This book offers a revised history of how changing times and technologies revolutionized both crime and crime control, as traditionally corrupt and localized police agencies found themselves overwhelmed by lawlessness. It explores the efforts of American law enforcement agencies to professionalize their performance in a new age of machine guns and motor cars, when gangsters such as Al Capone wielded more power than city governments, and outlaws such as John Dillinger exposed the inability of local police to cope with interstate fugitives. The authors revisit long-accepted accounts of many notorious events that the media dramatized in a violent and lawless era. They present new perspectives on the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the Kansas City Massacre, the deliberate killing of Pretty Boy Floyd, and the mystery that still surrounds the death of Baby Face Nelson. The book profiles both individual gangsters and outlaws and depression-era and prohibition-era gangs. Crimes and criminals are portrayed in the context of the socioeconomic and law-enforcement conditions that influenced their rise and fall. The chronology of crime control from 1919 through 1940 is presented. A 602-item partially annotated bibliography and a subject index