“John Dillinger robbed here first.”
A few days ago, 99 and I were on the road for a project. We drove into a little town in Ohio named New Carlisle. It is near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base northeast of Dayton, and is about an hour’s drive west of Columbus.
The sharp-eyed 99 saw a little plaque on a building that housed a curio shop. The plaque noted the building once housed a bank, and the bank was the first bank John Dillinger ever robbed.
Photo by Author. Where John Dillinger Robbed First?
So I looked into the claim.
John Dillinger, a native of Indianapolis, grew up in Mooresville, Indiana. He was bright and hard-working, but bored. He stole a car, then enlisted in the Navy to avoid capture. He jumped ship, married a 16-year-old girl in 1924 when he was 21, and moved her from Mooresville, Indiana to Indianapolis.
He and a hood with a criminal record named Ed Singleton tried to rob a store in Mooresville, but the police caught them. Singleton hired a lawyer, lied, and pleaded innocent. Singleton was found guilty, and got a two-year sentence. Dillinger, on the advice of his father, owned up to the crime, showed up without a lawyer after the local prosecutor promised an easy sentence, and drew a 2 to 14 year sentence and another 10 to 20 year sentence for his honesty. Dillinger did 8-1/2 years in an Indiana prison; state officials paroled him in 1933. His wife divorced him before his parole.
THE FBI’S LINE ON DILLINGER
According to the FBI website, this is what followed:
“His (Dillinger’s) period of infamy began on May 10, 1933, when he was paroled from prison after serving eight-and-a-half years of his sentence. Almost immediately, Dillinger robbed a bank in Bluffton, Ohio. Dayton (Ohio) police arrested him on September 22, and he was lodged in the county jail in Lima, Ohio to await trial.
(The government employee who wrote this forgot to note Bluffton and Lima are both in Allen County, Ohio. This would explain why cops jailed him there because it is the county seat, and the location of the county jail.)
In frisking Dillinger, the Lima police found a document which seemed to be a plan for a prison break, but the prisoner denied knowledge of any plan. Four days later, using the same plans, eight of Dillinger’s friends escaped from the Indiana State Prison, using shotguns and rifles that had been smuggled into their cells. During their escape, they shot two guards.
On October 12, three of the escaped prisoners and a parolee from the same prison showed up at the Lima jail where Dillinger was incarcerated. They told the sheriff that they had come to return Dillinger to the Indiana State Prison for violation of his parole. When the sheriff asked to see their credentials, one of the men pulled a gun, shot the sheriff, and beat him into unconsciousness. Then taking the keys to the jail, the bandits freed Dillinger, locked the sheriff’s wife and a deputy in a cell, and leaving the sheriff to die on the floor, made their getaway.
Although none of these men had violated a federal law, the FBI’s assistance was requested in identifying and locating the criminals. The four men were identified as Harry Pierpont, Russell Clark, Charles Makley, and Harry Copeland. Their fingerprint cards in the FBI Identification Division were flagged with red metal tags, indicating that they were wanted.
Meanwhile, Dillinger and his gang pulled several bank robberies. They also plundered the police arsenals at Auburn, Indiana and Peru, Indiana, stealing several machine guns, rifles, and revolvers, a quantity of ammunition, and several bulletproof vests.
John Dillinger
On December 14, John Hamilton, a Dillinger gang member, shot and killed a police detective in Chicago. A month later, the Dillinger gang killed a police officer during the robbery of the First National Bank of East Chicago, Indiana. Then they made their way to Florida and, subsequently, to Tucson, Arizona. There on January 23, 1934, a fire broke out in the hotel where Clark and Makley were hiding under assumed names. Firemen recognized the men from their photographs, and local police arrested them, as well as Dillinger and Harry Pierpont. They also seized three Thompson submachine guns, two Winchester rifles mounted as machine guns, five bulletproof vests, and more than $25,000 in cash, part of it from the East Chicago robbery.
Dillinger was sequestered at the county jail in Crown Point, Indiana to await trial for the murder of the East Chicago police officer. Authorities boasted that the jail was “escape proof.” But on March 3, 1934, Dillinger cowed the guards with what he claimed later was a wooden gun he had whittled. (How did he get the knife into his cell to whittle the gun, and the shoe polish he would need to black it, I ask. Bad police work. We’ll cover that later.) He forced them to open the door to his cell, then grabbed two machine guns, locked up the guards and several trustees, and fled.
It was then that Dillinger made the mistake that would cost him his life. He stole the sheriff’s car and drove across the Indiana-Illinois line, heading for Chicago. By doing that, he violated the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act, which made it a federal offense to transport a stolen motor vehicle across a state line. A federal complaint was sworn charging Dillinger with the theft and interstate transportation of the sheriff’s car, which was recovered in Chicago. After the grand jury returned an indictment, the FBI became actively involved in the nationwide search for Dillinger.
Meanwhile, Pierpont, Makley, and Clark were returned to Ohio and convicted of the murder of the Lima sheriff. Pierpont and Makley were sentenced to death and Clark to life imprisonment. But in an escape attempt, Makley was killed, and Pierpont was wounded. A month later, Pierpont had recovered sufficiently to be executed.
(Note how quickly state officials used to execute criminal scum.)
In Chicago, Dillinger joined his girlfriend, Evelyn Frechette. They proceeded to St. Paul (Minnesota), where Dillinger teamed up with Homer Van Meter, Lester (“Baby Face Nelson”) Gillis, Eddie Green, and Tommy Carroll, among others. The gang’s business prospered as they continued robbing banks of large amounts of money.
Evelyn Frechette
Then on March 30, 1934, an agent talked to the manager of the Lincoln Court Apartments in St. Paul, who reported two suspicious tenants, Mr. and Mrs. Hellman, who acted nervous and refused to admit the apartment caretaker. The FBI began a surveillance of the Hellmans’ apartment. The next day, an agent and a police officer knocked on the door of the apartment. Evelyn Frechette opened the door, but quickly slammed it shut. The agent called for reinforcements to surround the building.
