The Top 5 Most Notorious Outlaws (13 page)

In spite of the absence of real news about Dillinger over these two months, America’s Public Enemy Number One hardly disappeared from the news. If anything, Dillinger’s low profile only added to his legend. An endless stream of articles appeared on the FBI’s debacle at Little Bohemia, and Dillinger “sightings” came in from around the country. At the end of June, Dillinger celebrated his 31st birthday, and though his surgery scars were still healing, he actually began spending time in public. He attended baseball games at Wrigley Field during the day and went to clubs at night. With his previous girl Billie having been convicted the month before, he even found a new girlfriend, Polly Hamilton.

While Van Meter remained more cautious, the plastic surgery apparently emboldened Dillinger and gave him hope that he was still invincible. As in the Hollywood movies that his life sometimes seemed to resemble, Dillinger dreamed of one last big score, after which he would ride off into the sunset and disappear for good in Mexico, Latin America or some other exotic locale. On June 30, Nelson, Dillinger and Van Meter held up the Merchants National Bank in South Bend, Indiana.  Helping them may have been another Public Enemy, Pretty Boy Floyd, although that has never been proven conclusively. Regardless, the robbery began badly and only got worse.  Van Meter immediately shot and killed the first police officer on the scene, Howard Wagner.  Then Nelson was fired on by a local jeweler, Harry Berg, who hit him in the chest. However, Nelson’s bulletproof vest kept him from being seriously injured, and their exchange of shots wounded an innocent bystander.  In the ensuing chaos, an unarmed teenaged boy named Joseph Pawlowski tackled Van Meter, who hit him over the head with his gun.  

Meanwhile, Dillinger and his accomplices ran out of the bank carrying about $28,000 and bringing along three hostages.  Undeterred by dangers to the civilians, the police still fired, wounding two of the hostages and grazing Van Meter’s head.  Though several other citizens were wounded in the melee, the police did accomplish what they set out to do: neither Dillinger nor Nelson would ever rob another bank.

Tired of being away from the city’s nightlife, Dillinger moved from the seedy apartment at the edge of town to an apartment run by Anna Sage, a former prostitute who now had her own brothel and had in fact introduced Dillinger to his new girlfriend. Dillinger and Polly lived it up over the next few weeks, and Dillinger’s extreme confidence and risk-taking seem to have been rooted in a plan he and Van Meter were brainstorming. They had been developing a plan to ambush and rob a mail train. Using nitroglycerine, they would blow open the train’s armored car and walk away with their biggest score ever. The plan so captured their imagination, they even began talking about writing a screenplay detailing their exploits.

The line between reality and the movies was blurring. And in an entirely fitting way, that theme of unreality marked Dillinger’s end. Even while he and Van Meter were plotting their grand plan, a plot to bring the famous outlaw down was falling into place. Anna Sage was facing serious legal troubles. She was a Romanian immigrant facing deportation by the U.S. Immigration Service, as well as new prostitution charges. She brokered a deal with the Feds, mediated by none other than Martin Zarkovich, the corrupt East Chicago cop who also happened to be her boyfriend. She told the Feds that she was going to the movies with Dillinger and Polly Hamilton the next night, and that she would be wearing an orange dress so that the authorities could spot her. Though she was unsure which theater they were going to, she told them it would either be the Biograph Theater or the Marbro.

On the night of July 22, Sage accompanied Dillinger and his girlfriend to the movies. Ironically, the film they attended was
Manhattan Melodrama
, the story of a gangster played by Clark Gable who ends up going to the electric chair for his life of crime. Meanwhile, the Feds were waiting outside both the Biograph Theater and the Marbro Theater, so conspicuous that the Biograph’s manager actually called the Chicago police on them, thinking they were criminals casing the place. When the Chicago police arrived, the Feds had to wave them away.

