Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Lisa Townsend Rodgers was born in Poughkeepsie spent her formative
Speaker 2: years in New York City before eventually moving to Las Vegas.
Speaker 2: She's worked as a journalist and editor for a vast
Speaker 2: array of publications here in this town, as well as
Speaker 2: a teacher and librarian. This book, just out Shameless Women
Speaker 2: of the Underworld is just excellent.
Speaker 3: Lisa, welcome to the program.
Speaker 4: Ah, thank you for having me, and thank you for
Speaker 4: saying so much nice things.
Speaker 3: About my book.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, I really enjoyed it. I tell me
Speaker 2: this walk us through the inspiration. I mean, you've lived
Speaker 2: in this town for a while, and our mob history
Speaker 2: is well known, but it's mostly about guys Tony Spilatro,
Speaker 2: Lefty Rosenthal, Ben Siegel, folks like that. Is that part
Speaker 2: of the inspiration that you felt women, bad girl women
Speaker 2: needed some representation.
Speaker 4: Too, Yeah, I mean, and also being from New York,
Speaker 4: that's another city that has its own history with the Mob.
Speaker 4: And you know, I've always been interested in and you
Speaker 4: know sort of the people who are whose names you
Speaker 4: see mentioned, but nobody really tells you their story, and
Speaker 4: that's really sort of what these women were. You you know,
Speaker 4: we've heard infinitely about Tony Spilatro Lefty, and you keep
Speaker 4: hearing Jerry's name, and she's so important, But who was she?
Speaker 4: What was her deal? You know, same thing with Virginia Hill,
Speaker 4: you know, the flamingo. But who was she? You know,
Speaker 4: you just hear her name all the time. So I
Speaker 4: felt it was you know, that was sort of the inspiration,
Speaker 4: was looking into them, digging into that more before we
Speaker 4: jump into each of the individual characters, tell me a
Speaker 4: bit about the research.
Speaker 2: I mean, the footnotes make it clear that you did
Speaker 2: a lot of reading and did a lot of digging
Speaker 2: on your own.
Speaker 3: How you compile all this stuff?
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, in a way, you know, I've sort
Speaker 4: of you know, you think if I think about when
Speaker 4: I first started reading about Bonnie Parker, I mean, gosh,
Speaker 4: I was probably a teenager. So in a way, you
Speaker 4: could say researching this for most of my advice, but
Speaker 4: you know, mostly I was there over the last ten years.
Speaker 4: I was invited to do a book that was part
Speaker 4: of the Las Vegas Book Festival, and I wrote a
Speaker 4: chapter that was about Vegas in the seventies that was
Speaker 4: about Elvis Hunter, S. Thompson and Jerry Rosenthal about how
Speaker 4: Vegas kind of gives you what you want and then
Speaker 4: takes everything away. And then I did a piece for
Speaker 4: Desert Companion about Virginia Hill because you know who was
Speaker 4: the Flamingo and it turns out it wasn't actually named
Speaker 4: after her. And I started digging into those and then
Speaker 4: you know, I started going, hey, well what about these
Speaker 4: other women? And then my publisher, Anthony, who I knew,
Speaker 4: heard me telling stories about these women because I just
Speaker 4: looked into it and was like, you should write a
Speaker 4: book and lo and behold, I did you know? So
Speaker 4: it was just a lot of internet research. Unfortunately, during
Speaker 4: during a pandemic, I couldn't really go in person to
Speaker 4: a lot of collections. I did go to the Schomberg
Speaker 4: Center in New York obviously UNLV some places in LA
Speaker 4: but you know, it was a lot of online libraries,
Speaker 4: digging up books, getting old magazines, stuff like that.
Speaker 3: Is the mob Museum? Was that a resource for you?
Speaker 2: Here in Las Vegas, we have the Museum of Organized
Speaker 2: Crime and Law Enforcement.
Speaker 3: It's terrific.
Speaker 2: If you've ever been to Las Vegas and you haven't
Speaker 2: seen it, you've missed out. But were they helpful? I
Speaker 2: know Jeff Schumacher from the museum helped write a review.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's absolutely. You know, that's always been a resource,
Speaker 4: you know, I think for anybody who researches the mob
Speaker 4: in law enforcement and for this, you know, they were
Speaker 4: definitely helpful. And they were people I could, you know,
Speaker 4: when I had a question that arose that I couldn't
Speaker 4: just kind of look up, I could kind of go
Speaker 4: to them as a resource. You know, that was sort
Speaker 4: of the value of those places, and you know that is,
Speaker 4: as you said, definitely a fantastic place that people should
Speaker 4: visit when they're in Las Vegas.
Speaker 2: Let's start with a name that pretty much everyone on
Speaker 2: our audience well know. I it's not the first chapter
Speaker 2: in your book. It's Bonnie Parker, and you know Bodnie
Speaker 2: and Clyde. My gosh, I thought I knew a lot
Speaker 2: about her and about them, but this opened up a
Speaker 2: whole new avenues.
Speaker 3: For me as a reader, and it broke my heart.
Speaker 3: This story broke my heart.
Speaker 2: You know, it's been romanticized quite a bit, but gosh,
Speaker 2: you focus on a lot on the time they spend
Speaker 2: on the run. It is grim and nasty and bad.
Speaker 2: So tell me about learning about her. How much of
Speaker 2: this was new to you?
Speaker 4: I mean a lot of it was, you know, as
Speaker 4: I mentioned, I'd always been interested. Maybe that was sort
Speaker 4: of the beginning of my interest in this topic, you know,
Speaker 4: when as a kid. But you know, again you get
Speaker 4: the romantic version, this very Hollywood vision of them, and
Speaker 4: when you start digging into it, you know, unfortunately there
Speaker 4: are a lot of accounts from family members. You can
Speaker 4: you know, since they were so heavily covered, you can
Speaker 4: find a lot of contemporary accounts. But as I dug
Speaker 4: in further just finding out how again, it was just
Speaker 4: they were so desperate, you know, they you know, Bonnie's
Speaker 4: family been kind of middle class but lost everything. Clyde's
Speaker 4: family you know, as I say in the book, the
Speaker 4: Jodes would have pitied them like the Porks had never
Speaker 4: really had a home, you was, just were passed around.
Speaker 4: They lived under an aqueduct, you know. And then when
Speaker 4: they were on the run, it wasn't this sort of
Speaker 4: again glamorous vision of you know, funny cride, We rob banks.
Speaker 4: You know, they knocked over grocery stores to get by,
Speaker 4: basically camped out, you know, and one of the things
Speaker 4: that you know isn't discussed enough I think is also
Speaker 4: just you know, Bonnie was horribly wounded, like she could
Speaker 4: barely walk by the time they died, so you know,
Speaker 4: digging into that. And also that was the chapter that
Speaker 4: took me the longest. For that reason was just having
Speaker 4: to go through everything. Literally, I would say, there was
Speaker 4: a timeline. It's almost you know, week by week.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well you had to probably sort through a lot
Speaker 2: of mythology and toss it aside too, things that have
Speaker 2: been written about him that were not accurate.
Speaker 3: I mean, the.
Speaker 2: Public perceptions probably are way off base based on what
Speaker 2: I just read from you. As you note, if not
Speaker 2: for Bonnie of the Bonny and Clyde, Clyde might have
Speaker 2: been forgotten. It's just some two bit punk who got
Speaker 2: shot by police.
Speaker 4: Oh absolutely. I don't even know how interested the police
Speaker 4: would have really been. I mean, they would have gotten him.
Speaker 4: But you know, the media coverage was always about her,
Speaker 4: and again it was just the idea that there was
Speaker 4: a woman involved, which you know is still surprising to people,
Speaker 4: but back then was what And also, as I mentioned,
Speaker 4: you know she was and this is again one of
Speaker 4: the things I discovered from research like an incredibly bright woman,
Speaker 4: you know. I mean, she wrote those poems which are
Speaker 4: sort of you know, people sort of oh, they're sort
Speaker 4: of dogg roll in a way, but they're well done.
