John Dillinger: Public Enemy Number One

John Dillinger robbery career began when he was paroled in 1933. Several escaped inmates joined Dillinger, and they were arrested in 1934. Dillinger escaped, but was gunned down in July. To this day, conspiracy theories abound about his death.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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History Stuff. That's Audible podcast dot com slash History Stuff.
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm debling in Chuck
Reboarding and I'm fair doubting And earlier this year we
talked a lot about Ned Kelly and some other famous
bush rangers, who are essentially Australian outlaw was viewed as
folk heroes by many of their contemporaries. A couple of

(01:03):
times we compared that bush ranger phenomenon to the American
wild West and Jesse James, but the United States has
seen some more recent examples of these outlaw hero hybrids
in the form of the Depression era bank robber gangster.
Why would the public, or at least a portion of it,
root for a criminal with a scary Tommy gun. That's
what we asked ourselves, and it's similar to the bushranger situation,

(01:26):
is what we found. It had less to do with
people liking the bank robbers than it did with their
disliking the banks. Basically, what that meant was that in
the twenties banks speculated on stocks and then went bust
and left people who deposited money high and dry. And
then in the thirties banks foreclosed on farmers who had
been hit hard by drought, forcing thousands of people to

(01:46):
leave their land. So banks were the enemy. Yeah, and
some of the criminals, like the one that we're going
to focus on in this episode, John Dillinger, we're really
kind of likable guys. Dillinger was known for being charismatic.
He's been called Gentleman John or the Gentleman Bandit, and
even though his infamous crime spree only lasted for one year,

(02:07):
he was arguably the biggest celebrity criminal of his day.
He was the first criminal to be named Public Enemy
number one by the FBI, and Dillinger's demise also marked
the beginning of the end of the nineteen thirties gangster
era and the rise of the FBI. In fact, when
former and the first FBI director Jed gre Hoover, who's

(02:27):
been in the spotlight recently because of the movie, when
he was asked as an old man with his greatest
thrill or the high point in his career was, he said,
it was the night they got Dillinger. So we're going
to take a look at that night and some of
the mysteries and the myths surrounding it. But of course
we're going to talk a little bit about Jillinger's early
days first and how he became a star of the
crime world in the first place. So John Herbert Dillinger

(02:50):
was born June nineteen o three in a middle class
neighborhood in Indianapolis called Oak Hill. So most sources say
he was bull from a pretty early age, not mean spirited,
not a bully necessarily, but mischievous. According to an article
by Peter Carlson in American History, Dillinger's life of crime

(03:12):
really started in grade school, when he formed a gang
called the Dirty Dozen. They apparently stole watermelon. Some sources
say that they might have stolen coal um, but instability
from family life probably didn't help things. Dillinger's mother, Mary Ellen,
died when he was only about three or four years old,
and he was cared for it, mostly by his sister Audrey.

(03:35):
His father, John Wilson, who was a grosser, remarried when
Dillinger was about ten years old, but Dillinger wasn't very
fond of his stepmother, at least at first, so Dillinger
quit school when he was about sixteen and he went
to work in machine shops. He was a decent worker,
but he wasn't that into his work, so he started
staying out late like a lot, and in ninety his

(03:57):
father moved the family from the city to a farm Mooresville, Indiana,
presumably in part because he thought Dillinger was on the
road to getting into serious trouble. But moving to the
farm really didn't help with that problem very much. Dillinger
ran wild, and he got into trouble, or what or
was about to get into trouble, I should say, for
stealing a car. So at age nineteen, he joined the Navy,

(04:18):
but after only five months he went a wall when
his ship was docked in Boston, and later he was
dishonorably discharged, so he came home to Morrisville for a
little while. He got married to sixteen year old Beryl
Hovious in April of nineteen twenty four, and also for
a brief time he showed promise as a baseball player
for a team in Martinsville, Indiana, But it wasn't long

