Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Lisa Townsend Rodgers was born in Poughkeepsie spent her formative years in New York City before eventually moving to Las Vegas. She's worked as a journalist and editor for a vast array of publications here in this town, as well as a teacher and librarian. This book, just out Shameless Women of the Underworld is just excellent.
Lisa, welcome to the program.
Ah, thank you for having me, and thank you for saying so much nice things.
About my book.
Oh my gosh, I really enjoyed it. I tell me this walk us through the inspiration. I mean, you've lived in this town for a while, and our mob history is well known, but it's mostly about guys Tony Spilatro, Lefty Rosenthal, Ben Siegel, folks like that. Is that part of the inspiration that you felt women, bad girl women needed some representation.
Too, Yeah, I mean, and also being from New York, that's another city that has its own history with the Mob. And you know, I've always been interested in and you know sort of the people who are whose names you see mentioned, but nobody really tells you their story, and that's really sort of what these women were. You you know, we've heard infinitely about Tony Spilatro Lefty, and you keep hearing Jerry's name, and she's so important, But who was she?
What was her deal? You know, same thing with Virginia Hill, you know, the flamingo. But who was she? You know, you just hear her name all the time. So I felt it was you know, that was sort of the inspiration, was looking into them, digging into that more before we jump into each of the individual characters, tell me a bit about the research.
I mean, the footnotes make it clear that you did a lot of reading and did a lot of digging on your own.
How you compile all this stuff?
Well, I mean, in a way, you know, I've sort of you know, you think if I think about when I first started reading about Bonnie Parker, I mean, gosh, I was probably a teenager. So in a way, you could say researching this for most of my advice, but you know, mostly I was there over the last ten years.
I was invited to do a book that was part of the Las Vegas Book Festival, and I wrote a chapter that was about Vegas in the seventies that was about Elvis Hunter, S. Thompson and Jerry Rosenthal about how Vegas kind of gives you what you want and then takes everything away. And then I did a piece for Desert Companion about Virginia Hill because you know who was the Flamingo and it turns out it wasn't actually named
after her. And I started digging into those and then you know, I started going, hey, well what about these other women? And then my publisher, Anthony, who I knew, heard me telling stories about these women because I just looked into it and was like, you should write a book and lo and behold, I did you know? So it was just a lot of internet research. Unfortunately, during during a pandemic, I couldn't really go in person to
a lot of collections. I did go to the Schomberg Center in New York obviously UNLV some places in LA but you know, it was a lot of online libraries, digging up books, getting old magazines, stuff like that.
Is the mob Museum? Was that a resource for you?
Here in Las Vegas, we have the Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement.
It's terrific.
If you've ever been to Las Vegas and you haven't seen it, you've missed out. But were they helpful? I know Jeff Schumacher from the museum helped write a review.
Yeah, it's absolutely. You know, that's always been a resource, you know, I think for anybody who researches the mob in law enforcement and for this, you know, they were definitely helpful. And they were people I could, you know, when I had a question that arose that I couldn't just kind of look up, I could kind of go
to them as a resource. You know, that was sort of the value of those places, and you know that is, as you said, definitely a fantastic place that people should visit when they're in Las Vegas.
Let's start with a name that pretty much everyone on our audience well know. I it's not the first chapter in your book. It's Bonnie Parker, and you know Bodnie and Clyde. My gosh, I thought I knew a lot about her and about them, but this opened up a whole new avenues.
For me as a reader, and it broke my heart. This story broke my heart.
You know, it's been romanticized quite a bit, but gosh, you focus on a lot on the time they spend on the run. It is grim and nasty and bad. So tell me about learning about her. How much of this was new to you?
I mean a lot of it was, you know, as I mentioned, I'd always been interested. Maybe that was sort of the beginning of my interest in this topic, you know, when as a kid. But you know, again you get the romantic version, this very Hollywood vision of them, and when you start digging into it, you know, unfortunately there are a lot of accounts from family members. You can you know, since they were so heavily covered, you can
find a lot of contemporary accounts. But as I dug in further just finding out how again, it was just they were so desperate, you know, they you know, Bonnie's family been kind of middle class but lost everything. Clyde's family you know, as I say in the book, the Jodes would have pitied them like the Porks had never really had a home, you was, just were passed around.
