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00:17This is John Dillinger, the greatest bank robber of all time.
00:28Within a few months of the start of the American Great Depression of the 1930s, this small-time
00:33cook would become public enemy number one.
00:36He was even more famous than Al Capone and Bonnie and Clyde.
00:41John Dillinger was born in 1903.
00:44He lost his mother at a very early age and was raised with iron discipline by his father.
00:50After a troubled adolescence, he enlisted in the Navy, but later deserted.
01:00In 2003, the FBI declassifies its secret files on John Dillinger, and the writer Byron Burrow
01:07uses this new information to tell the true story in his book, Public Enemies, on which
01:13Michael Mann's film script is based.
01:16John Dillinger was, you know, kind of the quintessential Depression-era bank robber.
01:21He was a nobody from nowhere.
01:24One Saturday night when he was a kid, I want to say he was 21, unemployed, he mugged the
01:30grocer in his hometown outside Indianapolis, Indiana, and he got sent to prison for a good
01:37long time for something on the order of 10 years, as I recall.
01:48And he did hard time.
01:49And in prison, he met bank robbers.
01:52He met crooks.
01:53It was a school for crime.
01:55And when he came out, he not only wanted to be a bank robber, but, and this is one of
02:00the
02:00things that distinguishes Dillinger from others, he wanted to rob banks with a specific goal
02:07in mind.
02:07And that was to raise enough money that he could buy guns to smuggle back into prison to get
02:13his friends out.
02:31In 1933, when Dillinger's exploits as a gangster are becoming a legend, America is in the depths
02:37of the Great Depression.
02:43American industrial production has fallen 50% since 1929.
02:4813 million Americans are unemployed.
02:51In 1933, when Roosevelt becomes president of the United States, 25% of the working population
02:57is unemployed.
02:59Two million people are homeless.
03:10Hunger marches multiply.
03:13Millions of people demonstrate in the streets of the largest cities.
03:17Strikes break out across the country.
03:42It was a time where many, if not most, of Americans had lost their jobs or were losing them, had
03:50lost income, and they blamed the banks.
03:56And John Dillinger, who wasn't hurting them, seemed like a perfectly harmless, charming, smiling
04:04fellow who was going after the banks.
04:14He became not only an anti-hero, but a hero to a whole generation of Americans.
04:24The story of the bank robber John Dillinger is intimately linked with that of John Edgar
04:29Hoover, the longest serving head of the FBI.
04:34Hoover will use the hunt for Dillinger to consolidate his power, which will last for more than 50 years.
04:41The war on crime, 18 short months.
04:44At the beginning, J. Edgar Hoover was a nobody.
04:47If you're living in Iowa, if you're living in Florida, if you're living in Los Angeles,
04:50you've never heard the name J. Edgar Hoover.
04:5218 months later, J. Edgar Hoover is a media star.
04:56He is a household name.
04:58The genesis of J. Edgar Hoover's fame, the genesis of his power, the birth of the modern
05:05FBI is all during this 18 months.
05:09So while you may say John Dillinger was not a national menace, clearly there was significance,
05:14national significance to this war on crime period.
05:20The action during the great crime wave, during the book, during the movie, took place on
05:26the Great Plains of America, which is somewhat like the Russian steppe, I suppose, which basically
05:33is right down the middle of America from the Rockies to the Mississippi River.
05:39That was really where poverty had struck the worst.
05:44I mean, you've seen The Grace of Wrath.
05:46It seemed like the whole state of Oklahoma was getting in cars and going to California.
05:50And sit by my side, if you love me, do not hasten to bid me adieu.
06:02Just remember the Red River Valley, valley, valley, and the cowboy who loved you so true.
06:13So the poverty there was the worst.
06:15But also, it was immensely attractive to criminals, and especially bank robbers.
06:21Because remember, almost anyone can rob a bank.
06:24The challenge is always getting away.
06:32Bank robbers want a road that goes for 200 miles and that can drive flat out 90 miles an
06:37hour and get away fast.
06:38So the combination of the poverty and I think the geography is really what made the Great
06:43Plains kind of the premier battlefield of this era.
06:55We forget this was barely 75 years ago.