(04:40):
before Dillinger started to get into trouble again. That same
year in four he and an older friend named Ed
Singleton assaulted and robbed a local grocer, and they really
botched the crime. They messed up completely, and they got
caught and Singleton pled not guilty got off with a

(05:01):
light sentence. But Dillinger took some really bad advice from
his father, who convinced him not to get a lawyer
and to plead guilty. And uh, they were just sort
of assuming that maybe, since Dillinger had no prior criminal record,
maybe the court would show mercy let him off easy,
but it didn't go down that way. Dillinger was sentenced
to ten to twenty years in prison. So what a

(05:23):
way to start life. Yeah, pretty serious sentence, of course,
though he didn't just take it lying down and accept
his fate. At first. Dillinger attempted to escape from prison
a few times, acted up, got in all kinds of trouble.
He seemed to become more and more bitter about a
situation as time went on, especially when he was denied
parole and when his wife divorced him in nine while

(05:46):
he was still in there. After a while, though, Dillinger
settled down, or at least he appeared to. He worked
in the prison shirt factory and started making friends with
some of the older inmates, like Harry Pierpont, who could
school him and danced criminal tactics like the finer points
of robbing banks, for instance. Then in May if nineteen
thirty three, after nearly nine years in prison, Dillinger's good

(06:09):
prisoner facade paid off and he was paroled just a
few weeks later. On June tenth, nineteen thirty three, he
robbed his first bank in Ohio, and he made off
with somewhere in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars on
that first job, and he also started recruiting a few
friends and pulled off several more robberies that summer, but
it wasn't long before he was back behind bars again.

(06:30):
Really just at the end of the summer. He was
arrested in Dayton, Ohio and September twenty, nineteen thirty three,
and then he was thrown into the county jail and Lima,
Ohio UM. According to the FBI's website, when Lima police
were frisking Dillinger, they found a document which seemed to
be a plan for a prison break, but Dillinger said
he didn't know anything about that. But just a few

(06:53):
days later, eight to ten of Dillinger's prisoner buddies escaped
using the exact plan the police had found. So turned
out that Dillinger had arranged for guns to be smuggled
into the prison to aid the escape, so presumably this
had been the plan all along. Dillinger would make parole,
get out of jail, pull off some jobs to get money, UM,

(07:17):
to get guns, get m oh whatever, and then return
to prison to get his friends out. And his friends
didn't forget the favor either. Just a couple of weeks later,
several of the escape ees showed up at the jail
again where Dillinger was being held and at first they
pretended to be there to return Dillinger to the Indiana
State Prison since he had of course violated parole. But

(07:41):
as soon as Sheriff just Sarber asked to see some
sort of I D they shot and killed him, took
his keys, and freed Dillinger. So a wild double part
escape here and the band of outlaws became known as
the Dillinger Gang or the Terror Gang. And during the
last few months of nineteen thirty three, Dillinger and friends

(08:02):
rated police arsenals for guns and AMMO and bulletproof vests,
and they robbed about a dozen banks across the Midwest
and picked up some serious cash in the process. In October,
for example, they robbed a bank in Greencastle and made
off with about seventy five thousand dollars. They eventually made
hundreds of thousands of dollars doing this, and there was
no real leader to the gang, but Dillinger became kind

(08:25):
of the star of these robberies. He was well dressed,
he was good looking, and he was athletic. He had
this signature move he would do where he would leap
over the bank counter to intimidate employees and get access
to the teller's cages and also impressed by standards. At
the same time, well, he'd also impressed them by telling
people who were there to deposit their cash that they
could keep their personal money. He was only interested in

(08:49):
getting the banks money. So there was that Robin Hood
kind of thing going on that keeps on popping up
in a lot of these outlaw episodes we talked about.
But the Dillinger gang did hurt people too. They killed
about fifteen people and wounded several others during their crime spree.
Dillinger was even wanted for murder after a policeman was
killed during robbery at a bank in East Chicago, Indiana,

