One of America’s most exclusive clubs turns 60 this month. And none of its members even joined the club willingly.
They are the 523 fugitives who made it to the FBI’s Most Wanted list — criminals who fled from federal justice and are deemed particularly dangerous menaces to society.
Over 480 of the fugitives have been apprehended. A third were captured thanks to help from the public, which was alerted by the FBI’s Most Wanted posters. The rest — all but the current 10 — were dropped from the list because the FBI no longer considered them a threat to the public.
Prior to the Most Wanted list, the FBI applied the term “public enemy” to criminals like Al Capone, John Dillinger, and Baby Face Nelson. Then, in 1949, a reporter asked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to list the nation’s most dangerous fugitives. The result became a program to ask the public’s help in apprehending some of the most desperate criminals of the last six decades.
