In this episode, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Detective Gary jenkins welcomes John Oller, a former lawyer turned nonfiction author focusing on American history, biography, and true crime. John has authored a compelling true-crime book titled Gangster Hunters, shedding light on the often-overlooked FBI agents who pursued infamous criminals such as John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde. While these gangsters are well-known in pop culture, the agents who risked their lives to bring them down—aside from figures like J. Edgar Hoover and Melvin Purvis—remain largely unsung.

John takes us through his meticulous research process, which involved interviewing descendants of these agents and combing through FBI files. He paints a vivid picture of the early days of the FBI, where many agents, expecting desk jobs, found themselves facing off against heavily armed gangsters. We explore pivotal historical events, including the capture of Alvin Karpis, Hoover’s drive to portray himself as a hands-on lawman, and notorious shootouts involving Babyface Nelson and Ma Barker.

The conversation also delves into the reality of the gangster era, revealing how criminals often had superior firepower compared to law enforcement and how the FBI eventually adapted by recruiting sharpshooters, including ex-Texas Rangers, to handle these dangerous adversaries.

Please tune in for a deep dive into the world of early FBI agents and the harrowing challenges they faced in the fight against America’s most dangerous criminals.

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Transcript

[0:00]Well, Hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there back here in the studio of gangland wire. This is retired Kansas city police intelligence unit, Sergeant Gary Jenkins with another show. We’re going back into the thirties today. You know, you leave deal with these seventies gangsters a lot and, and, uh, sixties gangsters, uh, mafia, but this is going to go back to the thirties and the days of the bank robbers, the Midwest bank robbers. I mean, they, they caught out at got a wide swath across this country and we have a book by john aller gangster hunters and here it is and you’ll you’ll find links in the show notes to where you can find that book he does a great job of telling many of the unknown stories and the known stories in great detail of the famous bank robbers dillinger and uh pretty boy floyd and and uh the ma barker gang and and machine gun Kelly and all those great nicknames. So welcome, John. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks for having me.

[1:02]John, how did you get into this? Tell us a little bit about your history. I was a lawyer for many years, and then I retired from active practice to pursue a writing career or writing avocation, I would call it. And I’ve concentrated on nonfiction, American history, biography and true crime I’ve done, this is my third true crime book which I find a genre that interests me what I found out is that while all the bank robbers Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd and Babyface Nelson, etc Bonnie and Clyde in particular have been written about many times over and movies made of them and everybody’s heard of them very few people have heard know anything about the um kind of anonymous fbi agents who chased and captured and in some cases killed them of course everybody knows j edgar hoover yeah um but hoover by design kept his agents anonymous because he wanted all the glory of the fbi to flow Well, to him, love. I have read about that. I understand that Melvin Purvis actually was almost forced out of the service because J. Edgar Hoover was so jealous that he was getting all those headlines up in Chicago.

[2:31]Yeah, Melvin Purvis is probably the only FBI agent, field agent from that era who people might recognize the name. Of course, he’s been played in a number of movies, most recently in the Johnny Depp movie, Public Enemies. Johnny Depp played Dillinger and Christian Bale played Melvin Purvis, although it wasn’t a very historically accurate portrayal. Well, I mean, Christian Bale is this kind of handsome, big guy. And Melvin Purvis was this little, thin, wispy guy, 5’7″, 130 pounds.

[3:11]So other than Purvis, probably most of the guys, FBI guys in my book, other than Purvis and Hoover, the general public has never heard of. And so that attracted me to telling their story. And what I did is I tracked down a bunch of living relatives of these FBI agents, children, grandchildren, nephews, grandnephews, et cetera. And surprisingly, a surprising number were still living. So I would interview them and, you know, they had family stories and in some cases, photos of guys that had never been published before. And there’s a number of those in the book. And then I used a lot of raw FBI files to do the research because there are voluminous FBI files on all these cases.

[4:08]And it takes a long time to sift through them. They’re very lengthy reports, single-spaced, 20 pages or more. So I had to read all those. But that’s how I went about it. Yeah, I see. Here’s one. Johnny Madala, what do you call a briefcase agent? A briefcase agent, that’s like an agent that just has a briefcase, not a gun particularly. I know those early guys, they didn’t carry guns.

