AN EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK
THE HOOSIER HOT SHOTS
John Dillinger had a deep sense of loyalty to friends and family and his own brand of honor. Despite his reputation he was not a vicious man by nature, although he could resort to violence when it was necessary for self preservation. He claimed he never killed a man even though he was charged with killing an East Chicago policeman during a bank robbery. The evidence, although confusing, doesn’t seem to back up his contention that he was a thousand miles away at the time.
Dillinger could be the poster boy for those who insist an unhappy childhood totally lacking in love is the cause of wild, rebellious actions that can lead to a life of crime. His mother died when he was three so for a year he was "raised" by a much older sister, then she married and left. His father, a prosperous grocer, was a cold, religious man who believed any show of affection was unmanly. Therefore young Johnnie received none. When he was nine his father remarried but the boy and his step-mother never developed a close relationship.
Young Johnnie became increasingly rebellious and developed a sarcastic, one-sided grin that was displayed more and more frequently. His only confidantes were a couple of other boys who had similar problems at home. With them he engaged in some wild escapades but nothing that led to serious trouble with the law or provided a clue to his eventual career in crime. His activities did lead his father to move the family, if it could be called that, to Mooresville when John was sixteen. He felt that farm life and being away from the city would reform John. He was enrolled in high school, where he was well behaved but never studied and had nothing other than failing grades. When asked to come to the school to discuss the situation, his father claimed to be too busy.
During the next year or so he was married, perhaps twice, enlisted in the Navy but didn’t like being ordered around by so many people and deserted, then was given a dishonorable discharge.
John’s first serious encounter with the law came when he tried to rob a Mooresville grocer at gunpoint as the man walked along a street. During the course of a scuffle he hit the grocer on the head with a bolt he was carrying. He was arrested and the county prosecutor promised him a suspended sentence if he pleaded guilty. The prosecutor told John he didn’t need a lawyer. His father, as might be expected, was too busy to attend John’s hearing in court. Ignoring the plea agreement, the judge handed him a ten- to twenty-year sentence at the state reformatory in Pendleton. It was a bitter, angry young John Dillinger who heard the gate slam shut behind him.
At Pendleton he made two close friends, both of them fellow Hoosiers. Harry Pierpont was a strapping, handsome man bearing a striking resemblance to the actor Paul Newman when Newman was young. I once talked with a cousin of his who had met him when she was a young girl. This was at a family reunion near Muncie and she remembered him as having the most brilliant blue eyes she would ever see. Although only a year older than Dillinger, Pierpont was at Pendleton for the serious offense of having robbed a bank in Kokomo. Despite his good looks and a doting mother, Pierpont had a vicious streak that allowed him to kill without compunction.
PIERPONT
Oddly enough, Pierpont hated John’s other close friend at Pendleton, Homer Van Meter. Although hard as nails, Van Meter, who came from Fort Wayne, was a comedian with the ability to throw himself completely out of joint. He did this frequently to amuse other prisoners. Perhaps it was this sort of behavior that alienated the deadly serious Pierpont.
Both of them soon were transferred to the Indiana State penitentiary at Michigan City for separate acts of disobedience. This led Dillinger, an excellent baseball player and shortstop on the Pendleton team, to ask for a transfer to Michigan City when he was turned down for parole despite having been a model prisoner for years. At about the same time his wife divorced him.
At Michigan City, Dillinger found himself among hardened, mature criminals and life was difficult for him. As time went on, though, he became known as a good friend to other inmates and a skilled worker in the shirt shop. A gradual transformation from wild young kid to steady, reliable man took place.
With a parole likely in the near future, he was offered the chance to be the outside man on a breakout planned by Pierpont and his gang: John Hamilton, Charlie Makley and Russell Clark. Hamilton was a chance-taking daredevil while Makley was an intelligent, smooth operator capable of gaining the trust of just about anyone. He was chiefly responsible for the elaborate escape plans.
