“John Herbert Dillinger is America’s classic bankrobber,” wrote Jay Robert Nash in his excellent book, Bloodletters and Bad Men: A Narrative Encyclopedia of American Criminals From the Pilgrims to the Present.
“No other criminal ever approached his exploits and reputation,” Nash wrote. “Within the space of twelve months Dillinger robbed more banks and stole more money than Jesse James did in the sixteen years he was at large. It took the combined forces of five states and the FBI to pressure his operations to a halt.”
According to the FBI, Dillinger and his gang killed ten men and wounded seven others. They robbed banks, police arsenals and staged three jail breaks. They killed a sheriff during one jail break and wounded two guards in another. They also killed a police officer during a robbery and killed a detective who stopped Dillinger’s car.
With the release of Public Enemies, a Michael Mann film starring Johnny Depp as Dillinger and Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent who hunted him, a look back at the notorious criminal’s life is in order.
Mann’s film is based on the book Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, by Bryan Burrough. I wrote about the book in a two-part series for GreatHistory. Click here to read Part I and II.
Burrough’s book covered the years of 1933 and 1934, the years of the Depression-era’s bank robbers’ crime spree and the birth of the FBI. The book chronicles the crooks and the lawmen who hunted them. Mann, however, chose to concentrate his film only on Dillinger, his girlfriend Evelyn “Billie” Frechette and Purvis.
Dillinger was the most famous, or infamous, of the Depression-era criminals. He was born in 1903 in Indianapolis. His mother died in 1907 and he was raised by a 15-year-old sister. Unlike other Depression-era criminals, Dillinger was not poor. He was born into a middle-class family.
After graduating high school, Dillinger was uprooted by his grocer father, a stern disciplinarian, who purchased a farm and moved the family to Indiana. Dillinger refused to work the farm and found a job in Indianapolis.
In 1923 Dillinger stole a car and then joined the Navy to avoid arrest. He later deserted and returned to Indiana. Hanging around poolrooms in 1924 he and another crook planned the robbery of a grocer. The grocer was bludgeoned and Dillinger pulled out a pistol, but the grocer knocked it away as it fired. The robbers then ran off. Dillinger, 21 at the time, ended up in Indiana State Reformatory with a severe 10 to 20 year sentence.
He was later transferred to Michigan City Penitentiary where he met the men who would shape his criminal life, Homer Van Meter and Harry Pierpont. Pierpont, who worked with the legendary “Baron,” Herman K. Mann, taught Dillinger the Baron’s technique for robbing banks. The education was offered in return for Dillinger’s promise to break Pierpont and his gang out of prison after he was released.
More on Dillinger in my next blog.
Paul Davis also writes an espionage blog for GreatHistory. His website is http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/site. He can be reached at daviswrite@aol.com.
For more information on Dillinger, Purvis and their contemporaries, see Public Enemies and Keystone Cops on HistoryNet.
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