[4:38]That’s kind of a theme of the book is a lot of these early FBI agents entered the bureau, you know, thinking that they were going to have desk jobs. It was kind of a white collar job. You know, they would maybe investigate antitrust violations and bank fraud and that kind of thing. Perceived to be sort of a cushy job which paid relatively well during the depression and a lot of these guys were lawyers and they couldn’t really get jobs as lawyers so they went into government service and and then all of a sudden this war on crime broke out in 1933 these guys were pressed into service and you know they instead of a briefcase now they had a tommy gun in their hands, which they had never shot. A lot of these guys had never fired a weapon in their life and never been fired at by anyone. Now, some were, particularly the guys from the South, were a little more gun sappy than the Southwest. But the younger guys, they did not sign up for For this tour of duty. But yet they got thrown into it. And they were fairly inexperienced. In the beginning. And they didn’t have a lot of technological.

[5:59]Wherewithal. They didn’t have two-way radios. They didn’t have cell phones. Obviously. They didn’t have night vision goggles. It was just their own wits. And bravado. That they had to develop. To take on these gangsters. Who were much more heavily armed, had faster cars.

[6:22]Elaborately planned getaways, which were much better planned than the FBI raids. So all of the deck was stacked in favor of the gangsters in the beginning. Yeah, really. Tell me something. Did you stumble across this story? I seem to remember this, that at least one of these guys, I think it was…

[6:44]Who was arrested down in New Orleans? Was that- Alvin Karpis. Alvin Karpis. Did J. Edgar Hoover tell them to wait until he got there so he could be part of the arrest team or something? There’s some story I remember about that. Yes, yes. He had been embarrassed in Congress because he testified at a hearing. He was seeking more money for the FBI. And one of the senators who didn’t like the FBI, there were a lot of people who were who thought that the FBI was kind of this national police force and they didn’t like that. And so anyway, so this Senator was grilling Hoover and he asked him, you know, have you ever personally made an arrest? And Hoover had to admit, he had to admit, no, I mean, Hoover was a desk man, his entire life. He spent his 24 seven at his desk in Washington.

[7:38]And he was embarrassed by that. And so he came out of the meeting and he told his people, because he knew they were closing in on alvin karpis yeah um and i think he knew at some point that that karpis was going to be arrested in new orleans and he said i want to be there for that, so he flew to new orleans and um he was in on the arrest he didn’t personally make the arrest although he kind of um allowed the press to portray him as the guy who arrested um so it was it was sort of at by that time alan karpus was public enemy number one that was a term they used back then for the the most wanted and all the other public enemies number one had been killed or i guess killed uh before that karpus was the last one standing and so hoover was, christened Public Hero No. 1. So Public Hero No. 1 arrested Public Enemy No. 1. That was kind of the legend.

[8:43]They did not expect to take Karpis alive because every other… Public enemy number one, Dillinger, baby face Nelson, pretty boy Floyd had, you know, died in a shootout. They figured Karpis would be the same. So when they arrested him almost by accident, they didn’t. He came out of his hotel or his rooming house. Nobody had any handcuffs. They hadn’t brought any handcuffs along because they didn’t expect to take him alive. And so one of the agents, a guy named Buck Buchanan, took off his necktie and handed it to one of the other agents. And they used the necktie to tie Karpis’ hands. And Hoover actually asked the agent to send him that necktie for his exhibit room in Washington, which he did, although it’s been lost to history over the years. It disappeared. But anyway, that was a little tidbit of the Karpis arrest.

[9:47]Interesting. Now you talk about how they didn’t even have as good of plans. The story of the Battle of Little Bohemia, I’ve done that not too long ago, so we don’t need to really belabor it. But that was such a good example of they just jumped in their cars and headed north and they got in a plane and headed north and got up there and then borrowed another guy’s car and drove out to that lodge and then shot up all the wrong people at the start. Right, right. I mean, there was no plan.

