Bank Robber John Dillinger

 Bank Robber John Dillinger 

 

“The myth, created by lawmen and embellished by newspapers, and the man are hard to separate.  The myth was not mere fiction, for the man himself was possessed by it and lived up to it finally; and, at times, such as when he escaped from Crown Point, he even exceeded it.” John Toland

 

Even today, Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger is a local celebrity, with a museum in his name housed in the basement of the Lake County courthouse.  Over the weekend, with great fanfare, the 1934 Ford V-8 that Dillinger used as his getaway car, made a grand appearance at the site of where he escaped from jail. When I was writing weekly newspaper article on Gary history, one of the most popular was about Dillinger, who escaped with a Black prisoner, Herbert Youngblood, and was killed emerging from Chicago’s Biograph Theatre with a Gary prostitute known to history as “the Lady in Red” procured for him by brothel madam Anna Sage, a 42-year-old Romanian immigrant who managed Gary’s notorious Kostur Hotel that contained in its basement the Bucket of Blood saloon and rooms upstairs paid for by the hour. Sage had run afoul of immigration authorities and fingered Dillinger in return for reward money and a promise of amnesty from deportation that was later reneged on. In an article later revised for my history of Gary, “City of the Century,” I wrote:

  The swashbuckling manner in which the former Indiana farm boy leaped over railings, wisecracked with tellers, backed roadsters out of alleys, and hoodwinked police captured the imagination of Gary residents and appealed to their fantasies. At a time of low respect for authority, Dillinger was a symbol of rebellion and his crimes seemed no more heinous than the machinations of businessmen or the payoff arrangements among municipal officials and vice lords, bootleggers and numbers racketeers.

 

In January 1934, the Dillinger gang robbed the First National Bank of East Chicago, then fled to Arizona, where he was captured three weeks later after a freak fire destroyed the gang’s cover.  Lake County prosecutor Robert Estill secured his extradition and escorted him to the supposedly “escape-proof Crown Point jail.  After he broke out, a myth arose – started by Dillinger himself for reasons of bravado and to cover up the real story – that he had used a “toy gun” carved from a wooden washboard and darkened with show polish.  In all probability, a judge, bribed by Dillinger’s attorney, provided him with a real pistol. 

 

After Dillinger died in a hail of bullets, his body was put on public display  at the Chicago morgue, ostensibly to quash rumors that he was still alive. One vendor sold handkerchiefs dipped in blood to souvenir hunters. Dillinger’s Quaker father brought the body back to Mooresville, Indiana, and told reporters: “He might have been different if his mother hadn’t died  or if the law had given him a chance when he made his first mistake.” Dillinger was such a flamboyant maverick that the majority of letters to the press about him were complimentary. One “Group of Citizens” wrote: “We say Hurray for John Dillinger.  He is really a man Indiana should be proud to know