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!

THE BARKER-KARPIS GANG KILLS AGAIN

8/30/1933 - Murderous as always when pulling a robbery, members of the Barker-Karpis Gang heist a payroll in South St. Paul and bullets go flying again!  After watching the routine for weeks of money bags being delivered from the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis, the gang (Alvin Karpis, Freddy Barker, Doc Barker, Byron Bolton, Charlie Fitzgerald, and Fred Goetz) attacks at 9:45 in the morning.  Guards and carriers surprised and surrounded, wielding a sawed-off shotgun, Doc Barker yells "Stick 'em up," at police guard Leo Pavlak and the officer complies, but when Fitzgerald fires his weapon to get the attention of one of the police officers, the tipsy Barker, thinking he is under attack, yells "You dirty rat son-of-a-bitch" and puts a mortal load of shotgun pellets into Pavlak's head.

                                       
                                                           Arthur "Doc" Barker

And with that gunfire, everyone else cuts loose too with the weapons they are carrying, including a bystanding railroad signal man who will wound outlaw Fitzgerald in the leg.  In the ensuing maelstrom of lead released chiefly by the machine guns of Freddy Barker and Bryan Bolton, Officer John Yeaman, who has been sitting quietly in his car waiting for his partner, is seriously wounded when he takes a bullet that goes through his cap and hits him just above his right eyebrow, along with hits to the shoulder and neck that will have him carrying twenty-five bullet fragments in his body for the rest of his life.

                                               
                                                           Freddy Barker

Guards down, bank messengers Joe Hamilton and Herbert Cheyne wisely abandon the money sacks they had been carrying ... treasure the gang is quick to scoop up.  Then, sweeping three blocks of the city with suppressing machine gun fire, the gang roars out of town in an heavily armored black sedan driven by Karpis (in his autobiography he will describe the robbery as "a good day's work) with the fruits of their bloody 10 minutes of labor ... $33,000 in cash and bonds.

                  
                                                              Alvin Karpis

The local newspaper compares the robbers to Jesse James and calls them "cool and reckless."  Reckless indeed, on the force only four months, Patrolman Leo Pavlak leaves behind a widow and four children.

                                        
                                                                   Pavlak

HOMER VAN METER GOES BYE-BYE

8/23/1934 - Another member of the Dillinger Gang, Homer Van Meter, bites the dust, or in Homer's case, lots of dirty street alley grime, and again, betrayal by "friends" plays a crucial role in the killing.

                   
                                                           Michigan City Con

Hiding out in wilds of Minnesota in the aftermath of John Dillinger's death the month before (he is wanted on bank robbing and murder charges), in anticipation of leaping over the Canadian border, Homer Van Meter visits St. Paul to retrieve some of his bank robbing loot that is being held by that city's underworld, by some accounts estimated to be in excess of $10,000, but crooks being crooks, a number of parties decide to keep Van Meter's money and split it among themselves necessitating the need for the outlaw's demise.

    
                                                                   Outlaw

Unaware that he has been put on the spot, at 5:12 in the late afternoon, Van Meter, wearing a blue serge suit and a straw hat, steps out of an auto dealership where he has been looking at new cars, fully expecting to meet Jack Peifer of the local gaming house the Hollyhocks Club, a pal and one of the men holding his money.  Instead, tipped off, four crooked cops that include the town's former Chief of Police, Detective Tom Brown, and the current Chief of Police, Frank Cullen, are on hand with their guns at the ready, two sawed-off shotguns and two Thompson sub-machine guns, all fully loaded.  At the words, "STICK THEN UP," Van Meter instead starts running, while drawing a .38 Colt automatic and firing two shots over his shoulder at his pursuing antagonists.  A bad decision, it is a pursuit that lasts only a handful of seconds and steps because the bandit turns into a blind alley and is instantly trapped.  Turning to fire or to flee in another direction, Brown's shotgun blows Van Meter into the air, and when the bandit comes down and tries to continue the fight despite having a mangled hand and almost severed arm, the cops show they are fully aware of the meaning of the word overkill by emptying their weapons at, and into the desperado ... a tornado of lead, the outlaw's gun will be found ten feet away from his body by the time the firing ends!

  
                                                 Awaiting transfer to the morgue

At the morgue, Van Meter will be found to have $923 hidden in the pocket of his pants, another $450 hidden in a money belt, a gold Bulova watch on his wrist (how the police missed scooping up this booty remains a mystery to this day), and fifty bullets in his body ... so many hits that when his body is turned over to his family for burial, they will declare that his corpse looked like the St. Paul Police Department had used it for target practice!

                 
                                                            Holed Homer

Additionally, signs of Van Meter's unsuccessfully attempts to disguise himself are noted ... the outlaw had dyed his brown hair black, grown a mustache, had his fingertips burnt by acid to remove his fingerprints, a tattoo reading "HOPE" had been whittled on, and injected to alter his appearance, there is wax under his facial skin.  What isn't found is the money bag eyewitnesses say Van Meter was carrying and that his girlfriend, Marie Conforti, claims contained at least $6,000 in cash.