[10:20]Well, the problem was that they got there that night. You’ve probably covered this but i’ll just briefly touch on it they got there that night and they knew that dillinger and his gang were holed up in the little bohemia hotel lodge yeah and um they were planning to raid it the next morning but then they got word filtered out to him through a an informant that no dillinger had changed his plans and he was leaving that night So they either had to strike then or miss him. So they decided to go ahead with the thing and it was too dark. And so there was confusion in the darkness and they ended up killing an innocent civilian by accident. And one of the agents got killed by baby face Nelson. And it was a fiasco. And after that, a lot of people thought that Hoover would lose, lose his job.

[11:22]And per Melvin Purvis, um, who was in charge of the operation, they thought that he would lose and should lose his job. It had been botched so badly. So that was a very tenuous time for the FBI. And, um, uh, Instead, what happened, there was a public uproar and Congress passed some laws to strengthen the FBI and made things illegal that had not been illegal before, such as killing a federal officer, which was not a federal crime back then.

[11:54]They stumbled and bumbled around quite a bit in those early days. Yeah. One thing I will say, they extracted a price. They made Babyface Nelson pay for killing that agent up there. Oh, yes. There’s a little bohemian out there, and that’s a story in itself. Now, you cover that from the FBI’s angle particularly.

[12:14]Can you tell us about that, killing the baby-faced Nelson? That was in Barrington, Illinois, which is a little south of, a couple hours south of a resort in Wisconsin named Lake Como. A couple of agents were staking out a hotel in Lake Como where they had been where they were told Babyface Nelson was going to show up anytime.

[12:39]And he did show up. They didn’t recognize him at first. And they thought about taking a shot at him. They decided not to because they weren’t really sure that it was him. But anyway, he got away from the hotel. They did get his license plate number and he was with another one of his gang members and with his wife, Helen Gillis. And so the word got back to Chicago, the Chicago office, that they had spotted Baby Phelous Nelson and had his license plate number. So a couple agents went out in a car searching for him and the license plate number. They did see the car. They started to follow him. He turned around, started following them. And um and then another car um came by and there was a gun battle and one two of the fbi agents were killed by baby face nelson in that gun battle in barrington illinois but baby face nelson was also killed or mortally wounded in the same same battle so um he he holds the the distinction baby face nelson of having killed more fbi agents than any other person in history it’s three one at liberal bohemia and two in this battle at uh great barrington he was a.

[14:07]Basically a psychopath i mean he was a cold-blooded killer and he hated cops yeah you know i i think back to those times and these guys all uh the criminals were carrying uh they were raiding these uh armories these uh national armed armies and they were getting these bars and that you buy these colt monitor uh sub thompson submachines gun basically although Colt made their own version of it, you could buy them at a drug store. I mean, at a hardware store. Guns were really available to these guys, and the FBI had just started carrying guns. Yes, yes. The BAR was the favorite of Clyde Barrow. He preferred it to the Thompson submachine gun because a BAR could cut through an armored car.

[15:03]It was just much more powerful. And Clyde, he cut his down. It was a big, the BAR is a Browning automatic rifle. It’s a big thing. Clyde sawed his off so that he could hold it on his shoulder by a strap. And then the Colt Monitor, which was kind of also a shortened version of the BAR, became the first FBI fighting rifle. A couple of years later, Hoover wasn’t interested in it at first, and then he saw what it could accomplish, so he bought a bunch of them. There’s only about 120 ever manufactured, and if you can find one today, they’re worth over $100,000. Wow, that’s a collector’s item. Wow. Yeah. Anyway. Anyway.

[15:53]Interesting yeah the gun the gun that’s a whole story in itself i just i was browsing around i found a whole website that’s just dedicated to the guns of these 30s gangsters and and yeah you know the the colt the 1911 colt 45 and and some of the different guns that that they used back then they were popular with them and believe me the local cops especially were totally outgunned by these guys oh yeah i mean they had they had they had old six shooters you know yeah and um uh baby face nelson had what they called a baby machine gun it was it was basically a um uh a pistol which fired automatic and he got it custom made by a gun dealer down in texas who serviced a lot of these um uh criminals and uh that’s the gun he used to kill the the uh agent at the bohemia oh really did you have a picture did you have a picture of that in your book yes yes i remember i was looking over those pictures yeah i’ll make sure i get that picture up boy that’s interesting, yeah i have a picture of the colt monitor which is a version of the bar and the thompson machine submachine gun and the and the baby machine gun uh that babyface nelson favored.

