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The FBI's jurisdiction took a giant leap forward. A spate of high-profile kidnappings in mid-1933, and a bloody train station massacre, would mark the beginning of the Bureau's so-called War on Crime. This war would last until 1936 and expand to include manhunts for such infamous criminals as Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, and John Dillinger, each of whom held the colloquial title of "Public Enemy No. 1" in the newspapers at one time or another. A

humdrum federal agency was thrust onto the front pages for the first time.

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With few exceptions, the FBI man hunters who pursued the public enemies of the 1930s are little known today. Most histories and biographies of the era are told from the standpoint of the celebrity criminals, not the faceless men who chased them. Names such as Johnny Madala and Jim Metcalfe, to mention just two, mean nothing to generations of Americans accustomed to reading about the exploits of Dillinger, Floyd, and Nelson or seeing them portrayed on film.

Everyone has heard of Bonnie and Clyde and Ma Barker, while the fame of Machine Gun Kelly lives on in the moniker of a popular American rap artist.

Much of the unfamiliarity with individual FBI agents is also attributable to J. Edgar Hoover, whose ego and management style obscured the contributions of others. Hoover insisted that his agents remain anonymous—that it was the collective effort of the institution, the team, that counted. It was a philosophy the agents themselves shared. "The men prided themselves on being connected with a 'we' organization," recalled Jay Newman, a special agent in the Chicago office in the early 1930s, many years later.

But Hoover's "It's the organization, not the man" motto did not extend to the director himself. Despite engaging in none of his agents' heroics, Hoover wanted the credit for the Bureau's successes to flow to him alone. He would have the public believe that " scientific" policing methods—fingerprinting, lab analysis, and the like—were mainly what caught criminals, not the inspired legwork or bravery of individual agents. And because it was Hoover who introduced scientific sleuthing to the FBI and pushed to expand it, it was naturally he who deserved the acclaim.

No amount of flattery or obsequiousness was too much for Hoover; no trivial deviation from the mandated protocol escaped his microscope. Sycophants were rewarded, while perceived miscreants or glory usurpers were given the old Soviet Union treatment: banished as if to Siberia and regarded as nonpersons, their names written out of the agency's history. As the son of former FBI agent Tom McDade recalled his father once telling him, Hoover expected his men to "wear a white shirt, be clean shaven, and if you stepped out of line, you'd find yourself instantly reassigned to North Dakota."

A career bureaucrat with no law enforcement training or field experience (he had clerked for the Library of Congress before joining the Justice Department), Hoover drove his field agents mercilessly from his desk in Washington. He was an incurable Monday-morning quarterback, criticizing his men at every turn for blunders large and small. At times they had to wonder who their greater adversary was: the criminals they were chasing or their own boss.

No doubt Hoover accomplished great things: he cleaned up a corrupt bureaucratic organization, professionalized it, and transformed the agency from a collection of fact gatherers to a team of crime fighters. Tom McDade, a wry wit who went on to become a true-crime historian and mystery writer, told his son Jared that although Hoover was "dictatorial and micromanaged everything," the early special agents, himself included, respected their director for what he achieved.

Although Hoover refused to share the limelight with his agents, the men who tracked down the nation's most notorious criminals during the 1930s War on Crime were themselves remarkably free of personal jealousies. They were more a band of brothers than a team of rivals. They were fiercely devoted to the Bureau, to one another, and to bringing America's most wanted criminals to justice.

They didn't set out to be heroes. Instead, most of the men who joined the FBI in the early 1930s were seeking quiet, well-paying white-collar jobs with which to support a family during the Depression. The starting pay for a beginning agent in 1933 was $2,900, roughly double the average annual income of Americans and more than most law school graduates could earn in a legal job, if they could even find one.

Hoover's recruits were hardly prepared for war. Few of them had any experience with guns, much less had ever fired one at, or been fired upon by, another human being. They had to learn how to handle a crime scene. Jim Metcalfe, an aspiring poet who'd sold cars to help put himself through night law school, had to learn how to drive one.