It began unexpectedly in the upscale Louisville neighborhood of Harrods Creek in the autumn of 1934 when the socialite Alice Stoll was taken for ransom. The kidnapper, who’d spent time in an insane asylum, was a small-time grifter with delusions of grandeur who gained entrance to the house by masquerading as a telephone repairman.

Making off with what amounted to a million dollars in today’s terms, he was called “Johnny Spendthrift” by the press. Buying an ostentatious Packard, he and his mistress drove coast-to-coast, staying in the best hotels and remaining miraculously invisible to a cadre of J. Edgar Hoover’s best agents.Eventually labeled “Public Enemy No. 1,” he was brought to bay not by Hoover’s men but by his mistress’s betrayal.

This, however, marked only the first part of Thomas Robinson’s eccentric life, for what followed was two trials, a death sentence, a tour of America’s legendary hardcore prisons—from Atlanta to Alcatraz—and two escapes. And all of it set against the backdrop of the desperate 1930s when the country was trying to reinvent itself.

Ex-agent William E. Plunkett’s The G-Men and the Heiress is the strange story of the kidnapper, the kidnapped—and the tireless G-Men who worked against odds to create the country’s foremost investigative agency.

Wanted Thomas H. Robinson Jr