Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. This podcast is brought to you by Audible dot com, the Internet's leading provider of audio books, with more than eighty five thousand downloadable titles across all types of literature. One audiobook to consider is Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. This biography is based on many personal interviews with Steve Jobs, his family, his friends, and colleagues. Here the real story of one of the greatest innovators of our time. That's Steve Jobs. Available from Audible. To try Audible Free today and get a free audio book of your choice, go to Audible podcast dot com slash 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 dot com, the Internet's leading provider of audiobooks, with more than eighty five thousand downloadable titles across all types of literature and featuring audio versions of many New York Times bestsellers. To try Audible free today and get a free audio book of your choice, go to Audible podcast dot com, slash history stuff. That's Audible podcast dot com slash history stuff. The house Stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today. On iTunes,

Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. This podcast is brought to you by Audible dot com, the Internet's leading provider of audio books, with more than eighty five thousand downloadable titles across all types of literature. One audiobook to consider is Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. This biography is based on many personal interviews with Steve Jobs, his family, his friends, and colleagues. Here the real story of one of the greatest innovators of our time. That's Steve Jobs. Available from Audible. To try Audible Free today and get a free audio book of your choice, go to Audible podcast dot com slash 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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