Money would be needed in order to smuggle guns into the prison so Dillinger was given a list of banks and businesses to rob, a list drawn up by Pierpont’s group. This was in 1933, however, and the list was badly outdated because of the Wall Street Crash. Dillinger was coached by another potential escapee, Walter Dietrich. He had learned the way of approaching a bank robbery as you would a military operation from Herman K. Lamm, who had successfully plied the trade for thirteen years.
Following his parole on May 10, 1933, Dillinger assumed the role of model citizen in Mooresville just as he had been coached to do by Pierpont and Van Meter. The people who believed he was a changed man were unaware he had already contacted a second-tier criminal named Noble Claycomb, one of those on the list of potential associates given him by Pierpont. They, along with a William Shaw, robbed an Indianapolis supermarket. Other robberies were quickly staged, sometimes with Claycomb, Shaw or Harry Copeland of Muncie. They rented rooms in a house in Muncie but the landlady tipped off the cops because she knew a man – Dillinger – who wore a new shirt from McNaughton’s Department Store every day had to be an outlaw. The others were captured but Dillinger, who was just returning to the house, made his escape by backing his sporty new Chevrolet coupe out of an alley at full speed.
Plans were drawn up to rob the bank in the nearby village of Daleville. On the spur of the moment the night before the bank job they held up the Bide-A-Wee Inn, a Muncie tavern, and ran into a little trouble. Later Noble Claycomb confessed that the robbers were himself, Shaw and "Dan" Dillinger. The Muncie papers dubbed him "Desperate Dan."
Whether it was with Claycomb and Shaw or perhaps Copeland and another man, Dillinger went ahead with the Daleville robbery. The lone female teller wasn’t suspicious when the neatly dressed Dillinger walked in, asked a few questions and then pulled out a gun while saying, "Well, honey, this is a stickup." He then easily vaulted over the six-foot barrier in what would become his trademark method of beginning a bank robbery.
A few days later Dillinger and a second man held up the bank in the small town of Montpelier northeast of Muncie. They eluded police by throwing roofing nails on the road behind them, leaving their frustrated pursuers with flat tires. Homer Van Meter was identified as the second man. That was never proven but the use of nails was a Van Meter trademark. If it were indeed Van Meter, John was finally working with a real pro rather than a shaky group of amateurs.
By now Dillinger had attracted the attention of Matt Leach, head of the Indiana State Police. Capturing the elusive "Desperate Dan" became an obsession with Leach. Not only did he fail to do so, he was taunted by several letters sent to him by Dillinger, whose dry Hoosier sense of humor sometimes overrode common sense. While enjoying the sights at the Chicago World’s Fair in the company of a girl, Dillinger handed a camera to a policeman and had him snap their picture.
The guns needed for the break were obtained and smuggled into the prison, other preparations were made and everything was set, then Dillinger got himself arrested. His desire to be with a woman from Dayton, Ohio that he had taken to the Chicago World’s Fair plus the work of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency were responsible.
Among other robberies he committed during that period, John held up the bank in the small town of Bluffton, Ohio. Pinkerton’s was hired to solve the case and in short order informed the Dayton police that Dillinger would be visiting a girl there and even supplied them with the make and color of the car he would be driving, a black Terraplane.
They missed him, so Pinkerton’s supplied them with the name and address of the girl. Having been practically led to him by the hand, the Dayton police made the arrest. Dillinger was transferred to the jail in Lima to stand trial for the Bluffton bank job.
The prison break, the biggest in Indiana history, went off without a hitch on September 26, 1933. The ten escapees immediately split up. Those with Pierpont – they would become known as the first Dillinger gang – assembled in Indianapolis, then quickly moved to a house in Hamilton, Ohio.
The group was comprised of Harry Pierpont, John Hamilton, Charlie Makley, Russell Clark and Ed Shouse. Joining them was Harry Copeland. The latter two were destined to be booted out of the gang by Pierpont. Hamilton was often called "Red" or "Three Finger," having lost the other two as a boy when neighborhood kids would ride their sleds down a hill and see how close they could come to passing trains. The daredevil Hamilton came a bit too close.
