Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI Quotes.

1. "To the generations of Americans raised since World War 2, the identities of criminals such as Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, "Ma" Barker, John Dillenger, and Clyde Barrow are no more real than are Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones. After decades spent in the washing machine of popular culture, their stories have been bled of all reality, to an extent that few Americans today know who these people actually were, much less that they all rose to national prominence at the same time. They were real."
- Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI

2. "Art has now done for Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow something they could never achieve in life: it has taken a shark-eyed multiple murderer and his deluded girlfriend and transformed them into sympathetic characters, imbuing them with a cuddly likability they did not possess, and a cultural significance they do not deserve."
- Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI

3. "History is written by the victors, they say, and there was no one alive who would come forward to dispute Hoover’s fabricated story. Never mind that there was no indication whatsoever in Bureau files that Ma Barker had ever fired a gun, robbed a bank, or done anything more criminal than live off her sons’ ill-gotten gains."
- Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI

4. "an odd-job detective agency with fuzzy lines of authority and responsibility."
- Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI

5. "When one looks back across a chasm of seventy years, through a prism of pulp fiction and bad gangster movies, there is a tendency to view the events of 1933-34 as mythic, as folkloric. To the generations of Americans raised since World War II, the identities of criminals such as Charles Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Ma Barker, John Dillinger, and Clyde Barrow are no more real than are Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones. After decades spent in the washing machine of popular culture, their stories have been bled of all reality, to an extent that few Americans today know who these people actually were, much less that they all rose to national prominence at the same time."
- Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI

6. "Hoover viewed the Dillinger case as a potential quagmire and long resisted being drawn into it."
- Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI

7. "Hands up! Hands up! Everybody on the floor! The effect was akin to three wild-eyed berserkers storming a prayer meeting."
- Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI

8. "The first recorded U.S. bank robbery, actually a nighttime burglary, came in 1831, when a man named Edward Smith snuck into a Wall Street bank and made off with $245,000. He was caught and sentenced to a five-year term in Sing Sing."
- Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI

9. "the Bureau acquired the nickname The Department of Easy Virtue."
- Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI