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N0KFQ > TODAY 23.07.10 00:14l 128 Lines 6306 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History - Jul 22
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From: N0KFQ@N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA
To : TODAY@WW
Jul 22, 1934:
Dillinger gunned down
Outside Chicago's Biograph Theatre, notorious criminal John
Dillinger--America's "Public Enemy No. 1"--is killed in a hail
of bullets fired by federal agents. In a fiery bank-robbing
career that lasted just over a year, Dillinger and his
associates robbed 11 banks for more than $300,000, broke jail
and narrowly escaped capture multiple times, and killed seven
police officers and three federal agents.
John Dillinger was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1903. A
juvenile delinquent, he was arrested in 1924 after a botched
mugging. He pleaded guilty, hoping for clemency, but was
sentenced to 10 to 20 years at Pendleton Reformatory. While in
prison, he made several failed escapes and was adopted by a
group of professional bank robbers led by Harry Pierpont, who
taught him the ways of their trade. When his friends were
transferred to Indiana's tough Michigan City Prison, he
requested to be transferred there too.
In May 1933, Dillinger was paroled, and he met up with
accomplices of Pierpont. Dillinger's plan was to raise enough
funds to finance a prison break by Pierpont and the others, who
then would take him on as a member of their elite robbery gang.
In four months, Dillinger and his gang robbed four Indiana and
Ohio banks, two grocery stores, and a drug store for a total of
more than $40,000. He gained notoriety as a sharply dressed and
athletic gunman who at one bank leapt over the high teller
railing into the vault.
With the help of two of Pierpont's women friends, Dillinger set
up the jailbreak. Guns were bought and arranged to be smuggled
into Michigan City Prison. Prison workers were bribed, and a
safe house was set up. On September 22, however, just days
before the jailbreak was scheduled to occur, Dillinger was
arrested in Dayton, Ohio. Four days later, Pierpont and nine
others broke out of Michigan City. Pierpont's gang robbed a bank
in Ohio for $11,000 and on October 12 came to Ohio to free
Dillinger from the Lima city jail. The Lima sheriff was killed
during the successful breakout. On October 30, the gang robbed a
police arsenal, acquiring weapons, ammunition, and bulletproof
vests.
The Pierpont/Dillinger gang robbed banks in Indiana, Wisconsin,
and Chicago for more than $130,000, a great fortune in the
Depression era, and eluded the police in several close
encounters. In January 1934, the gang headed to Tucson, Arizona,
to lay low. By this time, four police officers had been killed
and two wounded, and the Chicago police had established an elite
squad to track down the fugitives. They were recognized in
Tucson and on January 25 captured without bloodshed.
Dillinger was extradited to Indiana, arraigned for his January
15 murder of Indiana police officer William Patrick O'Malley,
and held at Crown Point prison. On March 3, while still awaiting
trial, he executed his most celebrated escape. That morning, he
brandished a gun and methodically began locking up the prison
officials. The legend is that the weapon was a wooden gun carved
by Dillinger and blackened with shoe polish, but it may also
have been a real gun smuggled into the prison by an associate.
Whatever the case, Dillinger raided the prison arsenal, where he
found two sub-machine guns, and then enlisted the aid of another
prisoner, an African American man named Herbert Youngblood.
Dillinger and Youngblood then made their way to the prison
garage, where they stole a sheriff's car and calmly drove
off--after pulling the ignition wires from the other vehicles
parked there.
Parting ways with Youngblood, Dillinger traveled to Chicago and
formed a new gang featuring "Baby Face" Nelson, a psychopathic
killer who used to work for Al Capone. The new Dillinger gang
robbed banks in South Dakota and Iowa, netting $101,500 and
wounding two more police officers. The Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) joined the manhunt for Dillinger after he
escaped from Crown Point, and on March 31 two FBI agents closed
in on him at an apartment in St. Paul, Minnesota. Dillinger and
an accomplice shot their way out.
In April, the Dillinger gang went to hide out at a resort in
Wisconsin, but the FBI was tipped off. On April 22, the FBI
stormed the resort. In a disastrous operation, three civilians
were mistakenly shot by the FBI, one of whom died; Baby Face
Nelson killed one agent, shot another, and critically wounded a
police officer; the entire Dillinger gang escaped.
With two other gang members, Dillinger traveled to Chicago,
surviving a shoot-out with Minnesota police along the way. In
Chicago, he lived in a safe house and got a facelift to conceal
his identity. At some point, he also used acid to burn off his
fingerprints. On June 30, he participated in his last robbery,
in South Bend, Indiana. The gang got away with about $30,000 at
the cost of one officer killed, four civilians shot, and one
gang member shot.
In July, Anna Sage, a Romanian-born brothel madam in Chicago and
friend of Dillinger's, agreed to cooperate with the FBI in
exchange for leniency in an upcoming deportation hearing. She
also hoped to cash in on the $10,000 bounty that had been put on
his head. On July 22, Sage and Dillinger went to see the
gangster movie Manhattan Melodrama at the Biograph Theatre
around the corner from her house. Twenty FBI agents and police
officers staked out the theater and waited for him to emerge
with Sage, who would be wearing an orange dress to identify
herself.
At 10:40 p.m., Dillinger came out. Sage's orange dress looked
red under the Biograph's lights, which would earn her the
nickname "the lady in red." Dillinger was ordered to surrender,
but he took off running. He made it as far as an alley at the
end of the block before he was gunned down, allegedly because he
pulled a gun. Two bystanders were wounded in the gunfire. Public
Enemy No. 1, as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had deemed him, was
dead.
Some researchers have claimed that another man, not Dillinger,
was killed outside the Biograph, citing autopsy findings on the
corpse that allegedly contradict Dillinger's known medical
record.
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