Review written for the Veteran's Press, June 2003 Public Enemy Gun Molls Finally Speak by Don DeNevi, Author of "Riddle of the Rock," and "Alcatraz '46" "If you can still love, you're not bad." In her brilliantly lucid and highly satisfying "Don't Call Us Molls: Women of the John Dillinger Gang," author Ellen Poulsen shares with us her 15 years of research of a hitherto unexplored subject: the gun moll of the 1930s. Defined by Webster as "the woman companion of a gangster, often no more than a prostitute," the moll has been buried under decades of unsympathetic stereotypes and shameful parodies popularized by the pulp fiction and "B" and "C" movies and cliffhangers of the day. The fact that no serious writer or scholar has bothered to disinter the moll in order to penetrate her enigmatic personality testifies to the intolerance and bias she has unjustly endured for more than three-quarters of a century. Now, thanks to Ellen's life-long interest in John Dillinger, and her years of perusing courtroom and prison records, to say nothing of tracking down eyewitnesses and descendants, as well as informers and female peace officers, a legacy is revealed and examined. We are privy for the first time to read about the secret lives of the women who loved and stood by their nefarious badmen. Vignettes and long forgotten remininscences fill in the gap of the moll's role in Dillinger's Midwest crime wave. In a beautifully controlled writing prose, Poulsen portrays the moll who grew up neglected and abused but nonetheless had the capacity to not only nurture and nourish, but also to love. And let's not forget what Sigmund Freud taught us: "If you can still love, you're not bad." "Don't Call Us Molls," a 485 page softcover which sells for $19.95, spans three years, from August, 1932, through March, 1935. With over 85 photos, letters and documents, citing scores of previously unreleased FBI memos, prison letters and vital records, the story of those three years reveal the most complete and authentic account of the Dillinger gang, including its women. Historically, we've been offered glimpses of the various gang members by the true crime writers and newspaper reporters of the era. The text's 26 chapters divided into three main time-frame sections goes beyond, not only documenting fresh insights and new information about those gangsters, but also the dual roles of their molls as both indispensable managers of criminal enterprises and selflessly devoted lovers. After all, it was their women who enabled their men to lead lavishly illegal lives, criss-crossing America and robbing banks at will. There is no question that Ellen Poulsen, the daughter of a Brooklyn cop, has introduced the gun moll experience to the wider American culture as never before. Seen by critics as a magical new writer of great literary promise, she seductively draws us into the lives of the Dillinger gang and their molls and refuses to let us go. With tremendous skill and passion she may have written the definitive story of the 1930s moll. Who is this woman of sensual prose capable of writing a plot that captures both our angst and hearts? First of all, Ellen grew up reading police procedurals, true crime and anything she could find on Dillinger and his gang. "A standard coffee table book in our house was "New York's 13 Most Wanted," she laughs. She interviewed a variety of literary figures in her capacity as publicity columnist for the Queens College Evening Reading Series in New York City. This amazing and very talented woman may well be on her way to becoming this nation's foremost true crime writer. -Don DeNevi, Author, "Riddle of the Rock," and "Alcatraz '46," and numerous non-fiction and history titles. Review written by Andrew Smith, Readers' Nook, for the Lebanon Daily Record, Sunday, May 25, 2003 Don't Call Us Molls: Women of the John Dillinger Gang by Ellen Poulsen "Pick up this book on the women of the Dillinger Gang, and you'll be hard-pressed to put it down." The title is a quote attributed to Jean Delaney Crompton, the girlfriend of Tommy Carroll, one of the Dillinger Gang, or gangs, as the membership seems to have been fairly fluid. From time to time at, during or after various robberies and shoot-outs, one or another of the group would either be captured or killed. As the blurb on the back cover says, "without the women in their lives, these Tommy-gun toting Public Enemies would likely have remained among the down-and-out petty criminals so common in their day." As it was, they were the most notorious collection of bank-robbers and gun-wielders (though they actually killed very few) of the early 1930s. Their careers were