While waiting, the agents saw a man enter a hall near the Hellman’s apartment. When questioned, the man, Homer Van Meter, drew a gun. Shots were exchanged, during which Van Meter fled the building and forced a truck driver at gunpoint to drive him to Green’s apartment. Suddenly the door of the Hellman apartment opened and the muzzle of a machine gun began spraying the hallway with lead. Under cover of the machine gun fire, Dillinger and Evelyn Frechette fled through a back door. They, too, drove to Green’s apartment, where Dillinger was treated for a bullet wound received in the escape.
At the Lincoln Court Apartments, the FBI found a Thompson submachine gun with the stock removed, two automatic rifles, one .38 caliber Colt automatic with twenty-shot magazine clips, and two bulletproof vests. Across town, other agents located one of Eddie Green’s hideouts where he and Bessie Skinner had been living as “Mr. and Mrs. Stephens.”
On April 3, when Green was located, he attempted to draw his gun, but was shot by the agents. He died in a hospital eight days later.
Dillinger and Evelyn Frechette fled to Mooresville, Indiana, where they stayed with his father and half-brother until his wound healed. Then Frechette went to Chicago to visit a friend—and was arrested by the FBI. She was taken to St. Paul for trial on a charge of conspiracy to harbor a fugitive. She was convicted, fined $1,000, and sentenced to two years in prison. Bessie Skinner, Eddie Green’s girlfriend, got 15 months on the same charge. (Note: We’ll cover Evelyn’s bust later.)
Meanwhile, Dillinger and Van Meter robbed a police station at Warsaw, Indiana of guns and bulletproof vests. Dillinger stayed for awhile in Upper Michigan, departing just ahead of a posse of FBI agents dispatched there by airplane. Then the FBI received a tip that there had been a sudden influx of rather suspicious guests at the summer resort of Little Bohemia Lodge, about 50 miles north of Rhinelander, Wisconsin. One of them sounded like John Dillinger and another like Baby Face Nelson.
From Rhinelander, an FBI task force set out by car for Little Bohemia. Two of the rented cars broke down enroute, and, in the uncommonly cold April weather, some of the agents had to make the trip standing on the running boards of the other cars. Two miles from the resort, the car lights were turned off and the posse proceeded through the darkness. When the cars reached the resort, dogs began barking. The agents spread out to surround the lodge and as they approached, machine gun fire rattled down on them from the roof. Swiftly, the agents took cover. One of them hurried to a telephone to give directions to additional agents who had arrived in Rhinelander to back up the operation.
While the agent was telephoning, the operator broke in to tell him there was trouble at another cottage about two miles away. Special Agent W. Carter Baum, another FBI man, and a constable went there and found a parked car which the constable recognized as belonging to a local resident. They pulled up and identified themselves. Inside the other car, Baby Face Nelson was holding three local residents at gunpoint. He turned, leveled a revolver at the lawmen’s car and ordered them to step out. But without waiting for them to comply, Nelson opened fire. Baum was killed, and the constable and the other agent were severely wounded. Nelson jumped into the Ford they had been using and fled.
When the firing had subsided at the Little Bohemia Lodge, Dillinger was gone. When the agents entered the lodge the next morning, they found only three frightened females. Dillinger and five others had fled through a back window before the agents surrounded the house.
In Washington, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover assigned Special Agent Samuel A. Cowley to head the FBI’s investigative efforts against Dillinger. Cowley set up headquarters in Chicago, where he and Melvin Purvis, special agent in charge of the Chicago office, planned their strategy. A squad of agents under Cowley worked with East Chicago policemen in tracking down all tips and rumors.
Late in the afternoon of Saturday, July 21, 1934, the madam of a brothel in Gary, Indiana, contacted one of the police officers with information. This woman called herself Anna Sage; however, her real name was Ana Cumpanas, and she had entered the United States from her native Rumania [sic] in 1914. Because of the nature of her profession, she was considered an undesirable alien by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and deportation proceedings had been started. Anna was willing to sell the FBI some information about Dillinger for a cash reward, plus the FBI’s help in preventing her deportation.
(Anna Sage was a whore and then a madam (female pimp). In Hollywood, in DC, and among recent New York State attorneys-general like Eric Schneiderman and Eliot Spitzer, she would have a stay-out-of-jail-free card.)
At a meeting with Anna, Cowley and Purvis were cautious. They promised her the reward if her information led to Dillinger’s capture, but said all they could do was call her cooperation to the attention of the Department of Labor, which at that time handled deportation matters. Satisfied, Anna told the agents that a girlfriend of hers, Polly Hamilton, had visited her establishment with Dillinger. Anna had recognized Dillinger from a newspaper photograph.
(Special counsel Robert “Gestapo” Mueller protected mob boss and murderer Whitey Bulger. He also ran the FBI from 2001 thru 2013, when his pal James Comey took over. Mueller may well have protected a “businesswoman” like Anna Sage or Stormy Daniels if he thought the return would be big enough. How far standards have fallen.
Also, today’s illegal immigrant lobby would make a bigger hero out of Anna Sage than Molly Pitcher or Amelia Earhart or Rosa Parks. CNN and MSNBC talk show hosts would lionize her, and Ellen Degenerate would ask her for some of her girls’ services.)
Anna told the agents that she, Polly Hamilton (one of her prosties), and Dillinger probably would be going to the movies the following evening at either the Biograph or the Marbro Theaters. She said that she would notify them when the theater was chosen. She also said that she would wear an orange dress so that they could identify her.
On Sunday, July 22, Cowley ordered all agents of the Chicago office to stand by for urgent duty. Anna Sage called that evening to confirm the plans, but she still did not know which theater they would attend. Therefore, agents and policemen were sent to both theaters. At 8:30 p.m., Anna Sage, John Dillinger, and Polly Hamilton strolled into the Biograph Theater to see Clark Gable in “Manhattan Melodrama.” Purvis phoned Cowley, who shifted the other men from the Marbro to the Biograph.
Anna Sage, “The Lady in Red” … a Prostitute and Seller of other Women
(Anna Sage did wear an orange dress, but did not call ahead. Supposedly a Shirley Temple movie was playing at the Marbro, so Purvis was betting on the Biograph. But he had both places covered. Purvis’ and Cowley’s professionalism were so totally unlike the FBI before 9/11, and before the string of Moslem murderers who hit the Boston Marathon, Fatima and Clyde who killed government employees in San Bernardino, and the Pulse Nightclub booty shakin’ jihadist who killed 50 or so people at the Orlando homosexual and bisexual watering hole possibly because he got “shot down” by one or more patrons there. Oh, I almost forgot, and the FBI’s negligence before the Coward County school shootings in 2018. In each case, the FBI had foreknowledge and did nothing to stop the murderers.)
Cowley also phoned Hoover for instructions. Hoover cautioned them to wait outside rather than risk a shooting match inside the crowded theater. Each man was instructed not to unnecessarily endanger himself and was told that if Dillinger offered any resistance, it would be each man for himself.
At 10:30 p.m., Dillinger, with his two female companions on either side, walked out of the theater and turned to his left. As they walked past the doorway in which Purvis was standing, Purvis lit a cigar as a signal for the other men to close in.
Dillinger quickly realized what was happening and acted by instinct. He grabbed a pistol from his right trouser pocket as he ran toward the alley. Five shots were fired from the guns of three FBI agents. Three of the shots hit Dillinger, and he fell face down on the pavement. At 10:50 p.m. on July 22, 1934, John Dillinger was pronounced dead in a little room in the Alexian Brothers Hospital.
The agents who fired at Dillinger were Charles B. Winstead, Clarence O. Hurt, and Herman E. Hollis. Each man was commended by J. Edgar Hoover for fearlessness and courageous action. None of them ever said who actually killed Dillinger. The events of that sultry July night in Chicago marked the beginning of the end of the Gangster Era. Eventually, 27 persons were convicted in federal courts on charges of harboring and aiding and abetting John Dillinger and his cronies during their reign of terror. Baby Face Nelson was fatally wounded on November 27, 1934, in a gun battle with FBI agents in which Special Agents Cowley and Hollis also were killed. Dillinger was buried in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, Indiana.”
DILLINGER’S FIRST HEIST
Nowhere does the government employee who made the entry on the FBI website about Dillinger mention a Dillinger heist in New Carlisle, Ohio. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
I found this on the New Carlisle, Ohio bank robbery in the New Carlisle News. In an article called “The Life & Times of John Dillinger,” they reprinted the work of New Carlisle writer and western Ohio historian Bill Berry. Here are some excerpts:
“It was here (Indiana penitentiary) that he (John Dillinger) would meet a man that would strongly influence the rest of his life – Harry “Pete” Pierpont who was from Leipsic, Ohio, along with “Fat Charley” Makley, a forty-four year old bank robber from Ohio, John “Red” Hamilton, a tough, intelligent thirty-four year old bank robber, Russell Clark, a young man who was in jail for a single bank robbery, and later Martin Dietrich who taught Pierpont and his colleagues the “correct” procedures for robbing a bank.
John’s period of infamy began on May 10, 1933, when he was paroled from prison after having served 8-1/2 years of his sentence. A couple of weeks after being paroled Dillinger had lined up two of the men Pierpont had recommended, William Shaw and Paul “Lefty” Parker, telling them his name was “Desperate Dan” Dillinger, one of the many alias he would use during his crime spree. Other aliases used included Frank Sullivan, Joseph Harris, John Hall, John Donovan, and Carl Hellman. Shaw and his ex-con friend, Noble Claycomb were a part of a group that called themselves the White Cap Gang, which specialized in small local robberies.
Late in the evening of Tuesday June 20, 1933, Dillinger, Shaw, Parker, and Claycomb drove from Indianapolis to New Carlisle, Ohio. Shaw, the last surviving member of Dillinger’s bank robbery gang, and one of the few to die from natural cause, revealed in an interview with Bob Greene, syndicated Chicago newspaper columnist, just prior to his death in 1977 the circumstances surrounding the New Carlisle National Bank heist. At the time of the interview Shaw was living with an old friend but wanted to go back to Indianapolis, if he could find the bus fare.
Here’s the way Greene says Shaw tells the story. Shaw was living in the penitentiary hospital at Springfield, Missouri. His prison term ran out and now, for one of the few times since his childhood, he was a free man. Emphysema made it difficult for Shaw to breathe, and Greene said “he had the shakes so bad that his hands will not hold still even for a minute. When he talked though, it is of the days when he was a swaggering punk stickup man, sure that he was tougher than the whole world, and proud of the nickname Dillinger gave him the first time they met, “the Kid.”
Shaw, who was 19 when he first met Dillinger in Indianapolis, reported that Dillinger had heard about a small bank in Ohio at which a rear window to a rest-room was usually left open a crack, even at night. “We got to New Carlisle while it was still dark,” Shaw said. “It was a little bank. Dillinger had gotten a good tip someplace – it went just like he said. We went through the window next to the toilet, and that let us in the bank.”
“We crawled in and we lay behind the counter till the place started opening up. I remember us lying on the floor there, and John carrying a big gun. We tied the people up as they came in. We got about $13,000 out of that one,” Shaw said.
Shaw’s story seems plausible when connected with some of the true facts and or alleged stories passed down through the years from those who were actually present (bank employees) during the holdup and a host of other who provided second hand information. Some of the truth has meshed with some poetic license or myth if you will.
A little before 8:30 a.m., as he (Horace Grisso) unlocked the front door and stepped inside he was immediately confronted by the armed men and threatened with death if he made an outcry. In an attempt to retrieve the combination to the safe from a drawer, he was asked, “What are you
doing?”
Grisso replied, “I have to get the combination in order to open the safe.” Dillinger told him to go ahead.
Failing to open the safe quickly enough one of the gangsters grew impatient. He looked at Dillinger and said, “let me drill him, let me plug him . . . he’s stallin.” But Dillinger waved him off and said, “take your time buddy – but open it.” Dillinger was the only one who directed things according to Mr. Grisso. “He was very calm and it appeared that the other guys were doped up or something – their eyes were poppin’ and wild looking.”
Dillinger remained unflustered even after Grisso told him he didn’t have a key to the cash drawer once the doors to the vault were open and they would have to wait for the arrival of Carl Enoch, cashier, to open the drawer where the money and other valuable could be found.
Miss Mata Taylor, assistant cashier, and her twin sister Maude were next to arrive and they too were bound with cord and forced to lie on the floor behind the cashier’s cage where they could not be seen by persons passing in front of the building. Mata and Maude reported that Dillinger was polite and not threatening to his victims and that he had suggested that they lay their bank smocks on the floor to lie on so as not to get their clothes dirty.
Just a few minutes before nine o’clock, Carl Enoch, cashier, and Grant Widener, a local farmer and patron of the bank entered. They too were confronted by guns. Widener had sold “a big load of hogs” the day before and was itching to deposit the $500 check stuffed in his bib overhauls. With a revolver stuck in his back, he was told by one of the robbers, “Farmer, you came to the bank too early this morning.” He was bound and forced to lie on the floor along with Grisso and Taylor while Enoch was ordered to open the cashier’s drawer. He complied with their demand and then he too was tied up and forced to lie on the floor with the others.
Placing the money in bags and not seeming to be in any great hurry, the robbers walked to the rear of the building and crawled out the window they had entered by and ran through the rear yard at the home of Mrs. Martha Weeks (Martha Nichols). Today this is the home of Sally and Al Raiteri. They continued around the rear of the building to Jefferson Street where Noble Claycomb was waiting in a new Ford vehicle. They made their escape traveling east on Route 71(571 today) strewing nails for nearly a mile on the highway to thwart any pursuit.
Mrs. Weeks having seen the men run through her yard went to the home of Mrs. Erb (Olive) Luse, next door, to inform her about the strangers. They went to the rear of the bank and noticed the window of the bank building was raised. They called and cashier Carl Enoch asked them to come in and untie them, which they did. The alarm was given and Sheriff George Benham and his deputies along with Springfield Chief of Police George Abele and Sgt. John W. Law quickly responded.
The headlines of the Springfield Daily News, Home Edition that evening read: “New Carlisle Bank Robbed of $10,000 By Bandit Gang.” “Employees Bound and Tied While Trio Loot Vault!” The Springfield Sun called the robbery “one of the most cleverly executed crimes in the county’s history,” in a front page story that ran in the Morning edition on June 22.
The following day, bank officials reported that a check of the money taken had been completed. The check disclosed that the robbers obtained $10,500 in currency and $600 in Liberty bonds. The robbers had virtually “cleaned out” the bank according to the Thursday Springfield paper. The New Carlisle National Bank was reopened for business sometime on Thursday after receipt of a shipment of currency from the Federal Reserve Bank at Cleveland.”
Berry gives the backgrounds of the criminals with Dillinger. One of the aliases, Hellman, was in the story, and makes the FBI story more understandable, as that was the name Dillinger and his girlfriend Evelyn Frechette used in renting the apartment in Minnesota.
DILLINGER’S DAYTON DAME
Berry didn’t explain how police captured Dillinger after the New Carlisle, Ohio robbery. The FBI story said Dayton police grabbed him. The Dayton Daily News covered the arrest, and they updated Dillinger’s short stay in their town in an article on their website.
Here’s an excerpt:
“His girlfriend’s landlady snitched (him out) to police,” Mary Oliver, Dayton History’s director of collection, said of the local arrest of infamous bank robber John Dillinger on Sept. 22, 1933.
Already a seasoned crook, Dillinger learned all about Mary Jenkins Longnaker, an unhappily married 23-year-old Dayton resident, while in the Indiana State Penitentiary with her brother, convicted murderer James Jenkins.
The handsome Indianapolis native also learned how to carry out bank robberies while in the Michigan City Prison in Indiana, according to Oliver’s research.
(Note: Dillinger was not seasoned. He went to prison for one crime before he ever came to Dayton. He did pick up some tips on bank robbing while in the pokey.)
A 6/28/2009 Dayton Daily News article linked to this one noted:
John Dillinger drove into Dayton the first time in May 1933 behind the wheel of a battered Model A Ford, shortly after his release from the Indiana State Prison.
A former prison buddy, Jimmy Jenkins, had spoken often to Dillinger of his sister Mary Longnacker, who lived in Dayton. Anxious to meet the beauty, the bank robber drove down West First Street yelling at passers-by inquiring after Longnacker.
She was out of town.
Dillinger rented a room and waited for her, passing himself off as the young woman’s brother.
That first trip of a few short days was followed by more visits to Dayton. Dillinger would arrange trysts with Longnacker again in June, several times in July, then again in early August. During that visit, Dillinger revealed to his lady friend that “business” was getting better.
He had discarded the Ford coupe and acquired a Hudson Terraplane, then one of the fastest cars on the market.
By summer’s end, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency had learned of Dillinger’s Dayton connection and knew he was paying for the woman’s divorce.
“Dillinger calls upon this woman regularly and, no doubt, can be apprehended at Dayton, Ohio,” a divisional manager for the detective agency wrote to Dayton Police Inspector C.E. Yendes.
Dayton detectives acted on the tip. Longnacker’s landlady, Lucille Striker, allowed them to search her tenant’s room, where they found an incriminating letter from Dillinger.
Striker told police that Longnacker often received mail from the gangster. She agreed to steam open the correspondence before handing them over to Longnacker, then share the contents with police. Within days, a letter did arrive.
Dillinger had promised to visit soon.
Mary Longnacker and John Dillinger
The 30-year-old gangster was already a fugitive wanted in connection with multiple bank hold-ups in Ohio, including the robbery of the Citizens National Bank in Bluffton.
The manhunt was heating up.
