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The G-Man and the Diamond King: A True FBI Crime Story of the 1930s
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About The G-Man And The Diamond King: A True FBI Crime
In the summer of 1935, a nasty career criminal by the name of George Barrett shot to death a young FBI agent beside a flower garden in the little town of College Corner, which sat astraddle the state line between Ohio and Indiana. Indeed, when the shooting occurred, Barrett fired from Indiana and the agent fell dead in Ohio. It was only one peculiarity of the case of Barrett vs. J. Edgar Hoover's fledgling agency as it struggled for supremacy over the rampaging criminal elements of the chaotic 1930s.The case made national headlines for a number of reasons: the Cincinnati agent, Nelson Klein, was the first FBI agent to be killed in the line of duty; his killer, Barrett, a one-time Kentucky moonshiner who had killed his own mother, was only the second man tried under a new federal statute that made the murder of a government agent a federal offense-and the first to be executed. Even the execution itself was novel, for the verdict was death by hanging, and Indiana used electrocution, which necessitated bringing in the famous "human hangman," Phil Hanna-a story in himself-who dismantled an Illinois gallows and reassembled it in Indianapolis, expressly for George Barrett.The G-Man and the Diamond King: A True FBI Crime Story of the 1930s is not only the story of two men whose paths crossed in a backyard shootout with tragic results, but it is, too, the story of one of America's most dangerously exciting decades and the birth of modern crime-fighting.Even the story behind the story itself was captivating, for it began when the author, former Special Agent William Plunkett, stood in a Southgate, Kentucky, cemetery for Nelson Klein's memorial, held nearly seventy-five years after Klein's death. Overcome with melancholia, Plunkett took on Klein as his personal case: who was Klein, his life ended almost before it began; who was this man Barrett; and how did they end up tragically in a College Corner backyard?Plunkett's tenacious unraveling of this long-for