[17:14]As well as pictures of some of the getaway cars. The gangsters had these pretty fast getaway cars. There was one called the Essex Terraplane, which Dillinger liked. And Clyde Barrow had a big Ford V8, powerful Ford V8. Now, I say these were big, powerful. In fact, the gangster cars back then, while they were faster than the law enforcement cars, they’d be blown off the road by a Toyota family, Toyota Corolla today, which could go 120 probably. Probably these gangster cars really couldn’t go more than 80. And if you were on the roads back then, the dirt roads, you know, you were risking being run off, being run off the road if you went more than 45 or 50. So they looked very pretty and they still do the antiques, but they really weren’t that vast other than relative to the law enforcement vehicles.

[18:20]You know you know another famous story uh why don’t we talk about this a little bit and it’s partly because at least when i was young there was a movie an old movie that played about the ma barker gang and there’s this famous film clip where she’s like got this machine gun she’s screaming out the wind and she’s fighting tooth and nail and shooting with back and forth these fbi agents which these guys all battled with the agents nobody hardly anybody gave up only machine Sheen Gun Kelly, as far as I can tell, gave up. I don’t think anybody else gave up. I think that’s right. Karpis gave up, but that’s only because he was surrounded.

[18:59]But Ma Barker, she’s an interesting case because Hoover manufactured this myth about her that she was the criminal mastermind of the Barker-Karpis gang. She had four sons. They were all criminals. two of them uh doc barker and fred barker were the main barker gang uh guys and they teamed up with alvin karpus um to form the barker karpus gang but hoover said she was a diabolical you know um funeral mastermind that wasn’t true another gangster said that she couldn’t plan a breakfast um uh she was basically this woman from the ozarks uh who listened to hillbilly music and uh i guess you call it hill country music is the more euphemistic term but um um and she liked to play bingo and listen to amos and andy on the radio which is a popular old show um but.

[20:01]She did know that her sons were criminals, and she helped them out. She helped them get parole, and she willingly accepted their money to buy fur coats and the like and jewelry. So, but anyway, she finally gets holed up, H-O-L-E-D, holed up in this house with her son, Fred, in Florida, near Ocala, Florida. And the FBI tracked her down there, tracked her and her son. Uh son they surrounded the place and and ordered her to come out and fred barker her son you know with their hands up um they didn’t come out ordered them again they still didn’t come out and then all of a sudden these machine gun fires started coming out of an upper window at the FBI agents. And it turned out that machine gun fire and rifle fire started coming from multiple windows in this house. And so it couldn’t have all been coming from one person because it was simultaneous shooting.

[21:22]And I believe, and I think most historians agree, agree that she was doing some of the shooting with a machine gun. Now, I don’t think she was particularly adept with a machine gun. I’m not sure she’d ever fired one before, but she decided she was going to go down with her son in a blaze of glory. And there’s a photo that was taken by an FBI agent after she was killed and then her son was killed in an upstairs bedroom. And it shows Shows her with a machine gun at her side, next to her hands. And I have that photo in the book as well. So it’s not been seen. It’s a fairly rare photograph. I got it from the son of one of the FBI agents. So she wasn’t a criminal mastermind, but she wasn’t this innocent old lady either. He was somewhere in between.

[22:24]And, um, I, you know, I think you have to go back and realize that these guys, most of these guys had been, um, were murderers and they knew that if they got caught and put on trial back then, the death penalty was pretty automatic for murder. And, um, so they had nothing to lose. They were gonna, they were not gonna be taken alive if they could help it. So, um, the, the majority of them, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie, obviously, uh, John Dillinger, uh.

[23:00]Babyface nelson um and pretty boy floyd were all killed in action and um all of them had been killers and you know they were not they were not going back to jail and they were not going to face the electric chair interesting well these fbi agents says uh did they did the fbi start start recruiting some a different type of person i’ve solved one thing where it looked like that they at least tried to select some ex-policemen some guys that were real street savvy compared to those yes they did that they had they did particularly after the fiasco at little bohemia they brought in some um guys who had been either texas rangers or cops in you know oklahoma or or texas who were good with guns and um they weren’t intellectuals they were not you know law school trained or accountants yeah uh so but but you know their forte was shooting and so they brought some of these guys in um and in fact it was one of them a guy named charles winstead uh who was the man who killed who shot john dillinger in chicago outside the biograph theater.

