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John Herbert Dillinger (/ˈdɪlɪndʒər/; June 22, 1903 – July 22, 1934) was an American gangster in the Great Depression-era United States. He operated with a group of men known as the "Dillinger Gang" or "The Terror Gang" which was accused of robbing 24 banks and four police stations, among other crimes. Dillinger escaped from jail twice. He was also charged with the murder of an East Chicago, Indiana police officer who shot Dillinger in his bullet-proof vest during a shootout, prompting him to return fire; he was not convicted of this crime, however. It was Dillinger's only homicide charge, despite his infamy.
He courted publicity and the media ran exaggerated accounts of his bravado and colorful personality, styling him as a Robin Hood figure.[1][2][3] In response, J. Edgar Hoover, then Director of the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), used Dillinger and his gang as his campaign platform to evolve the BOI into the FBI, developing more sophisticated investigative techniques as weapons against organized crime.[1]
After evading police in four states for almost a year, Dillinger was wounded and returned to his father's home to recover. He returned to Chicago in July 1934 and met his end at the hands of police and federal agents who were informed of his whereabouts by Ana Cumpănaș (the owner of the brothel where Dillinger had sought refuge at the time). On July 22, 1934, the police and the Division of Investigation[4] closed in on the Biograph Theater. Federal agents, led by Melvin Purvis and Samuel P. Cowley, moved to arrest Dillinger as he exited the theater. He drew a Colt Model 1908 Vest Pocket and attempted to flee, but was killed. This was ruled as justifiable homicide.[5][6]
He courted publicity and the media ran exaggerated accounts of his bravado and colorful personality, styling him as a Robin Hood figure.[1][2][3] In response, J. Edgar Hoover, then Director of the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), used Dillinger and his gang as his campaign platform to evolve the BOI into the FBI, developing more sophisticated investigative techniques as weapons against organized crime.[1]
After evading police in four states for almost a year, Dillinger was wounded and returned to his father's home to recover. He returned to Chicago in July 1934 and met his end at the hands of police and federal agents who were informed of his whereabouts by Ana Cumpănaș (the owner of the brothel where Dillinger had sought refuge at the time). On July 22, 1934, the police and the Division of Investigation[4] closed in on the Biograph Theater. Federal agents, led by Melvin Purvis and Samuel P. Cowley, moved to arrest Dillinger as he exited the theater. He drew a Colt Model 1908 Vest Pocket and attempted to flee, but was killed. This was ruled as justifiable homicide.[5][6]
John Dillinger - Wikipedia
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Appointment With Destiny: Last Days Of John Dillinger
From the David L. Wolper series Appointment With Destiny, The Last Days of John Dillinger. Program can be found on disc called Mobster Collection (8 movies t...
Thank you, my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that June 22 is the anniversary of the birth of son of a mother who died at age 3, teenage gang leader, enlisted in navy and deserted, John Dillinger who was a notorious American gangster in the Great Depression-era United States.
Appointment With Destiny: Last Days Of John Dillinger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doelWvSzyjg
Images:
1. John Dillinger mug shots.
2. 1934 John Dillinger summary after death.
3. 1930's John Dillinger images.
4. John Dillinger sporting his signature grin.
Background from {[https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/john-dillinger]}
"During the 1930s Depression, many Americans, nearly helpless against forces they didn’t understand, made heroes of outlaws who took what they wanted at gunpoint. Of all the lurid desperadoes, one man, John Herbert Dillinger, came to evoke this Gangster Era and stirred mass emotion to a degree rarely seen in this country.
Dillinger, whose name once dominated the headlines, was a notorious and vicious thief. From September 1933 until July 1934, he and his violent gang terrorized the Midwest, killing 10 men, wounding 7 others, robbing banks and police arsenals, and staging 3 jail breaks—killing a sheriff during one and wounding 2 guards in another.
John Herbert Dillinger was born on June 22, 1903 in the Oak Hill section of Indianapolis, a middle-class residential neighborhood. His father, a hardworking grocer, raised him in an atmosphere of disciplinary extremes, harsh and repressive on some occasions, but generous and permissive on others. John’s mother died when he was three, and when his father remarried six years later, John resented his stepmother.
In adolescence, the flaws in his bewildering personality became evident, and he was frequently in trouble. Finally, he quit school and got a job in a machine shop in Indianapolis. Although intelligent and a good worker, he soon became bored and often stayed out all night. His father, worried that the temptations of the city were corrupting his teenage son, sold his property in Indianapolis and moved his family to a farm near Mooresville, Indiana. However, John reacted no better to rural life than he had to that in the city and soon began to run wild again.
A break with his father and trouble with the law (auto theft) led him to enlist in the Navy. There he soon got into trouble and deserted his ship when it docked in Boston. Returning to Mooresville, he married 16-year-old Beryl Hovius in 1924. A dazzling dream of bright lights and excitement led the newlyweds to Indianapolis. Dillinger had no luck finding work in the city and joined the town pool shark, Ed Singleton, in his search for easy money. In their first attempt, they tried to rob a Mooresville grocer, but were quickly apprehended. Singleton pleaded not guilty, stood trial, and was sentenced to two years in prison. Dillinger, following his father’s advice, confessed, was convicted of assault and battery with intent to rob and conspiracy to commit a felony, and received joint sentences of two to 14 years and 10 to 20 years in the Indiana State Prison. Stunned by the harsh sentence, Dillinger became a tortured, bitter man in prison.
His period of infamy began on May 10, 1933, when he was paroled from prison after serving eight-and-a-half years of his sentence. Almost immediately, Dillinger robbed a bank in Bluffton, Ohio. Dayton police arrested him on September 22, and he was lodged in the county jail in Lima, Ohio to await trial.
In frisking Dillinger, the Lima police found a document which seemed to be a plan for a prison break, but the prisoner denied knowledge of any plan. Four days later, using the same plans, eight of Dillinger’s friends escaped from the Indiana State Prison, using shotguns and rifles that had been smuggled into their cells. During their escape, they shot two guards.
On October 12, three of the escaped prisoners and a parolee from the same prison showed up at the Lima jail where Dillinger was incarcerated. They told the sheriff that they had come to return Dillinger to the Indiana State Prison for violation of his parole.
When the sheriff asked to see their credentials, one of the men pulled a gun, shot the sheriff, and beat him into unconsciousness. Then taking the keys to the jail, the bandits freed Dillinger, locked the sheriff’s wife and a deputy in a cell, and leaving the sheriff to die on the floor, made their getaway.
Although none of these men had violated a federal law, the FBI’s assistance was requested in identifying and locating the criminals. The four men were identified as Harry Pierpont, Russell Clark, Charles Makley, and Harry Copeland. Their fingerprint cards in the FBI Identification Division were flagged with red metal tags, indicating that they were wanted.
Meanwhile, Dillinger and his gang pulled several bank robberies. They also plundered the police arsenals at Auburn, Indiana and Peru, Indiana, stealing several machine guns, rifles, and revolvers, a quantity of ammunition, and several bulletproof vests. On December 14, John Hamilton, a Dillinger gang member, shot and killed a police detective in Chicago. A month later, the Dillinger gang killed a police officer during the robbery of the First National Bank of East Chicago, Indiana. Then they made their way to Florida and, subsequently, to Tucson, Arizona. There on January 23, 1934, a fire broke out in the hotel where Clark and Makley were hiding under assumed names. Firemen recognized the men from their photographs, and local police arrested them, as well as Dillinger and Harry Pierpont. They also seized three Thompson submachine guns, two Winchester rifles mounted as machine guns, five bulletproof vests, and more than $25,000 in cash, part of it from the East Chicago robbery.
