DON'T DO LUNCH WITH SCARFACE

9/20/1926 - Proving that a gangster that follows a set of routines is just asking to be killed, Al Capone is almost hit by his rivals in Chicago's North Side Gang.  

                 
                                                                 Scarface

Lunching as he commonly does at the restaurant of the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero, Illinois, the hotel that serves as the headquarters for Capone's underworld activities, the gangster and his bodyguard Frankie Rio hit the floor immediately when a car pulls up outside and unleashes a barrage of Tommy-gun fire.

                                              
                                                        Frankie Rio

Seeking to retaliate, when the firing stops, Capone jumps up and heads for the door, intent on firing at the fleeing vehicle, but the attack has been a ruse to create exactly that reaction from the mobster, blanks being fired to draw the mob boss outside where the real assault is to take place.  Deducing what is coming from the lack of shattered glass, Rio tackles his boss at the door and covers him with his own body.  And not a moment too soon, as Capone and Rio lay on the floor, a convoy of ten large touring cars filled with gangsters led by Hymie Weiss and Bugs Moran slowly passes by out front and fires machine guns, shotguns, and automatic pistols at the restaurant ... a hailstorm lasting minutes of over 1,000 rounds of lead sent out in search of Capone.

       
                                                                   Hymie Weiss
                                  
                                                            Bugs Moran
  
Amazingly, although an estimated 60 people also occupy the dining room with Capone and his bodyguard, only one person, a woman, is injured in the attack when she is struck in the eye by flying glass ... a wound that Capone gladly pays $10,000 to have treated so he can brag to the local newspapers that he saved the woman's sight. 

                  
                                  Police and others outside after the attack

Rattled by his near death experience, Capone calls for a truce with his enemies, but it doesn't last long and weeks later he will have six of his men machine gun to death Weiss as the gangster is about to enter the flower shop where he has his headquarters on State Street ... and he doesn't forget the other individual responsible for the attack, Moran he will attempt to kill in a little bit of death dealing that will go down in criminal history as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

                                   
                                        Payback a bitch, Weiss in death

A JACKPOT HAUL

9/17/1930 - Two master criminals prove their prowess by taking down the Lincoln National Bank and Trust Company of Lincoln, Nebraska.  Planned down to the second for weeks by bank robbers Harvey Bailey and Eddie Bentz, at 10:00 in the morning a large blue Buick containing six heavily armed men pulls up in front of the Barkley Building.

                           
                                                                  Bailey
                                                    
                                                                   Bentz

One man staying with the car and keeping its engine running, one man covering the outside activities of the locals by standing on the corner with a machine gun, with guns drawn four members of the robber team enter the bank and quickly scoop up cash and securities in the neighborhood of $2,700,000 ... the largest robbery in the history of the country up to that time.  Pros!  The robbery is planned so well that even though a teller flees out a side door and immediately calls the police, and a passing motorcycle officer is convinced to move on after having a machine gun pointed at his head (moving on directly to the nearby police station), by the time two patrol cars full of cops arrive they are all too late ... the gang is gone in less than ten minutes; helped to speed away from the scene of the crime by having their getaway car enhanced by a siren that causes the local traffic to move out of the way as the outlaws make their way out of the city.

                                  
                                                                   Bailey

In the aftermath of the robbery the local police chief loses his job, two shift new police cars are purchased by the city, outlaws Tommy O'Connor and "Pop" Lee are eventually arrested and sentenced to long prison terms, and Jack Britt is tried twice and eventually let go for lack of evidence.  But it is robber Gus Winkler who pays the biggest price. Free lancing from being a hitman for Al Capone (he is believed to be one of the killers that participates in the St. Valentines Day Massacre), with the heat on Winkler makes arrangements to escape prosecution by returning $575,000 in securities ... a decision that draws the wrath of Capone, who kept from his cut of the proceeds, has Winkler put into Lake Michigan leaking from 109 pieces of buckshot in his body.

                                      
                                                             Winkler

Never given up by members of their gang, only Bailey and Bentz avoid any repercussions for the huge payday!

