On 14 February 1929, seven members of "Bugs" Moran's gang were stooped by two men in police uniform in what appeared to be an ordinary raid. The uniformed officers asked the men to line up facing a wall with their arms raised. At that point four more men cam in bearing machine guns and virtually ripped the gangsters apart with a hail of bullets. This was the infamous St Valentine's Day Massacre.

The police investigated but no arrests were made. Intriguingly the FBI did not become involved at this stage, principally as there was no evidence that the assailants had crossed a state border.

Roll on nearly six years, and in January 1935 (by which time the disastrous Prohibition period had ended) Byron Bolton is arrested in connection with a kidnapping. Having been tried and convicted he is then reported in the Chicago press as having admitted to being one of the six participants in the St Valentine's Day Massacre, and naming his fellow killers. The response of the FBI was to deny that Bolton had made such a confession.

This book does not seek to investigate the accuracy or otherwise of Bolton's alleged confession. Instead, it reproduces the various newspaper articles along with extracts from the FBI files, released under the American Freedom of Information legislation. This gives a fascinating insight into the FBI's methodology and into some of the idiosyncrasies of FBI Director, J Edgar Hoover. ( )