Speaker 4: She staged most of those photos, you know, she was
Speaker 4: very good with media and image, and at time when
Speaker 4: people didn't understand that, and I'm sure even she didn't
Speaker 4: really understand what she was doing, but at a certain
Speaker 4: point she recognized that they were going to be spoken about,
Speaker 4: and she wanted to say in that. One thing that
Speaker 4: was interesting is, you know, out in prim they have
Speaker 4: the Bonnie and Clyde dusk car right, which is unfortunately
Speaker 4: now like literally in the middle of the casino floor
Speaker 4: used to be a little bit off so you can
Speaker 4: sort of focus on it more, but now it's just
Speaker 4: sort of literally ringed with slot machines. But when you
Speaker 4: look at things like the newspaper clippings they literally have
Speaker 4: up there, they talk about how they aren't that final
Speaker 4: poem that she wrote. The newspapers already had it when
Speaker 4: they died, or somebody had it to give to them,
Speaker 4: you know, And literally she had said, don't hand this
Speaker 4: off until after we passed, because I want to make
Speaker 4: sure I get our final word.
Speaker 2: In U share with us as you describe her. I mean,
Speaker 2: she was bright, and she was smart. She could have
Speaker 2: gone places, she had high hopes. She was personal in
Speaker 2: that she would win people over it, converse them. She
Speaker 2: was interested in other people. And how does she go wrong?
Speaker 2: Where does that go wrong? Just her family was in poverty.
Speaker 2: But tell the story of how she hooks up with Clyde.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean the thing is, yeah, she was this
Speaker 4: honorable student in this sweetheart, but also she did have
Speaker 4: this sort of you know, she was the girl who
Speaker 4: fight you on the playground side. And basically she got
Speaker 4: married very young because you know, she was a dramatic creature.
Speaker 4: She wanted to fall in love. She married this other guy, Broy,
Speaker 4: who was also a criminal who wound up getting arrested.
Speaker 4: So she was actually married when she met Clyde, and
Speaker 4: she was still married when they both died. You know,
Speaker 4: but you know, he was in jail. She had lost
Speaker 4: her job because of the depression, and she was taking
Speaker 4: care of a friend, just hanging out in her house
Speaker 4: and he walked in and it was, you know, that
Speaker 4: sort of mythical love at first sight. You hear about
Speaker 4: where two people look at each other and the room
Speaker 4: stops and everybody sees it. And it was that kind
Speaker 4: of devotion until the end. Basically, I mean, that's sort
Speaker 4: of what brought her low, was just she worshiped him,
Speaker 4: and to be fair, he felt the same way about her.
Speaker 4: And you know, she kind of followed him down this
Speaker 4: path and at the beginning of their relationship she begged
Speaker 4: him to reform, but he went up in East Camp Prison,
Speaker 4: a terrible place where he was horrifically mistreated, where he
Speaker 4: committed his first murder and of self defense, to be fair,
Speaker 4: and he was then consumed with revenge that he was
Speaker 4: going to go back knock over East to prison free
Speaker 4: everybody kill the guards. You know that that vengeance fantasy,
Speaker 4: and and that was really kind of what their crimes
Speaker 4: Free was about.
Speaker 1: In a way.
Speaker 4: He spent more time knocking over armories and trying to
Speaker 4: get people to help him take Easton than he did
Speaker 4: trying to rob and make money. And you know, she
Speaker 4: sort of followed him down that path. And I mean,
Speaker 4: to be fair again, he actually did break people out
Speaker 4: of Eastern Prison, yeah, and she helped him. So there
Speaker 4: is that.