(09:12):
in January nineteen thirty four. But by this time the
gang was making front page news, I mean, obviously for
for heists like this, and local law enforcement in the
Midwest wanted the FBI, which was then called the Bureau
of Investigation or Division of Investigation, to get involved give
them a little help with all of this. But by

(09:33):
the letter of the law at the time, Dillinger and
his friends hadn't committed any federal crimes yet, so therefore
the future FBI couldn't couldn't lay a hand on him,
and I'm not officially at least that winter, Dillinger took
his girlfriend, Evelyn fri Schett, and the rest of the
gang to Florida on vacation in Daytona Beach for a
couple of weeks, and then after that the whole gang

(09:55):
headed west to Tucson, Arizona, and that's where they were discovered, recognized,
and arrested by police after a fire broke out in
one of the hotels a couple of them were staying
in under assumed names. They were all wanted all over
the Midwest at this point, so states were actually competing
over who would get them. Most of the gang ended
up going to Ohio, but the East Chicago police got

(10:17):
Dillinger and threw him in Crown Point, Indiana Jail, which
was supposedly escape proof. At this time. There was a
media frenzy surrounding Dillinger when he was there. The warden
would let reporters interview him, and Dillinger apparently joked with
them and really just charmed them all. I mean, some
of them thought, Hey, this is a shame that this
guy is gonna end up getting executed because he murdered somebody,

(10:38):
because he really is kind of likable. But less than
two months later, Dillinger put the jail security to the test.
On March third, four, Dillinger escaped by waving a pistol
to force guards to let him out of his cell.
He then captured Crown Points, Warden and guards and locked
them in a cell and fled. According to the popular

(10:59):
version of the Store, the gun Dillinger used in this
instance was one that he'd carved out of wood and
darkened with boot black, so basically shoe polish. And some people,
of course think that this is totally bogus and that
he actually had a real gun. But it's one of
those one of the many myths out there about Dillinger
that just you want to believe it because it's such
a good story. Encyclopedia Britannica says that he was singing

(11:22):
as he left, quote I'm heading for the last round up.
And in Carlson's article, he says that Dillinger later wrote
about the incident in a letter to his sister and
said quote you should have seen their faces, ha ha ha,
with all exclamation points there too. So right after this
escape is when Dillinger made the mistake that would eventually

(11:44):
lead to his downfall. Is part of his escape from jail,
he stole a sheriff's car and crossed the Indiana Illinois
state line, which violated the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act.
So finally there was a federal offense in Jaeger Hoover,
the Bureau of Investigation could at last go after Dillinger

(12:04):
full force. Dillinger had, of course, basically made a full
out of law enforcement officials with this latest escape and
the possible boot blackened gun, and catching him would be
a huge accomplishment and a much needed win at this
point for Hoover's fledgling bureau, So Hoover put his Chicago

(12:24):
Bureau chief, Melvin Purvis, in charge of finding the outlaw,
but they didn't have any luck at first. All of
their initial attempts to capture him through raids failed. In
the meantime, though Dillinger was busy. He put together a
new gang since all of his other friends were in
jail already, and the new members of the Dillinger gang
included the likes of baby Face Nelson, who was generally

(12:46):
considered an unbalanced homicidal psychopaths. He Denistan with al capone
and people were I mean, this guy was a guy
to be feared, but he wasn't necessarily the type of
person that Dillinger had worked with in the past. But
they set off together on another series of robberies. Purvis
and his guys have been searching for Dillinger all over
the place, but they kept not finding him or kind

(13:08):
of just missing him, and they'd find out that he
was somewhere, but he'd escaped before they could catch him. Then,
in April of nine thirty four, the Bureau got a
tip that the gang was hiding out at the Little
Bohemia Lodge north of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, while Dillinger recovered from
a wound he'd gotten on their last job. So Purvis
and Hugh Clegg, the assistant director of the Bureau at
the time, led a small army of agents and approached

