John Dillinger: From a $50 Robbery to Public Enemy Number One

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

On a July night in 1934, bystanders in a Chicago alley dipped handkerchiefs and scraps of newspaper in the blood of a man federal agents had just shot. The man was John Dillinger, born in 1903 in Indianapolis and raised by a strict grocer father. His path to that alley began with a clumsy 1924 grocery store robbery that netted about $50. On his father's advice he pleaded guilty without a lawyer, expected leniency, and got 10 to 20 years. He came out in May 1933 after nine and a half years, trained by veteran bank robbers in the stopwatch methods of Herman Lamm.

This episode follows the short, violent career that came next. Dillinger robbed his first bank within weeks, was broken out of an Ohio jail by the mentors he had armed, and walked out of the supposedly escape proof jail at Crown Point. To a public that blamed banks for the Depression, he looked like an avenger. To J. Edgar Hoover, his state-hopping was the argument for a federal police force. The pursuit ran through shootouts in St. Paul and at Little Bohemia, back room plastic surgery, and a betrayal outside the Biograph Theater.

• Lamm's system gave each robber a role, including a driver who timed the job with a stopwatch, and Dillinger avoided Anderson, Indiana because trains might block his getaway.
• The March 1934 Crown Point escape is credited to a wooden pistol blackened with shoe polish, though a deputy and a later investigator claimed the gun was real.
• A doctor paid $5,000 nearly killed him with an ether overdose during facial surgery, then burned his fingertips with nitric and hydrochloric acid.
• A brothel owner facing deportation to Romania tipped off the FBI and wore an orange dress to the movies on July 22nd, which the papers turned into the Woman in Red.
• An estimated 15,000 people lined up to view his body, and his gravestone at Crown Hill Cemetery has been replaced several times because visitors chip off pieces.