DOC IS LET OUT OF JAIL

9/10/1932 - The combination of pleading letters from Ma Barker and secret bribes given to government officials using bank robbery assets gathered by outlaw buddies Freddy Barker and Alvin Karpis results in Arthur R. "Doc" Barker receiving a parole from his life sentence for the 1921 murder of Fuller Construction Co. night watchman Thomas J. Sherrill in Tulsa.

                         
                                                        Ma in 1930

A big mistake by the state of Oklahoma, Doc immediately joins his brother and Karpis in a tragic criminal spree that will include three bank robberies, a payroll robbery, the ransom kidnappings of William Hamm and Edward Bremer, and gunplay that results in a police officer being disabled for life, the shooting of a Northwest Airways employee the gang believes is a cop, the murders of four police officers, a civilian being killed for appearing to be interested in the license plate number of the stolen car the gang is using, the assassination of underworld doctor Joseph Moran, and the killing of a gang member thought to be giving information to the authorities.

                            
                                                             Doc  
                                       
                                                            Fred
                                         
                                                         Karpis

There is a plus side however, it is because of Doc foolishly leaving a fingerprint on a gas can (despite Karpis telling him to wear gloves) that the FBI is able to connect the gang to the kidnapping of Edward Bremer, and worse for the gang, when the FBI captures Doc in Chicago in 1935, they discover a map Barker has stupidly circled that shows the latest hideaway of his mother and his brother Freddy in Florida ... a discovery that results in a shootout that his mother and brother will not survive.

                                     
                                                Next stop Alcatraz for Doc

And like the other members of his family, Doc will eventually be shot to death while trying to escape from Alcatraz in 1939 (oldest brother Herman will commit suicide when cornered after a 1927 robbery, Ma and Fred are blasted by machine guns in 1935, and Lloyd Barker, after being released from serving a 25-year stretch in Leavenworth, on the losing end of a family argument, is shot and killed in Colorado by his wife in 1949).

                   
                                                            Doc

THE BOSS OF BOSSES NO MORE

9/10/1931 - Arrogance does in Mafia crime lord Salvatore Maranzano.  The winner of what is known as the Castellamarese War, a nation-wide battle to control Italian crime in America that kills dozens over a year's time, Maranzano upon the death of his New York rival, Giuseppe "Joe the Boss" Masseria (thanks to the betrayal of his second-in-command, Charles "Lucky" Luciano) calls a meeting of over 500 killers and crooks to let everyone know who is in charge and what the new rules will be governing their criminal activities.

                            
                                                                 Maranzano
                                              
                                                                   Masseria
                              
                                    Masseria after Coney Island lunch with Lucky Luciano

At a large hall on Washington Avenue in the Bronx. Maranzano declares himself to be the "Capo de tutti Capi," the Boss of Bosses who will run a criminal underworld of Italians he calls "La Cosa Nostra" ("This thing of ours") in an organization patterned after Julius Caesar and his Roman legions.  Listening, young killers like Luciano, Vito Genovese, Thomas Lucchese and others are less than happy with the myriad of rules that must be followed and the tribute they must pay monthly to their new leader and immediately begin plotting to give Maranzano a Caesar-like sendoff.

                
                              Luciano                                  Genovese
                                        
                                                       Lucchese

No fool, at the same time as a plot is being hatched against him, Maranzano decides to have a purge of his own of the "Young Turks" in his new organization and authorizes hits on Luciano, Genovese, Al Capone, Frank Costello, Willie Moretti, Joe Adonis, and Jewish gangster Dutch Schultz.  A race of blood baths, at 2:50 in the afternoon Maranzano is in his Manhattan real estate office in the Eagle Building at 230 Park Avenue when four men arrive and flash badges and state they are police officers and tax agents come to inspect the books, an audit the crime boss is expecting.  Unfortunately for Maranzano, the group has not been sent by the local authorities, but consists of a squad of killers put together by Luciano buddy Meyer Lansky ... Red Levine, Bugsy Siegel, Albert Anastasia, and Lucchese (the core of a group that will soon be known as Murder, Inc.).

