemies’. Journalists, already fascinated with Chicago's gang problem, quickly adopted the term as their own, crowning Capone ‘Public Enemy Number One’. The second archetype, which really took off in the Depression-era, was the itinerant rural bank robber; Charles ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd - memorialized in song as a sort of populist bandit; John Dillinger; and Bonnie and Clyde.”

The Great Depression of the Thirties saw banks foreclosing on mortgages left and right, so when destitute farmers and homesteaders read reports of flamboyant robbers sticking up banks and taunting the law with daring prison escapes – such as the surely apocryphal tale of John Dillinger busting out of the joint armed with a fake gun fashioned from a bar of soap – they rooted for them as if they were latter-day Robin Hoods.

Al Capone was patently no Robin Hood, but Dr. Laura Cook Kenna, Professor of American Studies at George Washington University argues he was an aspirational figure within his own community. “Coverage of Capone tended to comment on his over-the-top style of dress. You could read this detail as mere trivia. You could also read such descriptions as reminders of Capone's low-class, immigrant background; or you could read about those silk suits and think, ‘Now this guy… This guy knows how to live! I hope someday I make it big myself and can show it off to world just like he does.’”

Dillinger eventually went down in a hail of bullets and Capone was nabbed for tax evasion and passed away in Alcatraz. Prohibition was repealed, the Great Depression was over and the days of the guns-blazing gangster had passed. The world went to war.

 

‘It was a nervous, downhill feeling, a mean kind of Angst that always come out of wars …’ Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels

Long-time FBI director and shameless publicity seeker J. Edgar Hoover conceived of the ‘Ten Most Wanted’ list in 1950, and the first men to make the List could be considered as much a product of their times as the gangsters of the Thirties had been.

Many soldiers who returned from WWII bought into the new prosperity touted by Madison Avenue and enjoyed the easy living of suburban life. Others, however, didn’t re-assimilate quite so well, and despite such colourful characters as disguise-wearing thief Wille ‘The Actor’ Sutto and Frank Sprenz - who made his getaways in a helicopter - the reports on the first ‘Top Ten’ tell of twilight lives lived in cheap rooming houses, and of brutal, drunken arguments in seamy neon rat-traps straight out of a James Ellroy novel. In his book ‘Hoover’s FBI: The Men and the Myth’ former FBI agent William Turner accused the Bureau of creating public enemies from an ‘array of cheap thugs, barroom knifers, psychopathic rapists, wife-beaters and alcoholic stick-up men’ to deflect attention away from what Turner saw as the true menace to society – organised crime.

Whatever the reasons behind Hoover’s refusal to acknowledge organised crime – and the idea that the Mob were blackmailing him over his alleged homosexuality cannot be entirely discounted – the fact remains that there were no Mafia figures on the ‘Most Wanted’ list until the late Seventies. Ex-crime reporter and author of books on Dillinger and the FBI Dary Matera offers a more prosaic possibility. “The FBI's ‘Top Ten’ list is designed to track down wanted felons on the lam. Organised crime figures are highly provincial and rarely run because they have no power, connections, or income outside the small but lucrative territories they rule.”

 

‘We’ve got the beginnings here of an outright revolution.’ Warren P. Knowles, Att. Gen. Wisconsin, 1970

If the Fifties was a period of readjustment in America then the Sixties demanded wholesale change. The ‘Most Wanted’ list still found room for throwbacks like John William Clouser – the ‘Florida Fox’ who was described as a ‘braggart, Mama’s boy and sadist’ and wanted for the seemingly bizarre crime of kidnapping two Orlando, Florida theatre managers. Then there was murderous transvestite Leslie Ashley Douglas, who was picked up while working the carnival circuit as Bobo the Clown. But in such a politically charged period it was inevitable that activists and revolutionaries should be main targets. “The FBI's Top ‘Ten Most Wanted’ list has, unfortunately, been highly politicised over the years,” bemoans Matera. “It too often reflects the political ideologies of the administration in power. This was especially true in the Sixties when the List was stocked with anti-war demonstrators, Black Power rebels, and anti-government student groups like The Weather Underground.”

These were different kinds of fugitives, with a good deal more ‘moral stamina’ than the crooks the FBI were used to. This led to some heavier tactics on Bureau’s part – which often backfired; “The FBI was viewed as a bunch of square, terribly un-hip government jackboots, narcs and snitches who were out of tune with the youth of the day,” continues Matera. “Some of those listed, like Black Panther Angela Davis became heroes to large percentage of the population. Being on ‘The Man's hit-list was a badge of honor.”