06:59Frank Sinatra was an 18-year-old singing songs.
07:02Marlon Brando was a kid.
07:04Ronald Reagan was already broadcasting on radio.
07:10In terms of the 20th century, it was yesterday.
07:26The war and crime that we discuss today really began with an event in June 1933 called the
07:33Kansas City Massacre.
07:37In this case, a gentleman named Frank Nash, sometimes known as Jelly Nash.
07:42And a couple of FBI agents had arrested him down in Arkansas and were taking him back to
07:48Leavenworth Prison in Kansas City via the train station in Kansas City.
07:54What happened when the FBI took Frank Nash off the train in Kansas City and they were joined
08:01by other FBI agents and Kansas City cops?
08:04It didn't matter.
08:05Several unknown assassins opened up with Thompson guns, killed, I believe, I want to say six
08:10of the law enforcement men, including an FBI man and including Frank Nash.
08:22It was this event, the Kansas City massacre, that led the Attorney General and J. Edgar Hoover
08:28to declare America's first ever war on crime.
08:32They were going to go after the gangsters, they were going to go after the bank robbers,
08:35and they were going to bring them down.
08:37And, of course, it became a much bloodier, much more complicated war than I think they
08:42had anticipated.
08:45Right in the wake of the Kansas City massacre, Dillinger was released from prison in May 1933,
08:53and he immediately went to robbing banks.
09:19At FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., J. Edgar Hoover becomes deeply concerned about these
09:25repeated bank robberies and the inability of the local police to stop them.
09:50of C. Edgar Hoover becomes completely handicapped.
09:58Have a great day.
09:58Of the past, too, to be with the police officers.
09:58Of the city's safety, right?
09:58I think there were a lot of police officers yesterday.
10:00But really, the years in 1933 and 1934, when Dillinger and the others were at large, was
10:05not the beginning of a crime wave.
10:07It was the end of a crime wave that began in the mid-1920s, which was largely the result
10:13of technology outstripping the legal system.
10:16Two things in particular I'd mention, the new V8 engine, which an awful lot of criminals
10:21could get their hands on when lawmen couldn't, allowed bank robbers to easily out-distance
10:26local law enforcement, and also the introduction after World War I of the Thompson submachine
10:32gun, which took firepower from one-shot pistols to thousand-shot-a-minute guns, which also
10:40criminals could get their hands on, but by and large a county sheriff in rural Nebraska
10:45wasn't going to have it.
10:45He was going to have a Model A and a bird gun, and a bunch of sharp bank robbers out
10:51from
10:51Chicago with V8 engines and Thompson submachine guns, they could practically rob the whole
10:56state of Nebraska.
11:08Meanwhile at the FBI, Hoover takes action, training his agents to fight the gangsters with these
11:14new weapons.
11:27One of the other things that made robbing banks in the early 1930s relatively easy was how fragmented
11:37American law enforcement was.
11:38By and large, if you robbed a bank in County A and you managed to escape across the county
11:46line, certainly across the state line, those authorities in the county and the state couldn't
11:52come after you.
11:53They could call ahead to someone and say, oh, by the way, would you mind picking up a criminal
11:57for us?
11:58That didn't happen too often.
12:01What's important to understand, and what's seldom understood, is how incredibly compacted
12:07all these events were.
12:09The very month that the war on crime started, the month of the Kansas City Massacre, was
12:15the same month that John Dillinger robbed his first drug store and his first bank.
12:21So his emergence directly paralleled that of this new federal war on crime when the feds
12:28were out there wanting to take people down.
12:31And the whole rise and fall of Bonnie and Clyde, of John Dillinger, of Pretty Boy Floyd was all
12:37in this two-year period, 1933 into 1934, and really formally ended in January 1935.
12:45This did not stretch out over five years or ten years.
12:47This was all inside 18 to 24 months.
12:50There was an awful lot going on just about every single day.
13:02One of the things that made Dillinger such an appealing figure was not just that he robbed
13:08banks, but that he escaped from jail, and he did it twice.