[24:20]Um and a couple other ones um uh doc white he was a he was an ex uh texas ranger if you if you’re familiar if you saw the movie the osage about the osage murder uh murders in um.

[24:39]Uh oklahoma killers killers of the killers of the flower moon the martin scorsese movie one of the one the lead uh fbi guy in that movie was a guy named tom white who was an ex texas ranger he’s played by actor jesse pleemans in the movie his younger brother was doc white and doc white was in on some of the later gunfights including the one that uh in which mama barker died um so yes so they brought in some of those guys and they certainly helped um in the final stages of the capture and kill killing of the most vicious of the criminals interesting they must have flown them around the country whenever they thought they were getting some of the the bad guys surrounded or pinned down they must have flown these special guys in like bring in the SWAT team or the HHR, I think they call it now. Yeah. Yeah.

[25:40]Yeah. Yeah. But that’s another thing. Back then, there were bulletproof vests, which the agents sometimes wore, but as often or not, they decided, you know, they were too bulky. And so they wouldn’t even wear them into action. And at least a couple of the guys who were killed probably would have survived if they’d had their bulletproof vests on, but they just didn’t use them. Now, the criminals used them when they could.

[26:10]And John Dillinger was saved once when a Chicago cop shot him. Not a Chicago, an East Chicago, East Chicago, Indiana cop during a bank robbery.

[26:23]Shot Dillinger at point blank range, but it bounced off his bulletproof vest. And, um, so Dillinger lived another several months until he was gunned down, um, by, Without a bulletproof vest outside the movie theater in Chicago. Yeah. I don’t usually wear your, uh, boat proof vest out on a date, I guess.

[26:51]Yeah. I never did. I remember when we first got them, uh, and everybody got it, they were a pain. They were hot in the summer. They were bulky. They were hot. And these were a lot lighter and smaller than the, those ones back in the thirties. But yes a lot of guys didn’t wear them for a long time once you start wearing them you’d go into work at night one night i remember going in and i forgot it at home i usually would carry it in because it was real hot i’d carry it in then put it on just before i went out and well i just felt naked all night long it was uh yeah yeah feeling the comfort with that bulletproof vest yeah and And of course they didn’t, it didn’t protect your face. So, but yeah, at least you had a chance. Yeah. Yeah. Unless you’re facing one of those Bars and that, uh, 30 odd six round with, with, with military ammo, with, uh, uh, the, uh, uh, full jacketed, uh, ammo would just go right, cut right through like a knife through butter, man. Yeah. It would not help at all. Yep. Yep.

[27:57]Um anyway so that was ma barker and uh she uh um i think shelly winters played i think you’re right i think you’re right iconic image of her battling it out with agents yeah yeah so it’s you know it’s it there’s a kernel of truth in in that yeah movies in which she she did go down firing a machine gun. Now, you know, she didn’t, none of the FBI agents were killed or were even hit in that final battle in Florida. Anyway, so that’s, that’s her. So your book, you deal a lot with the FBI agents. Is there anything else you want to tell us about the FBI agents that, you know, were especially tasked to go after these Midwest bank robbers? Because they were bad. They were the baddest of the bad at that point in time.

[28:50]Yeah. Um, I think, I think over time, even the young lawyers and accountants got better at what they did. You know, they, after a while they sort of got the raids down, they got a protocol, they knew how to do it. And I think what they learned over time was that the only way you were going to get these guys was to outnumber them greatly. I mean, they had 20 law enforcement, FBI and police surrounding the Biograph Theater that Dillinger was killed in. There were at least six or seven guys who gunned down Pretty Boy Floyd in a field in Ohio and, Um, a body and Clyde were ambushed by a whole posse. So what they, what they realize is that in a one-on-one or two-on-two battle, they were going to have the short end of the stick versus the criminals who were just better shots and more experienced and ruthless.

[30:04]Um, you know, that sometimes the FBI guys would, would, would hold their fire in one One case because one of the gun malls, Babyface Nelson’s wife was in the way, so they didn’t shoot. And the criminals, they had no such inhibitions.

[30:25]I should mention that a lot of the book talks about the so-called gun malls. And some of them were pretty interesting. You know, the not just Bonnie Parker, but, you know, Dillinger’s girls and Babyface Nelson’s wife and Pretty Boy Floyd’s girls. And some of them were prostitutes. Some of them were just looking for a good time, you know, kind of a joyride kind of thing. Remember, this was the Depression and it was a pretty bleak time. Time, some of these women, you know, they might be a waitress in a little soup kitchen or diner and, uh, they didn’t make any money. And, and so this guy would come along and he’d flash his jewels and he’d flash his wad of money. And, and they said, Hey, you know, that sounds like a pretty good gig just, you know, um, and, and they would, they would basically scout ahead. They would rent the apartments that were the hideouts they would cook the meals you know and none of them ended up.

[31:38]Killed um i don’t believe other than bonnie parker and she was more than a just a sidekick she was actually uh um you know she she actually shot at people so um that’s i talk about that in the but is this it’s kind of a debate through history did bonnie parker actually ever shoot at a law enforcement agent um and the answer is the answer is yes um at least on a couple on that that’s killing the two state troopers that were on motorcycles on i believe it’s dove road down yeah uh just outside of dallas north of fort worth i believe they had a witness that saw her walk up to one of those troopers that was down and and fire a gun into him is that true yeah that good that’s that’s sort of a disputed um story um but what’s not disputed at least from From the FBI’s files and from another, one of the cops who was kidnapped, kidnapped and taken across state lines and finally let out, is that she did pull a gun a couple times on law enforcement agents.

[32:53]And interesting, Bonnie and Clyde were not… They were not nearly the big time bank robbers that these other guys, they were, you know, they knocked over gas stations and little grocery stores, you know, for twenty five dollars or forty dollars. But they attained a level of fame and infamy. A lot of it due to those photos that were found. They found some film in one of the places that they had vacated. And of course, they published those throughout the country in the newspapers. That was the famous one with Bonnie smoking a cigar and guns and holding guns against each other. Yeah. Yeah. Now, there was an interesting story that Bonnie, um, uh, when she, when they let go one of their hostages, a cop, um, uh, he said, you know, the newsmen are going to want to interview. Um, what should I tell him? and you know she could have said tell him i didn’t kill that guy back there tell him i didn’t pull a gun did it no what she said tell him i don’t smoke cigars.

[34:05]She was she was outraged by that because it was just a playful she didn’t actually smoke she did smoke cigarettes but she didn’t yeah she just posed with a cigar and she was you know enraged that she was viewed as a cigar smoker our egos are fragile egos uh yes yes yeah they were kind of the uh the john gottys of uh of the bank robbers they got all the publicity the rest of the guys didn’t get much and dylan dillinger was not averse to publicity if you remember those pictures he posed for there at the uh jail at crown point jail with the the lady sheriff there and everything. He was not opposed to publicity.

[34:48]Oh, yeah, he had his arm around the prosecutor and vice versa. And he was joking with the reporters. And when Hoover saw that photograph, he went ballistic. He thought it was completely inappropriate that these two, that this prosecutor and sheriff, local sheriff, were, you know, chumming around with a killer like John Dillinger. Um uh you know interestingly with both with bonnie and clyde and with john dillinger originally hoover didn’t was not interested in getting involved in chasing those guys he wanted to leave it to the locals but what happened is dillinger’s fame especially after he broke out of that jail with a allegedly with a wooden gun um and bonnie and clyde after they They had killed a number of law enforcement officers there that they became so famous and infamous that Hoover decided, well, if his little agency, which was not that well known and not, and kind of lightly regarded time, if they were going to be perceived as a top notch criminal fighting unit, they had to get involved in going after John Dillinger and, and, and Bonnie and Clyde. Yeah. And the FBI was actually involved heavily in the search for Bonnie and Clyde. They were not there at the final ambush because the guy was.

[36:18]Off on off on some other case and there’s some suspicion that that hoover sent him on a wild goose chase so that he couldn’t reap the glory of of the ambush of bonnie because he he was having an affair with the wife with the wife of the district attorney in louisiana and that got back to hoover and hoover thought you know he was going to fire this guy and so he didn’t want to get the glory of Bonnie and Clyde. So Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger, got all the publicity, even though the FBI was intimately involved in helping set up that ambush.

