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Read MoreAbout Paul
I’ve been writing about the history of the American Southwest for a dozen years, specifically efforts to secure law, order, and justice along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during times of economic dislocation, political corruption, and criminal violence. My first book, Salt Warriors: Insurgency on the Rio Grande, relates how the corruption of law and politics and the legal theft of economic resources in El Paso led Tejano citizen soldiers to take up arms against Texas Rangers, Buffalo Soldiers, and a posse of outlaws and mercenaries. Salt Warriors won the Robert A. Calvert Book Prize (2007) and was named a Southwest Book of the Year for 2008. While digging through the archives at the Arizona Historical Society, I came across newspaper accounts of an extraordinary crime, the kidnapping of June Robles of Tucson in 1934. That story led me to the wider history of the FBI’s War on Kidnapping, an element of FDR’s 1930s War on Crime, waged by the Justice Department’s Attorney General Homer S. Cummings and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. In Public Enemies, Bryan Burrough’s fast-paced masterpiece on the War on Crime, the author brings to life the early FBI’s 1930s war on the violent bank robbers and ransom kidnappers. He focuses on Hoover’s campaign to end the bloody careers of Dillinger, Nelson, Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, Kelly, and the Barker-Karpis gang. While Burrough touches on ransom kidnappings, he necessarily leaves out the wave of child kidnappings that took place in the 1930s. My current project focuses on the early FBI’s efforts to end ransom kidnappings, the dedication to duty of Hoover’s special agents in the field, the “G-men,” and the price of failure when a crime can’t be solved. The unsolved 1934 kidnapping of June Robles is the vehicle for telling that story. My first blog posts provided some background, dealing with major crimes that occurred before the so-called “Crime of the Century,” the Lindbergh baby kidnap/murder that led to federal legislation and FBI involvement. The book project is tentatively titled, The Girl in the Iron Box: Devotion to Duty & the Price of Failure in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The website also contains some photos my father took of fellow flyers in the famous 19th Bombardment Group and an article on Wyatt Earp’s nemesis, Curly Bill Brocius. Enjoy. I look forward to your...
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Read MoreSalt Warriors
Winner of the 2007 Robert A. Calvert Book Prize Winner of a Southwest Book Award for 2008, Border Regional Library Association Honorable Mention, 2009 Tejano Book Prize, Tejano Genealogy Society of Austin Finalist for 2009 Wild West History Association Book Award Published by Texas A&M University Press, 2008 “The author elegantly navigates the shaky alliances, the deep enmities, the hubris of some and the courage of others in the struggle over control and use of the salt lakes near El Paso. The Salt War ranks with the Lincoln County War in its drama and complexity, and in its evidence of a troubled American past with issues that reverberate into the 21st century. This is an authoritative and important work by a gifted scholar.” —Paula Mitchell Marks, author of To Die in the West “No previous work on the Salt War has mined such a quarry of primary sources, explicated the political power plays (involving both Tejanos and Anglos) in the conflict with such clarity, interpreted the insurgency of those relying on the salt lakes so incisively, and chronicled the aftermath that the episode had on the common people of the El Paso Valley so skillfully. The book is destined to become the definitive treatment of the subject.” —Arnoldo De León, author of Mexican-Americans in Texas: A Brief History “… an exceptionally well researched piece of scholarship that goes way beyond what has previously been written. It is obvious from the first page that Cool has made great efforts to uncover every piece of evidence that might in any way shed any new facts on his dramatic but bloody event.” —Jerry Thompson, author of Cortina: Civil War to the Bloody End “The so-called El Paso Salt War of 1877 undoubtedly ranks among th least known conflicts of the late 19th century. Paul Cool’s account is a fascinating study of an insurgency, with a cast of characters including laborers, land barons, corrupt politicians, lawmen of questionable backgrounds, the national press, the Texas governor, the Texas Rangers, President Rutherford B. Hayes, and last but not least, the United States Army. Among the civilian participants in this tragic events were Anglos, Mexican-Americans, and Mexicans. Many of the soldiers were African Americans…. The author unravels the incredibly tangled web of villains, heroes, and the not-so-heroic…. Salt Warriors is a well-researched and competently written work, with photographs of many participants, maps, and an extensive and useful bibliography. —Lt. Col. G. Alan Knight, US Army (ret.), in the Journal of American’s Military Past...