In between bank robberies across Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky, Dillinger took Longnacker on a 10-day trip to the World’s Fair in Chicago.
Dillinger slipped into Longnacker’s room in a high-class boarding house at 324 W. First St. in Dayton with the familiarity of someone who had visited often.
The fugitive carried a .45 automatic in his pocket, with a smaller gun hidden up his sleeve. His wallet bulged with more than $2,700.
Dayton police, acting on a tip from the FBI, had staked out the boarding house for seven weeks in hopes of catching the bank robber.
Detectives had given up their round-the-clock vigil that very afternoon.
Though the street around the boarding house had been empty when Dillinger silently let himself in after midnight, his entrance didn’t go unnoticed.
Striker had seen him pull up and quickly alerted police.”
Back to the other Dayton Daily News article, by Amelia Robinson:
“The landlady led them up the stairs to Longnaker’s room and even knocked on the door, according to Oliver.
Police burst into the room after Longnaker opened the door.
“Get ’em up, John. We are police!” Pfauhl screamed, according to Matera.
Pfauhl and Gross jammed the muzzle of a sawed-off shotgun and a Tommy gun into his frozen face. The suspect didn’t attempt to use the .45 automatic in his pocket or the smaller pistol hidden up his sleeve.
The newspaper reported that Dillinger later told police “I would have been a…fool to have pulled that gun.”
The Herald’s story from that day says that Dillinger was said “to have in his possession five revolvers, a large quantity of ammunition and $2,604 in money.”
He had “detailed notes explaining the speediest way to escape from various cities, and sacks full of carpet tacks,” according to a Dayton Daily News article. The tacks could be scattered on highways to puncture the tires of pursuing police cars.
Longnaker and 26-year-old Claude Constable, a man staying in the boarding house, were held for questioning. Dillinger was arrested.
“Calm and smiling, the prisoner answered questions with a shrug and the comment, ‘See my lawyer,'” the Dayton Daily News reported.”
So there’s the skinny on Dillinger’s capture.
SOME MORE DILLINGER ITEMS
Here are some more tidbits from Berry’s article.
On his incarceration:
“John Dillinger, while behind bars in the Allen County jail, Lima, Ohio, attempted to justify in a letter written to his father why he gave up and became a criminal.
“I know I have been a big disappointment to you but I guess I did too much time, for where I went in a carefree boy I came out bitter toward everything in general.”
On the Allen County Jail breakout in Lima, Ohio:
“On October 12, 1933, at 6:30 p.m., Pierpont, Charles Makley, Harry Copeland and Russell Clark entered the office of Sheriff Jesse Sarber at the Allen County jail in Lima, Ohio where he was seated at his desk reading. Sheriff Sarber, a former used car salesman, was elected sheriff in November 1931. During his nearly two years in office, he had become known as one of Allen counties most liked sheriffs and had earned a reputation for the good treatment of his prisoners.
His wife had just finished serving the evening meal and now sat near her husband working a crossword puzzle. Deputy Wilbur Sharp, not in uniform, sat on a nearby couch. Dillinger was playing cards with a fellow-inmate. Sarber’s son Don was outside playing.
The three [sic] told Sarber they were from the prison in Michigan City, Indiana and wanted to question Dillinger. When Sarber requested identification, Pierpont is said to have replied, “Here is our credentials,” and pulled out his revolver.
When Jesse Sarber reached for his gun in the desk, Pierpont fired one round into the sheriff’s stomach severing a major artery. When Sarber attempted to stand up, Makley pistolwhipped him about the head.
The three [sic] demanded the keys to the cell striking the dying sheriff again and again, stopping only when Mrs. Sarber cried, “Let Dad alone! I’ll get the keys!” Mrs. Sarber and Sharp (a deputy) were pushed into the cell as Dillinger picked up his jacket and before leaving knelt down to examine Sheriff Sarber who had been considerate of him. Avoiding Mrs. Sarber’s eyes he ran off with the other three [sic] who carried the jail keys with them.
Mrs. Sarber and Deputy Sharp broke out a window in the cell and began yelling for help, which soon arrived. Young Don Sarber heard the commotion and rushed into find his father lying in a pool of blood, moaning. He called for an ambulance and then helped remove his mother and Sharp from the cell using an acetylene torch. As Sheriff Sarber was being carried away he said to his wife, “Mother, I believe I am going to have to leave you.” He was taken to Lima Memorial Hospital where for a time he regained consciousness and tried to describe what had happened. He died at 8:05 p.m. He was 45 years old.”
On Dillinger’s attempts to elude capture: “For the next four months he eluded capture through disguise. He grew a mustache and a physician gave him a facelift. He poured acid on his fingertips to eradicate fingerprints.”
On Dillinger’s death:
“The outfit she actually wore that evening, by the way, was an orange skirt that had turned scarlet under the bright lights of the theater’s marquee causing it to appear red. (Hence the “Lady in Red” nickname for Anna Sage.)
Purvis, federal agents and a variety of police agencies were waiting outside in key locations that night when the two females and John Herbert Dillinger exited the theater. In a prearranged signal to the lawmen, Purvis was to light a cigar to indicate that the man was indeed Dillinger. Agents and policemen closed in on their prey from all directions.
Dillinger spotted them and began running in a semi-crouching position, shifting his body in a zigzag motion like a football player running toward the goal line for a touchdown, all the time reaching toward his trouser pocket for his gun.
It was to no avail. Federal agents and policemen opened fire and cut him down in a nearby alley.
Of five shots fired by three Bureau agents, three found there mark and he fell face down on the pavement. Dillinger was struck twice in the chest, one actually nicking his heart. The third shot, and no doubt the fatal shot, entered the back of his neck and exited just under his right eye.
The hunt for Public Enemy #1 was over. At 10:50 p.m. on 22 July, 1934, John Herbert Dillinger was pronounced dead in a Chicago hospital. He was 31 years of age. He was buried in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Dillinger’s death was described in banner headlines in newspapers all across the country the following day. Jack Lait of the International News Service filed his story from Chicago that began:
“John Dillinger, ace bad man of the world got his last night – two slugs through his heart and one through his head… It took 27 men under the head of the Chicago Bureau to close Dillinger’s case and their strength came out of his weakness — a woman.”