Led by Melvin Purvis, the agents waited outside the theater, having decided it would be best to take Dillinger down as he left the film. As the film ended and customers came out, Purvis signaled Dillinger’s exit by lighting his cigar while standing at the entrance. Somehow, Dillinger got the sense that something was wrong; after making eye contact with Purvis, Dillinger stepped out ahead of the two women and tried but failed to grab his gun. As agents approached him and ordered him to surrender, Dillinger tried to flee into an alley, only to find that federal agents had closed that escape off. At least three agents fired several rounds at Dillinger, hitting Dillinger in the back and sending him face first to the pavement. Dillinger had been hit three or four times, with the fatal shot having gone through the back of his neck and out his head just below his right eye, killing him instantly.  The man credited with firing the fatal shot, Charles Winstead, would be given a personal letter of commendation from Hoover himself.

The apparently invincible outlaw Houdini who had slipped away so many times had finally met his end.

The Biograph Theater in 1934

Dillinger’s legend only grew with his death, and the myth-making began almost from the moment his body hit the sidewalk. A huge crowd gathered that night, scavenging for souvenirs and hoping for a glimpse of the dead outlaw. As people around the theater began to realize what had just happened and who the target was, some of them dipped their handkerchief in the famous outlaw’s blood. Crowds followed Dillinger as his body made its way, first to the hospital where he was declared dead, then to the coroner’s office, and finally to a funeral home in Mooresville. Rumors began circulating about a “lady in red” who had betrayed Dillinger. The coroner’s office returned a mere seven dollars to Dillinger’s father, and another set of rumors grew about what had happened to all of the outlaw’s money. Still more rumors flew around about Dillinger’s brain having been removed during the autopsy.

Dillinger’s body

Of course, like Jesse James and other famous outlaws, rumors that Dillinger had somehow escaped or not been killed outside the theater persisted. Author Jay Nash has extensively argued in his book,
The Dillinger Dossier
, that the man killed outside the Biograph Theater that night was not Dillinger but another petty thief known as Jimmy Lawrence, who slightly resembled Dillinger. Nash’s theory was that Martin Zarkovich set up the elaborate plot to have someone take the fall in Dillinger’s place, which would allow Dillinger to escape the heat, and that the FBI covered it up upon realizing that they had killed someone other than Dillinger. According to his elaborate conspiracy, Nash insisted Dillinger was still alive and well, living out his life doing manual labor in California.

J. Edgar Hoover carefully nurtured his official version of the Dillinger story. Shortly after the outlaw’s death, Van Meter and Nelson and other famous Depression-era bandits were captured or killed, lending credence to Hoover’s claim that the new federal War on Crime was bearing fruit and reversing the tide. The following year, his Division of Investigation was renamed the FBI, and the hunt for Dillinger was front and center in the new agency’s own history of itself. In his office, Hoover installed an exhibit case holding an array of Dillinger memorabilia, including the hat and glasses the outlaw was wearing the night he was killed. Up to this day, FBI trainees engaged in target practice sometimes shoot at life-sized John Dillinger targets. Over the years, Hoover carefully turned the outlaw into a symbol of his agency’s triumph and a moral lesson that crime does not pay.

If Dillinger’s life often seemed to resemble a Hollywood movie, Hollywood went on to play a major role in his ongoing legacy. The movie industry underwent a profound shift in the early ‘30s. Films that openly romanticized flashy urban gangsters like Al Capone had been a mainstay of Hollywood in the ‘20s, but in response to public fear and revulsion of crime in the Depression, the industry imposed on itself a strict code that would remain in place for two decades, one that banned glorification of violence and sex. For a brief period of a couple of years, however, explicit violence was allowed if the purpose of the film was to denounce criminality and extoll the virtues of law enforcement.

During this transitional period, the public got their fill of movie violence in films that romanticized not criminals but those who sought to put them behind bars, particularly the agents of the newly revitalized FBI. Emblematic of this shift was the actor James Cagney, who appeared as a gangster in the 1932 film
Public Enemies
, only to reappear as a federal agent in the 1935 film
G-Men
(short for “Government Men,” popular slang designating FBI agents).

As the Hollywood Code of the ‘30s eventually fell into disrepute and became outdated, movies exploring the grit and grime of criminal life began reappearing. Gangster films started making a comeback in the ‘50s, and Dillinger himself has naturally popped up in every decade. Some of his more notable appearances include Warren Oates in the title role of a 1973 film, Robert Conrad in 1979’s
The Lady in Red
, and Johnny Depp in Michael Mann’s 2009
Public Enemies
.

