Mexican drug lords who are beheaded in the middle of the night. Civil war conspiracies and to bring down the late Martin Luther king. Let me introduce you to this cheery, cheery group of guys. [laughter] ill be going in no particular order so the cspan cameraman will have to move around. This is the First Complete biography of the great gangster that cuts down all the hollywood myth about capone and even about the great heroic, absolutely now as we know nonheroic elliott ness as the gman who brought him down. Hampton sides author of hell hound on his trail has pieced together a dramatic ticking clock narrative of the last days of Martin Luther king going back and forth from the days of kings life to his funeral. To the manhunt which at the time was the largest in history for his assassin James Earl Ray. And most amazing hampton took the title of his book from a Robert Johnson song, probably the First Time Ever thats been done in american literature. And speaking of titles, we now have james l. Swanson author of the book with undoubtedbly the longest title of 2010 bloody crimes the chase for Jefferson Davis and the death pageant of lincolns corpse. Its in many ways a sequel to manhunt the novel, bestselling Nonfiction Book that he came out a few years ago about the 12day hunt for james wilkes booth the assassin of lincoln. He follows stories of lincoln and davis as the civil war end. The trajectory in which lincoln follows the body before being buried in illinois while at the same time theres a hunt for Jefferson Davis, the head of the confederacy, who is attempting , and this i never knew, to perhaps make his way to texas according to some accounts to rebuild the confederacy there. Finally, malcolm beat has written a book on joaquin posa. Entitled the last narco. It traces his rise to power and the futile attempts to get at him. Please note everyone that the first three authors ive introduced have written about historical figures, long dead. Mr. Beith has written about figures who are very much alive and perhaps willing to come across the border even to a sweet little spot in austin on a sunday morning to kill us all. Thank you, malcolm. [laughter] everybody here has had serious careers. Big has written for the wall street journal. Hampton has written for outside magazine. Beith has written for newsweek, slate. Com, foreign policy, james intelligence weekly and the soldier of Fortune Magazine . What did you write a story about how to buy bazookas . And then swanson is a very respected attorney whos worked for respected think tanks who out of the blue when there have been 15,000 titles on lincoln alone so far, figured out a seam that has never before been mind, mined, the hunt for booth and turns the thing into an International Bestseller called manhunt and now is back with another one. Around the country lots of writers, wouldbebookwriters that would seethe with fury that the son of a bitch pulled off one. These guys are authors even if they are on the top of the bestseller list they have got to pay up their books every few years to pay the mortgage and send their kids off to school so thats my first question. I write books on lou gehrig and jakie robinson, heroes of american life. Hampsons last book was on kit carson, the great heroic western hero. Go up and down the table and explain before you even did research why you chose the subject in this characters that you did . Jonathan well, i wrote these two books about these great guys, these heroic men, action figures, baseball players, lou gehrig and jackie robinson. I knew i didnt want to do a third baseball player and i thought who else used baseball bats . Al capone . [laughter] it just seemed like a natural. I like stories with action. Im not sure i could write a biography of a writer or a scientist. I dont know if i could do it but these are stories that have a lot of action and a lot of drama and ive kind of tried to think about personalities who maybe we think we know but we really dont. And capone fit that category and i found a ton of new material that really told the story in a new different way and challenged a lot of preconceptions. It wasnt elliott ness. And he wasnt is psychopath that Robert De Niro made him out to be. Malcolm i was in mexico covering i had to cover the drug war. It was the big story and i knew right now going on in mexico besides the violence thats going on, theres a battle in society between the government trying to convince the people that there for the first time in mexican history they are the good days, but you have people like elchappo the impoverished and the disenfranchised looked to him as their hero. Its a struggle of the two elements of society, whos going to win. Its more than just a manhunt for him. Its luring people over to effectively the good side. James in approximate my case, it was really fate or destiny. I was born on february 12th, Abraham Lincolns birthday. In chicago, illinois, lincoln country. And as a boy people gave me lincoln trinkets, souvenirs. And it really began when my grandmother who is a veteran of the old chicago tabloid newspaper era gave me for a tenth birthday a framed engaving of the pistol. And framed with that engaving was part a of clipping from the chicago tribune, the morning that lincoln died, and i remember reading those headlines over and over again. The president shot. Both, the actor, assassin. Jumps to the stage, cries out and runs out the back door and at that point someone had cut off the clipping in midsentence. And i remember as a boy when that clipping was hanging on my wall i said to myself, must be 100 times. I want to know what happened. Whats the rest of the story. Ive got to know. Manhunt was the book i really wanted to write. My parents kidded me. Its a good thing they didnt have me on Grover Clevelands birthday or adolph hitlers birthday. And what else happened you