(Note: Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer would later team up to write the “Confidential” books after World War Two. They would go to a city, check out prostitution, gambling, organized crime, political corruption, and police corruption, and write about it. They would even list addresses and phone numbers for vice spots. They would dare local citizens to clean up their towns. I read “USA Confidential” from the library of my Grandpa Charlie, who was a Chicago police detective during Prohibition. Lait’s and Mortimer’s sarcastic exposé style was a huge influence on me as a writer and investigator.)
Mrs. Horace Grisso happened to be attending the Chicago World’s fair when Dillinger was shot. She visited the Biograph Theater the next day while Dillinger’s body lay in a Chicago Morgue. She reported that a large crowd had descended upon the theater. It was a carnival atmosphere.”
Polly Hamilton
On the ends of the individual criminals involved with Dillinger, this:
“The Terror Gang” was the name often ascribed to all those men and women who at one time or another made up John Dillinger’s three different gangs during his 13 ½ month crime spree and most suffered violent deaths.
Tommy Carroll was killed by the police in Waterloo, Iowa. John Hamilton was gravely wounded in a shootout with authorities in St. Paul, Minnesota on April 23. He was taken to Aurora, Illinois where he lingered for eight days. He died on April 30, 1934. Homer Van Meter was also killed by St. Paul, Minnesota police when resisting arrest on August 23, 1934.
Eddie Green died from wounds received by agents in St. Paul on April 3, 1934. Charles Makley was shot to death during a failed attempted escape with his pal Harry Pierpont on Sept. 22, 1934 from the Ohio Penitentiary. Pierpont, after recovering from his wounds in the failed escape attempt, was put to death in the electric chair at the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus on Oct.17, 1934.
Baby Face Nelson went down in a blaze of glory after a deadly shootout with two federal agents. Nelson killed both agents, but 17 of the agent’s bullets made their mark on the outlaw. He escaped in the agent’s car, after the shootout and died shortly after. His wife and another companion later dumped his nude body on the side of the road by a graveyard.
Anna Miller Sage, the women in red, was deported back to Rumania a year after Dillinger was killed. She died there in 1947.
(How appropriate. That’s the year the Soviets formally made Romania a Red colony.)
(Harry Copeland, by the way, did time for robbery but was never tried for his role in the murder of Sheriff Sarber.)
Back to the omissions by the FBI writer.
The government writer missed the detail about Evelyn Frechette’s capture that Ms. Frechette went into a tavern in Chicago to see if the coast was clear. Melvin Purvis and some other lawmen were in the joint and they pinched her. Dillinger and other gang members watched the lawmen lead her away in cuffs. Dillinger wanted to rescue her, but none of the other gang members did, and he was vastly outgunned by the feds. So Dillinger would spend time and money on his lawyer Louis Piquett in fruitless attempts to help her out.
The payroller did not mention Melvin Purvis was in on the killing of Baby Face Nelson, and Baby Face’s wife and another man threw his naked bullet-riddled body out of a car near a cemetery when they tried to escape.
Nor did the payroller mention Melvin Purvis was in on the killing of Pretty Boy Floyd in December 1934. Nor did the payroller mention that J. Edgar Hoover, basically a desk jockey, was so insanely jealous of Purvis that he forced the heroic agent out of the FBI not long afterward.
The payroller failed to mention J. Edgar Hoover sat on a manuscript and notes by Purvis that the widow of one of the goons who participated in the Valentines Day Massacre gave him concerning organized criminals’ friendships with Democrat mayors. FDR might not be pleased.
I WILL COVER THIS EVIL STORY IN THE FUTURE. THE TOP PEOPLE OF THE FBI HAVE LEGACIES OF PROTECTING CORRUPT DEMOCRATS FROM FDR’S PALS TO LBJ. AND THE OTHERS WHO PLOTTED THE MURDER OF JOHN KENNEDY TO BILL CLINTON TO HILLARY CLINTON AND MANY OTHERS IN THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION.
The payroller’s laughable claim about the killing of Dillinger leading to the end of the gangster era needs no formal rebuttal. The year 1934 did see Melvin Purvis help take down Dillinger, Nelson, and Floyd, and did see Frank Hamer and Texas and Louisiana lawmen shoot Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow and their car so full of holes that the car could be used as a colander. But organized crime continued.
Crimes have increased exponentially since the 1930s, despite advances in police tactics and forensic science. Midwestern bank robbers gave way to organized criminals whose names ended in vowels; these people gave way to organized criminals from many other communities, to include the illegal alien criminal gangs around the nation. Shyster lawyers and politicians and judges are to blame for lenient treatment of criminals and the importation of criminals by the hundreds of thousands into America since the start of the LBJ regime. In helping LBJ become president as the evil Texas degenerate stepped over the corpse of JFK, the FBI became part of the criminal order. Events of the last two years have made it painfully clear the FBI’s top people, along with those in the CIA, are important underbosses of the criminal order.
DILLINGER’S WOODEN GUN
It turns out Dillinger had help with the wooden gun. According to Indiana historian Archibald McKinlay (8/27/2000 Northwest Indiana Times), he had crooked lawyer and crooked lawmen help. Piquett got the plans for the Crown Point lockup from a jailer named Baker. When a sheriff’s deputy named Ernest Blunk balked at smuggling in a real pistol to Dillinger, Piquett’s detective Arthur O’Leary came up with the idea of smuggling in a wooden gun. This way, Dillinger could claim he whittled it in his cell and get Blunk off the hook. O’Leary had a German woodcarver make the fake Roscoe, and Blunk delivered it to Dillinger the morning of his breakout.
