Crime Wave: 18 Months of Mayhem

I appeared on this show so I can knock it. So did a dozen or more other historians and authors, most of whom didn't even get their names in the credits, though their interview segments are the saving grace of the program. Bryan Burrough, Tony Stewart, and I were about the only ones listed in the credits but Bill Helmer, Ellen Poulsen, Tom Smusyn, Ron Morgan, John Neal Phillips and others, all knowledgeable crime historians, appeared on the program and contributed the positives here.

It's pretty average really, maybe one of the better of the typically bad crime documentaries that air on cable TV, but that's the best that can be said. The writing and the narration are superficial, inaccurate, and fictionalized. Much of the story is left out, including Pretty Boy Floyd and the Barker-Karpis Gang, even though the show opens with the Kansas City Massacre which is left unresolved. Silly and inaccurate reenactments make up the bulk of the show. You have a few seconds of interview snippets with Marvelle Feller, the one living eyewitness to the Barrow Gang battle at Dexfield Park, followed by a completely inaccurate reenactment of Bonnie and Clyde making their escape in a pickup. Would have been better to have used a few minutes of Marvelle's interview to tell how it really happened. But action visuals are fun and actors may be cheaper than '29 Plymouth autos.

Where they dug up their "firearms expert" I have no idea, unless he was a friend of the producer. Since when did Model '21A Thompson submachine guns have 30-shot stick mags? Those didn't come out until World War II. They took his word for it for the reenactments, of course.

There are some good insights and many good interview segments so it's not a total loss. But most of it is reenacted (cheaper to buy actors than old photos and newsreels) and none of the reenactments are accurate. It's almost an anti-documentary in that sense.

Halfway through 1933 to the end of 1934 marked the worst crime wave in the history of the United States, according to the writers of this country. One thing that is indisputable: it produced many of the country's most famous criminals, names that we all know today: some 75 years later.

This two-hour TV program, aired on the History Channel, highlights the following criminals: John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly and Baby Face Nelson. All of them became big-time "celebrities" during this short period. In addition to the profiles of the above, it highlights the rise of the FBI from a totally useless clerk-oriented group into a nationwide crime-fighting until that slowly learned to get its act together.

The FBI, however, and most police, were way behind the criminals in 1933 who were far better armed, had better vehicles and seemed almost unstoppable, able to commit any crime they attempted. Many of the crimes by the above participants involved robbing banks.

This program consistently remarks how the general populace actually rooted the gangsters because they were so disgusted with how banks were not being helpful but actually taking away their farms. (Almost all of the crime spree - with the exception of big-city Chicago - was in rural Midwestern America.) We learn that some of these hoods, like Dillinger (the most famous gangster of them all), Clyde Barrow and others were made into much worse hardened criminals because of their experience in jail. Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde and George "Babyface" Nelson, all specialized in bank robberies while George Barnes, a.k.a. Machine Gun Kelly, went into kidnapping.

The show was interesting because of the many facts in presented and the mixture of re-enactment scenes and real-life old footage of these people and vrious towns. Boy, that was sad era in American history with poverty, drought, dust storms, bank foreclosures, bread lines, on and on.....an era ripe for crime, especially with law enforcement unprepared and hindered by state lines and how far they could go to catch these thieves.