HAMILTON
Pierpont’s first priority was to free Dillinger from the jail in Lima. To obtain some much needed money, the gang held up the bank in St. Marys, Ohio, Makley’s hometown. Lima was just a short distance to the north so an evening or two later Pierpont, Makley and Clark walked into the sheriff’s office while Shouse stood watch on the corner and Hamilton did the same in front of a theater just down the street.
Allen County Sheriff Jess Sarber, his wife and a deputy were in the office. When Pierpont said they were officers from the prison at Michigan City and wanted to talk to Dillinger, Sarber asked to see their credentials. Pulling a gun from his pocket, Pierpont told him, "Here’s our credentials," and fired. The unfortunate sheriff died a short time.
Studying Harry Pierpont, known to his friends as Pete, would be a psychiatrist’s dream come true. During a bank robbery in Racine, Wisconsin a man and woman were taken hostage. When the woman complained that she was cold as they drove along, Pierpont took off his overcoat, wrapped it around her and asked if she was comfortable. When the man said his head was cold and asked if he could cover it with a handkerchief, Makley told him no. Pierpont took off his hat and placed it on the man’s head. When Makley began cursing, Pierpont said, "Cut it out, Mac, there’s a lady present."
Later, when talking with an Indianapolis reporter, Pierpont agreed that he’d be a good subject for study. After making a number of statements he said, "In the last few years of my life there’s never been a day but that some incident hasn’t occurred to make me hate the law. I suppose I’m what you’d call an abnormal mental case, a case for a psychiatrist. Maybe I am, but once I was normal. Place your own construction on what I’ve said."
After leaving Lima the gang split into two groups and headed for Chicago. Along the way those in Dillinger’s car held up the police station in Auburn, Indiana and left with a submachine gun, several rifles, bulletproof vests and more than a thousand rounds of ammunition. Not long after that Pierpont walked into the police station in Peru, Indiana carrying a Thompson submachine gun. Dillinger followed holding a pistol. The three cops present watched them leave with another machine gun, shotguns, other weapons and more ammunition.
So incensed by all this was Matt Leach that he decided to split up the gang by announcing that Dillinger was the leader even though he knew it really was Pierpont. The tactic, or so he believed, would lead to a quarrel and a parting of the ways. The plan failed. Pierpont didn’t care who got the credit and made the headlines while Dillinger, who saved all the clippings, grew more quiet and conservative.
And make the headlines they did. Soon the entire country was following the escapades of the Dillinger Gang. So famous were they that the gang was credited with far more bank robberies than they could possibly have committed unless they managed to be in Texas at 10 a.m. and upstate New York by noon. In reality their activities were restricted to the Midwest, the country familiar to them.
While Pierpont was the dominant figure, the gang was quite democratic. Everyone took part in planning their robberies and if someone didn’t go along with the idea it was scrapped. Several of them did have girlfriends living with them but drinking was taboo. Violating that rule cost Copeland his place in the gang. Shouse was thrown out for making passes at Dillinger’s girlfriend, definitely an imprudent move.
Each job was carefully planned and staged with precision, although things occasionally went wrong. There was nothing laughable to those in a bank at the sight of several neatly dressed men wearing business suits, neckties and fedoras walking in carrying submachine guns and pistols, but on one or two occasions things did turn a little humorous. The day the gang held up the bank in Greencastle, Indiana, for example.
Greencastle is a typical small Indiana county seat with a stately courthouse on the town square and business blocks facing it on four sides. The city is different than similar county seats in one respect; it is the home of DePauw University.
Catty-corner from the bank was a J.C. Penney store. John Hamilton was left outside as the guard, the "tiger" in their terminology. It was his job to see that no one left or entered the bank. Did this job frequently fall to him because of his hot temper and quickness on the trigger?
A small, elderly woman of foreign extraction was in the bank but decided to leave while Dillinger, Pierpont, Clark and Makley were at work. Hamilton reached out to stop her but she shook him off, saying, "I go to Penney’s and you go to hell." The nonplussed Hamilton watched her walk away and cross the street to the department store.