mentioned in manhunt there was this chase for davis. You mentioned in a sentence or two theres a long funeral pageant for lincoln. So i decided manhunt was first part of the trigology of three Great Stories of the end of the year and three important journeys that effect history to this day. The chase for booth, the funeral journey that made lincoln from man to american saint and the , incredible six week hunt for Jefferson Davis. Ultimately i view them as one story with three great parts. Hampton i guess in my case, i was interested in going back to my hometown. I grew up in memphis and had left memphis and hadnt been there for many years and wanted to go back and understand this Pivotal Moment in memphis history that the assassination of Martin Luther king probably the most devastating most episode in americas history. I wanted to write about blues be the cotton, the mississippi river, important subjects like barbecue. And this is sort of what initially gravitated why i gravitated towards this story. But then James Earl Ray sort of took over. This guy who kept he keeps making left turns. He is into locksmithing courses, ballroom dancing, trying to become a porn director. He is hes taking hypnosis, undergoing hypnosis. He gets a nose job one month before the assassination. You know, this James Earl Ray in narrative terms became a gift that kept on giving. And kept me occupied for a couple of years. Skip what then happens because youre looking at the subjects all of which have been written about extensively including ray. And except for youre the only guy, malcolm, that had really touched the subject unknown to anybody, really. What was the moment the aha moment where you went ive got some research here that no one else has . What did you find that made you think, this is going to be better than just another book about the assassination, another book about capone . Another book about lincoln . And by the way, all you wouldbe writers, the key is to start collecting memorabilia from the cradle. Is that it . So what was it . Malcolm for myself it was actually in the Mexican Press theres a lot about written about him. The key was filtering through and finding what was real and what was not. This is a man like many fugitives a lot of mythology surrounding him. What i found through talking through law enforcement, mexican military, official sources and then low level traffickers people on the ground, i could actually i had a moment where i realized i know more about this guy than the authorities do. And then, you know, we started talking and theyd ask me whether i could share any information. They shared it back and it was a sort of i was almost on their you know, on their team but as a journalist, of course detached. Skip malcolm was described as risking life and limb to get these stories . Malcolm to a point. I like my life. There are a lot of mexican journalists who are daily trying to report on this stuff and get in deep. Were talking about Serious Organized Crime and about 45 journalists have been killed since 2000. So i risk my life to a certain point. They are risking their lives every day much further. Jonathan i definitely did not risk my life in writing about capone. All of his relatives who i interviewed are really old now. [laughter] im pretty sure theyre not really connected anymore. Theyre really sweet people. For me the aha moment and as you said there was a huge amount of stories written about capone over the years, movies, tv shows, but early in my research, was there anything new to say about this guy because he had become a cartoon character. I decided very quickly that elliott ness would not be the hero of the story. The guy who i identified as the hero was george e. Q. Johnson. Anybody heard of george e. Q. Johnson . Not i saw one hand. Thats more than i usually get. He was the u. S. Attorney who prosecuted capone. And i very quickly just checked to see if any of his kids are alive. It turns out his son was still alive. He was 95 years old. I found an article in 1980s where he said trying to get somebody to write his fathers story. And hed given all his papers to this College Professor in nebraska in the hopes somebody would finally tell his fathers story. I contacted this College Professor. He had still all of these original materials from the capone trial. Things that were not in the national archives. Not in the library congress. Nobody had this stuff except for this College Professor who was collecting dust in his office for 25 years. Not just new material, new material that told a story. Told a story that capone was a scapegoat and the federal government was hell bent to put him away, and part because Herbert Hoover needed some kind of Public Relations score. And they wanted to make an example of the nations most famous bootlegger. And a guy who admitted he was a criminal and yet they couldnt put him away all these years. Suddenly i had a story. I had a story about this notorious criminal guilty of so many things and the government cant put him away for even the least of these crimes, tax evasion. And that was it for me. That was the moment where i found found my theme as you put it. Hampton i had a moment very similar to that. Early in the research for hell hound i was in memphis at the university of memphis. And a curator at the rare book and manuscript collections there said theres a gentleman by the name of vince that you might want to contact. And he gave me business card. I thought some guy had some stuff. About a year later i finally did get around to calling vince and he was very suspicious of me at first. He didnt know what i was up to. He said all right. Ill meet you in a back room of a back room of a back room of the Memphis Public Library and i want you to know that everything i have is backed up on multiple hard drives in various bank vaults around the city. In case i was going to