They lived under an aqueduct, you know. And then when they were on the run, it wasn't this sort of again glamorous vision of you know, funny cride, We rob banks. You know, they knocked over grocery stores to get by, basically camped out, you know, and one of the things that you know isn't discussed enough I think is also just you know, Bonnie was horribly wounded, like she could barely walk by the time they died, so you know, digging into that. And also that was the chapter that
took me the longest. For that reason was just having to go through everything. Literally, I would say, there was a timeline. It's almost you know, week by week.
Yeah, well you had to probably sort through a lot of mythology and toss it aside too, things that have been written about him that were not accurate.
I mean, the.
Public perceptions probably are way off base based on what I just read from you. As you note, if not for Bonnie of the Bonny and Clyde, Clyde might have been forgotten. It's just some two bit punk who got shot by police.
Oh absolutely. I don't even know how interested the police would have really been. I mean, they would have gotten him. But you know, the media coverage was always about her, and again it was just the idea that there was a woman involved, which you know is still surprising to people, but back then was what And also, as I mentioned, you know she was and this is again one of the things I discovered from research like an incredibly bright woman,
you know. I mean, she wrote those poems which are sort of you know, people sort of oh, they're sort of dogg roll in a way, but they're well done. She staged most of those photos, you know, she was very good with media and image, and at time when people didn't understand that, and I'm sure even she didn't really understand what she was doing, but at a certain point she recognized that they were going to be spoken about,
and she wanted to say in that. One thing that was interesting is, you know, out in prim they have the Bonnie and Clyde dusk car right, which is unfortunately now like literally in the middle of the casino floor used to be a little bit off so you can sort of focus on it more, but now it's just sort of literally ringed with slot machines. But when you look at things like the newspaper clippings they literally have up there, they talk about how they aren't that final
poem that she wrote. The newspapers already had it when they died, or somebody had it to give to them, you know, And literally she had said, don't hand this off until after we passed, because I want to make sure I get our final word.
In U share with us as you describe her. I mean, she was bright, and she was smart. She could have gone places, she had high hopes. She was personal in that she would win people over it, converse them. She was interested in other people. And how does she go wrong? Where does that go wrong? Just her family was in poverty. But tell the story of how she hooks up with Clyde.
Well, I mean the thing is, yeah, she was this honorable student in this sweetheart, but also she did have this sort of you know, she was the girl who fight you on the playground side. And basically she got married very young because you know, she was a dramatic creature. She wanted to fall in love. She married this other guy, Broy, who was also a criminal who wound up getting arrested. So she was actually married when she met Clyde, and she was still married when they both died. You know,
but you know, he was in jail. She had lost her job because of the depression, and she was taking care of a friend, just hanging out in her house and he walked in and it was, you know, that sort of mythical love at first sight. You hear about where two people look at each other and the room stops and everybody sees it. And it was that kind of devotion until the end. Basically, I mean, that's sort of what brought her low, was just she worshiped him, and to be fair, he felt the same way about her.
And you know, she kind of followed him down this path and at the beginning of their relationship she begged him to reform, but he went up in East Camp Prison, a terrible place where he was horrifically mistreated, where he committed his first murder and of self defense, to be fair, and he was then consumed with revenge that he was going to go back knock over East to prison free
everybody kill the guards. You know that that vengeance fantasy, and and that was really kind of what their crimes Free was about.
In a way.
He spent more time knocking over armories and trying to get people to help him take Easton than he did trying to rob and make money. And you know, she sort of followed him down that path. And I mean, to be fair again, he actually did break people out of Eastern Prison, yeah, and she helped him. So there is that.
He doesn't become a big time criminal until right toward the end the breakout of prison, and also they do a he breaks people out and then they start robbing banks and their actual big time criminals. But as you note, most of what they did was robbing liquor stores, gas stations, grocery stores, small time stuff, right.
Yeah, yeah, stealing cars, stuff like that. Again, just kind of enough to keep going, you know. And also one thing I else to do point out is that you know, Clyde was not a great planner, so.
It's a great gang.
Yeah, he was a driver. If he had been like I'm going to be the driver for a big gang, he could have been a big time criminal. But you know, trying to lead like whatever local bumpkins and you know, recent escapees he could ring together for a couple of weeks was not going to get him to you know, Dillinger's status.
They get a lot of bad stuff, some of it circumstantial. They get into circumstances where somebody else who's with them as part of their little gang goes overboard kills somebody, and then then they're really wanted. But they really get become notorious because of these photos they get released.
You have the one in your book.
A Bonnie with their leg up on the bumper of a getaway car, holding a gun and smoking a cigar, and it was all stage.