(13:30):
the lodge at night, trying to ambush the gang. But
as they approached, the owner's watchdogs began to bark, and
around the same time, three men were leaving the building
and they got into a car. Apparently, Purvis tried to
yell at the car where government agents, but the men
didn't hear him and started the car and they started
to pull away, and as the car pulled away, agents

(13:51):
opened fire. They ended up wounding two of the men
and killing one of them, and they were all non
gangster civilians, so big embarrassment there. And after that, Purvis
and his men opened fire on the lodge, but as
soon as Dillinger and his men heard the shooting, they
managed to escape. They jumped out windows onto the first
floor roof and got away. But meanwhile, in an encounter

(14:13):
with baby Face Nelson at a neighboring resort, one Bureau
agent was wounded and another one killed, and their government
vehicle was stolen too. So all of this, you know,
shooting innocent men, um having one of their own agents
killed by baby Face, Losing Dillinger yet again was a
huge embarrassment for Purvis and Hoover, and newspapers were calling

(14:36):
them to be fired, and some members of the Roosevelt
administration we're thinking that they might need to get a
new SBI director. But after the Wisconsin incident, Dillinger and
his gang went on to rob another bank in Ohio,
and Hoover went ahead and dubbed the outlaw public Enemy
number one and put up a pretty significant cash reward

(14:59):
of ten thou and dollars for any information about his whereabouts.
He was he I think he knew at this point
his job was kind of riding on on catching him. Yes,
he did, and their speculation that this may have made
Dillinger a little bit more cautious finally, maybe to the extreme.
Even he's rumored to have undergone plastic surgery around this

(15:19):
time to change his appearance and his fingerprints, but of
course we don't have any proof of that. That's just
kind of a story that's out there. Even if Dillinger
did go to this extreme, though ultimately it didn't help
him at all. On July twenty one, and a stage
contacted a police officer with information Sage was a Romanian
immigrant who was the madam of a brothel in the

(15:39):
Chicago area. Her real name was actually on a Coumpanus.
Because of the profession she was in, she was being
deported and in exchange for giving the Bureau information about Dillinger,
she wanted the cash reward and the FBI's help in
preventing her deportation. So Purvis and his colleagues agreed on
at least the first part, and they said maybe her
cooperation would help her with the second part of it,

(16:01):
so she told them she knew Dillinger's current girlfriend, Polly Hamilton's.
Some sources say that Anna and Polly were roommates, others
say that they were just girlfriends, but regardless, she said
that she, Dillinger and Hamilton's we're all going to see
the Clark Gable movie Manhattan Melodrama, which was ironically a
gangster movie, and either the Biograph or the Marlborough Theater
in Chicago the following night. So Stage said she'd let

(16:24):
them know which theater they were going to, and she
also said she would wear an orange skirt so that
they could pick her out. That's how she became known
as the Woman in Red later on. So when Sunday
July rolled around, Stage still didn't know what theater they
were going to, so agents were sent to both locations.
Then around eight thirty pm, Stage, Dillinger, and Hamilton's all
showed up at the Biograph, whoever, wanted the agents to

(16:48):
wait until Dillinger came out so that they wouldn't hurt
anyone who was inside the theater watching the movie, So
all of the agents that the other theaters used that time.
During the movie to come over to the biograph and
to serve as re enforcement. So at ten thirty pm,
Dillinger came out of the theater with the ladies and
purpose was supposed to light his cigar as the signal

(17:09):
for the agents to close in and surround Dillinger, but
there's some question as to whether the cigar was actually
ever lit or not. They may have just rushed in. Yeah,
they may have just gone for him as soon as
they saw him. The agents did surround Dillinger. Some witnesses
say that Dillinger went for its gun, others say that
he didn't, but the agents claim he did and the

