Running With Bonnie and Clyde: The Ten Fast Years of Ralph Fults

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Summary: Running with Bonnie and Clyde
Review: Great Story! Lots of facts, fairly accurate except for Bonniand Clyde's actual death event. This book uses the Bonnie and Clyde movie version of their fatal end. This is not the way it happened.

Rating:
Summary: Running with Bonnie and Clyde
Review: Great Story! Lots of facts, pretty accurate except for Bonnie and Clyde's death. This book uses the movie Bonnie and Clyde version of their fatal end. This is not the way it happened.

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Summary: The stories Ralph Fults told me. Personally!
Review: I live in Dallas, and everyone has a Bonnie & Clyde story. I was always curious about outlaws, but only by reading about them. I met Ralph Fults when I was about 14. I believe he worked as a security guard at the Buckner Orphanage. I was there occasionally when our soccer team would play on the Orphanages grounds. He would tell these stories that seemed like some movie. Some detail though reminded me of stories my moms best friend had told us. I always figured he was full of hot air. Years later I read an article in Dallas' Parade section of a News Paper. It was that man I had heard tell so many stories. I then asked my moms friend about her childhood. Turns out she had grown up across the street and down 2 houses from Bonnie. She was always fetching oranges and whatever fruit to send with the gang when they'd leave Dallas. There were a couple of photos she showed me with all these people in a Basment or cellar where they'd visit and hideout. The Basement/cellar location had been my biggist memory from my mothers friend. What she recalled fit perfectly with Ralph Fults' recollections. After reading this book and having heard some these storie years ago, Ralph's memory hasn't seemed to change. I would put his view on Clyde, Bonnie, Buck, and the running from the law above most for a realistic idea on what it was like to barely survive in those times and why they chose the path they chose.

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Summary: Mixed Reactions
Review: Running With Bonnie and Clyde may be the best book yet on Texas' favorite Depression outlaws. The extensive documentation is impressive, priceless interviews with now deceased Barrow and Parker kinfolk, former associates and adversaries, and previously unpublished photos makes this an invaluable addition to the library of any '30's gangster aficionado. But problems exist here, too. One is that the recollections of one of Phillips' principal informers, former Barrow gangster Ralph Fults, are sometimes questionable. From past testimony of James Mullens, Floyd Hamilton and others, it is well authenticated that the Eastham prison break was planned from the inside by Raymond Hamilton and that Clyde became involved almost by accident, which makes one wonder about Fults' allegation that the Barrow gang was formed with the intention of oneday staging a crashout. The $33,000 bank robbery Phillips reports in 1932, based on the recollections of Fults, raises more questions than it answers. Phillips gives no exact date for the robbery but, on pages 68-69, reports that it was of the First National Bank in Lawrence, Kansas. In his source notes, however, Phillips expresses uncertainty as to the location of the bank or the amount stolen and admits that the crime "cannot be verified by hard evidence" but accepts the story on the trusting basis that it was the only Fults tale that didn't check out! So was the robbery in Lawrence or somewhere else? Was $33,000 taken? Or more? Or less? Where do these details come from? If Fults provided this information it should have been easy to confirm through contemporary newspaper accounts. Phillips owes his readers a major explanation here. Later, describing the ambush of Bonnie and Clyde, Phillips wrongly records that every man in the posse was armed with a Browning Automatic Rifle. The only B.A.R. present, other than the three in Clyde's car, was fired by Deputy Ted Hinton, as both he and Hamer reported. Phillips seems to have a thing about Brownings, though. A photo on page 245 shows an officer armed with a Remington Model 8 Autoloader--the type of rifle carried by Hamer and Gault at the ambush--which is misidentified as a B.A.R. The author's gun expertise may be somewhat lacking but guns play such a prominent role in the Bonnie and Clyde story that it demands accurate firearm identification. This may be the best Bonnie and Clyde book yet but it remains seriously flawed.

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Summary: Good to the Last Page
Review: This is the story of a criminal in the 1930's who was part of the Barrow gang, and whom we've previously heard little if any about. Though a good part of the book is about his time spent with Bonnie and Clyde, it's also about his own career in crime and the atrocities of the Texas prison system of the era. The book is well written and also very well researched. The author is to be applauded for his extensive list of resources. Mr. Fults, the ex-gang member, does put a sympathetic spin on Barrow and Parker. But he was there, and he got to know them in a different way than a lawman or reporter. The book contains some good photos, many which were new to me. Well done!