He had staged this thing. They took some photos.
How is it that those photos get out into the public and how are they used and what's the overall effect?
Well, how the photos got out into the public was during the Battle of Joplin, as they called it, when they took a cabin in Joplin, Missouri. Bonnie Clyde, Clyde's brother Buck, his wife Blanch, and the perennial sidekick Wd and the you know, they are foolish and noisy and rambunctious, and the police notice they are there, think they're just bootleggers. Obviously not you know, there's a shootout. They have to flee and leave everything, something they had to do constantly,
just leave everything. And one of the things they left behind was this camera where which they had used to just you know, take photos. And there were you know, cheesecake photos of Blanche and a lot of other photos on the road. But they had done a series of photos. And you know, there's also the legendary one of also Bonnie pointing a gun at Clyde, and so when these got out again, they published ones, Oh yeah, here's Clyde with his gun, and YadA, YadA, YadA. But people had
photos like that before. The photos of Bonnie posing with a gun were not something that had really been seen before, so of course, you know, what are the newspapers going to run with? And then that turned into this whole myth of like, she runs the gang, she's this criminal, because again it's kind of a better story, and that's you know, who really knew at the time, and especially because you know she had staged the photo smoking a cigar with a pistol on pointing a gun at Clyde.
You know, it's it's amazing you detail their exploits and so much, I mean nearly everything that they do is just circumstance. They bounce from one hideout to another, trying to stay ahead of the law, make really bad decisions pretty much every step of the way that eventually, you know, at leads to some terrible situations. And but you know, there was no master plan. They did not have access to criminal resources like the big name gangsters of that era.
They were on her own, and it seemed like they made so many dumb mistakes, stay someplace too long, or drop the bloody bandages on the side of the road that gets the police on their trail. Talk about that period a little bit and how it ends in such a bad way. The last couple of weeks of their life, as you described in great detail, was absolutely horrible, horrible.
Yeah, as I had mentioned, Bonnie had had this horrible accident which unfortunately was caused by Clyde just driving too fast and crashing off of a bridge. She winds up pinned under a burning car, getting hit with battery acid. You know, her, she's basically crippled. You know, she is burned to the bone, in agony, completely wrecked, and they
have nothing for her. All they can do is just drive around on back roads and try to steal aspirin for her, you know, And that is sort of also one of the moments where you know, Clyde actually almost grows up a little bit and you know, realize that he will never leave her, and he's going to do anything to protect her. But unfortunately, you know, again that doesn't involve trying to make any sort of concrete plans or get her help or get organized, and she won't
leave him. He does try to get her to leave him, and so towards the end they you know, they do this breakout of East and they sort of pull the gang back together and that's where they kind of do some bank robberies and manage it, but things fall apart. They wind up with this this woman Mary, who sort of causes problems with Bonnie. She's the girlfriend of one
of the new gang members. She stirs up trouble. Eventually that all breaks up because they try to convince Bonnie she should kill Clyde and is sleep and as you can imagine, Bonnie doesn't take kindly to that, and neither does Clyde, so break up the gang. So then they're back to just sort of ping ponging around trying to
just knock over whatever they can. The reason reduced actually taking things from their family, like begging their own starving families that they used to give things for, like can you get us some food and blankets. At one point they had to flee and were so bloody and shot up they had to just get rid of their clothes and drive around with sheep songs, and you know, at the end, their last gang member kind of you know, as sells them out basically, you know, his father does
to try to save his son. They wind up they had tried to avoid killing cops, but they wind up killing cops because gang members drink and get crazy. And this is what then sort of also pushes the we must get Bonnie and Clyde at any cost, and at the end they're sort of sold out. They're set up
in this ambush and that's the end of them. And one interesting kind note is that Ted Hinton, who had been one of the who was one of the chief law enforcement officers, had actually known von before she met Clyde, and she was a waitress and he had a crush on her. She worked near the courthouse, and she was literally one of the people who put a bullet in her many bullets, and he was the person who opened the door and caught her body as it fell out, which is just sort of chilling.
Yeah, your description of what happens at the end, I mean, we all remember the movie version of it, but it's even more horrible than that. And then what happens to their bodies after that, you know, I guess you know, they're paraded through town and then there are are funerals.
Are these are huge events, right yeah.
Attended by over ten thousand people came to Bonnie's funeral. Funeral they had to throw out like the local drunks and stuff.
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot com for more