How a botched plea deal helped turn John Dillinger into a notorious bank robber
At twenty, John Dillinger robbed a small-town grocery of fifty dollars. His father, a church deacon, persuaded him to plead guilty without a lawyer, expecting leniency. Instead the judge handed down ten to twenty years. Prison became his classroom, and he walked out almost a decade later ready to rob banks.
Born in Indianapolis in 1903, Dillinger lost his mother before he turned four and grew up under a strict grocer father. As a teenager he fought, stole and bullied. A move to rural Mooresville failed to calm him, and a spell in the Navy ended with desertion in Boston. The grocery holdup with his friend Ed Singleton was clumsy: a minister recognised them and they were arrested the next day. Singleton, who fought the charge, got two to fourteen years. His father later told reporters he regretted his advice.
Between 1924 and 1933 Dillinger served time in two Indiana prisons, where he vowed to come out mean and fell in with experienced bank robbers such as Harry Pierpont and Homer Van Meter. He also studied the meticulous robbery method devised by Herman Lamm. Paroled in May 1933, at the bottom of the Great Depression, he robbed his first bank a month later, taking ten thousand dollars in New Carlisle, Ohio.
Jail rarely held him. Friends of his smuggled guns to his old cellmates, who broke out and then sprang him from a county lockup in Lima, Ohio. In March 1934 he escaped a Crown Point jail that police had called escape-proof, bluffing guards with a pistol without firing a shot. Whether the gun was real remains disputed: a deputy said it was, while FBI files describe one carved from wood.
Newspapers loved him, casting a charming outlaw as a kind of Robin Hood. J. Edgar Hoover used that fame to argue for turning his Bureau of Investigation into the FBI, with sharper techniques for fighting organised crime. A brothel owner, Ana Cumpănaș, tipped agents off, and on 22 July 1934 they shot him dead outside Chicago's Biograph Theater as he tried to flee.
Source: John Dillinger