Speaker 2: He doesn't become a big time criminal until right toward
Speaker 2: the end the breakout of prison, and also they do
Speaker 2: a he breaks people out and then they start robbing
Speaker 2: banks and their actual big time criminals. But as you note,
Speaker 2: most of what they did was robbing liquor stores, gas stations,
Speaker 2: grocery stores, small time stuff, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, stealing cars, stuff like that. Again, just kind
Speaker 4: of enough to keep going, you know. And also one
Speaker 4: thing I else to do point out is that you know,
Speaker 4: Clyde was not a great planner, so.
Speaker 3: It's a great gang.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he was a driver. If he had been like
Speaker 4: I'm going to be the driver for a big gang,
Speaker 4: he could have been a big time criminal. But you know,
Speaker 4: trying to lead like whatever local bumpkins and you know,
Speaker 4: recent escapees he could ring together for a couple of
Speaker 4: weeks was not going to get him to you know,
Speaker 4: Dillinger's status.
Speaker 2: They get a lot of bad stuff, some of it circumstantial.
Speaker 2: They get into circumstances where somebody else who's with them
Speaker 2: as part of their little gang goes overboard kills somebody,
Speaker 2: and then then they're really wanted. But they really get
Speaker 2: become notorious because of these photos they get released.
Speaker 3: You have the one in your book.
Speaker 2: A Bonnie with their leg up on the bumper of
Speaker 2: a getaway car, holding a gun and smoking a cigar,
Speaker 2: and it was all stage.
Speaker 3: He had staged this thing. They took some photos.
Speaker 2: How is it that those photos get out into the
Speaker 2: public and how are they used and what's the overall effect?
Speaker 4: Well, how the photos got out into the public was
Speaker 4: during the Battle of Joplin, as they called it, when
Speaker 4: they took a cabin in Joplin, Missouri. Bonnie Clyde, Clyde's
Speaker 4: brother Buck, his wife Blanch, and the perennial sidekick Wd
Speaker 4: and the you know, they are foolish and noisy and rambunctious,
Speaker 4: and the police notice they are there, think they're just bootleggers.
Speaker 4: Obviously not you know, there's a shootout. They have to
Speaker 4: flee and leave everything, something they had to do constantly,
Speaker 4: just leave everything. And one of the things they left
Speaker 4: behind was this camera where which they had used to
Speaker 4: just you know, take photos. And there were you know,
Speaker 4: cheesecake photos of Blanche and a lot of other photos
Speaker 4: on the road. But they had done a series of photos.
Speaker 4: And you know, there's also the legendary one of also
Speaker 4: Bonnie pointing a gun at Clyde, and so when these
Speaker 4: got out again, they published ones, Oh yeah, here's Clyde
Speaker 4: with his gun, and YadA, YadA, YadA. But people had
Speaker 4: photos like that before. The photos of Bonnie posing with
Speaker 4: a gun were not something that had really been seen before,
Speaker 4: so of course, you know, what are the newspapers going
Speaker 4: to run with? And then that turned into this whole
Speaker 4: myth of like, she runs the gang, she's this criminal,
Speaker 4: because again it's kind of a better story, and that's
Speaker 4: you know, who really knew at the time, and especially
Speaker 4: because you know she had staged the photo smoking a
Speaker 4: cigar with a pistol on pointing a gun at Clyde.
Speaker 2: You know, it's it's amazing you detail their exploits and
Speaker 2: so much, I mean nearly everything that they do is
Speaker 2: just circumstance. They bounce from one hideout to another, trying
Speaker 2: to stay ahead of the law, make really bad decisions
Speaker 2: pretty much every step of the way that eventually, you know,
Speaker 2: at leads to some terrible situations. And but you know,
Speaker 2: there was no master plan. They did not have access
Speaker 2: to criminal resources like the big name gangsters of that era.