Dillinger was sequestered at the county jail in Crown Point, Indiana to await trial for the murder of the East Chicago police officer. Authorities boasted that the jail was “escape proof.” But on March 3, 1934, Dillinger cowed the guards with what he claimed later was a wooden gun he had whittled. He forced them to open the door to his cell, then grabbed two machine guns, locked up the guards and several trustees, and fled.
It was then that Dillinger made the mistake that would cost him his life. He stole the sheriff’s car and drove across the Indiana-Illinois line, heading for Chicago. By doing that, he violated the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act, which made it a federal offense to transport a stolen motor vehicle across a state line.
A federal complaint was sworn charging Dillinger with the theft and interstate transportation of the sheriff’s car, which was recovered in Chicago. After the grand jury returned an indictment, the FBI became actively involved in the nationwide search for Dillinger.
Meanwhile, Pierpont, Makley, and Clark were returned to Ohio and convicted of the murder of the Lima sheriff. Pierpont and Makley were sentenced to death and Clark to life imprisonment. But in an escape attempt, Makley was killed, and Pierpont was wounded. A month later, Pierpont had recovered sufficiently to be executed.
In Chicago, Dillinger joined his girlfriend, Evelyn Frechette. They proceeded to St. Paul, where Dillinger teamed up with Homer Van Meter, Lester (“Baby Face Nelson”) Gillis, Eddie Green, and Tommy Carroll, among others. The gang’s business prospered as they continued robbing banks of large amounts of money.
Then on March 30, 1934, an agent talked to the manager of the Lincoln Court Apartments in St. Paul, who reported two suspicious tenants, Mr. and Mrs. Hellman, who acted nervous and refused to admit the apartment caretaker. The FBI began a surveillance of the Hellman’s apartment. The next day, an agent and a police officer knocked on the door of the apartment. Evelyn Frechette opened the door, but quickly slammed it shut. The agent called for reinforcements to surround the building.
While waiting, the agents saw a man enter a hall near the Hellman’s apartment. When questioned, the man, Homer Van Meter, drew a gun. Shots were exchanged, during which Van Meter fled the building and forced a truck driver at gunpoint to drive him to Green’s apartment. Suddenly the door of the Hellman apartment opened and the muzzle of a machine gun began spraying the hallway with lead. Under cover of the machine gun fire, Dillinger and Evelyn Frechette fled through a back door. They, too, drove to Green’s apartment, where Dillinger was treated for a bullet wound received in the escape.
At the Lincoln Court Apartments, the FBI found a Thompson submachine gun with the stock removed, two automatic rifles, one .38 caliber Colt automatic with twenty-shot magazine clips, and two bulletproof vests. Across town, other agents located one of Eddie Green’s hideouts where he and Bessie Skinner had been living as “Mr. and Mrs. Stephens.” On April 3, when Green was located, he attempted to draw his gun, but was shot by the agents. He died in a hospital eight days later.
Dillinger and Evelyn Frechette fled to Mooresville, Indiana, where they stayed with his father and half-brother until his wound healed. Then Frechette went to Chicago to visit a friend—and was arrested by the FBI. She was taken to St. Paul for trial on a charge of conspiracy to harbor a fugitive. She was convicted, fined $1,000, and sentenced to two years in prison. Bessie Skinner, Eddie Green’s girlfriend, got 15 months on the same charge.
Meanwhile, Dillinger and Van Meter robbed a police station at Warsaw, Indiana of guns and bulletproof vests. Dillinger stayed for awhile in Upper Michigan, departing just ahead of a posse of FBI agents dispatched there by airplane. Then the FBI received a tip that there had been a sudden influx of rather suspicious guests at the summer resort of Little Bohemia Lodge, about 50 miles north of Rhinelander, Wisconsin. One of them sounded like John Dillinger and another like Baby Face Nelson.
From Rhinelander, an FBI task force set out by car for Little Bohemia. Two of the rented cars broke down enroute, and, in the uncommonly cold April weather, some of the agents had to make the trip standing on the running boards of the other cars. Two miles from the resort, the car lights were turned off and the posse proceeded through the darkness. When the cars reached the resort, dogs began barking. The agents spread out to surround the lodge and as they approached, machine gun fire rattled down on them from the roof. Swiftly, the agents took cover. One of them hurried to a telephone to give directions to additional agents who had arrived in Rhinelander to back up the operation.
While the agent was telephoning, the operator broke in to tell him there was trouble at another cottage about two miles away. Special Agent W. Carter Baum, another FBI man, and a constable went there and found a parked car which the constable recognized as belonging to a local resident. They pulled up and identified themselves.
Inside the other car, Baby Face Nelson was holding three local residents at gunpoint. He turned, leveled a revolver at the lawmen’s car and ordered them to step out. But without waiting for them to comply, Nelson opened fire. Baum was killed, and the constable and the other agent were severely wounded. Nelson jumped into the Ford they had been using and fled.
When the firing had subsided at the Little Bohemia Lodge, Dillinger was gone. When the agents entered the lodge the next morning, they found only three frightened females. Dillinger and five others had fled through a back window before the agents surrounded the house.
John Dillinger in the 1930sIn Washington, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover assigned Special Agent Samuel A. Cowley to head the FBI’s investigative efforts against Dillinger. Cowley set up headquarters in Chicago, where he and Melvin Purvis, special agent in charge of the Chicago office, planned their strategy. A squad of agents under Cowley worked with East Chicago policemen in tracking down all tips and rumors.
Late in the afternoon of Saturday, July 21, 1934, the madam of a brothel in Gary, Indiana, contacted one of the police officers with information. This woman called herself Anna Sage; however, her real name was Ana Cumpanas, and she had entered the United States from her native Rumania in 1914. Because of the nature of her profession, she was considered an undesirable alien by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and deportation proceedings had been started. Anna was willing to sell the FBI some information about Dillinger for a cash reward, plus the FBI’s help in preventing her deportation.
At a meeting with Anna, Cowley and Purvis were cautious. They promised her the reward if her information led to Dillinger’s capture, but said all they could do was call her cooperation to the attention of the Department of Labor, which at that time handled deportation matters. Satisfied, Anna told the agents that a girlfriend of hers, Polly Hamilton, had visited her establishment with Dillinger. Anna had recognized Dillinger from a newspaper photograph.
Anna told the agents that she, Polly Hamilton, and Dillinger probably would be going to the movies the following evening at either the Biograph or the Marbro Theaters. She said that she would notify them when the theater was chosen. She also said that she would wear an orange dress so that they could identify her.
On Sunday, July 22, Cowley ordered all agents of the Chicago office to stand by for urgent duty. Anna Sage called that evening to confirm the plans, but she still did not know which theater they would attend. Therefore, agents and policemen were sent to both theaters. At 8:30 p.m., Anna Sage, John Dillinger, and Polly Hamilton strolled into the Biograph Theater to see Clark Gable in "Manhattan Melodrama." Purvis phoned Cowley, who shifted the other men from the Marbro to the Biograph.
Cowley also phoned Hoover for instructions. Hoover cautioned them to wait outside rather than risk a shooting match inside the crowded theater. Each man was instructed not to unnecessarily endanger himself and was told that if Dillinger offered any resistance, it would be each man for himself.
At 10:30 p.m., Dillinger, with his two female companions on either side, walked out of the theater and turned to his left. As they walked past the doorway in which Purvis was standing, Purvis lit a cigar as a signal for the other men to close in.
Dillinger quickly realized what was happening and acted by instinct. He grabbed a pistol from his right trouser pocket as he ran toward the alley. Five shots were fired from the guns of three FBI agents. Three of the shots hit Dillinger, and he fell face down on the pavement. At 10:50 p.m. on July 22, 1934, John Dillinger was pronounced dead in a little room in the Alexian Brothers Hospital.
The agents who fired at Dillinger were Charles B. Winstead, Clarence O. Hurt, and Herman E. Hollis. Each man was commended by J. Edgar Hoover for fearlessness and courageous action. None of them ever said who actually killed Dillinger. The events of that sultry July night in Chicago marked the beginning of the end of the Gangster Era. Eventually, 27 persons were convicted in federal courts on charges of harboring and aiding and abetting John Dillinger and his cronies during their reign of terror. Baby Face Nelson was fatally wounded on November 27, 1934, in a gun battle with FBI agents in which Special Agents Cowley and Hollis also were killed. Dillinger was buried in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, Indiana."
FYI LTC Greg Henning LTC Jeff Shearer CWO3 Dennis M. SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL PO1 H Gene Lawrence PO2 Kevin Parker Maj Robert Thornton SPC Douglas Bolton Cynthia Croft SSgt Boyd Herrst TSgt Joe C. SGT John " Mac " McConnell CPL Dave Hoover SPC Margaret Higgins SSG William Jones PO3 Craig Phillips PVT Mark Zehner SP5 Jeannie Carle LTC John Shaw
Appointment With Destiny: Last Days Of John Dillinger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doelWvSzyjg
Images:
1. John Dillinger mug shots.
2. 1934 John Dillinger summary after death.
3. 1930's John Dillinger images.
4. John Dillinger sporting his signature grin.
Background from {[https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/john-dillinger]}
"During the 1930s Depression, many Americans, nearly helpless against forces they didn’t understand, made heroes of outlaws who took what they wanted at gunpoint. Of all the lurid desperadoes, one man, John Herbert Dillinger, came to evoke this Gangster Era and stirred mass emotion to a degree rarely seen in this country.
Dillinger, whose name once dominated the headlines, was a notorious and vicious thief. From September 1933 until July 1934, he and his violent gang terrorized the Midwest, killing 10 men, wounding 7 others, robbing banks and police arsenals, and staging 3 jail breaks—killing a sheriff during one and wounding 2 guards in another.
John Herbert Dillinger was born on June 22, 1903 in the Oak Hill section of Indianapolis, a middle-class residential neighborhood. His father, a hardworking grocer, raised him in an atmosphere of disciplinary extremes, harsh and repressive on some occasions, but generous and permissive on others. John’s mother died when he was three, and when his father remarried six years later, John resented his stepmother.
In adolescence, the flaws in his bewildering personality became evident, and he was frequently in trouble. Finally, he quit school and got a job in a machine shop in Indianapolis. Although intelligent and a good worker, he soon became bored and often stayed out all night. His father, worried that the temptations of the city were corrupting his teenage son, sold his property in Indianapolis and moved his family to a farm near Mooresville, Indiana. However, John reacted no better to rural life than he had to that in the city and soon began to run wild again.
A break with his father and trouble with the law (auto theft) led him to enlist in the Navy. There he soon got into trouble and deserted his ship when it docked in Boston. Returning to Mooresville, he married 16-year-old Beryl Hovius in 1924. A dazzling dream of bright lights and excitement led the newlyweds to Indianapolis. Dillinger had no luck finding work in the city and joined the town pool shark, Ed Singleton, in his search for easy money. In their first attempt, they tried to rob a Mooresville grocer, but were quickly apprehended. Singleton pleaded not guilty, stood trial, and was sentenced to two years in prison. Dillinger, following his father’s advice, confessed, was convicted of assault and battery with intent to rob and conspiracy to commit a felony, and received joint sentences of two to 14 years and 10 to 20 years in the Indiana State Prison. Stunned by the harsh sentence, Dillinger became a tortured, bitter man in prison.
His period of infamy began on May 10, 1933, when he was paroled from prison after serving eight-and-a-half years of his sentence. Almost immediately, Dillinger robbed a bank in Bluffton, Ohio. Dayton police arrested him on September 22, and he was lodged in the county jail in Lima, Ohio to await trial.
In frisking Dillinger, the Lima police found a document which seemed to be a plan for a prison break, but the prisoner denied knowledge of any plan. Four days later, using the same plans, eight of Dillinger’s friends escaped from the Indiana State Prison, using shotguns and rifles that had been smuggled into their cells. During their escape, they shot two guards.
On October 12, three of the escaped prisoners and a parolee from the same prison showed up at the Lima jail where Dillinger was incarcerated. They told the sheriff that they had come to return Dillinger to the Indiana State Prison for violation of his parole.
When the sheriff asked to see their credentials, one of the men pulled a gun, shot the sheriff, and beat him into unconsciousness. Then taking the keys to the jail, the bandits freed Dillinger, locked the sheriff’s wife and a deputy in a cell, and leaving the sheriff to die on the floor, made their getaway.
Although none of these men had violated a federal law, the FBI’s assistance was requested in identifying and locating the criminals. The four men were identified as Harry Pierpont, Russell Clark, Charles Makley, and Harry Copeland. Their fingerprint cards in the FBI Identification Division were flagged with red metal tags, indicating that they were wanted.
Meanwhile, Dillinger and his gang pulled several bank robberies. They also plundered the police arsenals at Auburn, Indiana and Peru, Indiana, stealing several machine guns, rifles, and revolvers, a quantity of ammunition, and several bulletproof vests. On December 14, John Hamilton, a Dillinger gang member, shot and killed a police detective in Chicago. A month later, the Dillinger gang killed a police officer during the robbery of the First National Bank of East Chicago, Indiana. Then they made their way to Florida and, subsequently, to Tucson, Arizona. There on January 23, 1934, a fire broke out in the hotel where Clark and Makley were hiding under assumed names. Firemen recognized the men from their photographs, and local police arrested them, as well as Dillinger and Harry Pierpont. They also seized three Thompson submachine guns, two Winchester rifles mounted as machine guns, five bulletproof vests, and more than $25,000 in cash, part of it from the East Chicago robbery.
Dillinger was sequestered at the county jail in Crown Point, Indiana to await trial for the murder of the East Chicago police officer. Authorities boasted that the jail was “escape proof.” But on March 3, 1934, Dillinger cowed the guards with what he claimed later was a wooden gun he had whittled. He forced them to open the door to his cell, then grabbed two machine guns, locked up the guards and several trustees, and fled.
It was then that Dillinger made the mistake that would cost him his life. He stole the sheriff’s car and drove across the Indiana-Illinois line, heading for Chicago. By doing that, he violated the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act, which made it a federal offense to transport a stolen motor vehicle across a state line.
A federal complaint was sworn charging Dillinger with the theft and interstate transportation of the sheriff’s car, which was recovered in Chicago. After the grand jury returned an indictment, the FBI became actively involved in the nationwide search for Dillinger.
Meanwhile, Pierpont, Makley, and Clark were returned to Ohio and convicted of the murder of the Lima sheriff. Pierpont and Makley were sentenced to death and Clark to life imprisonment. But in an escape attempt, Makley was killed, and Pierpont was wounded. A month later, Pierpont had recovered sufficiently to be executed.
In Chicago, Dillinger joined his girlfriend, Evelyn Frechette. They proceeded to St. Paul, where Dillinger teamed up with Homer Van Meter, Lester (“Baby Face Nelson”) Gillis, Eddie Green, and Tommy Carroll, among others. The gang’s business prospered as they continued robbing banks of large amounts of money.
Then on March 30, 1934, an agent talked to the manager of the Lincoln Court Apartments in St. Paul, who reported two suspicious tenants, Mr. and Mrs. Hellman, who acted nervous and refused to admit the apartment caretaker. The FBI began a surveillance of the Hellman’s apartment. The next day, an agent and a police officer knocked on the door of the apartment. Evelyn Frechette opened the door, but quickly slammed it shut. The agent called for reinforcements to surround the building.
While waiting, the agents saw a man enter a hall near the Hellman’s apartment. When questioned, the man, Homer Van Meter, drew a gun. Shots were exchanged, during which Van Meter fled the building and forced a truck driver at gunpoint to drive him to Green’s apartment. Suddenly the door of the Hellman apartment opened and the muzzle of a machine gun began spraying the hallway with lead. Under cover of the machine gun fire, Dillinger and Evelyn Frechette fled through a back door. They, too, drove to Green’s apartment, where Dillinger was treated for a bullet wound received in the escape.
At the Lincoln Court Apartments, the FBI found a Thompson submachine gun with the stock removed, two automatic rifles, one .38 caliber Colt automatic with twenty-shot magazine clips, and two bulletproof vests. Across town, other agents located one of Eddie Green’s hideouts where he and Bessie Skinner had been living as “Mr. and Mrs. Stephens.” On April 3, when Green was located, he attempted to draw his gun, but was shot by the agents. He died in a hospital eight days later.
Dillinger and Evelyn Frechette fled to Mooresville, Indiana, where they stayed with his father and half-brother until his wound healed. Then Frechette went to Chicago to visit a friend—and was arrested by the FBI. She was taken to St. Paul for trial on a charge of conspiracy to harbor a fugitive. She was convicted, fined $1,000, and sentenced to two years in prison. Bessie Skinner, Eddie Green’s girlfriend, got 15 months on the same charge.
Meanwhile, Dillinger and Van Meter robbed a police station at Warsaw, Indiana of guns and bulletproof vests. Dillinger stayed for awhile in Upper Michigan, departing just ahead of a posse of FBI agents dispatched there by airplane. Then the FBI received a tip that there had been a sudden influx of rather suspicious guests at the summer resort of Little Bohemia Lodge, about 50 miles north of Rhinelander, Wisconsin. One of them sounded like John Dillinger and another like Baby Face Nelson.
From Rhinelander, an FBI task force set out by car for Little Bohemia. Two of the rented cars broke down enroute, and, in the uncommonly cold April weather, some of the agents had to make the trip standing on the running boards of the other cars. Two miles from the resort, the car lights were turned off and the posse proceeded through the darkness. When the cars reached the resort, dogs began barking. The agents spread out to surround the lodge and as they approached, machine gun fire rattled down on them from the roof. Swiftly, the agents took cover. One of them hurried to a telephone to give directions to additional agents who had arrived in Rhinelander to back up the operation.
While the agent was telephoning, the operator broke in to tell him there was trouble at another cottage about two miles away. Special Agent W. Carter Baum, another FBI man, and a constable went there and found a parked car which the constable recognized as belonging to a local resident. They pulled up and identified themselves.
Inside the other car, Baby Face Nelson was holding three local residents at gunpoint. He turned, leveled a revolver at the lawmen’s car and ordered them to step out. But without waiting for them to comply, Nelson opened fire. Baum was killed, and the constable and the other agent were severely wounded. Nelson jumped into the Ford they had been using and fled.
When the firing had subsided at the Little Bohemia Lodge, Dillinger was gone. When the agents entered the lodge the next morning, they found only three frightened females. Dillinger and five others had fled through a back window before the agents surrounded the house.
John Dillinger in the 1930sIn Washington, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover assigned Special Agent Samuel A. Cowley to head the FBI’s investigative efforts against Dillinger. Cowley set up headquarters in Chicago, where he and Melvin Purvis, special agent in charge of the Chicago office, planned their strategy. A squad of agents under Cowley worked with East Chicago policemen in tracking down all tips and rumors.
Late in the afternoon of Saturday, July 21, 1934, the madam of a brothel in Gary, Indiana, contacted one of the police officers with information. This woman called herself Anna Sage; however, her real name was Ana Cumpanas, and she had entered the United States from her native Rumania in 1914. Because of the nature of her profession, she was considered an undesirable alien by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and deportation proceedings had been started. Anna was willing to sell the FBI some information about Dillinger for a cash reward, plus the FBI’s help in preventing her deportation.
At a meeting with Anna, Cowley and Purvis were cautious. They promised her the reward if her information led to Dillinger’s capture, but said all they could do was call her cooperation to the attention of the Department of Labor, which at that time handled deportation matters. Satisfied, Anna told the agents that a girlfriend of hers, Polly Hamilton, had visited her establishment with Dillinger. Anna had recognized Dillinger from a newspaper photograph.
Anna told the agents that she, Polly Hamilton, and Dillinger probably would be going to the movies the following evening at either the Biograph or the Marbro Theaters. She said that she would notify them when the theater was chosen. She also said that she would wear an orange dress so that they could identify her.
On Sunday, July 22, Cowley ordered all agents of the Chicago office to stand by for urgent duty. Anna Sage called that evening to confirm the plans, but she still did not know which theater they would attend. Therefore, agents and policemen were sent to both theaters. At 8:30 p.m., Anna Sage, John Dillinger, and Polly Hamilton strolled into the Biograph Theater to see Clark Gable in "Manhattan Melodrama." Purvis phoned Cowley, who shifted the other men from the Marbro to the Biograph.
Cowley also phoned Hoover for instructions. Hoover cautioned them to wait outside rather than risk a shooting match inside the crowded theater. Each man was instructed not to unnecessarily endanger himself and was told that if Dillinger offered any resistance, it would be each man for himself.
At 10:30 p.m., Dillinger, with his two female companions on either side, walked out of the theater and turned to his left. As they walked past the doorway in which Purvis was standing, Purvis lit a cigar as a signal for the other men to close in.
Dillinger quickly realized what was happening and acted by instinct. He grabbed a pistol from his right trouser pocket as he ran toward the alley. Five shots were fired from the guns of three FBI agents. Three of the shots hit Dillinger, and he fell face down on the pavement. At 10:50 p.m. on July 22, 1934, John Dillinger was pronounced dead in a little room in the Alexian Brothers Hospital.
The agents who fired at Dillinger were Charles B. Winstead, Clarence O. Hurt, and Herman E. Hollis. Each man was commended by J. Edgar Hoover for fearlessness and courageous action. None of them ever said who actually killed Dillinger. The events of that sultry July night in Chicago marked the beginning of the end of the Gangster Era. Eventually, 27 persons were convicted in federal courts on charges of harboring and aiding and abetting John Dillinger and his cronies during their reign of terror. Baby Face Nelson was fatally wounded on November 27, 1934, in a gun battle with FBI agents in which Special Agents Cowley and Hollis also were killed. Dillinger was buried in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, Indiana."
FYI LTC Greg Henning LTC Jeff Shearer CWO3 Dennis M. SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL PO1 H Gene Lawrence PO2 Kevin Parker Maj Robert Thornton SPC Douglas Bolton Cynthia Croft SSgt Boyd Herrst TSgt Joe C. SGT John " Mac " McConnell CPL Dave Hoover SPC Margaret Higgins SSG William Jones PO3 Craig Phillips PVT Mark Zehner SP5 Jeannie Carle LTC John Shaw
(6)
(0)
LTC Stephen F.
John Dillinger, very rare film footage
rare footage
John Dillinger, very rare film footage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RFixRan824
Images:
1. Dillinger poses playfully with Lake County, Indiana prosecutor Robert Estill and Sheriff Lillian Holley at the jail in Crown Point, Indiana. At this point, Dillinger was a bona fide celebrity. “I guess my only bad habit is robbing banks. I smoke very little and don’t drink much,” he told reporters. 1934.
2. Future FBI “Public Enemy No. One” John Dillinger as a young boy, seated on a fence post on his father’s Indiana farm.
3. John Dillinger with machine gun and pistol in hand.
4. A young John Dillinger (far left) with his Navy pals.
Background from {[https://allthatsinteresting.com/john-dillinger]}
John Dillinger Wasn’t Just A Bank Robber. He Was A Bona Fide Celebrity.
By Richard Stockton
Published July 13, 2019
Updated July 24, 2019
After 10 years behind bars, John Dillinger went on a year-long bank-robbing spree that captured America's imagination.
The bank robber and gangster John Dillinger didn’t live a long life, but he spent almost all of his 31 years in some kind of trouble.
He quickly gained notoriety as one of America’s leading celebrity criminals, becoming a legendary media character who commanded the entire country’s attention.
In the months he spent terrorizing the American Midwest, John Dillinger helped reshape federal law enforcement and changed the way interstate crimes are investigated for nearly a century to come.
But like most famous criminals, John Dillinger’s death was as violent as his dealings.
John Dillinger: A Troubled Boy
John Dillinger was born in Indianapolis in 1903. His parents already had a 14-year-old daughter, Audrey, and his mother passed away in 1907, when John was three.
Back then, it was customary for widowed men to find alternative arrangements for their children, so Dillinger’s father quickly married off Audrey and sent John to live with the newlyweds.
But a few years later, after his father remarried and Audrey’s family grew too big to manage, John moved back in with his dad.
By this point, the young Dillinger was already a handful. He bullied kids at school and became the lead of a neighborhood gang, with whom he stole coal from the Pennsylvania Railroad. And thus began his first run-in with the law: When some of the housewives he sold coal to ratted out him and his co-conspirators, Dillinger got a talking to from a local judge.
And a talking to was all he got — no punishment, not even an actual slap on the wrist. The judge might have thought the lecture was enough to set him straight.
Boy was he wrong.
Dillinger’s Run-In With The Law
John Dillinger dropped out of school as a teenager and worked at a machine shop in Indianapolis, spending his spare time shoplifting and drinking. Afraid the city was corrupting his boy, Dillinger’s father moved the family to rural Mooresville, Indiana.
The move to farm country came too late for Dillinger. By this point, he was molded into a young man who always seemed to be looking for trouble. He fell in love with a young woman — Frances Thornton — but her stepfather’s disapproval brought their affair to an end.
In 1923, at age 19, he boosted a car in Mooresville and took a joy ride around Indianapolis. When the police were hot on his trail, he escaped capture on foot and enlisted in the Navy to avoid prosecution.
Predictably, he had a problem with maintaining discipline and following orders, so just a few months after joining, he deserted while his ship was docked at Boston Harbor. He ultimately received a dishonorable discharge and went back home to Indiana.
Cleaning Up The Act And Marrying
Back in Mooresville, 20-year-old John Dillinger bounced around from job to job and from woman to woman. His father had become a member of the local clergy, and the family was getting fairly well-known around town.
He met 16-year-old Beryl Hovious and the two became attached, marrying on April 12, 1924.
Despite appearances, however, Dillinger had not changed his ways. When it became clear he couldn’t support his wife, Dillinger turned to the only thing he knew: crime.
John Dillinger’s Prison Stint
Not long after his wedding day, Dillinger and an associate, Ed Singleton, waited behind a church. They knew that Frank Morgan, an old grocery store owner in town, walked the same route home every night.
As Dillinger later recounted, “When [Morgan] came along I jumped out from behind the building and hit him twice on the head with a bolt which I had wrapped up in a handkerchief. He then turned and grabbed a revolver which I had in my hand. The gun was discharged when I jerked it away from him, the bullet entering the ground. We then ran.”
The Mooresville Times’s account of the story mirrored Dillinger’s — with the added detail that Morgan’s wounds required 11 stitches.
Dillinger’s father talked him into confessing, pleading guilty, and asking for leniency. Instead, the court threw the book at him.
Ten years later, Indiana Gov. Paul V. McNutt lamented Dillinger’s harsh sentence: “The judge and the prosecutor took him out and assured him if he would tell certain things they would let him off with a lighter sentence. They didn’t keep their word. They gave Dillinger 10 to 20 years while his partner in crime, Edgar Singleton, got two to 14 years and was released at the end of two years. This made a criminal out of John Dillinger.”
Years later, Dillinger wrote his father: “I know I have been a big disappointment to you but I guess I did too much time, for where I went in a carefree boy, I came out bitter toward everything in general….If I had gotten off more leniently when I made my first mistake this would never have happened.”
To add insult to injury, Dillinger’s first prison physical included a diagnosis of gonorrhea.
He wound up serving nine and a half years. In 1929, five years into his sentence, John Dillinger’s wife Beryl got a divorce, unable to handle the separation.
Dillinger Tastes Freedom
Did Dillinger’s length sentence really make him a criminal? Well, before his incarceration Dillinger committed a smattering of one-off petty crimes; after nine and a half years milling with convicts in the Indiana State Prison system, he promptly committed a string of high-stakes, high-profile bank robberies.
Resenting society and embittered by the harshness of his sentence, John Dillinger got serious about learning the criminal trade. Surrounded by several of Indiana’s worst bank robbers and strong-arm men, Dillinger spent most of his 20s learning as much as he could about organizing stick-ups and evading the law.
Instead of acting like a loudmouth, Dillinger minded his manners and picked the brains of several notable criminals, including the likes of Harry Pierpont, Charles Makley, Russell Clark, and Homer Van Meter.
But then came a shift. In the early 1930s, the Great Depression stretched the Indiana state penal system thin. Funding cuts were exasperated by a doubling of the prison population, after families who’d lost everything began stealing and pilfering out of desperation. In 1933, a new parole board convened, and it was looking to free more inmates than before.
Dillinger wrote his sister, Audrey, and asked her and their father to help Johnnie plead his case for early release. The family obliged and circulated a petition that got 188 signatures. On May 10, 1933, with the blessing of Gov. McNutt, 29-year-old John Dillinger finally got paroled.
Meanwhile, the Great Depression was still in full force, and work of any kind was almost impossible to find, even for the most dedicated and hard-working men. Unfortunately, Dillinger was neither of those things.
John Dillinger: The Bank Robber
At Dillinger’s parole hearing, he vowed to return to his family’s farm and work the land after his release. Needless to say, that didn’t happen.
Dillinger immediately turned to the crime he learned so much about in prison: bank robberies. Just a month after returning home, he gathered a crew of men who had been recommended to him in prison — Paul “Lefty” Parker, William Shaw, and Shaw’s friend Noble Claycomb — and robbed $10,000 from the New Carlisle National Bank in Ohio. They camped out in the bank overnight, tied up two employees the next morning, and forced a third employee to open the safe for them.
Rather than coasting on that score, which was almost $200,000 in 2019 dollars, Dillinger and his gang moved onto another bank — this time Bluffton. This bank had been robbed before, however, and so the team got away with less loot — only $2,000 — and had to fire shots to escape through the windows. “The bandits vanished as quickly as they came,” declared the local paper.