Makley and Pierpont joked about the way Dillinger had vaulted over the barrier in the bank so he never did it again. He did, however, later decide to phone Matt Leach and say, "How are you, you stuttering bastard?" He continued to call Leach whenever the urge struck. And when his girlfriend said she couldn’t fix his breakfast because she didn’t know how to cook he said, "Start learning."
John Hamilton killed a Chicago policeman who was waiting for him in a service garage after receiving a tip that an Auburn sedan belonging to the gang was there being repaired. When Hamilton arrived, he fired first.
The gang spent the Christmas holidays at a house they had rented in Daytona Beach. While there Dillinger forced his girlfriend, Billie Frechette, to leave following an argument. He gave her $1,000 and his new car so she could return to her home in Wisconsin. When the gang decided to go to Tucson and hide out, Dillinger wanted to first try to talk her into returning. That meant passing through Chicago, where he made another of his prank calls, this one to Frank Reynolds, the cop in charge of the "Dillinger Squad."
In need of money, Dillinger and Hamilton, who had accompanied him on the trip, held up the bank in East Chicago, Indiana. Unlike the jobs organized by Pierpont, this one was poorly planned and turned sour. When cops arrived there was a gun fight and policeman Patrick O’Malley was killed. Dillinger was reported to have fired the fatal shot. He always denied it. Hamilton was seriously wounded and fell, but Dillinger went back while under fire and helped him to their car. Miraculously, they made a successful escape.
Dillinger did talk Billie Frechette into traveling to Tucson with him, but soon after their arrival everything went wrong for the gang. One by one in separate places and at different times Makley, Clark, Pierpont and Dillinger were taken by surprise and captured.
By coincidence, a Tucson reporter was also from St. Marys, Ohio and Makley had known his father. During their conversation Makley said all members of his family were honest but that wasn’t the life for him. "I’ve lived as long in forty minutes at times as my dad did in forty years." That, in just a few words, summed up the outlook of all the outlaws.
The others also had something to say. Clark contended he was going to buy a football helmet because, "Every time we get in trouble I get hit over the head."
When the governor of Arizona arrived to look over the prisoners, Pierpont said, " Well, governor, I’m sorry to see you here." He later said to the policemen who had arrested him, "There are two kinds of officers – rats and gentlemen. You fellows are gentlemen and the Indiana and Ohio cops are rats."
It was Dillinger, though, who rather accurately pointed out that, "We’re exactly like you cops. You have a profession – we have a profession. Only difference is you’re on the right side of the law, we’re on the wrong."
John turned surly, though, and refused to leave his cell to meet the governor. His biggest concern was finding someone who would give his newly acquired puppy a good home.
Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin all wanted possession of the gangsters and a battle for them ensued. When the fireman who had given police the original tip leading to the captures asked them to verify his story so he could collect the reward offered by True Detective magazine they refused, claiming they should get the money.
When Dillinger was advised to waive extradition to Indiana he grinned. "I haven’t a thing to do when I get there."
He was furious and fought like a tiger when without an extradition hearing he was dragged to a small plane that would fly him to Indiana. When his leg was shackled to a seat post in the plane he said, "Hell, I don’t jump out of these things."
Dillinger was taken to an "escape proof" jail in the little town of Crown Point to stand trial for the killing of the East Chicago policeman. Soon after his arrival, news photographer’s gathered in the office to take pictures of him with the county prosecutor, Robert Estill. While Estill was distracted, Dillinger, the hint of a sardonic smile on his face, rested his arm on the prosecutor’s shoulder. Estill’s arm appeared to be around Dillinger. The "good buddies" photo created a furor. It was said to cost Estill a shot at being governor and Indiana Governor Paul V. McNutt his chance of running for president.