Since Dillinger had no access to cash in jail, and since Piquett didn’t want to lay out his own money till Dillinger could pay him from his stash of cash, Piquett borrowed money to pay off the lawmen and build Dillinger a fast car from one of his clients, a Scottish born nurse named Ada Martin. Ada and her boss Doctor Josephine Gabler were abortionists. Whenever they botched abortions, Piquett paid off the women or their families to keep quiet. In those days, abortion was illegal, so the payoffs kept them out of prison. Ada and Josephine were two of the richest gals in the Windy City due to their abortion racket.
JOHN DILLINGER AND YOUR OWN DETECTIVE WORK
Now for some other thoughts on the Dillinger story that will apply to you as you are doing your own detective work:
The plaque on the building in New Carlisle has the wrong date. Several Internet sources got it wrong, too. This indicates you have to double check and triple check your facts … especially if you are preparing to say or write something negative.
I corrected some items in the Dayton Daily News sources. I make errors, but I fly without an editor. They don’t. I had to use one article to correct the problems with the other article. Just because someone has as newspaper job does not mean he or she is a good writer. Most newspapers don’t pay their people well.
Mr. Berry also had some minor problems in his article. But I am a careful reader who tries to resolve discrepancies. You need multiple sources to get at the truth. Even honest eyewitnesses miss things.
However, newspaper articles, especially older ones, can be good sources of info. The old-timers tried to print the truth and add some human interest to their work. Articles can also point to other sources of info, like individuals or police records or other government records.
John Dillinger tried plastic surgery to alter his appearance and tried acid to wipe out his fingerprints. He also grew a mustache.
Problem is the acid burns did not do a good enough job, and Dillinger’s future fingerprints would have the acid burnouts in them, making it easy to ID them. Plastic surgery was in its infancy, and was very painful. Plus the doc didn’t try to alter Dillinger much, so he was dissatisfied with going under the knife.
The mustache actually worked the best. It was cheaper, and it made him look more handsome and sensitive instead of merely macho.
Dillinger also got a faster car and stole automatic weapons.
Dillinger, by having nails spilled on the road behind him, was thinking of slowing down the pursuit. Why shoot your way out of a scrape if you don’t have to?
Dillinger as a professional was trying to better his work as a criminal.
Dillinger’s Dayton doll was a loudmouth. She got herself and her man in trouble with the law. Criminals need associates who can keep secrets.
My wife 99 said, on hearing about how the landlady relayed Mary’s small talk to the police, said, “This is why women will never be made priests. Too many of us gossip, pry, and snitch. Odds are a woman priest couldn’t keep confessions secret.”
Bank owners would have to harden their buildings to make them harder to enter illegally. Engineers would have to improve alarm systems. Likewise we have to check on our own security vulnerabilities and minimize them to the extent we can do so.
Police officials and sheriffs had to harden their facilities and their security procedures. Dillinger robbed police of weapons because they were not expecting his sort of assaults on them. Expect the unexpected at your home and workplace.
Police also had to check mail to and from prisoners properly. Not covered above is how Dillinger, knowing some fellow prisoners needed weapons to escape, reportedly sent them in shipments of thread and cloth to the prison workhouse.
Dillinger and his accomplices devised reasons to justify coming into banks or police buildings. One time they claimed they were bank alarm mechanics. The guys who sprung Dillinger pretended they were criminal justice officials. In one case, Dillinger and his people pretended they were from a movie company looking to shoot footage for a bank robbery scene. They preyed upon people’s gullibility or lack of quick thinking. Don’t you likewise be caught with your guard down.
Radios and phones were becoming police weapons. Fingerprinting was still a young forensic science, but it was gaining legitimacy. Private detective “Pinkertons” dusted the Bluffton, Ohio bank for prints and sent them to the Dayton police. These were of help in determining Dillinger was holing up with a gal in her living quarters.
Same with ballistics. The police in that era had gained the ability to detemine which weapons fired bullets by checking marks on the bullets and shell casings.
Too many criminals are vicious people who deserve little quarter. There was no need for Dillinger’s associates to shoot and pistol-whip Sheriff Jesse Sarber. Even Dillinger was upset about the murder, because he stopped to check on the fallen man and would not make eye contact with his wife. The Sarbers had treated Dillinger kindly.
Supposedly Dillinger told the farmer taken captive in the New Carlisle, Ohio robbery to keep his check. He said his gang only wanted the bank’s money.
Dillinger’s gal Evelyn Frechette, who was in prison when Melvin Purvis and his men killed the outlaw, refused to disown him. She said he was kind and thoughtful to her.
Dillinger had to die because he killed a policeman during a robbery. His kindness had limits.
Many criminals are impulsive. This makes them easy to out-think, but makes them dangerous to others. Dillinger “fired” some of the crew after the New Carlisle, Ohio robbery because they were unstable and incompetent. They wanted to kill Horace Grisso due to his inability to open the safe by himself. Dillinger coolly kept them under control and continued to capture bank employees until he could have them open the safe for him. Otherwise they would have made no money and would be fugitives from a murder.
Not covered in this post is one bank robbery in South Bend, Indiana, where Baby Face Nelson foolishly shot a machine gun inside a bank. The noise alerted cops and some people who tried to stop the robbery in progress.
Dillinger was a leader of criminals because he was bold, smart, tough, adaptable, cool under fire, and persuasive. He had made friends in prison by outworking his quota, then helping less gifted criminals who fell behind in their work. He was athletic, which helped him elude capture and helped him fight his way out as needed. He planned robberies with good intel and good getaway plans. He preferred to avoid violence, but would use it if he needed to escape of if he wanted to raid the police. It took guts to raid police facilities for weapons and bulletproof vests. Dillinger changed plans often, which helped him and his fellow criminals escape capture. He boldly led by example and kept his cool under fire. His leadership in robberies and gunfights with the police made lesser criminals perform better. After his death, criminals who knew him praised him because he looked out for them.
Dillinger was a leader of men almost in a military way. Sadly, he wasted his God-given gifts on crimes.
Police have to be tough and clever and cool to bring a guy like him down. Fortunately for them, most of their adversaries aren’t as tough or cunning or gutsy or adaptable or cool under fire as John Dillinger.