On September 22, just a couple weeks after stealing more tan $21,000 from a bank in his hometown of Indianapolis, Dillinger was arrested by Dayton, Ohio police .
He was captured in the boarding house where his girlfriend, Mary Longnaker, lived, with “four pistols, $2,600 in cash, quantities of rifle and shotgun shells, detailed notes explaining the speediest ways to escape from various cities and sacks full of carpet tacks,” according to that day’s edition of the Dayton Daily News. Longnaker’s landlady had snitched him out.
As a repeat felon, there was no way Dillinger could avoid prison this time.
Escape And Adventure
In addition to the cash and guns John Dillinger was carrying at the time of his arrest, he had with him a cryptic document and a crudely drawn map. Dillinger refused to say what it was, but to the police it certainly looked like a prison escape plan.
And that plan, meant for eight of Dillinger’s friends, worked flawlessly. Using smuggled shotguns and rifles, the men broke out mere days after Dillinger’s arrest.
To return the favor, three of the escapees came back to the Lima, Ohio jail on October 12, this time disguised as Indiana State Police officers. They told the sheriff that they were there to return Dillinger to an Indiana penitentiary for violating his parole.
When the sheriff asked them for some identification documents, one of the convicts pulled a gun, shot him, and beat him until he was unconscious. They then fished out the key to Dillinger’s cell and broke him out. The gang then fled back to Indiana.
Hoover And The Bureau Of Investigation
By crossing a state border while fleeing a crime, the Dillinger Gang had committed an interstate offense. That, plus the death of the sheriff, drew the attention of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
After the gang robbed at least four more banks in different Midwestern states, the FBI coordinated with local law enforcement to ensnare the outlaws.
Caught Again
In January 1934, the Dillinger Gang robbed $20,000 from a bank in Indiana and fled to the southwest. Thanks to the FBI, police jurisdictions along the route were tipped off about the fugitives. Their intelligence paid off in Tucson, Arizona, where Dillinger was arrested 10 days after the robbery.
The chief of the Indiana State Police personally transported Dillinger back to Indiana to answer charges there, where he was locked up in the “escape-proof” Crown Point jail — or so they thought. That is, until Dillinger reportedly carved a fake gun out of wood and used it to escape.
He quickly reconnected with his gang, which now included the infamous cop-killing psychopath Baby Face Nelson. Now the subject of a nationwide manhunt, the crew holed up in Minneapolis and within a single week robbed banks as far apart as South Dakota and Iowa.
No Rest For The Wicked
By March 1934, Dillinger had moved into an apartment in St. Paul, Minnesota, reunited with an girlfriend, Evelyn Frechette.
Their nosy landlady took an interest in the couple, and on March 30, she had enough to go to the FBI field office and report her suspicions. The Bureau sent a pair of agents to check out her story, who were soon confronted by an enraged Dillinger bursting out the door and firing a tommy gun from the hip.
The agents returned fire, hitting Dillinger in the leg. The robber limped away, fleeing back to Mooresville with Frechette and holing up at the family home. After a week of recovery, Dillinger and his associates set out again toward Ohio.
It’s not entirely clear what they meant to do, but they were carrying multiple guns and a bullwhip. Later testimony indicated they were looking for one of Dillinger’s former lawyers to work off an old grudge. Unfortunately for them, on April 7, they accidentally rear-ended a couple on the road.
When their vehicle description was read over the radio, the local FBI swarmed the site, only to find the gang’s empty car on the side of the road.
Desperate Times Call For Desperate Measures
Two days later, on April 9, Frechette went to a meet a potential new landlord in Mooresville.
Smelling trouble, the robber held back in the car and sent her in first. As soon as she walked into the bar, FBI agents put her in handcuffs and hauled her off. She would never see Dillinger again.
He tried to rescue her, even using a hostage law enforcement officer to break into a police armory for bulletproof vests. However, the plan — crazy even by Dillinger’s standards — was eventually abandoned.
The wanted gangster next moved to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and then Chicago, taking the alias of Jimmy Lawrence.
By now, the FBI had a dedicated Dillinger task force and called him “Public Enemy No. 1.” They even managed to find his abandoned car in the city. The FBI knew he was in town, but for several months the team worked without any leads.
Then, near the end of May, in another attempt to evade law enforcement, the gangster paid a plastic surgeon $5,000 to alter Dillinger’s appearance. He had some moles and scars removed, his famous chin cleft filled in, and his fingerprints burned off. “Hell, I don’t look any different than I did!” he supposedly said upon gazing in the mirror.
Still, the few alterations apparently were enough for him to pass by a couple of Dillinger Squad agents undetected at a Cubs game. Around this time, he also started dating the teenage runaway-turned-prostitute, Polly Hamilton.
The End Is Nigh
During their brief time together, Dillinger and Hamilton saw each other daily. On July 22, Dillinger suggested they see a show at the Biograph Theater, just around the corner from their hideout.
What he didn’t know was that Hamilton’s madam, Ana Cumpănaș, or Anna Sage, a Romanian immigrant facing deportation for running a brothel in Gary, Indiana had betrayed him.
Though Dillinger was still going by his alias, Sage recognized him from the wanted posters. Looking to cut a deal, she told the FBI everything she knew about Dillinger’s whereabouts. This allowed them to set up surveillance of the neighborhood he was staying in. (As it happens, she ended up being deported anyway.)
On the evening of July 22, while Dillinger and Hamilton were watching the show, the FBI task force surrounded the theater, splitting into two groups. The end seemed nigh for the famed bank robber.
The Death Of John Dillinger
In an unexpected turn of events, the theater’s manager called Chicago police after mistaking the agents for potential robbers. The police tried to arrest the agents before the situation was explained to them. However, it wasn’t enough to save Dillinger.
When the movie ended, Dillinger walked out with Hamilton — right past an FBI agent named Melvin Purvis, who lit a cigar to signal the others. According to Purvis’s testimony, Dillinger spotted the signal and turned to look across the street, where the other agents were drawn up.
This was just two months after famous Depression-era robbers Bonnie and Clyde had been machine-gunned to death. Dillinger seemed determined not to be taken as helplessly as they were.
Fishing in his pocket for his Colt pistol, he sprinted across the street to an alley that had already been blocked off.
Three agents followed him and fired six times, hitting him with four shots. Three shots were superficial. However, the one fired by Agent Charles Winstead entered through the back of Dillinger’s neck, clipped his brain stem, and popped out of his face under his right eye.
The 31-year-old bank robber was almost certainly dead before his body hit the pavement. It is rumored that John Dillinger’s last words were, “You got me.”
He was buried in a modest grave in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indiana, where his grave marker has had to be replaced four times — in a fitting tribute, thieves keep stealing pieces of the headstone.
John Dillinger’s Popular Personality
Even after John Dillinger’s death, many people continued to see him as a Robin Hood-type of character, because he robbed the banks that many people held responsible for the Great Depression.
In that sense, many Americans saw him as someone who robbed from the rich to give the the poor — a man of the people.
J. Edgar Hoover did not agree with that assessment. He famously quipped, “I cannot remember a single instance in which John Dillinger fancied himself a knight-errant, obtaining revenge upon a cruel world for past injustices. Rather, he was a cheap, boastful, selfish, tight-fisted pug-ugly, who thought only of himself.”
No matter which take you believe, at least his persona was big enough to be portrayed by Johnny Depp.