Speaker 2: They were on her own, and it seemed like they
Speaker 2: made so many dumb mistakes, stay someplace too long, or
Speaker 2: drop the bloody bandages on the side of the road
Speaker 2: that gets the police on their trail. Talk about that
Speaker 2: period a little bit and how it ends in such
Speaker 2: a bad way. The last couple of weeks of their life,
Speaker 2: as you described in great detail, was absolutely horrible, horrible.
Speaker 4: Yeah, as I had mentioned, Bonnie had had this horrible
Speaker 4: accident which unfortunately was caused by Clyde just driving too
Speaker 4: fast and crashing off of a bridge. She winds up
Speaker 4: pinned under a burning car, getting hit with battery acid.
Speaker 4: You know, her, she's basically crippled. You know, she is
Speaker 4: burned to the bone, in agony, completely wrecked, and they
Speaker 4: have nothing for her. All they can do is just
Speaker 4: drive around on back roads and try to steal aspirin
Speaker 4: for her, you know, And that is sort of also
Speaker 4: one of the moments where you know, Clyde actually almost
Speaker 4: grows up a little bit and you know, realize that
Speaker 4: he will never leave her, and he's going to do
Speaker 4: anything to protect her. But unfortunately, you know, again that
Speaker 4: doesn't involve trying to make any sort of concrete plans
Speaker 4: or get her help or get organized, and she won't
Speaker 4: leave him. He does try to get her to leave him,
Speaker 4: and so towards the end they you know, they do
Speaker 4: this breakout of East and they sort of pull the
Speaker 4: gang back together and that's where they kind of do
Speaker 4: some bank robberies and manage it, but things fall apart.
Speaker 4: They wind up with this this woman Mary, who sort
Speaker 4: of causes problems with Bonnie. She's the girlfriend of one
Speaker 4: of the new gang members. She stirs up trouble. Eventually
Speaker 4: that all breaks up because they try to convince Bonnie
Speaker 4: she should kill Clyde and is sleep and as you
Speaker 4: can imagine, Bonnie doesn't take kindly to that, and neither
Speaker 4: does Clyde, so break up the gang. So then they're
Speaker 4: back to just sort of ping ponging around trying to
Speaker 4: just knock over whatever they can. The reason reduced actually
Speaker 4: taking things from their family, like begging their own starving
Speaker 4: families that they used to give things for, like can
Speaker 4: you get us some food and blankets. At one point
Speaker 4: they had to flee and were so bloody and shot
Speaker 4: up they had to just get rid of their clothes
Speaker 4: and drive around with sheep songs, and you know, at
Speaker 4: the end, their last gang member kind of you know,
Speaker 4: as sells them out basically, you know, his father does
Speaker 4: to try to save his son. They wind up they
Speaker 4: had tried to avoid killing cops, but they wind up
Speaker 4: killing cops because gang members drink and get crazy. And
Speaker 4: this is what then sort of also pushes the we
Speaker 4: must get Bonnie and Clyde at any cost, and at
Speaker 4: the end they're sort of sold out. They're set up
Speaker 4: in this ambush and that's the end of them. And
Speaker 4: one interesting kind note is that Ted Hinton, who had
Speaker 4: been one of the who was one of the chief
Speaker 4: law enforcement officers, had actually known von before she met Clyde,
Speaker 4: and she was a waitress and he had a crush
Speaker 4: on her. She worked near the courthouse, and she was
Speaker 4: literally one of the people who put a bullet in
Speaker 4: her many bullets, and he was the person who opened
Speaker 4: the door and caught her body as it fell out,
Speaker 4: which is just sort of chilling.
Speaker 2: Yeah, your description of what happens at the end, I mean,
Speaker 2: we all remember the movie version of it, but it's
Speaker 2: even more horrible than that. And then what happens to
Speaker 2: their bodies after that, you know, I guess you know,
Speaker 2: they're paraded through town and then there are are funerals.
Speaker 3: Are these are huge events, right yeah.
Speaker 4: Attended by over ten thousand people came to Bonnie's funeral.
Speaker 4: Funeral they had to throw out like the local drunks
Speaker 4: and stuff.
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