Law enforcers in the states worked together to bring Dillinger down. Dillinger and his bank robbing crews crisscrossed the Midwest in cars, went down to Florida, and even out to Arizona, which in the early 1930s was still a rough haul for a car of that era. In some instances, state police co-operated with their opposites in other states to capture or kill or capture members of Dillinger’s gangs.
They also had to work together to ensure criminals got punished in every state in which they committed crimes. More rapid interstate travel and faster and more ruthless interstate crime gangs made this co-operation among police forces necessary if they intended to keep dangerous criminals under control.
There is no honor among criminals. Anna Sage, who was a criminal and an illegal alien, came forward not out of concern for the public, but for the desire to keep her ill-gotten gains from selling other women, to get more money in rewards, and to avoid deportation as a criminal alien who committed numerous crimes of moral turpitude. Like Stormy Daniels, the whore and leftist media darling who let another whore be sexually assaulted to protect her crew and the porn film company, according to the alleged victim Tasha Reign. (Source: Fox News, 5/14/2018)
Today, Anna Sage would be a media star instead of a deported madam. Most politicians an media people and too many in law enforcement and the courts are in favor of criminal aliens.
There have always been crooked lawyers. That’s why Abraham Lincoln had the nickname “Honest Abe.” He was a good man in a profession full of liars, cheats, and thieves. Only now there are more crooked lawyers and many of them work for the DOJ and the FBI and for the Democratic National Committee and for Republican establishment types.
There have always been some crooked lawmen. Baker and Blunk took money to help Dillinger escape. But Scot Israel, Coward County Sheriff, is worse because his crookedness led to the deaths of 17 children. Same with the FBI pukes who turned blind eyes to Moslem murder plotters. Same with the law enforcement officials in Charlottesville, VA, and San Jose, CA, who facilitated riots to maximize the lawbreaking of Klanlike Antifa criminals. One woman is dead thanks to the crooked cops and crooked Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe. Many other victims of felon illegals have been murdered and raped thanks to crooked cops in California, New York, and elsewhere letting them go instead of holding them for ICE.
Abortionists Ada Martin and Josephine Gabler had to pay victims of their malpractice to stay out of jail because abortion used to be illegal. Since seven old men in kimonos legalized abortion in 1973 with the Roe v. Wade ruling, many thousands of women and girls have been victims of abortionists’ malpractice. I have personally found about 1300 such lawsuits, and another 200 or so death certificates or autopsy reports on victims of abortion doctors, and there are thousands of others I haven’t seen. In many cases, shyster lawyers and shyster judges prevent victims or their survivors from getting any compensation. So the wounding and killing continues.
Media cover criminals like celebrities. The truth is most of them wind up jailed and/or dead.
G. Gordon Liddy, when he was in prison in connection with the Watergate break-in, said the average criminal begins to go straight when he realizes the time he does in prison means the value of the things he stole to get there or the drugs he pushed to get there divided by the length of his sentence means he could have made more money per hour working at K-Mart (the wage slavers at Wal-Mart weren’t that big them).
Chester Gould, the man behind the Dick Tracy comic strip, received a lot of worthless criticism because he showed criminals committing gruesome murders, and Dick Tracy and his men killing criminals. Some criticized Gould for being too pro-police. And some lawyers and leftists complained when he introduced “Flyface,” a crooked lawyer who had buzzing flies surrounding him. No caricature ever captured the ACLU’s or the Democratic National Committee’s mouthpieces any more effectively than “Flyface.”
Chester Gould’s “Flyface.” A perfect symbol for DNC and ACLU lawyers.
Gould said some buttinsky woman asked him why he made criminals like Flyface, Flattop, Pruneface, Mr. Bribery, and The Brow look so grotesque in the Dick Tracy series. Gould said the evil of their crimes – the murders, the rapes, the beatings, the corruption of politicians, the stealing of people’s life savings – was far more ugly than the ugly and comical looking criminals he drew for the funny papers.
One more sobering thought: No matter how good crimefighting tools have become, they are almost useless when prosecutors, lawmen, and public officials are corrupt and work together at corruption. In Al Capone’s day, the feds had to bust him on a tax charge because Illinois courts were so corrupt and the governor was corrupt. Capone never had to stand trial for the murders he ordered or the prostitution he compelled or the extortions he ran or his other crimes. Capone could tamper with juries or bribe prosecutors, judges, or the governor.
At the LBJ Ranch, LBJ routinely whipped his unit out in front of reporters and politicians to urinate, out in the open, and not in a hunter or camper field expedient way either. None of them had the guts to report LBJ’s flasher exhibitionism. The media have been whipped for sure since the start of LBJ’s murderous presidency. LBJ profited from the murder of his predecessor and better, John Kennedy.
Today, Hillary Clinton can sell access to American atomic bomb making uranium to the Russians for $150 million and go unpunished. Her campaign, working with key Obama administration officials, can use government agents and foreign government spies to spy on rival politicians because the top officials of the FBI and Justice Department have been filled with corrupt men and women and because the federal courts are filled with corrupt judges.
Likewise, all the tools in the Department of Homeland Security’s control are almost worthless when state officials and local officials release illegal aliens, warn illegal aliens, steal taxpayers’ money to accommodate illegal aliens, and get protection from corrupt judges to continue braking the laws against aiding and abetting and harboring criminals.
Unlike John Dillinger, none of the Deep State’s top criminals have physical courage. But there are a damn lot more of them, with their law degrees, and their backing with insiders’ money, and federal agent guns to protect them.
As many have said, “Don’t lie, cheat, steal, pimp, rape, or commit sorcery, blasphemy, or murder. The government hates competition.”
This is why you have to vote to purge the corrupt people whose terms in office you have a say in. This requires you to stay vigilant and protective, which is not as easy as watching your kids play soccer or overpaid actors slut about on TV. When it comes to your family and your community, you are your own first responder.
SHERLOCK JUSTICE
WE CAN SHOW YOU HOW TO BE YOUR OWN DETECTIVE.
