Description
A unique work in the world! The history of the United States in the first half of the 20th century is full of colorful gangster figures, such as Al Capone, John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, who illustrated the mythical golden age of organized crime. To them belong the big headlines of the national and foreign newspapers, the biographies, the films relating their misdeeds. However, you will not find them in this book, which is not dedicated to them. For there areautres thugs, obscure unknowns, without glory or panache, John T. Honeycutt, Marion Barhart, Charles Jefferson and Irene Kelly, and so many othersautres, who crisscrossed the country at the same time, sowing terror in their wake, breaking into safes, ripping off, murdering. Just like their illustrious colleagues, but they only had the right to a few articles in the local chronicles. Then they sank into a deserved oblivion. Gangsters offers nearly 200 photographic portraits of the period, which are rare documents, most of them unpublished, concerning these everyday thugs. This book gathers press agency photographs, taken on the spot in police stations, at the arrival of suspects, during police custody or presentation to the investigating judge. First-hand documents, full of realism and humanity. Beyond the evocation of these petty criminals, it is the face of the United States, fractured by the Great Depression, that is revealed. An unknown America, that of the underworld, with a sordid reality, is revealed through these images of desperately common people, caught up in the turmoil of an implacable era. A striking testimony, a window on History.