as brief as they were noteworthy and productive of loot. One of their biggest hauls from a single bank was $50,000 cash, about $1,500,000 in today's money. The women themselves, as revealed in the book, are mostly personable, fairly smart, not bad-looking, devoted to their men, and mostly well-treated by them. If met casually on the street, one would not pick them from the crowd as having any links to the underworld. And mostly they did not participate directly in the crimes perpetrated by the men, but were involved to the extent of "harboring" known criminals, driving the gang's cars, even doing the rental, arranging and caring for their apartments and hotel rooms. Most of them were products of dysfunctional families characterized by abusive and/or neglectful parents or bad environment, or victimized by misguided or mismanaged schools. The experience of Evelyn Frechette, Dillinger's woman, who receives the greatest attention of the author, with the Bureau of Indian Affairs agency in charge of the Menomenee tribe's school in Wisconsin, epitomized this latter aspect. The word "moll," coined originally according to the author to denote a female pickpocket, was during Prohibition days, extended to mean "gun moll," one who handled firearms to the extent of doing some of the shooting, as did Bonnie Parker of "Bonnie and Clyde" fame. These particular women were not this kind. The closest any one of them came to being so was acting as the driver of a get-away car, without actually firing any sort of defensive weapon. J. Edgar Hoover further romanticized them as being "more dangerous to society than the desperado himself." A born self-promoter, J. Edgar was not involved directly with the capture of Dillinger, and was not even involved in the hunt for him until Dillinger had the misjudgment to drive a stolen car across a state line, Indiana to Illinois, in violation of federal law. This book is a detailed history of the principals in the Dillinger group and these wives and girlfriends. It biographs about 20 of each through their home upbringing and subsequent meeting, with special emphasis on Dillinger himself and a few of his principal associates until his near-capture followed by death in a shoot-out in 1934. It also follows up a few of the women in their subsequent imprisonment, release and later lives. It was 15 years in the researching and writing and is an absolutely fascinating sociological study of the principals, lives and their characters, formation by their various environments. Meticulously researched, annotated, indexed, copiously illustrated, the book's author is a social historian who says her hobby interest has been the Dillinger gang. What a way to spark reminiscences of the early 1930s when I was a grade-schooler and the newspapers were full of the gang's exploits and those of the various groups of enforcers trying to run them down. It is indeed the case, as the author states, that some areas of the country were terrorized by the frequency and magnitide of some of the bank robberies they got away with. A few years later a lot of these events were semi-fictionalized in such dramatic radio serial programs as "Gangbusters," that we kids avidly tuned to in the evenings when we should have been doing our homework. This book will remind you of the underworld and its characters of those times like nothing else will, and you will learn more than you ever thought you would about the social ills then current, and you'll then wonder why the social infrastructure developed since that day has not been more effective in bringing about improvement. On the other hand, you'll reflect that the "Gold Ole Times" weren't all that good. I recommend the book highly to any normally well-educated adult. You'll also get insight into the truth of the epigram, "Don't underestimate the power of human stupidity" (on both sides of the law). Pick it up, and you'll be hard-pressed to put it down.-Andrew Smith, The Lebanon (Mo.) Daily Record Recent Testimonial by Linda Mattix, Research Assistant to 1930s Crime Historian Rick Mattix. Linda is currently assisting in the compilation of the definitive history of the Barker-Karpis gang. It is wonderful to finally read a book dedicated to the women who followed these outlaws. For the book to be written by a woman's point of view is a definite plus. You could tell Ms. Poulsen had done painstaking, indepth research to write a book of this magnitude. I could almost feel the ostracism of Evelyn Frechette, both as an Indian and as one isolated from her own people by her choice of lifestyle. -Linda Mattix Online Book Discussion of "Don't Call Us Molls" by Johnny Depp fans