                       
                                                                      Headlines
                                               
A messy end for John Dillinger's best friend since their days at the Pendleton Reformatory in Indiana, Van Meter had ironically told friends and family he didn't intend to someday end up dying in a dirty alley ... exactly the way he actually does die though!!!!!!!!!!!

VINCENT COLL EARNS HIS "MAD DOG" NICKNAME

7/28/1931 - Continuing his ongoing war with gangster Dutch Schultz over respect, money, and revenge for the murder of his older brother Peter, Irish born killer Vincent Coll finds Schultz associate Joey Rao in front of the Helmar Social Club on East 107th and makes the snap decision to take the mobster out on the spot.

           
                        Dutch Schultx                                           Vincent Coll

The choice is not surprising given that Rao is known to be after the $10,000 payday that Schultz has put on the head of Coll, but unfortunately the timing and place are not conducive to mano-a-mano mobster mayhem ... a sweltering evening of temperatures in the 90s, Rao is sharing the sidewalk and street with a host of innocent adults and children, outdoors hoping to encounter a cooling breeze.  Bad decision, Top Shot winners the hoodlums are not!!!!!  Firing from a moving touring car with a shotgun, while his buddy Frank Giordano blasts away with a .45 automatic, Coll misses Rao and his two bodyguards, when sensing danger, the men duck to the sidewalk.  Sadly, he is much more accurate hitting the children that are playing near Rao ... two youngsters, five and fourteen years old are slightly wounded, a seven-year-old is hit five times, a three-year-old sleeping in a stroller is struck twice in the back, and five-year-old Michael Vengali is mortally wounded when hot lead rips through his stomach.
                                
                              
                                                        "Mad Dog" Coll
                           
Instantly on the run, not only from Schultz killers, but now from every cop in the city too, Coll is labeled a "Mad Dog" by New York City mayor Jimmy Walker, and true, the name sticks  In hiding, he will dye his blonde hair black and grow a mustache ... changes in his appearance that nonetheless fail to keep the police from eventually finding him at the Cornish Arms Hotel on October 4, 1931.  Captured without a struggle, Coll and Giordano go on trial later that year for the death of Vengali, but are found not guilty when high profile defense attorney Samuel S. Leibowitz shows the shyster at his core and gets the guilty murderers off by destroying the testimony of the prosecution's star eyewitness, George Brecht.

                                 
                                                         Acquitted

Justice will be served though!  On February 8, 1932, Coll spends so much time in a drugstore phone booth threatening mobster Owney Madden with the kidnapping of his brother-in-law unless he is paid $50,000, that the sometimes partner of Schultz has enough time to have the call traced back to the store.  Still jabbering away, a group of Schultz and Madden gunmen that includes Rao, arrive and open up with machine guns on their trapped enemy, and unable to run or even draw his pistol, in the turkey shoot that ensues, Coll is turned into a slab of human Swiss cheese (fifteen slugs are taken out of his head and chest at the morgue and there are even more leaking holes in the corpse where rounds passed through).  

                          
                               Cops removing Coll from the London Chemist drugstore

The "Mad Dog" is all of twenty-three when he answers for his many crimes!

DID DILLINGER DIE AT THE BIOGRAPH?

7/22/1934 - The accepted story of course is that using information supplied by the infamous "Woman in Red," Anna Sage, a prostitute from Romania seeking to avoid deportation on morals charges, Public Enemy #1, John Dillinger was gunned down outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago when attempting to draw a pistol from his pants pocket he fled from federal agents and East Chicago police officers under the direction of Melvin Purvis.

                                     
                                                                 Biograph
                         
                                                              Going Cold

But is that what really happened?  If the "Jackrabbit" got it as the legend tells, then how do these issues with the killing get resolved (and remember, when Dillinger joined the name and when he went to prison accurate physical measurements that matched each other were taken of the outlaw):

*The corpse presented to the Cook County coroner had brown eyes, but Dillinger's were blue.
*With the muscle relaxation of death, bodies grow slightly taller, yet the Dillinger corpse was half an inch shorter.
*The fingerprints taken from the body identified as Dillinger were not an exact match for those on file at FBI headquarters in Washington D.C.
*The stress of being the most hunted man in America caused Dillinger to lose weight while he was on the run, yet the corpse is heavier than Dillinger's stated weight.
*Why did the official autopsy report vanish?
*The gun displayed for years as being taken from Dillinger after he was shot wasn't manufactured until 1935 ... a year AFTER the events outside the Biograph.