(17:30):
outlaw was shot trying to escape down the alley. That's
their story at least so bystanders apparently tried to crowd
around Dillinger's body in the street and dip their handkerchiefs
and the edges of their skirts or bits of paper
in his blood as souvenirs. Another case of these grizzly
gangster souvenir things going on. But the remaining gang members

(17:53):
were all captured or killed not too long after Dillinger's death,
which really just added to the prestige age of the
Bureau of Investigation, which became the FBI in nineteen thirty
five and really boosted Hoover's reputation. By mid nineteen thirty six,
the heyday of the nineteen thirties outlaws was really pretty
much over, and Hoover said to have kept Dillinger's gun, straw,

(18:17):
hat and death mask in a glass case outside of
his office. The shrine stayed there until Hoover's death in
nineteen seventy one. But of course it's never just that
simple when it comes to a famous outlaw. Some researchers
claimed that Dillinger wasn't really killed that night. They think
that the Bureau of Investigation agents killed another man in

(18:38):
his place. In his book History's Greatest Lies, which was
exerted in a two thousand nine issue of History Magazine,
William Weir references a letter that Emil went Not Jr.
Received in nineteen sixty eight. Now Emil went not Ka Junior,
just to remind you guys, he's Um, the son of
the man who owned the Little Bohemia Lodge, the lodge
in Wisconsin, Um. When Dillinger stayed there in nineteen thirty four,

(18:59):
the play they had, the innocent guys were shot exactly. So,
since Dillinger had escaped in such a hurry, he left
his stuff at the lodge, and the owners had used
those belongings to set up a little Dillinger museum. The
person who had sent the letter to when Nanka said
that Dillinger was still alive and had been living in
Hollywood under an assumed name since the shooting. Here she
also included a photo with the letter, offering it for

(19:23):
use in the museum, and that was, I guess, supposedly
the purpose of the letter. And it apparently looked a
lot like Dillinger could have looked as an older man.
So we have to ask what pieces of evidence have
people put forth to actually support this theory. Some say
the person shot had black hair and Dillinger was supposed

(19:43):
to have brown hair, but that could be a pretty
easy fix. You can dye your hair and everything. Um.
There was, however, also a discrepancy in eye color, so
Navy records say that Dillinger's eyes were blue, but the
autopsy showed that the person shot had on eyes. Um Again,
though you know, you never know with eye color, people

(20:04):
can have different interpretations. But finally, the man autopsy had
a heart condition that there's no record of Dillinger having
that's kind of the strange outlier here. So what do
people who buy this theory think really happened. Well, it
said that before he died, Dillinger was going by the
alias Jimmy Lawrence in Chicago. But there really was a

(20:27):
low level Chicago criminal named Jimmy Lawrence who kind of
resembled Dillinger and also had a heart condition. So some
people think this man was killed instead of Dillinger and
that Dillinger got the last laugh. Although we should say
that the FBI really considers this one of the top
ten myths out there about Dillinger, and there are so
many myths out there about him, it's sometimes hard to

(20:49):
separate fact from fiction because you, I mean, you'll see
this theory kind of posed in regular sources all over
the place. But also, if you're gonna cupe Dillinger's gun
straw hat and death map in a glack case for decades,
you'd better stand by your story. That's true too. So
people continue to explore Dillinger's life and all of these
theories through books and stories and film of two thousand nine,

(21:14):
for example, in two thousand nine, there was a movie
called Public Enemies that John Death started in and he
was he played Dillinger. So this is another great opportunity
I think for us to play one of our favorite games,
which is tell us one of your favorite movies related
to our podcast. You should write in and tell us
which movie that features Dillinger in his life is RST
Gangster Movies. Yeah, so right to us. You can find

(21:36):
us at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com,
or on Facebook or on Twitter at mt in history.
And if you want to learn about a few other
public Enemies out there after we've covered Public Enemy number one,
we do have an article you can search for Public
Enemy on our homepage at www dot how stuff works
dot com. This podcast is brought to you by Audible

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(22:26):
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