Regardless of who was right, Dillinger’s persona was big enough to inspire the 2009 movie Public Enemies, where he was portrayed by a fellow Midwestern John D., Johnny Depp."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RFixRan824
Images:
1. Dillinger poses playfully with Lake County, Indiana prosecutor Robert Estill and Sheriff Lillian Holley at the jail in Crown Point, Indiana. At this point, Dillinger was a bona fide celebrity. “I guess my only bad habit is robbing banks. I smoke very little and don’t drink much,” he told reporters. 1934.
2. Future FBI “Public Enemy No. One” John Dillinger as a young boy, seated on a fence post on his father’s Indiana farm.
3. John Dillinger with machine gun and pistol in hand.
4. A young John Dillinger (far left) with his Navy pals.
Background from {[https://allthatsinteresting.com/john-dillinger]}
John Dillinger Wasn’t Just A Bank Robber. He Was A Bona Fide Celebrity.
By Richard Stockton
Published July 13, 2019
Updated July 24, 2019
After 10 years behind bars, John Dillinger went on a year-long bank-robbing spree that captured America's imagination.
The bank robber and gangster John Dillinger didn’t live a long life, but he spent almost all of his 31 years in some kind of trouble.
He quickly gained notoriety as one of America’s leading celebrity criminals, becoming a legendary media character who commanded the entire country’s attention.
In the months he spent terrorizing the American Midwest, John Dillinger helped reshape federal law enforcement and changed the way interstate crimes are investigated for nearly a century to come.
But like most famous criminals, John Dillinger’s death was as violent as his dealings.
John Dillinger: A Troubled Boy
John Dillinger was born in Indianapolis in 1903. His parents already had a 14-year-old daughter, Audrey, and his mother passed away in 1907, when John was three.
Back then, it was customary for widowed men to find alternative arrangements for their children, so Dillinger’s father quickly married off Audrey and sent John to live with the newlyweds.
But a few years later, after his father remarried and Audrey’s family grew too big to manage, John moved back in with his dad.
By this point, the young Dillinger was already a handful. He bullied kids at school and became the lead of a neighborhood gang, with whom he stole coal from the Pennsylvania Railroad. And thus began his first run-in with the law: When some of the housewives he sold coal to ratted out him and his co-conspirators, Dillinger got a talking to from a local judge.
And a talking to was all he got — no punishment, not even an actual slap on the wrist. The judge might have thought the lecture was enough to set him straight.
Boy was he wrong.
Dillinger’s Run-In With The Law
John Dillinger dropped out of school as a teenager and worked at a machine shop in Indianapolis, spending his spare time shoplifting and drinking. Afraid the city was corrupting his boy, Dillinger’s father moved the family to rural Mooresville, Indiana.
The move to farm country came too late for Dillinger. By this point, he was molded into a young man who always seemed to be looking for trouble. He fell in love with a young woman — Frances Thornton — but her stepfather’s disapproval brought their affair to an end.
In 1923, at age 19, he boosted a car in Mooresville and took a joy ride around Indianapolis. When the police were hot on his trail, he escaped capture on foot and enlisted in the Navy to avoid prosecution.
Predictably, he had a problem with maintaining discipline and following orders, so just a few months after joining, he deserted while his ship was docked at Boston Harbor. He ultimately received a dishonorable discharge and went back home to Indiana.
Cleaning Up The Act And Marrying
Back in Mooresville, 20-year-old John Dillinger bounced around from job to job and from woman to woman. His father had become a member of the local clergy, and the family was getting fairly well-known around town.
He met 16-year-old Beryl Hovious and the two became attached, marrying on April 12, 1924.
Despite appearances, however, Dillinger had not changed his ways. When it became clear he couldn’t support his wife, Dillinger turned to the only thing he knew: crime.
John Dillinger’s Prison Stint
Not long after his wedding day, Dillinger and an associate, Ed Singleton, waited behind a church. They knew that Frank Morgan, an old grocery store owner in town, walked the same route home every night.
As Dillinger later recounted, “When [Morgan] came along I jumped out from behind the building and hit him twice on the head with a bolt which I had wrapped up in a handkerchief. He then turned and grabbed a revolver which I had in my hand. The gun was discharged when I jerked it away from him, the bullet entering the ground. We then ran.”
The Mooresville Times’s account of the story mirrored Dillinger’s — with the added detail that Morgan’s wounds required 11 stitches.
Dillinger’s father talked him into confessing, pleading guilty, and asking for leniency. Instead, the court threw the book at him.
Ten years later, Indiana Gov. Paul V. McNutt lamented Dillinger’s harsh sentence: “The judge and the prosecutor took him out and assured him if he would tell certain things they would let him off with a lighter sentence. They didn’t keep their word. They gave Dillinger 10 to 20 years while his partner in crime, Edgar Singleton, got two to 14 years and was released at the end of two years. This made a criminal out of John Dillinger.”
Years later, Dillinger wrote his father: “I know I have been a big disappointment to you but I guess I did too much time, for where I went in a carefree boy, I came out bitter toward everything in general….If I had gotten off more leniently when I made my first mistake this would never have happened.”
To add insult to injury, Dillinger’s first prison physical included a diagnosis of gonorrhea.
He wound up serving nine and a half years. In 1929, five years into his sentence, John Dillinger’s wife Beryl got a divorce, unable to handle the separation.
Dillinger Tastes Freedom
Did Dillinger’s length sentence really make him a criminal? Well, before his incarceration Dillinger committed a smattering of one-off petty crimes; after nine and a half years milling with convicts in the Indiana State Prison system, he promptly committed a string of high-stakes, high-profile bank robberies.
Resenting society and embittered by the harshness of his sentence, John Dillinger got serious about learning the criminal trade. Surrounded by several of Indiana’s worst bank robbers and strong-arm men, Dillinger spent most of his 20s learning as much as he could about organizing stick-ups and evading the law.
Instead of acting like a loudmouth, Dillinger minded his manners and picked the brains of several notable criminals, including the likes of Harry Pierpont, Charles Makley, Russell Clark, and Homer Van Meter.
But then came a shift. In the early 1930s, the Great Depression stretched the Indiana state penal system thin. Funding cuts were exasperated by a doubling of the prison population, after families who’d lost everything began stealing and pilfering out of desperation. In 1933, a new parole board convened, and it was looking to free more inmates than before.
Dillinger wrote his sister, Audrey, and asked her and their father to help Johnnie plead his case for early release. The family obliged and circulated a petition that got 188 signatures. On May 10, 1933, with the blessing of Gov. McNutt, 29-year-old John Dillinger finally got paroled.
Meanwhile, the Great Depression was still in full force, and work of any kind was almost impossible to find, even for the most dedicated and hard-working men. Unfortunately, Dillinger was neither of those things.
John Dillinger: The Bank Robber
At Dillinger’s parole hearing, he vowed to return to his family’s farm and work the land after his release. Needless to say, that didn’t happen.
Dillinger immediately turned to the crime he learned so much about in prison: bank robberies. Just a month after returning home, he gathered a crew of men who had been recommended to him in prison — Paul “Lefty” Parker, William Shaw, and Shaw’s friend Noble Claycomb — and robbed $10,000 from the New Carlisle National Bank in Ohio. They camped out in the bank overnight, tied up two employees the next morning, and forced a third employee to open the safe for them.
Rather than coasting on that score, which was almost $200,000 in 2019 dollars, Dillinger and his gang moved onto another bank — this time Bluffton. This bank had been robbed before, however, and so the team got away with less loot — only $2,000 — and had to fire shots to escape through the windows. “The bandits vanished as quickly as they came,” declared the local paper.