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Professor of American History at Edinburgh University and author of ‘The FBI: A History’ disputes Matera only on timing. As he reckons it, “the American public had a favourable image of the FBI Right up until Watergate in the Seventies. In the Sixties the Bureau targeted protesters in spite of their law-abiding behaviour - Martin Luther King, for example, and protesters against the Vietnam War. The public did not learn about the FBI’s questionable aims until Seventies. At that point, all hell broke loose…”

 

‘In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.’ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up

With Hoover’s death in 1972 coinciding with the release of pop-culture leviathan ‘The Godfather’, one might imagine that the Mob would at last be on the agenda, but although the FBI now acknowledged the existence of organised crime, without the strength of Hoover’s personality behind them, it would be years before they began to make inroads into the Mafia.

The Bureau’s most notable cases during the Seventies and early Eighties could, perhaps, be said to centre on serial killers. Christopher Wilder, for example, was a high-living professional racing driver who went on a kill-crazy rampage over eight states before being shot dead by a New Hampshire state trooper who had recognised him from a ‘Most Wanted’ poster. Ted Bundy murdered at least thirty women and twice escaped from prison between 1974 and 1978 and was eventually executed in 1989 after being apprehended while on the List. In an interview given the night before his death, Bundy said, ‘There are loose in the towns and their communities people like me today, whose dangerous impulses are being fuelled day in, day out, by violence in the media… particularly sexual violence.’ I asked Dr. Cook Kenna – who specialises in crime and the media - if the media could in any way be to blame for such terrible crimes.

“Maybe the question is not so much whether media violence shaped a particular generation of killers but, rather, how mass media shape our perceptions of violence. In the U.S., this almost paranoid vision of criminals lurking everywhere resonated particularly well with the growing sensibility that threatening forces were at work in myriad areas of life.” Bundy was, though, I remind her, all too real.
“It's not that serial killers weren't actually out there doing heinous things,” she is quick to agree, “but I'm suggesting is that the particular ways that Seventies’ Americans understood serial killers and their crimes were shaped by the kind of world they lived in: one where threats were increasingly insidious and abundant.”

 

‘They are after our way of life and we have to deal with them.’ Condoleezza Rice, US Secretary of State 2005

While the ‘War on Drugs’ that reached its peak in the Eighties and Nineties was a huge - if only intermittently successful - operation, it rather fell into the purview of the Drug Enforcement Administration. This period instead saw the FBI very much involved in combating other enemies, both domestic and foreign. “The liberal democratic Bill Clinton era saw a rash of conservative rebels hit the list,’ notes Dary Matera. ‘Anti-abortionists, separatist, White Supremacists and their ilk were now ‘Most Wanted’s.”

Terrorism was also very high on the agenda, with Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi making the List in 1995 for the bombing of an American airplane over Lockerbie, Scotland, while Ramzi Yousef - nephew of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – was Listed for the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing. Both were subsequently caught and sentenced.

The FBI has not always met with such success regarding terrorist activity. Professor Jeffreys-Jones explains, “Federal investigations into 9/11 were critical of the FBI’s performance against terrorism. They charged that the Bureau had not kept abreast of terrorist escalation. Since then federal enquiries, reforms and legislation have demanded that the FBI step up its intelligence performance, and the Bureau had diverted resources to that area.”

This is the controversial Patriot Act, passed in October 2001 and that many claim violates the Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights. It gives the FBI much greater authority to gather intelligence in pretty much any manner that it sees fit. With such resources, why bother with, say, a ‘Most Wanted’ picture of Osama Bin Laden – on the List since 1999 for the bombing of US Embassies in Tanzania and the Yemen – in every Post Offices in America? “Over the years, the public have responded to the Ten Most Wanted List, submitting information that led to arrests,” says Jeffreys-Jones. “Conceivably, this could happen in the case of Bin Laden.”

“The criminals that populated the Most Wanted list have always mirrored society,” says Matera. “From the bank robbers of the Thirties to the anti-war radicals of the Sixties; from the drug kingpins of the Eighties and Nineties to the terrorists of today, nearly 500 of those criminals have been sought since the List's inception in 1950. Of those, more than 460 have been located.” And for all the mistakes and misdeeds that have attended it, Matera has no doubt as to the List’s overall efficacy. “For more than a half century,” he says, “the FBI's Top Ten Most Wanted list has served as one of the strongest law enforcement tools ever invented.”

 

‘He strikes fire in the hole and draws out his steel. Then they all move on again.’ Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

‘Who watches the watchmen?’ asked Alan Moore via Roman poet Juvenal, but an equally valid translation of the original Latin yields the phrase ‘But who shall guard the guardians?’ With the US at the heart of a geopolitical maelstrom and the FBI now also posting a ‘Ten Most Wanted Terrorists’ list, it is clear that US law enforcement faces new challenges and is more accountable than ever. Despite the undiminished success of their Most Wanted list, whether the FBI, with their new, improved powers, emerge as guardians or merely as watchmen remains to be seen.