A History of Heists
Bank Robbery in America
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- € 28,99
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- € 28,99
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No crime is as synonymous with America as bank robbery. Though the number of bank robberies nationwide has declined, bank robbery continues to captivate the public and jeopardize the safety of banks and their employees.
In A History of Heists, Jerry Clark and Ed Palattella explore how bank robbers have influenced American culture as much as they have reflected it. Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Willie Sutton, and Patty Hearst are among the most famous figures in the history of crime in the United States. Jesse James used his training as a Confederate guerrilla to make bank robbery a political act. John Dillinger capitalized on the public’s scorn of banks during the Great Depression and became America’s first Public Enemy Number One. When she held up a bank with the leftist Symbionese Liberation Army, Patty Hearst fueled the country’s social unrest. Jerry Clark and Ed Palattella delve into the backgrounds and motivations of the robbers, and explore how they are as complex as the nation whose banks they have plundered.
But as much as the story of bank robbery in America focuses on the thieves, it is also a story of those who investigate the heists. As bank robbers became more sophisticated, so did the police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other law enforcement agencies. This captivating history showshow bank robbery shaped the modern FBI, and how it continues to cultivate America’s fascination with the noble outlaw: bandits seen, rightly or wrongly, as battling unjust authority.
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Retired FBI agent Clark and veteran journalist Palattella opt for breadth rather than depth in this solid survey of bank robberies in the United States, beginning in 1798 with the first one on record and spanning to the present. Their work suffers a bit from hyperbole; in their introduction, the coauthors assert that bank robbery "is a crime that, perhaps more than any other, has helped influence and define the nation." Victims of gun violence at the hand of mass murderers probably won't agree that "no single crime is more synonymous with crime in the United States than bank robbery." Despite this, the book serves as a useful introduction to the topic, particularly in the sections that cover the 18th and 19th centuries. Other works, such as Bryan Burrough's Public Enemies (2004), have gone deeper into the era of Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde, and the shift to online theft and the reduced use of cash make this more of academic rather than practical interest.
