David Grann Meet the Author

Now, it's time for Meet The Author.

Oklahoma in the 1920s and the true story of a murder conspiracy that

absorbed and shocked America, and epitomised the darker

side of the Wild West and all its lingering lawlessness.

Native Americans being herded into reservations and dismissed

as inferior Red Indians.

Then the oil gushes sprouting out of the prairies

and changing everything.

And eventually, a conspiracy fuelled by greed and jealousy that became

one of the obsessions of the young J Edgar Hoover and his new FBI.

David Grann's book Killers Of The Flower Moon is a trip

into the story of the Osage people, a journey into a part

of American's past that's closer than we sometimes think.

Welcome.

David, this is a fabulous melodrama, but it's also a human story

that is full of tragedy.

When you lifted the lid on this series of murders

in Oklahoma in the early '20s, apart from knowing you'd stumbled

across a wonderful story, how did it affect you?

I've written so many stories, this was the one that was probably

the most emotionally draining.

I worked on it for nearly half a decade, and I began to collect

pictures, photographs, of the victims.

And I would keep those photographs by my desk

as I worked on the project.

And the real tragedy was, as I began the project,

I thought there were, you know, so many victims, a dozen,

and then a dozen grew to two dozen, and by the end of the project

I was looking at scores of victims who were caught up in this

incredibly sinister conspiracy.

And of course, they were Native Americans.

Yes.

Red Indians, as we grew up to call them in an earlier age.

And they faced the most terrible problems in their lives.

The land was removed, the discrimination was at a level

that we can barely imagine.

Yes.

And then they discovered the black oil was coming up through their land

and they became rich.

The way the story begins its extraordinary, it takes

you to another planet.

Yes.

I mean, it's amazing.

So, the Osage suffered the same fate as so many Native American

communities and tribes and nations in the United States,

which is that they were driven off their land.

They once controlled most of the Midwest.

Thomas Jefferson referred to them as "that great nation".

And then within a few years, they had to cede millions

and millions of acres.

And eventually they were driven to this little corner

of north-east Oklahoma.

They went there because they thought the land was rocky and infertile

and they said the white men will finally leave us alone.

So they go there, and lo and behold they're sitting on some

of the largest deposits of oil in the world.

And overnight, they became millionaires.

They became the richest people per capita, not only

in the United States, but in the world.

And they lived in mansions.

It was said at the time that where each American might own one car,

each Osage owned 11 cars!

And the car had come, we're in the 20th century in this story,

but it's the Wild West!

It is the last remnants of the Wild West.

It's lawless, it's outlaws...

Power hungry...

Pistol shooters...

And because of the oil, this area drew, it was like a magnet

for every kind of outlaw.

Getty arrived on the train.

All the great oil men made their fortune in the Osage.

Getty...

All the great names we associate with oil barons,

they all made their fortune in the Osage.

And in the midst of it, you tell the story of a real set of

murders, a conspiracy, what we would now call a cover-up

Yes.

And a target for the nascent FBI, Hoover the new director sitting

in Washington, sending his men in undercover

to try to sort this out.

Yes.

I mean, it's a story that's, it's better than fiction.

Yeah, it is crazier than fiction.

It's hard to believe.

What's amazing about this story is it has been almost

excised from history, partly because of racial prejudice.

I had known nothing about this story when I started writing it.

And yet it was huge.

Across America.

It was big in its day, yeah.

It was big in its day.

It became the nascent FBI's first major homicide case.

It became J Edgar Hoover at age 29 doing his job, believe it or not,

insecure about his security and holding onto his job.

It became his first big case.

And after they badly bungled the case, and,

just to give one example of that, they recruited an outlaw,

appropriately named Blackey, to go in undercover to use

as an informant.

Instead, he slips away, robs a bank and kills a police officer.

J Edgar Hoover is sitting in Washington petrified

that he might actually lose his job, that his dreams of

a bureaucratic empire might end.

He turns the case over to an old frontier lawman,

an agent named Tom White.

Tom White puts together an undercover team and it is like

something out of Oceans 11.

Texas Rangers come in.

Yeah, Texas Rangers.

They have one guy pose as an insurance salesman.

He used to sell insurance.

He actually opens an insurance store in town.

He's selling real policies.

The most amazing thing is, too, that the undercover team included

an American Indian agent, and this was remarkable,

because there was so much prejudice at the time,

he was probably the only American Indian or Native American

in the bureau at the time.

And in the midst of this, you uncover for us a conspiracy,

the nature of which we won't reveal because it would spoil it

for readers, and subsequently a sensational trial.

That I think goes deep into the American story

in the sense that you can see through this prism,

with all its melodrama and bloodstained detail,

the emergence of a real system of laws and order.

Yes.

In the 1920s - it took that long.

Yes - this was really the emergence of what I would call

professionalism, an effort to professionalise law enforcement.

One of the things that shocked me was just how

lawless the country was, how untrained sheriff's office was,

and how widespread corruption was.

And so this was an attempt to professionalise

the art of detection.

The amazing thing about Tom White is, he began his career riding

on a horse when justice was meted out by the end of a barrel

of a gun, and by the 1920s, when he's working this case,

he's wearing a suit and a fedora, trying to work out how

to study fingerprints, handwriting analysis,

and he has to file paperwork, which he can't stand.

This is a magical story.

But as you said when we began, it's also a very painful story.

Yeah.

What did you learn about your country in the 1920s that

you hadn't really thought of?

You know, I was shocked, even though you grow up hearing

about racial prejudice, the degree of racial prejudice that

allowed these crimes to go on.

These were crimes of greed and avarice, but they were carried

out without consciousness, because the targets and the victims

were Native Americans.

And in their minds, and many

of the killers, these were seen as sub-humans.

And because of that, these crimes are covered up.

I guess the thing that shocked me most is, we tend to think

about murder stories with a singular evil force, right?

You have one really bad man, and the whole kind

of concept of a mystery, both in fiction and in nonfiction,

is, you capture that bad man, you expunge it and you feel

better about society.

What happens when you have a crime story where the whole of white

society, the whole town, is possibly complicit in it?

Finally, how have the Osage people that you've been

in touch with reacted

to the telling of the story, and the fact that it will now be

read by millions of people?

Yeah, I mean, I didn't know when I began the project how people

would receive me, and the desire to tell the story, and I was struck

that the Osage were remarkably generous, because they carried

this story inside them for so many years.

And so for them, I think, the chance to share the story,

that it might receive its place in history and a wider audience,

at least so far, my experience has been extremely positive.