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Read MoreCurrent Project: The Robles Kidnapping Investigation
At the height of the Depression-era War on Crime, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI G-men,Tucson and Pima County lawmen,and outraged citizens hunt the men who abducted a six-year-old child. The 1934 ransom kidnapping of June Robles created a nationwide sensation, rivaling the Lindbergh case in itstangled puzzle of mishandled evidence, disputed forensics, conflicting eyewitnesses, dodgy tipsters, large cast of suspicious characters, and media frenzy. When court records were sealed, the dramatic events were left to recycled newspaper articles, folk music, dramatic theater, and 75 years of rumor built upon rumor. Using newly discovered documents, Paul Cool will reveal the 3-year search for the truth behind a mysterious crime that once transfixed...
Most Recent Articles
Looking for family papers of former FBI Special Agents
While I have personnel files for most the of FBI Special Agents who are the leading characters in my book-in-progress on the FBI’s investigation into the 1934 kidnapping of 6-year-old June Robles, I would like to flesh out this material with family photos, letters, and other papers dealing with the following agents (referred to only by initials in many documents): Harold Edward Andersen / H.E. Andersen Orville C. Dewey / O.C. Dewey Joseph Edward Patrick Dunn / J.E.P. Dunn...
Read MorePaulCoolBooks.com Redesigned!
Welcome to my new website. Here you’ll find all the news about my writings, past, current, and planned. I may not blog the recommended 3x a week (or is it 3x a day?), but I will from time to time take you on side trips flowing from my research into the FBI’s investigation into the 1934 kidnapping of June Robles, my thoughts about the craft of writing and the business of publishing history, and anything else I want to...
Read MoreHiring Special Agents – Lewis Taylor Part 2
Bureaus are breeding grounds for bureaucracy, and Hoover’s was no different. Hoover might be interested in virtually everything his agency did, down to the smallest detail, but he could not do it all himself. He might read virtually every piece of paper passing through the Bureau of Investigation, he might direct its movement, but he could not control it. Paperwork in Hoover’s domain, as in anyone else’s, had a life of its own. In Lewis Taylor’s case, all necessary...
Read MoreHiring Special Agents – Lewis C Taylor Part 1
As FBI Assistant Director Harold “Pop” Nathan explained in 1934, the Division of Investigation (later renamed the FBI), “First and foremost… selects its personnel with the greatest care from the best available material.” The applicant’s record and associations should be “rigidly scrutinized” all the way back to his school days. Higher education, agency testing, and hiring interviews ensured that the prospective law enforcement officer possessed the required “resourcefulness, aggressiveness, tact, energy, and the like.” The hiring of Special Agent...
Read MoreThe G-man: Hoover’s “ideal law enforcement officer”
To better ensure that crimes got solved and criminals got caught, J. Edgar Hoover demanded that the Bureau’s agents meet and exhibit the highest professional standards. The expected qualities, and they were legion, were listed in a speech given in September, 1934, by Assistant Director Harold Nathan on his boss’s behalf. The “ideal law enforcement officer,” and that certainly meant the Bureau’s special agents, according to Nathan, “should be well educated, because law enforcement is now a profession.” In...
Read MoreJ Edgar Hoover & the G-men
While the Lindbergh Law assigned jurisdiction over kidnapping to the United States Bureau of Investigation (BOI) within the Department of Justice, that authority applied only if the kidnap victim was transported across a state or international border. Unfortunately, the law as originally written failed to provide a practical trigger for BOI intervention in a case. In the absence of some clue dropped by the kidnappers, or the violation of some other federal statute by the suspects, such as the...
Read More“Unless something drastic is done…”
By the 1930s, kidnappings in the United States were commonplace, and the crime “had become a profession.” The police chief of St. Louis, the national epicenter of the gangster “snatch racket,” advised Congress that he investigated 282 cases extending into 21 states within the space of a year. Police chiefs in 501 cities reported to Congress in 1931 that 279 kidnappings had taken place, a fraction of the estimated total. Only 69 persons had been convicted, out of the...
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