pick him off or something. And we met. And he showed me what he had. And what he had was the preeminent digital archive of the king assassination. More than 20,000 documents. Many, many videos. Photographs, crime scene analysis. Unredacted fbi stuff. And also stuff from scotland yard, from the Royal Canadian mounted police, the Mexican Federal raleighs i mean, all this stuff all in one place. In digital form that could be very conveniently emailed to me. And so everywhere i go on this book tour i speak about this man, vince hughes, who was the dispatcher on duty on april 4th, 1968. He was the guy that said, white mustang heading north on is out on south main. And this event touched his life profoundly and he decided to devote the rest of his his entire retirement to putting together this digital archive which eventually will be put , online and open to the public. So this was sort of the first book that would make use of the vince hughes collection. So when you find somebody named vince and if youre a writer i mean, i think we all need a vince and thank god i found mine. James i found my way in, in each book in a couple ways. When i do my books, the original materials are very important to me. I dont want photocopies. I dont want to read photographs of things or relics. I want to hold in my hand the original civil war newspaper from washington and richmond. I want to feel that rag paper. Its texture. I want to see where the ads are laid out and i want to look at their civil war photographs and look at their sepia tone and if anyone had written information on the back. I want look at the original photographs and go to places where it happened. And in manhunt it was too relics i just stared at for a couple hours and then i thought i found the way in. One was a lock of hair with Abraham Lincoln cut by secretary of war stanton. He gave that lock of hair to the wife of the secretary of the navy and she framed it with flowers that had adorned Abraham Lincolns coffin at the white house funeral on april 19. And i have it in my hands and i looked at it. And i thought about it for an hour just staring at it. And i thought now im in the peterson house. Now i know exactly what happened. Now i can feel what happened. And i can convey to the reader what happened. I did the same thing in fords theatre. When i had in my hands a piece of laura keens costume. The actress in the play who held lincolns bleeding head in her lap and i had the dress screened stained with his blood and brain matter and im in that theater box right now i can see whats happening. And in the case of the new book, bloody crimes, i went to the cemetery in georgetown where Abraham Lincoln buried his son for three years, willy, who died in 1862. Its an aboveground tomb. Lincoln would often go there alone and apparently even have the coffin removed from its spot and look at his sons embalmed body. I discovered when i went to that cemetery Jefferson Davis son , was buried just a few yards from where Willy Lincoln had died. That boy died in washington in the and i suddenly had an image 1850s, of Abraham Lincoln walking alone down that desolate path of the far corner of the cemetery near rock creek and the trees walking past the grave of , Jefferson Davis boy to visit his own. It was amazing. And then the other relic that meant so much to me in this book was the series of letters during jefferson and marina davis during his time in captivity. The letters between them totally forgotten today are to me like the love letters between john and abigail adams. So it was through these original places and things that i felt i gained my point of entry and i could see the story in a way that id never read in a book before. Skip and you guys think writers are not obsessed. [laughter] but its an interesting point that james brings out. He immerses himself by staring at lincolns lock of hair. What do the rest of you guys do to it immerse yourself in that time period . Like jonathan, i saw that youtube thing you did where youre walking past capones original saloon but, of course its an empty lot now. So how do you the other three of you get into the era you write about . Jonathan well, for me living in chicago helps cause im literally walking down the streets where capone walked and there are still a few places where you can find places that he visited that are very much the same. The house where he lives the house that he bought for his mother and for his family when he first started to make a little bit of money is a really revealing place. And i spent time there. I got to know the woman who lives there and i would go in the house and i would look in the basement and see the little crucifix up to where she said was the wine cellar. You get a feel for this family by seeing this very modest working class house that he bought in 1924 when he was unknown and was just starting to make money as a bootlegger and making more money than he dreamed. What we forget about guys like capone they were a product of their culture and family. But more than anything, hes a product of prohibition. And when booze became illegal suddenly guys who thought all their lives they were going to be maybe a Truck Drivers or pick pockets or, you know, just tough guys who worked in bars, which was what capone was doing , and suddenly they have a chance to start raking in money like they never dreamed in. And suddenly he buys this house and he doesnt buy a mansion on the lake he buys this working class house in a working Class Community across the street from the street that his mother wants to attend and where her mother goes to say mass every day. So you do start living with these people and you start having dreams about them, i found. I dont know i dont know if any of my panelists frequently dreamed about their subject. Hampton i think its really important, you know, physically to go to these places like