On September 22, just a couple weeks after stealing more tan $21,000 from a bank in his hometown of Indianapolis, Dillinger was arrested by Dayton, Ohio police .
He was captured in the boarding house where his girlfriend, Mary Longnaker, lived, with “four pistols, $2,600 in cash, quantities of rifle and shotgun shells, detailed notes explaining the speediest ways to escape from various cities and sacks full of carpet tacks,” according to that day’s edition of the Dayton Daily News. Longnaker’s landlady had snitched him out.
As a repeat felon, there was no way Dillinger could avoid prison this time.
Escape And Adventure
In addition to the cash and guns John Dillinger was carrying at the time of his arrest, he had with him a cryptic document and a crudely drawn map. Dillinger refused to say what it was, but to the police it certainly looked like a prison escape plan.
And that plan, meant for eight of Dillinger’s friends, worked flawlessly. Using smuggled shotguns and rifles, the men broke out mere days after Dillinger’s arrest.
To return the favor, three of the escapees came back to the Lima, Ohio jail on October 12, this time disguised as Indiana State Police officers. They told the sheriff that they were there to return Dillinger to an Indiana penitentiary for violating his parole.
When the sheriff asked them for some identification documents, one of the convicts pulled a gun, shot him, and beat him until he was unconscious. They then fished out the key to Dillinger’s cell and broke him out. The gang then fled back to Indiana.
Hoover And The Bureau Of Investigation
By crossing a state border while fleeing a crime, the Dillinger Gang had committed an interstate offense. That, plus the death of the sheriff, drew the attention of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
After the gang robbed at least four more banks in different Midwestern states, the FBI coordinated with local law enforcement to ensnare the outlaws.
Caught Again
In January 1934, the Dillinger Gang robbed $20,000 from a bank in Indiana and fled to the southwest. Thanks to the FBI, police jurisdictions along the route were tipped off about the fugitives. Their intelligence paid off in Tucson, Arizona, where Dillinger was arrested 10 days after the robbery.
The chief of the Indiana State Police personally transported Dillinger back to Indiana to answer charges there, where he was locked up in the “escape-proof” Crown Point jail — or so they thought. That is, until Dillinger reportedly carved a fake gun out of wood and used it to escape.
He quickly reconnected with his gang, which now included the infamous cop-killing psychopath Baby Face Nelson. Now the subject of a nationwide manhunt, the crew holed up in Minneapolis and within a single week robbed banks as far apart as South Dakota and Iowa.
No Rest For The Wicked
By March 1934, Dillinger had moved into an apartment in St. Paul, Minnesota, reunited with an girlfriend, Evelyn Frechette.
Their nosy landlady took an interest in the couple, and on March 30, she had enough to go to the FBI field office and report her suspicions. The Bureau sent a pair of agents to check out her story, who were soon confronted by an enraged Dillinger bursting out the door and firing a tommy gun from the hip.
The agents returned fire, hitting Dillinger in the leg. The robber limped away, fleeing back to Mooresville with Frechette and holing up at the family home. After a week of recovery, Dillinger and his associates set out again toward Ohio.
It’s not entirely clear what they meant to do, but they were carrying multiple guns and a bullwhip. Later testimony indicated they were looking for one of Dillinger’s former lawyers to work off an old grudge. Unfortunately for them, on April 7, they accidentally rear-ended a couple on the road.
When their vehicle description was read over the radio, the local FBI swarmed the site, only to find the gang’s empty car on the side of the road.
Desperate Times Call For Desperate Measures
Two days later, on April 9, Frechette went to a meet a potential new landlord in Mooresville.
Smelling trouble, the robber held back in the car and sent her in first. As soon as she walked into the bar, FBI agents put her in handcuffs and hauled her off. She would never see Dillinger again.
He tried to rescue her, even using a hostage law enforcement officer to break into a police armory for bulletproof vests. However, the plan — crazy even by Dillinger’s standards — was eventually abandoned.
The wanted gangster next moved to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and then Chicago, taking the alias of Jimmy Lawrence.
By now, the FBI had a dedicated Dillinger task force and called him “Public Enemy No. 1.” They even managed to find his abandoned car in the city. The FBI knew he was in town, but for several months the team worked without any leads.
Then, near the end of May, in another attempt to evade law enforcement, the gangster paid a plastic surgeon $5,000 to alter Dillinger’s appearance. He had some moles and scars removed, his famous chin cleft filled in, and his fingerprints burned off. “Hell, I don’t look any different than I did!” he supposedly said upon gazing in the mirror.
Still, the few alterations apparently were enough for him to pass by a couple of Dillinger Squad agents undetected at a Cubs game. Around this time, he also started dating the teenage runaway-turned-prostitute, Polly Hamilton.
The End Is Nigh
During their brief time together, Dillinger and Hamilton saw each other daily. On July 22, Dillinger suggested they see a show at the Biograph Theater, just around the corner from their hideout.
What he didn’t know was that Hamilton’s madam, Ana Cumpănaș, or Anna Sage, a Romanian immigrant facing deportation for running a brothel in Gary, Indiana had betrayed him.
Though Dillinger was still going by his alias, Sage recognized him from the wanted posters. Looking to cut a deal, she told the FBI everything she knew about Dillinger’s whereabouts. This allowed them to set up surveillance of the neighborhood he was staying in. (As it happens, she ended up being deported anyway.)
On the evening of July 22, while Dillinger and Hamilton were watching the show, the FBI task force surrounded the theater, splitting into two groups. The end seemed nigh for the famed bank robber.
The Death Of John Dillinger
In an unexpected turn of events, the theater’s manager called Chicago police after mistaking the agents for potential robbers. The police tried to arrest the agents before the situation was explained to them. However, it wasn’t enough to save Dillinger.
When the movie ended, Dillinger walked out with Hamilton — right past an FBI agent named Melvin Purvis, who lit a cigar to signal the others. According to Purvis’s testimony, Dillinger spotted the signal and turned to look across the street, where the other agents were drawn up.
This was just two months after famous Depression-era robbers Bonnie and Clyde had been machine-gunned to death. Dillinger seemed determined not to be taken as helplessly as they were.
Fishing in his pocket for his Colt pistol, he sprinted across the street to an alley that had already been blocked off.
Three agents followed him and fired six times, hitting him with four shots. Three shots were superficial. However, the one fired by Agent Charles Winstead entered through the back of Dillinger’s neck, clipped his brain stem, and popped out of his face under his right eye.
The 31-year-old bank robber was almost certainly dead before his body hit the pavement. It is rumored that John Dillinger’s last words were, “You got me.”
He was buried in a modest grave in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indiana, where his grave marker has had to be replaced four times — in a fitting tribute, thieves keep stealing pieces of the headstone.
John Dillinger’s Popular Personality
Even after John Dillinger’s death, many people continued to see him as a Robin Hood-type of character, because he robbed the banks that many people held responsible for the Great Depression.
In that sense, many Americans saw him as someone who robbed from the rich to give the the poor — a man of the people.
J. Edgar Hoover did not agree with that assessment. He famously quipped, “I cannot remember a single instance in which John Dillinger fancied himself a knight-errant, obtaining revenge upon a cruel world for past injustices. Rather, he was a cheap, boastful, selfish, tight-fisted pug-ugly, who thought only of himself.”
No matter which take you believe, at least his persona was big enough to be portrayed by Johnny Depp.
Regardless of who was right, Dillinger’s persona was big enough to inspire the 2009 movie Public Enemies, where he was portrayed by a fellow Midwestern John D., Johnny Depp."
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