                                     
                                                                  Levine                                            
           
                                                                 Meyer Lansky
                         
                                                                      Anastasia
                                        
                                                                     Bugsy

Fighting for his life once the actual occupation of his visitors is revealed when knives and guns are pulled, Maranzano is stabbed six times in the stomach and chest by Levine, and then to make sure he stays down, shot once by each of the killers.  Mission accomplished the murderers then flee, passing killer Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll on the stairs of the building, late for a scheduled meeting with Maranzano to discuss the execution of Luciano and his supporters.

                                          
                                                         The Boss of Bosses

The killing is not over though, and in real scenes that portend the end of The Godfather when Michael Corleone takes over, across the country a mass extermination of Maranzano allies takes place that leaves various police departments to deal with over forty corpses (Maranzano lieutenants Samuel Monaco and Louis Russo will wash ashore in Newark with their heads crushed, throats slashed, and various pieces of their body missing compliments of meat cleaver hacking).  Hold on power solidified, Luciano and his peers do away with the title of Boss of Bosses, and instead former a commission of criminal leaders that will vote on matters of importance to organized crime, while retaining some of Maranzano other ideas like the establishment New York City's Five Families ... Italians that will wreck mayhem over the city under the banners of the Lucchese Family, the Bonanno Family (now Massino), the Mangano Family (now Gambino), the Luciano Family (now Genovese), and the Profaci Family (now Colombo, the family that Mario Puzo is said to have used as the inspiration for his Godfather novel).  

HOW TO CREATE A PUBLIC ENEMY

9/6/1924 - In Mooresville, Indiana at 8:30 in the evening, training to become Public Enemy #1, fortified with shots of whiskey, twenty-year-old John Dillinger, and his partner Ed Singleton (a thirty-one year-old web-fingered drunk that has umpired some of shortstop Dillinger's local baseball games), attempt to rob West End Grocery Store owner B. F. Morgan.  

                                             
                                        Young Dillinger

Unhappy with his job as an upholsterer and newlywed life, the young man allows himself to be influenced by distant-in-law Singleton and booze fueled fantasies about his hero, Jesse James, a combination that leads to the bad decision that will effect the rest of Dillinger's short life.

                 
                                                  Dillinger and his father

A carnival of criminal ineptitude, in the robbery that takes place the men exchange clothes, thinking that will prevent their identification if anyone spots them while the crime is taking place, and then hide in a patch of bushes near a local church they know their victim will walk by.  When Morgan does appear, Dillinger springs forth and hits the grocer over the head with a metal bolt wrapped in a handkerchief planning to rob an incapacitated foe.  Not enough though, the blow is deadened by the bolt wrapping and Morgan wearing a straw hat (he will receive only minor cuts) and the grocer resists fiercely, wrestling in the dark with his assailant and causing Dillinger to discharge the Iver Johnson .32 pistol he is carrying.  The still of the night shattered by the gunshot, Mooresville becomes even noisier when Morgan instinctively gives the "Masonic Grand Hailing Sign of Distress," a set of noises accompanied hand and arm moments that causes porch lights to go on up and down the street

                             
                                                         Graduation photo

Thinking his shot might have wounded or killed the grocer, Dillinger flees the commotion he has caused, but arriving at where he and Singleton have parked their getaway car, discovers that not only has his partner decided not to participate in the crime he had planned, he has stranded Dillinger by driving off in the escape vehicle, a Model T Ford.

                          
                                Dillinger as part of the crew of the battleship, USS Utah

Not the cool customer he will one day become when pulling jobs, a panicked Dillinger ducks into the first place he comes upon where he thinks he can hide, a pool hall a few blocks away.  There he provides police with the only clue they will need to solve the crime by asking about the injury status of Morgan before anyone even knows Morgan has been assaulted; foolishness that is compounded by patrons of the establishment noting that the flustered young man babbling about the local grocer is attired in clothes that are torn and bloodstained!   


