Highlighted Crime
Story of the Week -
On July 22, 1934, John Dillinger, America’s “Public Enemy
No. 1″ was shot and killed by FBI agents outside of the Biograph Theater in
Chicago. In a fiery bank-robbing career that lasted just over a year, Dillinger
and his associates robbed nearly a dozen banks, broke out of jail, and killed
seven police officers and three federal agents.
John Dillinger was born in 1903 in Indianapolis, Indiana.
A juvenile delinquent, he was arrested in 1924 after a botched mugging. He
pleaded guilty, hoping for clemency, but was sentenced to 10 to 20 years at
Pendleton Reformatory. While in prison, he made several failed escapes and was
adopted by a group of professional bank robbers led by Harry Pierpont, who taught
him the ways of their trade. When his friends were transferred to Indiana’s
tough Michigan City Prison, he requested to be transferred there as well.
In May 1933, Dillinger was paroled, and he met up with
accomplices of Pierpont. Dillinger’s plan was to raise enough funds to finance
a prison break by Pierpont and the others, who then would take him on as a
member of their elite robbery gang. In four months, Dillinger and his gang
robbed four Indiana and Ohio banks, two grocery stores, and a drug store for a
total of more than $40,000. He gained notoriety as a sharply dressed and
athletic gunman who at one bank leapt over the high teller railing into the
vault.
With the help of two of Pierpont’s women friends,
Dillinger set up the jailbreak. Guns were bought and arranged to be smuggled
into Michigan City Prison. Prison workers were bribed, and a safe house was set
up. On September 22, however, just days before the jailbreak was scheduled to
occur, Dillinger was arrested in Dayton, Ohio. Four days later, Pierpont and
nine others broke out of Michigan City. On October 12 Pierpont came to Ohio to
free Dillinger in the process the Lima sheriff was killed. On October 30, the
gang robbed a police arsenal, acquiring weapons, ammunition, and bulletproof
vests.
The Pierpont/Dillinger gang robbed banks in Indiana,
Wisconsin, and Chicago for more than $130,000, a great fortune in the
Depression era, and eluded the police in several close encounters. In January
1934, the gang headed to Tucson, Arizona, to lay low. By this time, four police
officers had been killed and two wounded, and the Chicago police had
established an elite squad to track down the fugitives. They were recognized in
Tucson and on January 25 captured without bloodshed.
Dillinger was extradited to Indiana, arraigned for his
January 15 murder of Indiana police officer William Patrick O’Malley, and held
at Crown Point prison. On March 3, while still awaiting trial, he executed his
most celebrated escape. That morning, he brandished a gun and methodically
began locking up the prison officials. The legend is that the weapon was a
wooden gun carved by Dillinger and blackened with shoe polish, but it may also
have been a real gun smuggled into the prison by an associate. Whatever the
case, Dillinger raided the prison arsenal, where he found two sub-machine guns,
and then enlisted the aid of another prisoner, an African American man named
Herbert Youngblood. Dillinger and Youngblood then made their way to the prison
garage, where they stole a sheriff’s car and calmly drove away.
Parting ways with Youngblood, Dillinger traveled to
Chicago and formed a new gang featuring “Baby Face” Nelson, a psychopathic
killer who used to work for Al Capone. The new Dillinger gang robbed banks in
South Dakota and Iowa and wounded two more police officers. The Federal Bureau
of Investigation joined the manhunt for Dillinger after he escaped from Crown
Point, and on March 31 two FBI agents closed in on him at an apartment in St.
Paul, Minnesota. Dillinger and an accomplice shot their way out.
In April, the Dillinger gang went to hide out at a resort
in Wisconsin, but the FBI was tipped off. On April 22, the FBI stormed the
resort. In a disastrous operation, three civilians were mistakenly shot by the
FBI, one of whom died; Baby Face Nelson killed one agent, shot another, and
critically wounded a police officer; the entire Dillinger gang escaped.
With two other gang members, Dillinger traveled to
Chicago, surviving a shoot-out with Minnesota police along the way. In Chicago,
he lived in a safe house and got a facelift to conceal his identity. At some
point, he also used acid to burn off his fingerprints. On June 30, he
participated in his last robbery, in South Bend, Indiana in which one officer was
killed, four civilians shot, and one gang member shot.
In July, Anna Sage, a Romanian-born brothel madam in
Chicago and friend of Dillinger’s, agreed to cooperate with the FBI in exchange
for leniency in an upcoming deportation hearing. She also hoped to cash in on
the $10,000 bounty that had been put on his head. On July 22, Sage and
Dillinger went to see the gangster movie Manhattan
Melodrama at the Biograph Theater. Twenty FBI agents and police officers
staked out the theater and waited for him to emerge with Sage, who would be
wearing an orange dress (not red as has been erroneously reported) to identify
herself.
At 10:40 p.m., Dillinger came out. Sage’s orange dress
looked red under the Biographs lights, which would earn her the nickname “the
lady in red.” Dillinger was ordered to surrender, but he took off running. He
made it as far as an alley at the end of the block before he was gunned down,
allegedly because he pulled a gun. Two bystanders were wounded in the gunfire
and Dillinger was dead.
Check back every
Monday for a new installment of “This Week in Crime History.” Because I will be
on vacation next week’s installment will be postponed.
Michael Thomas Barry is a columnist for www.crimemagazine.com and is the author
of six nonfiction books that includes the award winning Murder and Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California, 1849-1949.
Visit Michael’s website www.michaelthomasbarry.com
for more information. His book can be purchased from Amazon through the
following link:
