Chapter One
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 witha snowy white crew cut and a glint in his turquoise eyes. At seventy he was still lean and alert, with high-slantingcheekbones, a sharp chin, and those clear-framed eyeglasses that made him look like a minor-league academic. Hespent much of his time holed up in his cluttered garage apartment, watching BBC footage of the Iranian hostage crisison a flickering black-and-white television, surrounded by bottles of Jack Daniel's and pills and memories. If you methim down on the beach, he came across as a gentle soul with a soft laugh. Almost certainly he was the most pleasantmurderer 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 ten years before, he still knew how tohave a good time. There was that frowsy old divorcie from Chicago he used to see. They would go t
Chapter One
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 witha snowy white crew cut and a glint in his turquoise eyes. At seventy he was still lean and alert, with high-slantingcheekbones, a sharp chin, and those clear-framed eyeglasses that made him look like a minor-league academic. Hespent much of his time holed up in his cluttered garage apartment, watching BBC footage of the Iranian hostage crisison a flickering black-and-white television, surrounded by bottles of Jack Daniel's and pills and memories. If you methim down on the beach, he came across as a gentle soul with a soft laugh. Almost certainly he was the most pleasantmurderer 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 ten years before, he still knew how tohave a good time. There was that frowsy old divorcie from Chicago he used to see. They would go tooling aroundthe coast in her sports car and chug tequila 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 olddays; that crew from Canada was the worst, posing him in front of roadsters and surrounding him with actors infedoras 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 cafis, after a few beers, when the sun began to sink down the coast, he wouldtell stories. The names he dropped meant little to the Spaniards. The Brits and the odd American thought he wasnuts, 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 EnemyNumber One-right after John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd and his old protigi Baby Face Nelson-people turnedaway and rolled their eyes. When he said he and his confederates had single-handedly "created" J. Edgar Hooverand the modern FBI, well, then he would get bitter and people would get up and move to another table. He wasobviously unstable. How could you believe anyone who claimed he was the only man in history to have met CharlesManson, Al Capone, and Bonnie and Clyde?
Few in Torremolinos knew it was all true. In those last years at Terminal Island in the sixties he'd taught Manson toplay the steel guitar. He'd been at Alcatraz for twenty-one damp winters before that, leaving for Leavenworth a fewyears 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 syphiliticseizures, 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, whenHitler was still a worrisome nut in a bad mustache and FDR was learning to find the White House bathrooms, he wasthe country's best known yeggman. Folks today, they didn't even know what a yegg was. Dillinger, he liked to say, hewas 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 latenthomosexual Clyde Barrow, Faye Dunaway as a beautiful Bonnie Parker (now that was a stretch), Richard Dreyfussas a chattering asshole Baby Face Nelson (okay, they got that right), Shelley Winters as a machine-gun toting MaBarker, a young Robert De Niro as one of her sons. To him they were all ridiculous Hollywood fantasies, fictionalconcoctions in a made-up world.
At that point the old man would just shake his head. As he sat on his couch at night, sipping his Jack Daniel's andpopping 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.And the truth of it, the actual true facts, was all but lost now, forgotten as totally as he was. Dillinger, Floyd, Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker: He had known them every one. He was the last one left alive. He had even outlivedHoover himself.
Hoover.
Fucking Hoover.
He leaned over and reached for a bottle of his pills.
Continues...
Excerpted from Public Enemiesby Bryan Burrough Copyright © 2005 by Bryan Burrough. Excerpted by permission.
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