• 176 pages
• 7 x 10
• Hardcover
• ISBN 978-1939710-260
• Copyright 2015

By William E. Plunkett

In the summer of 1935, a nasty career criminal by the name of George Barrett shot to death a young FBI agent beside a flower garden in the little town of College Corner, which sat astraddle the state line between Ohio and Indiana. Indeed, when the shooting occurred, Barrett fired from Indiana and the agent fell dead in Ohio. It was only one peculiarity of the case of Barrett vs. J. Edgar Hoover's fledgling agency as it struggled for supremacy over the rampaging criminal elements of the chaotic 1930's.

The case made national headlines for a number of reasons: the Cincinnati agent, Nelson Klein, was the first FBI agent to be killed in the line of duty; his killer, Barrett, a one-time Kentucky moonshiner who had killed his own mother, was only the second man tried under a new federal statute that made the murder of a government agent a federal offense - and the first to be executed. 

This story is not only the story of two men whose paths crossed in a backyard shootout with tragic results, but it is, too, the story of one of America's most dangerously exciting decades and the birth of modern crime-fighting.

Even the story behind the story itself was captivating.