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Omaha Steve

(99,659 posts) Sat Nov 15, 2014, 11:44 PM Nov 2014

Papers signed by famous '30s FBI man found in Ohio

Source: AP-Excite

AKRON, Ohio (AP) — Record-keepers examining long-forgotten documents in a courthouse have found some unremarkable depositions with a noteworthy signature: Melvin Purvis Jr., the FBI man famous for tracking down John Dillinger and other gangsters in the 1930s.

Workers found the documents in the Summit County courthouse attic, the Akron Beacon Journal (http://bit.ly/1qCxGPt) reported. The depositions, signed in 1927, involved a lawsuit over potatoes between an Akron company and one in South Carolina, where Purvis practiced law before joining the FBI.

FBI historian John Fox said it's an interesting discovery because the agency typically doesn't have many records on agents from that era prior to their FBI work.

"He's certainly one of those interesting characters in our past," Fox said.

FULL story at link.

In this Oct. 30, 2014 photo, Teresa Corall, director of Records Retention for Summit County, left, and Karen Kearns, records clerk, look over a deposition from 1927 notarized by famous Melvin H. Purvis Jr. in the records retention office in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. Purvis was an FBI man famous for tracking down John Dillinger and other gangsters in the 1930s. (AP Photo/Akron Beacon Journal, Karen Schiely) MANDATORY CREDIT

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Papers signed by famous '30s FBI man found in Ohio (Original Post) Omaha Steve Nov 2014 OP

Fascinating! Purvis provided great PR for the FBI. So much so that he began to make Hoover jealous RufusTFirefly Nov 2014 #1

Purvis also went through Akron when Pretty Boy Floyd was being tracked down..... marble falls Nov 2014 #2

RufusTFirefly

(8,812 posts)

1. Fascinating! Purvis provided great PR for the FBI. So much so that he began to make Hoover jealous

Reply to Omaha Steve (Original post)

Sun Nov 16, 2014, 12:05 AM

Nov 2014

After fatally shooting Pretty Boy Floyd and receiving extensive, intoxicating publicity for his roles in the deaths of both John Dillinger and Floyd, Melvin Purvis capitalized on his growing celebrity and publicly vowed to hunt down Nelson, but was pulled from the case by a jealous J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI. Then Hoover set about the task of rewriting the FBI’s account of both the Dillinger and Floyd shootings, emphasizing the importance of the FBI in general, rather than focusing in on Purvis. (Young and Young, The Great Depression in America: a cultural encyclopedia, Volume 1, 163)

And here's his epilogue:

Melvin Purvis’s growing fame as the “G-man” who killed John Dillinger made J. Edgar Hoover intensely jealous. The Director did everything he could to make Purvis’s time at the Bureau increasingly uncomfortable. Shortly before the year anniversary of Dillinger’s death (Dillinger was killed in July 1934), Purvis resigned from the Bureau, denying that he had differences with Hoover and insisting instead that his reasons for departure were personal. When Purvis attempted to open his own detective agency, Hoover went out of his way to ensure that the country’s best known G-man didn’t get any cooperation from law enforcement. During World War II, Purvis joined the rival OSS, which ultimately became the CIA. In 1960, after learning that he had inoperable cancer, Purvis committed suicide, shooting himself with the pistol his fellow agents had given him at his retirement party.(Gentry, Curt. J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, 175-6.)

marble falls

(57,102 posts)

2. Purvis also went through Akron when Pretty Boy Floyd was being tracked down.....

Reply to Omaha Steve (Original post)

Sun Nov 16, 2014, 09:24 AM

Nov 2014

Floyd was almost caught in Akron a week or so before he was shot down like a dog in a field in southern Ohio by Purvis. Floyd hid under a bed in house off Lovers Lane when police came to the door of a home of Floyd's friends he was staying at for a few days.

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