John Dillinger: America's Favorite Bank Robber
The Great Depression brought ruin to American families and livelihoods, eroding hope in the idea of the self-made man. If a lifelong career could be lost so easily, how could you depend on the system to protect you? These attitudes prepared an embittered populace for idols of the extreme counterculture: the rebels of the Gangster Era. Youthful Bonnie and Clyde made one notorious pair, but even more successful than the Barrow Gang was the Dillinger Gang.
Who was John Dillinger, the FBI’s “Public Enemy Number One,” before the 1934 shootout left him dead as…well, Dillinger?
Born June 22nd, 1903, John Herbert Dillinger grew up in suburban Indianapolis. John’s disobedience and trouble in school, including exploits with his neighborhood group, ‘The Dirty Dozen,’ led his father to move the family to rural Mooresville, Indiana. John enlisted in the Navy in 1923 and deserted in the same year, returning to Mooresville to marry 16-year-old Beryl Hovius. The couple left the farm and looked for new opportunities in Indianapolis. Instead, Dillinger would walk into his first conviction and nearly a decade in prison.
Dillinger had met Ed Singleton, a pool shark, and made his first partner in crime. The partnership didn’t last long. A failed attempt at robbing an elderly grocer led to both their arrests in 1924 — but while Singleton retained a lawyer and pleaded not guilty, Dillinger’s father prompted his son to plead guilty, trusting the court to have mercy. Dillinger had no previous convictions. Singleton, with a prison record, served less than two years. Easily convicted of assault, battery with intent to rob, and conspiracy to commit a felony, Dillinger’s sentence was for 10-20 years. His time in the Indiana State Reformatory would teach him the skills and the motivation to never return.
Dillinger tolerated the first few years, visited by his wife and family, and wrote to Beryl frequently. That bright spot ended with her divorce in 1929, followed by his first denial of parole. His new companions included Harry Pierpont, Homer Van Meter, and Walter Dietrich, all of whom contributed to Dillinger’s education in bank robbing and fencing goods. Eight and a half years after his conviction, their crash course would pay off.
On May 10th, 1933, Dillinger was paroled. He immediately proceeded to bank robberies, hitting five locations through Indiana and Ohio in four months, accompanied by one to four partners. An arrest in September only slowed him down for a month: five convicts whose own escapes he’d previously funded came to break him out of jail. The gang targeted banks in Indiana and Wisconsin, earning tens of thousands at a time through an extremely organized setup. They employed “machine guns, sawed-off shotguns and ammunition” raided from a police arsenal, narrates HISTORY.com, and protected themselves with bulletproof vests. They’d gotten the FBI’s attention after killing members of law enforcement. Without having broken federal laws, they weren’t yet being hunted by the agency in earnest.
The breakout, the competent string of robberies, their avoidance of civilian deaths, and the way Dillinger’s gang seemed to easily outdo the police made them stars in the papers. They made their homes in Chicago, keeping low profiles when they weren’t on the job. But on robberies, shrouded with overcoats and low hat brims, the stories became even more audacious. They allegedly once posed as alarm sales reps to enter a bank vault, and once as a film crew arranging a set for a movie heist.
Their good fortune lasted till four members of the gang were caught in January 1934 at Tucson, Arizona: Russell Clark, Charles Makley, Pierpont, and Dillinger. Dillinger was extradited to Indiana, locked in the supposedly inescapable Crown Point Prison before trial. After only a month, he bluffed his way out with a hand-whittled wooden ‘gun,’ and absconded with the sheriff’s car as he fled for Chicago. By this violation of the federal National Motor Vehicle Theft Act, the FBI were compelled to step in. Dillinger wouldn’t survive the year.
Robberies were harder to carry out with the FBI setting traps, and shootouts got bloodier. Reinforced with new, more chaotic members, including Baby Face Nelson, the Dillinger Gang began to take damage. Dillinger allegedly got plastic surgery in Chicago to hide his identity, according to Britannica. A $10,000 reward on his head, along with the title of “Public Enemy Number One,” made every safehouse a risk. The FBI directed Special Agents Samuel A. Cowley and Melvin Purvis to lead the operation that would corner Dillinger. Their breakthrough was Ana Cumpanas, or ‘Anna Sage,’ a brothel madam from Indiana who knew Dillinger’s current girlfriend, Polly Hamilton.
On July 22nd, 1934, Cumpanas reported that she’d narrowed down Dillinger’s evening plans to two movie theaters. She found him and Hamilton at Chicago’s Biograph Theater, and Purvis phoned in the order. Agents were stationed outside, waiting into the evening, while Dillinger viewed the crime flick Manhattan Melodrama. He emerged at 10:30PM. When the trap went off at Purvis’s signal, Dillinger had only had time to draw his pistol.
Three FBI agents fired five shots, hitting Dillinger three times, and the gangster was pronounced dead in the hospital that night. About 15,000 people crowded through to view his body in the Cook County Morgue. He was 31 years old at his death.
The Gangster Era didn’t last much longer than Dillinger — federal convictions faced 27 of the gang’s accomplices over time, and Baby Face Nelson was famously killed in another FBI shootout that November. Myths of Dillinger’s survival would crop up, claiming that a body double died outside the theater and fooled the FBI, but the fingerprints didn’t lie. Like Bonnie and Clyde only two months before, John Dillinger’s crime spree had been ended for good.