                         Dillinger under arrow, Singleton is in cap at the end of the bottom row

No Sherlocking required, Dillinger is arrested the next morning at his father's farm by Deputy Sheriff John M. Haysworth and Mooresville Marshal Greeson and the family fun begins.  Taking bad advice from his father when there is no hard evidence that he robbed the grocer, the future outlaw confesses to the crime, then at trial, waives his right to a lawyer and pleads quilty ... a decision that allows crime fighting Judge Joseph Warford Williams to use the youth as an example for others not to follow in his path by sentencing Dillinger to 10-20 years on a first offense consisting of conspiracy to commit a felony and assault with intent to rob.  Embittered by his sentence and the knowledge that his former friend Singleton receives a lesser punishment of a 2-14 years by hiring a lawyer, getting a change of venue that comes with a different judge, and not pleading guilty (he will serve only two years), Dillinger will use the nine years he is forced to serve behind bars (first at the Pendleton Reformatory and then the Indiana State Penitentiary at Michigan City) by studying how to become a competent professional bank robber, lessons he will excel at and that in 1934 make him the nation's first designated Public Enemy #1!

                    
                                                     Pendleton
                          
                                                                  Michigan City
                                  

HOLLYWOOD TRAVESTY

Because the book Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough was outstanding, I was filled with great anticipation when I heard that director Michael Mann was going to make the tome into a movie, and with Johnny Depp as John Dillinger.  And then I saw the film on its first day of release and was deeply disappointed that amazing truth had to once more be jazzed up by Hollywood.  Beyond the names of characters, place names for a handful of incidents and a feel for the time period, the movie is historically a joke and it is beyond my comprehension how Burrough could be satisfied with the finished product other than receiving a fat paycheck for the travesty.  A true scholar of the period could probably dismantle the film better than I, but here are some of the glaring inaccuracies that jumped off the screen for me:

*Dillinger is shown assisting in the 1933 Michigan City prison break in person, and yet at the time, he was really behind bars in Lima, Ohio on robbery charges.
*John Hamilton is shown assisting Dillinger in the Michigan City prison break from outside dressed as cop, but at the time of break, Hamilton was a prisoner on the inside.
                                         
*Homer Van Meter is shown as one of the prisoners breaking out, but in reality he had already been paroled, and because he and Pierpont hated each other, would not join up with Dillinger until 1934 when Pierpont was back behind bars.
                                        
*No huge gun battle in which both guards and prisoners got killed EVER took place during the Michigan City escape.
*Bank robber Walter Dietrich was not killed escaping Michigan City ... he actually went on the lam and committed more crimes until he was recaptured in 1934 ... and he will be paroled in 1948, hardly the history of an already dead man.
                               

*The prisoners at Michigan City did not wear black and white striped uniforms ... the pen colors for Indiana state prisoners was blue.
*As can be seen in the many photographs taken of Dillinger during various arrests, the man did NOT have a long facial scar on the right side of his face as Depp does in the movie, assumingly to make him look "tough.". 
                                       
*After the prisoners escaped, there was no stop at a lonely lady's farm for food and a change of clothing ... that took place when Harry Pierpont's girlfriend, Mary Kinder, found the gang shelter later that night.
                        
*Glaringly inaccurate, Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd was killed three months AFTER Dillinger's night at the Biograph ... NOT the year before.  And when he was, Floyd was armed with a pistol, NOT a sub-machine gun, he tried to escape into a pocket of trees through an open corn field, NOT an apple orchard with plenty of cover, and while Melvin Purvis was present, he did not fire the shots that brought Floyd down (and having really been killed at Little Bohemia, Agent Carter Baum wasn't there at all). 
    
*The Dillinger Gang, at least before Baby Face Nelson, did not start bank jobs by assaulting employees and customers ... if provoked they would, but never as their first move upon entry into a bank.
*Homer Van Meter did not team up with Dillinger until after Dillinger escaped from the Crown Point jail ... he was nowhere to be found when Dillinger robbed his first bank with his Michigan City friends at Greencastle, Indiana.
*The Dillinger Gang containing escapees from Michigan City NEVER got into any gun battles with police during their bank robberies ... or blasted their way out of town shooting off Tommy guns from their escape vehicle.
*The hearing where Hoover was embarrassed in Washington D.C. about never making an arrest took place after Dillinger and his gang had already been smashed (1934) and led directly to the FBI Director's supposed arrest of outlaw Alvin Karpis in 1936.
                                                