Dillinger has remained a pop culture fixture since his spree and demise, but his life and death had an important impact on the real world as well. The wave of bank robberies for which the ‘30s were famous was most heavily concentrated in the struggling farm states of the Midwest, and J. Edgar Hoover would go so far as to call the tri-state area comprising Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma the “crime corridor.” As early as 1930, a bank raid in this region was a weekly occurrence, more often than not followed by a car chase.

As urban banks fortified themselves with updated security measures, bandits turned toward more vulnerable rural banks. In addition to featuring less formidable security, rural banks allowed outlaws to quickly disappear into the countryside via a vast network of newly paved roads. While bank robbers such as Dillinger might have been embraced as folk heroes by some, this was not the case among the rural townspeople of the Midwest. As more and more banks in the region fell victim to well-organized heists, locals began forming “citizen protective associations” to supplement bank security. Informal posses sometimes sped off in pursuit of fleeing getaway cars, often at great personal risk. Dillinger’s gang had come across vigilantes on a handful of occasions, and his success ensured that such a system stayed in place.

In recent years, some historians contend that the crime wave of the early ‘30s was more a product of perception than of reality. What these historians argue is with society apparently crumbling around them, the American public saw outlaws like John Dillinger, and the spectacular crimes they committed, in highly symbolic terms. As one historian puts it, “every major crime was turned into a test of whether America and its values could survive the depression.”  Amidst such a fearful environment, the federal government actively encouraged this perception, in a sense “marketing” outlaws and promoting them as celebrities. They did so to justify the passage of an ambitious package of anti-crime legislation that radically redefined the role of the federal government in law enforcement. The War on Crime that emerged from this legislation served two purposes. First, it reassured an anxious public desperate for a semblance of order and normalcy. Second, it paved the way for aggressive federal intervention in other areas of American life as well.

A look at the historical record provides some evidence for this view. The FBI didn’t collect national crime statistics until 1930, and even then the records were sketchy until 1933. But examinations of crime trends in various cities suggest that “serious crime in America rose to a peak in 1918 and steadily declined until the 1940s.”

But if the actual crime wave of the 1930s was a subjective matter, the public reaction to that perceived crime wave was all too real. After the Lindbergh kidnapping in 1932, an editorial in the
New York Herald Tribune
declared that an “army of desperate criminals which has been recruited in the last decade is winning its battle against society.” Other papers calls for citizen vigilante groups, an American version of Scotland Yard, even nationalization of the police. The first use of the term “Public Enemy” to describe a criminal was by the Chicago Crime Commission, a private gathering of lawyers, bankers, and businessmen that had gone as far as hiring its own investigators to seek punishment for high-profile criminals. The public, and the culture, were demanding action. The popular “Dick Tracy” cartoon strip pre-dated the actual War on Crime by several years. When Attorney General Homer Cummings finally assembled his national Conference on Crime, it was a belated response to a swelling of public opinion long in the making.

Much has been made of the contrast between the urban gangsters of the 20s and the rural outlaws of the 30s. There were indeed some real differences; Al Capone and other gangsters of the Roaring Twenties saw themselves as businessmen trying, in their own way, to become part of and take advantage of the system—a system that was viewed by many as offering everyone a real the chance of prosperity. By contrast, John Dillinger and other Depression-era outlaws saw themselves as enemies of the system at a time when that system seemed to be failing the majority. But the contrast between outlaws and gangsters can be overdrawn. Dillinger and other outlaws spent considerable time in jail before embarking on their crime sprees, and while in prison they came into contact with established figures of organized crime who would prove to be key allies once they were released. In between their notorious bank heists, outlaws needed a place to lay low, and they frequently made use of the brothels and clubs controlled by organized crime. They also used their underworld contacts to obtain weapons and to get rid of stolen goods. It is no accident that the supposed farm boy John Dillinger spent his final days and met his end on the streets of Chicago.