On March 3, 1934 Dillinger put the capper on all his performances by escaping from the jail at Crown Point despite the unusual number of guards on hand as well as Indiana National Guardsmen. He claimed he did it with a wooden gun carved from a washboard. The police, hoping to look less like the fools that John had made of them, claimed the gun was real. No one will ever be certain, but Dillinger was photographed holding a wooden gun in one hand, a submachine gun in the other during another risky visit to Mooresville. Adding insult to injury, he made his getaway in the sheriff’s car after disabling all the others in the jail’s garage.
Dillinger headed for Chicago and once there quickly organized another gang with John Hamilton serving as his right hand man. Another addition was a little, kill-crazy man named Lester Gilles. He liked to be called Big George but was better known as Baby Face Nelson. No one ever called him that to his face, of course. The trio, accompanied by Billie Frechette, headed for St. Paul to link up with Homer Van Meter, who had been robbing banks in that area for quite some time. He brought in two more men, Eddie Green, an expert at casing banks, and Tommy Carroll, a handy man with a machine gun.
BABY FACE NELSON
At Green’s suggestion, the new gang quickly held up a bank in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It was not the smooth type of operation organized by Harry Pierpont, at times bordering on a bad comedy, but they escaped with more than $40,000. Not, however, before the wild-eyed Nelson shot a man. The escape was aided by Van Meter’s old trick of scattering roofing nails behind the getaway car.
Dillinger used much of his share to pay lawyers for Pierpont’s trial in Lima. He was convicted, with the help of damning testimony from former colleague Ed Shouse, and he and Makley were sentenced to death. Clark was handed a life sentence. When the prosecutor accused Pierpont of getting $300,000 from bank robberies he denied it, then caused laughter in the courtroom by saying, "Well, at least if I did I’m not like some bank robbers – I didn’t get myself elected president of the bank first."
Pierpont and Makley later attempted to break out of the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus. Makley was killed and Pierpont wounded. Nursed back to health, he then was put to death in the electric chair.
Dillinger was wounded in a shootout at his apartment in St. Paul, but once again the police botched up the job and he escaped. Of all the places on earth he would be expected to avoid, Mooresville topped the list and yet that’s where he went to recuperate.
Back in action, he and Van Meter held up another police station, this one in Warsaw, Indiana. Then they held up the bank in Mason City, Iowa in what amounted to another fiasco. During the course of some serious gunplay, Dillinger, Hamilton and Van Meter were wounded, none seriously. Nelson again shot a bystander. Again roofing nails came into play but Dillinger had to scold Baby Face for scattering them under their own car.
In need of a rest, the gang decided a good place for it would be the Little Bohemia Lodge in the northern reaches of Wisconsin. For several days Dillinger, Hamilton, Nelson, Van Meter and Carroll relaxed, playing cards and taking a little target practice. But people, including the owner of the lodge and his wife, were suspicious and managed to tip off the FBI. What followed was another FBI fiasco.
Led by Melvin Purvis, agents positioned themselves outside the lodge in the dark of night. Three customers who lived nearby left the lodge and the FBI opened fire, killing one of them and severally wounding the other two. A story supplied to a website by the FBI makes no mention of that.
Alerted by the gun shots, four of the gangster who had been playing cards in the lodge returned the fire. So did Baby Face Nelson from a nearby cabin. With the agents milling around in front of the lodge, four of the gang jumped out of a second story window at the back, landing in a snowbank that cushioned their fall. They escaped by running to the right along the lakeshore. Nelson did the same by running to the left. At a house a short distance away, Nelson killed an FBI agent and severely wounded a second.
In three separate cars, all five members of the gang escaped the area. Meanwhile the FBI agents continued firing at the lodge, eventually engulfing it with teargas. Three young women came stumbling out, tears streaming down their faces. And so ended the "battle" at the Little Bohemia lodge.
The nation was appalled by the incompetent performance of the FBI in not only failing to capture the men they were after but shooting innocent parties in the process. Humorist Will Rogers wrote, "Well, they had Dillinger surrounded and was all ready to shoot him when he come out, but another bunch of folks come out ahead, so they just shot them instead. Dillinger is going to accidentally get with some innocent bystanders sometime, then he will get shot."