*Melvin Purvis was placed in charge of the Chicago office of the Bureau of Investigation by Hoover in 1932 while Dillinger and his cohorts were still in the Michigan City Prison ... NOT AFTER THE BREAKOUT!
                                          
*Hoover didn't pump Purvis to the press ... before or after Dillinger was killed ... he wanted to face of the Bureau to be his!
*The meetings that took place between Dillinger and Karpis took place after the Little Bohemia raid when Dillinger was trying to find a safe place to treat his wounded friend, John Hamilton ... not in Chicago immediately after the Michigan City breakout.
*Dillinger was not made the first Public Enemy #1 until AFTER he escaped from Crown Point in 1934 ... certainly not during the period of the Racine, Wisconsin robbery in 1933 when Pierpont was actually running the gang.
*Public encounter where Dillinger is violent with a man wanting his coat while talking to Billie Frechette never happened.
*The Chicago encounter where Baby Face Nelson kills an FBI agent outside the apartment he is hiding in while Purvis goes for help NEVER happened!
                                       
*The arrest of Dillinger in Tucson did not take place in a hotel room while the outlaw was distracted by his girlfriend Billie taking a bath ... the Tucson cops grabbed Dillinger when he went to visit the location where Russell Clark was staying and had been arrested earlier in the day.
*The gang was in the custody of the Tucson police for several days ... Pierpont, Makley, and Clark were not sent to Ohio the same day they were caught as is depicted in the film.
                                
*In the film there is NO Russell Clark ... one of the Michigan City escapees, core member of the first Dillinger Gang, the man that got a life sentence for his part in the Sheriff Jesse Sarber murder that sprung Dillinger from the Lima, Ohio jail, the man who along with Makley bribed firemen to rescue their luggage from a burning hotel that led to the Tucson police capturing the gang, the man Dillinger was going to visit when he was arrested in Tucson ... yeah, Clark wasn't an important character at all, but Eddie Shouse who is kicked out of the gang almost immediately for drinking and hitting on Dillinger's girlfriend, he is shown as being in the gang all the way to Little Bohemia ... GIVE ME A BREAK!!!!!!!!!
                   
*Dillinger was escorted to Crown Point by over two hundred cops ... including the one in the car that had a shotgun trained on the outlaw and was hoping to use it ... he sat quietly like a statue the whole ride to Crown Point so as not to give his guard an excuse for shooting him ... there was no waving to crowds of citizens that WEREN'T lining the streets in the freezing cold!
*Very little brutalizing of the guards took place during Dillinger's escape from Crown Point ... and unlike the way the movie depicts it, a guard was not sent head over heels down a flight of stairs.
*During the escape, Dillinger took great pains to keep his wooden gun behind his victims where they couldn't see it ... that howver is not the case in Depp's and Mann's recreation of the event.
*Dillinger took over a dozen individuals hostage escaping from the Crown Point jail, but Mann did not believe audiences would find that truth credible so he cut the number back to a more manageable number of seven.
*Unlike in the movie where it is implied that the FBI is chasing Dillinger from the Michigan City breakout, the transportation of Sheriff Lillian Holley's car over state lines as part of the Crown Point escape is when the Feds actually went after the outlaw.
*Dillinger didn't call his girlfriend Billie Frechette with the FBI listening when he escaped from Crown Point ... he met her at his lawyer's office and they were together again from then until her arrest in Chicago in April of 1934.
                                        
*Gun drawn Dillinger confrontation with Frank Nitti gangsters NEVER took place!
*Tommy Carroll was not mortally wounded during the Sioux Falls bank robbery and then tortured by the FBI to give up the whereabouts of the gang, resulting in the Little Bohemia debacle ... Carroll died as a result of a shootout with police in Waterloo, Iowa ... AFTER LITTLE BOHEMIA!  The outlaw who was shot and then tortured by the FBI to give information on the gang, though nothing dealing with Little Bohemia, was Eddie Green ... another character not shown in the movie.
                                           
