Posts Tagged ‘Bonnie Parker’
Youthful Crimestoppers for the Twenty-First Century…
by Ted McCagg
Via the wonderful Libraryland.
As we contemplate the clues that surround us, we might recall that it was on this date in 1934 that Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were ambushed and killed on a rural road near Gibsland, Louisiana, by a posse of four Texas Rangers and two Louisiana Troopers armed with Browning Automatic Rifles sporting 20 round magazines with armor piercing bullets. The barrage that caught the bandits in their car reportedly left each with 50 bullet wounds– and left the ambushers deaf for 30 minutes after their attack.
The dispatch of Barrow and Parker was the beginning of the end of the “Public Enemy era” of the 1930s. New federal statutes that made bank robbery and kidnapping federal offenses, the growing coordination of local jurisdictions by the FBI, and the installation of two-way radios in police cars combined to make the free-roaming outlaw lifestyle much more difficult in the summer of 1934 than it had been just a few months before. Indeed, two months after Gibsland, John Dillinger was ambushed and killed in Chicago; three months after that, Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd took 14 FBI bullets in the back in Ohio; and one month after that, Lester “Baby Face Nelson” Gillis shot it out, and lost, in Illinois. By 1935, Public Enemies had migrated pretty completely to the Silver Screen.
Bonnie and Clyde, 1933 (source)
Alert: Avoiding embarrassing exposure…
As Sacha Baron Cohen roams the U.S. searching for folks to inveigle into appearing in his next film, he is operating behind a series of dummy companies and web sites intended to mask his involvement in the follow-up to his smash Borat.
In his new movie, Cohen appears as “Bruno,” a gay Austrian journalist who, like Borat, asks embarrassing (and often salacious) questions. Prospective interviewees– e.g., ballroom dancers, Alabama National Guard officials, and a white supremacist– are told that Bruno is working with Amesbury Chase, a Los Angeles-based production company, and are directed to the Amesbury Chase web site, on which the firm is described as having “world class facilities, and state-of-the art equipment to help you create dynamic and compelling content.”
The firm’s address is actually a box at Sunset Blvd. Mailboxes. And the company and its web site were both created within the last 18 months. Three other Cohen front companies– Cold Stream Productions, Coral Blue Productions, and Chromium Films–all use, as the reader will see, the same mailbox drop, phone number, and web site template as Amesbury Chase.
So, if an uber-stylish man with a microphone and a teutonic accent approaches you, claiming to have a Sunset Boulevard address…
(Thanks, Smoking Gun)
As we prepare to mince words, we might wish an alias-free happy birthday to Clyde Barrow, who teamed with Bonnie Parker to terrorize bankers and lawmen across the Mid-West through the 30s; the masculine half of “Bonnie and Clyde” was born on this date in 1909.
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