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His son tells the life story of Melvin
Purvis, once an iconic G-man and public hero, who was destroyed
not by the famous villains of the 1930s but by the jealousy
of his boss, J. Edgar Hoover.
By the end of 1934 Melvin Purvis was, besides
President Roosevelt, the most famous man in America. Just
thirtyone years old, he presided over the neophyte FBI’s remarkable
sweep of the great Public Enemies of the American Depression—John
Dillinger; Pretty Boy Floyd; Baby Face Nelson. America finally
had its hero in the War on Crime, and the face of all the
conquering G-Men belonged to Melvin Purvis. Yet these triumphs
sowed the seeds of his eventual ruin. With each new capture,
each new headline touting Purvis as the scourge of gangsters,
one man’s implacable resentment grew. J. Edgar Hoover, Director
of the FBI, was immensely jealous of the agent who had been
his friend and protégé, and vowed that Melvin
Purvis would be brought down. A vendetta began that would
not end even with Purvis’s death. For more than three decades
Hoover trampled Purvis’s reputation, questioned his courage
and competence, and tried to erase his name from all records
of the FBI’s greatest triumphs.
Alston Purvis is Melvin’s only surviving
son. With the benefit of a unique family archive of documents,
new testimony from colleagues and friends of Melvin Purvis
and witnesses to the events of 1934, he has produced a grippingly
authentic new telling of the gangster era, seen from the perspective
of the pursuers. By finally setting the record straight about
his father, he sheds new light on what some might call Hoover’s
original sin—a personal vendetta that is one of the
earliest and clearest examples of Hoover’s bitter, destructive
paranoia.
Alston Purvis has appeared widely
in the media, including the History Channel and A&E, to talk
about his father. He is head of Boston University’s design
department.
Alex Tresinowski is a senior writer
for People magazine specializing in politics, crime and current
events. The author of five books, including an upcoming biography
of boxer Billy Conn, he lives in New Jersey.
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