                         
                                                         Gunned Down

*Wounds on the body did not match known bullet hits Dillinger took in several of his robberies.
*When a copy of the original autopsy report is found over thirty years later (the doctor who performed the procedure made himself a copy otherwise the details of body analysis would have been lost forever), the entry angle of the wounds noted could only have come from firing DOWN into a body.
*What happened to the thousands of dollars Anna Sage said that Dillinger was carrying at the time of the murder ... when the corpse arrives at the morgue it has slightly over seven dollars to its name.
*In the meat wagon the corpse can be seen wearing a ruby ring, but when its person effects are documented, no ring is noted (see left hand below).

                          
                                                                 Off to the morgue

*Why did hundreds of people in Dillinger's hometown of Mooresville say the corpse on display at the local funeral parlor was not the bandit?
*The corpse was identified as having a debilitating heart condition that could have caused an early did, and that did lead to major surgery documented on the body by a long healed major scar running from the outlaw's chest to his belly ... but the Navy, prison, captured gang members, and his girlfriend Billie Frechette, never mentioned the condition and throughout his brief outlaw career Dillinger was known for the athletic manner in which he robbed banks and ran from his deeds.

                                           
                                                        Dead On Arrival

*Two days after the outlaw's official funeral, his father has the body dug up and then reburied under tons of concrete and steel bars creating an underground tomb that can never be opened without completely destroying whatever is left of the body within ... why and where did the money come from for the operation?



Questions and issues that now can no longer be resolved ... could the FBI have killed a Dillinger look-a-like and then covered up the deed to preserve Hoover's job ... who can say, but whether killed as his legend is told or able to pull off an escape even better than his wooden gun antics at Crown Point, somewhere John Dillinger is wearing his trademark crooked grin!

                    

PRETTY BOY FLOYD KILLS A GOVERNMENT AGENT

7/20/1931 - On the run from a shootout in the downtown Bowling Green, Ohio, in which his partner in crime, Bill Miller is killed, and he will gun down Officer Ralph Castner and wound the city's police chief, future Public Enemy #1, Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd hides out in turf he is familiar with, the criminal underground of Kansas City, Missouri.
 
Floyd Rap Sheet

Castner

Availing himself of the criminal underground services of Kansas City crime boss John Lazia and local kingpin Democrat politician, Thomas J. Pendergast (who will launch the career of future president, Harry Truman), Floyd is given shelter in a two-story brick building at 1039 Independence Avenue ... the bottom floor occupied by the Lusco-Noto Flower Shop, while a bootlegging operation ran out of the top floor ... Floyd is assigned a curtain partitioned "room" on the second floor.

Lazia

Pendergast

 

Unaware that anyone other than bootleggers occupy the upper floor, Kansas City police officers (led by Lt. E. L. Nelson) and Prohibition agents (Glenn Havens, Joe Anderson, and Curtis Burks) climb the stairway to the second floor, and suddenly crash through the door and into a dimly lit room smelling of whiskey, completely surprising nine men seated around a table.  "It's a raid, boys!  Put 'em up!" Havens orders, and the men seemingly do as requested (helped by the example of a man who protests, and is instantly beaten about the head with a pistol) ... at first.

Burks

Calm despite being surrounded by cops with drawn guns, as officers start searching the boxes in the room for contraband, Floyd slowly rises from the table and acts like he is drunk, stumbling and mumbling to himself, and about to collapse on the floor.  Nothing but a ruse, as a voice of one of the agents proclaims, "Hey, you fellas know who this is? It's that Pretty Boy character," the outlaw throws a whiskey bottle across the room and on to a nearby bed ... and as if watching a volley in a tennis match, all the heads in the room turn for a split second and look at the bed.  A mistake of taking their eyes off Floyd even for a moment, with rattlesnake speed the desperado draws two .45 automatics and begin firing.  An actual "shoot-out-the-lights" moment in which the room goes dark in the lead melee that follows, Floyd empties both guns forward, bulls his way through two men trying to grab him, leaps down the stairs and escapes through a crowd beginning to gather in the street, exiting the area in a nearby parked Plymouth.

Next Day Headlines

Vanishing into Oklahoma's Cookson Hills (a rugged area that had previously sheltered the likes of Jesse James, Belle Starr, the Dalton brothers, and Bill Doolin), the outlaw leaves chaos behind him in Kansas City ... 23-year-old bootlegging suspect Joe Careo is cut down by a law enforcement shotgun blast, 37-year-old bootlegging suspect Joseph Lusco is sent to a local hospital with a fractured skull, officer Joe Anderson suffers a glancing bullet wound to his stomach, detective Clarence Reedy is wounded in the neck, 36-year-old Special Agent is mortally wounded by a round that holes his stomach, and outside, a 23-year-old innocent bystander named M. P. Wilson, from Bessemer, Alabama dies from another bulleted belly.

 

Wanted Poster

Lazia and Pendergast not happy at having one of their operations shot up, Floyd now has the criminal underworld looking for him, along with local and Federal authorities ... trifecta of fate awaiting ... the outlaw has 3 years, 3 months, and 3 days left to live ... a time period in which he is not done killing cops!

Floyd

Fingerprinting Dead Floyd