This Land

“I’ve been arrested!” Gasko croaked over the cell phone as the FBI agents watched his every move. Seconds earlier, a neighbor had scolded the officers for the way they surprised and roughed up the old man in the storage area of his seedy Santa Monica apartment complex. She noticed that…

They were mostly dead by then, the girlfriends, mothers, and wives of the 1930s era gangsters who once dominated front pages. Their men put the once-obscure Federal Bureau of Investigation and its director J. Edgar Hoover in the headlines from coast to coast, during the largest crime wave in American…