*After the Sioux Falls robbery the gang did not flee directly to the Little Bohemia Lodge ... before that happened there was a shootout in St. Paul, Green's killing in St. Paul, the Mason City robbery, and Billie Frechette's arrest.
*Dillinger was shot in right shoulder at Mason City ...not in the arm at Sioux Falls.
*The Little Bohemia raid might be the biggest travesty of the entire movie ... a debacle in which the ENTIRE Dillinger Gang escaped while the FBI killed an innocent civilian and had one of its members murdered by Baby Face Nelson, it is instead depicted as a triumph for the Feds that leaves Dillinger alone and vulnerable.  Here is the BOLOGNA:
@There was NO protracted gun battle ... after hearing the Feds fire on the civilians, the gang let loose with a volley from their positions within the Lodge and then fled.
@Eddie Shouse, not only was not killed at Little Bohemia ... he wasn't even in the gang by that time ... he'd been kicked out in '33 and was back in jail by the time of the FBI raid.
@Homer Van Meter was not killed at Little Bohemia ... he died a month after Dillinger, in August of 1934 in St. Paul ... and Purvis had nothing to do with the death.
@John Hamilton was not killed at Little Bohemia ... attempting to reach St. Paul the next day with Dillinger and Van Meter, in a running gun battle with police Hamilton took a wound in the back that turned septic and he died in agony days later ... and there is also a school of thought that while wounded fleeing Little Bohemia, he survived and lived out his life in hiding in Canada (the story his family now tells) ... and of course, Purvis had nothing to do with the death and neither did Charles Winstead.
@Baby Face Nelson was not killed at Little Bohemia ... after the deaths of Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, he lived long enough to replace them as the country's Public Enemy #1 ... the most wanted bandit in the country until November when though hit seventeen times, the mortally wounded gunman killed FBI agents Herman Hollis and Sam Cowley in Barrington, Illinois ... while Purvis was back at the FBI office in Chicago.
                   
@There is no known instance of Baby Face Nelson EVER doing an impersonation of James Cagney saying "You dirty rat!"
@Carter Baum was not waylaid on a forest road and killed by Baby Face Nelson ... along with two other officers, he was ambushed by Nelson when the trio pulled into the Little Star Lodge to investigate rumors about a car being stolen nearby.
*Billie Frechette's arrest at a bar in Chicago, with Dillinger waiting for her outside, took place before Little Bohemia ... NOT AFTER ... and when it went down, Dillinger did not get out of his car with a weapon in his hand while debating with himself whether or not to attempt a rescue of his girlfriend!
*Purvis did not threaten to have Anna Sage deported within 48 hours if she did not cooperate with the Feds.
*Agent Winstead actually was brought to Chicago to assist with the Dillinger hunt AFTER Little Bohemia ... and in no way did he postulate that Dillinger would go to the Biograph instead of the Marbro based on the outlaw probably preferring Gable to Shirley Temple.
*Dillinger was sometimes in the same building as the police that were hunting for him, but their department was on another floor ... and there is NO known instance of the bandit walking into the office where the Dillinger Squad conducted business and asking how the Cubs game was going.
*The timepiece Dillinger carried at his death contained a picture of Polly Hamilton ... NOT Billie Frechette.
*The scenes showing Myrna Loy in closeup in Manhattan Melodrama took place throughout the film ... not in a montage as is portrayed in Public Enemies.
*There are MANY accounts that claim Purvis was so nervous about confronting the outlaw, fumbling with his matches, that he never got his cigar lit to signal his men to close in on Dillinger.
*If Dillinger wasn't dead when he hit the ground at the head of the alley, he was within seconds of the event ... and whether he was or wasn't, there was certainly NO exchange between the outlaw and Winstead regarding giving Billie a message in prison regarding the song Bye Bye Blackbird ... COMPLETE NONSENSE!!!!!!!!
*The heroic Purvis of the movie was nowhere to be found in reality after Dillinger was killed ... by his own account, the shooting and ghoulish souvenir hunters dipping objects in the dead bandit's blood caused Purvis to throw-up in the alley.
*While Purvis was giving details of the action that brought down Dillinger to the press, the agent that actually called Hoover to tell him his men had taken out Dillinger was Samuel Cowley! 
                                                

Watch the movie if you wish, but when you do, know that you are viewing a huge load of malarkey!