Reading the accounts of the events, Dillinger must have been smiling. However, while driving south from Little Bohemia a day or so later the stolen car in which Dillinger, Hamilton and Van Meter were riding was spotted and Hamilton was shot in the back. Nearly a week of trying to find a doctor willing to treat him proved fruitless and he died. He was buried in a gravel pit after having lye poured on his hands and face to prevent his body from being identified. Dillinger handled the job himself, saying, "I hate to do this, Red, but I know you’d do the same to me."
The heat was really on by the time Van Meter and Dillinger arrived in Chicago. They didn’t make it easy on themselves by abandoning a bloodstained Ford on a city street. Every cop in the country was on the lookout for it. They managed to hide out, though, and with the help of his lawyer, Dillinger arranged to have plastic surgery. Van Meter did the same. The work did little to alter their features. Even so, Dillinger paid a visit to his Indiana home at Mooresville and spent another day at the World’s Fair in Chicago.
In the meantime, Tommy Carroll was killed in a shootout with police. Then Van Meter suffered a head wound when he, Dillinger, Nelson and a couple of unidentified men held up a bank in South Bend. A policeman was killed in the shootout that followed. The robbery netted the gang only $20,000. The take disappointed Dillinger, who was hoping to accumulate enough money to travel to Mexico.
For a short time, though, he managed to live the quiet life of an ordinary citizen in Chicago, doing such things as attending a Cubs baseball game at Wrigley Field. He also was dating a woman named Polly Hamilton – no relation to John. An older woman, Anna Sage, became his friend and came to know his true identity. Dillinger was confident she would not betray him, but she did.
The events of the hot July night when he took the two women to the Biograph Theater are well known. In a hail of gunfire as they left the theater, Dillinger at last was killed. In the process two female bystanders were wounded. Ironically, the last movie seen by Dillinger was Manhattan Melodrama in which Clark Gable played the role of a criminal sentenced to death, thanks to the work of his friend, Prosecutor William Powell.
But was it really Dillinger who died or a small-time criminal set up to take the fall? All the evidence indicates it was indeed John Dillinger, yet there have always been doubters. The color of the eyes were wrong and the coroner’s explanation that being in the sun could have caused the change was weak at best. The first photo taken of the body lying on a slab in the morgue showed he was wearing a ring. Dillinger never wore jewelry because it was identifiable. In subsequent pictures the ring was gone. Despite stories to the contrary, it seems almost certain that the body buried at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis was Dillinger’s.
A month after Dillinger’s death, Homer Van Meter would die in another gun battle with police in St. Paul. Four months after the fateful night at the Biograph, Baby Face Nelson was killed in yet another shootout, but not before he killed two more FBI agents, giving him a total of three to his credit.
And so ended the Dillinger era. It had lasted a mere thirteen months but placed his name among the leading figures in crime. Just another unknown criminal when it began, he came to be a legend in his own time and actually grew to become the man it had made him out to be.
Other flamboyant outlaws became famous, or infamous, during the years of the Great Depression. Pretty Boy Floyd, Ma Barker and her sons Dock and Fred, Alvin Karpis, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, their names will live on so long as people are intrigued by crime and criminals. Those desperadoes of the 1930s were unique, unlike any before or after. They bore no resemblance to the big city gangster spawned by Prohibition. They robbed banks, escaped in fast cars, shot it out with the police whenever the need arose. And sooner or later they died in a blaze of gunfire.
Why were so many people fascinated by their exploits? Certainly not for the reason given in a typically self-serving FBI text which claims, "During the 1930s Depression, many Americans, nearly helpless against forces they didn’t understand, made heroes of outlaws who took what they wanted at gunpoint."
Forces they didn’t understand? Oh, they understood perfectly. They understood the bank failures that cost so many their life savings. They understood the bank foreclosures that cost a countless number their homes and farms. When a group of neatly dressed outlaws walked into a bank and left with large sums of money, people indeed understood. They understood it was payback for what had been done to so many of them and they found it deeply satisfying.
