Public Enemy: From Nero's Rome to Al Capone and Hoover's FBI

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The phrase public enemy calls up pinstripe suits, tommy guns, and Al Capone, but it began as a political weapon in ancient Rome. In AD 68 the Senate declared Emperor Nero a hostis publicus, cutting him off from the protection of the law so that anyone could kill him without penalty. The term surfaced again in the United Kingdom around 1642 and turned lethal in the French Revolution, when Maximilien Robespierre argued in 1793 that the government owed enemies of the people nothing except death.

This episode follows the label across the Atlantic to Chicago in April 1930, where Frank J. Loesch of the Chicago Crime Commission faced gangsters everyone knew were guilty but no court could convict. His answer was publicity: a short list of public enemies with Al Capone at the top, mailed to police, sheriffs, and newspaper editors. J. Edgar Hoover then took the idea national, reserving it for charged fugitives and turning Public Enemy Number One into a running drama that laid the ground for the Ten Most Wanted list in 1950.

• The law of 22 Prairial in 1794 stripped defendants of witnesses and counsel and made spreading false news to divide or trouble the people a capital offense.
• Loesch cut a list of about a hundred known hoodlums down to 28 names, a cast small enough to fit on one newspaper page, and put Capone's brother right behind him.
• Hoover reversed Loesch's approach: where Chicago named men whose crimes could not be proved, the FBI named only fugitives who had already been charged.
• From June 1934 to May 1936 the number one title passed in sequence from John Dillinger to Pretty Boy Floyd to Baby Face Nelson to Alvin Karpis.
• During the Depression many people resented the banks, so Hoover used the label to recast robbers such as Bonnie and Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly, and Ma Barker as villains instead of folk heroes.