[37:01]Interesting. There’s a lot of little stories like that in this book, guys. I’ll tell you what, you need to get this. Gangster Hunter, John Aller, right? Did I get that right? Aller? Yes, yes. All right, John Aller, Gangster Hunter. John, I really appreciate you coming on and telling us these stories and telling guys what’s in this book. And I’ve been looking through it. It’s great. We’ll use some of those pictures. And you guys, if you’re watching this on YouTube, you’ll see some of the pictures. They’re interesting pictures that he’s got in his book. It’s almost worth it just for some of the photos and see like that baby machine gun. I’d never heard of that or seen that before. And these are pictures that you got from relatives of the FBI agents, so they’ve never really seen the light of day before, correct? Correct. John, I really appreciate you coming on the show, and I really appreciate you writing this book. It’s going to be a real addition to anybody’s true crime library, and certainly to mine. That’s one advantage of doing this podcast is you can see the books in the background, and that’s just a tenth of what I got. And I give a bunch of them away every once in a while to a friend of mine. So I get a lot of books doing this and they’re great books. And this is a particularly good one on John. You got any last words of wisdom for us? No, I think, I think, um.

[38:20]I hope that some of these guys get their final, finally get their due in recognition. You know, they’re not going to become household names, but I think they’re deserving of being remembered by history for really being, you know, brave for doing this stuff when they were not really trained or qualified to do it. Yeah, really. But they did it, but they did the job nonetheless.

[38:47]Yeah, yeah. And they got their men. men in the end they got their men you know when uh one last story by me i used to work with the fbi a lot when i was in intelligence they’d always send their guys their their intelligence their mafia investigators over to work with us to get a feel for the city and what was going on you know who was who and where things were so we’d always take them down to union station and show them the bullet holes in the wall and say this is where the first fbi agent got killed so remember that’s true That’s true. That’s true. And that’s a big episode in my book, too. I know you’ve covered it in another episode of your podcast, but there’s a historical debate, which I don’t think is much of a debate anymore, as to who were the criminals at Union Station in Kansas City. And it’s positive that Vern Miller was one of them there’s some question over who the others were but I think it’s pretty clear that Babyface Nelson Pretty Boy Floyd was there and his sidekick Adam Ricchetti they convicted Adam Ricchetti on pretty slim evidence but.

[40:10]You know, they wanted heads after that Union Station massacre. Somebody wanted a head. Somebody had to pay. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think Ricchetti was he was not guilty of the crime that he was convicted of and executed for. I do believe he was there, whether he fired any shots or whether he was just as a lookout or getaway car driver or or some people say he was too drunk to take the drunk sober enough. But I think where, where Floyd was, Richetti was, Richetti was always at Floyd’s side. And I can’t, I can’t believe Floyd would have gone there without Richetti.

[40:52]No. And, and Richetti’s fingerprints were on a beer bottle at Floyd’s house. Floyd been staying in. So those little clues, forensic clues like that would leave me believe that, that that’s, as you said, that’s exactly. And and ricchetti had a he had no alibi you know they asked him afterwards uh you know where did you go after that he couldn’t remember um he couldn’t remember where he went and why it was just it was it was consciousness of guilt anyway all right um okay john aller gangster hunters great book john i really appreciate you coming on the show okay thank you enjoyed it well guys You know, I like to ride motorcycles, so don’t forget, watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there. And if you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, go to the VA website.

[41:43]And if you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, go to Anthony Ruggiano’s website or go and find his hotline number or find him down in Florida.

[41:53]And if you have a problem with gambling, that’s that way in 800 bets off. So that’s all the, uh, public service announcements I have, uh, you know, don’t forget to like and subscribe. And check this book out uh gangster hunters and don’t forget to give me a review if you think about it if you’re on apple podcast and i’ve got some stuff for sale and we take donations on my website gangland wire and i got a couple movies out there brothers against brothers uh savella sparrow war and gangland wire on amazon you can rent them for a dollar 99 and and tell your your friends about us and keep coming back and listens every week because we get a lot of good stories on here so thanks guys.