THE SUPER-CROOKS: A Rogue's Gallery of Famous Hustlers, Swindlers and Thieves

It's impossible not to shoot this down no matter where one aims -- so obviously a cheap shot job itself produced with nothing more in mind than a quick cash-in on the crook craze. Out of the thirteen included only a few of these supposed razzle-dazzlers are people one could conceivably want to know more about: London's 17th-century fence Moll Cutpurse (with an a.k.a. like that how could she fail immortality), or Izzy Schawartzberg, a New Yorker who died in 1970, a hood with a flair and a finger in every imaginable con-pie including the college basketball fixes which shocked the country in the early '50's. But why oh why yet again Jessie James, Willie Sutton, John Dillinger? The editor was guided, he explains, by two criteria in making his choices: the characters could not be violent people (the rule was bent to include James and Dillinger) and they had to have distinguished themselves by more than one glorious moment (another bent rule: the Brink's Gang is here, so are England's Great Train Robbers) but judging from the overall quality here, notwithstanding John Toland and Quentin Reynolds, one wonders if easy copyright permission didn't have a lot to do with it.