13:12The first time was he was arrested while visiting a girlfriend in Dayton, Ohio in September 1933,
13:18at which point his gang of buddies, they came and broke him out of jail, murdering the sheriff,
13:24I should say, and that's really what started once Dillinger united with his group of prison
13:31pals that he'd gotten out that really started the first reign of the first Dillinger gang.
13:42It's amazing to think about this.
13:44The FBI had no powers of arrest.
13:47If you are a bank robber and I'm an FBI man, I can't arrest you.
13:52I have to call a sheriff to arrest you.
13:54Worse, I can't carry a gun.
13:55They had no authority to carry guns.
13:57They were babes in the woods who, unfortunately, would only learn how to fight crime after
14:03one too many funerals.
14:05And really what happened in 1933 and 1934 was that the federal government, in the person
14:11of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, finally got involved.
14:22My name is Richard Hack and I wrote Puppet Master, The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover.
14:30It was a time when there was no central organization of anything in this country.
14:36There were certainly no computers, there was no central filing system, there was no fingerprinting
14:41that was kept on an organized basis.
14:45There was not even a reporting of criminals at large between one city to the next.
14:54Because at the time, the Bureau of Investigation was extremely corrupt.
14:59It didn't take much to become an agent.
15:02In fact, they would pay people $1 a year, give them access to stationery and name them agents.
15:10And they could do what they basically wanted in the name of the federal government.
15:16In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge decides that the time has come to root out corruption
15:21in the American administration and clean up the Justice Department and its Bureau of Investigation.
15:29And the new attorney general, Harlan Stone, decided to clean up the Bureau of Investigation.
15:35And he turned to J. Edgar Hoover, this young man, still in his 20s, saying, can you do this job?
15:43And Hoover said, I can do the job, but I won't do the job if I have got to answer
15:49to anyone else but you.
15:52At the age of 30, Hoover becomes director of the FBI, a position he will hold for 48 years until
15:59his death.
16:01Hoover decided to make the Bureau of Investigation not only a perfect organization as far as the legal aspects were
16:13concerned,
16:14but he wanted to make it a glamorous organization that agents would want to join.
16:20He was a famous trumpet man from Mount Chicago Way.
16:23He had a boogie style that no one else could play.
16:26He was the top man of his craft.
16:29But then his number came up and he was gone with the draft.
16:33He's in the Army now.
16:39They made him blow a bugle for his Uncle Sam.
16:58He decided to centralize the rudimentary taking a fingerprint identification.
17:06So what Hoover did was say, all of you, let's put all the fingerprints in one spot.
17:12I'll give you total access to anything you need.
17:15And at least we'll all have access to everything that we know, all at the same point.
17:29Using these new methods, Hoover will eventually accumulate files on more than 150 million Americans.
17:40At FBI headquarters, files are held on every criminal, outlaw, and suspect in the country.
17:50A new, extremely powerful and efficient agency is being created.
17:56Dillinger and his gang have yet to realize this.
17:59Oh, no fire.
18:01There's no sun up in the sky.
18:04Stormy weather.
18:06After he had robbed so many banks during 1933, Dillinger and his gang wanted to take a vacation.
18:15And this is where things went horribly awry for the gang.
18:19Gloom and misery everywhere.
18:22Stormy weather.
18:25Can't get my...
18:26Initially, they went down to Daytona Beach in Florida where they were for New Year's Eve.
18:31They went down and took in some dog races in Miami.
18:55You know, the great love of Dillinger's life was Billy Frechette.
18:58They clearly connected.
19:00They were two kind of Depression-era refugees who really had nowhere to go and nothing to do but take
19:06care of each other.
19:08The FBI files reveal the important role played by the gangsters' women in this era.
19:15The role of women in the war on crime has always fascinated me because if you imagine that 30%
19:24of American men were out of work, imagine their powerlessness and their poverty.
19:30Well, imagine a woman for whom in those days it was much more difficult to find a job.
19:35You found a whole legion of women during the Great Depression who were more than willing to take in the
19:43bed, inhabit the bed of a bank robber if he took care of them, basically.
19:47Here is the story, Bob, little Joe Carew, and all the things he'd done for his gal named Lou.
19:54When Lou said, Joey, I want diamonds galore, he rounded up the gang and robbed a jewelry store.
20:02Women like Billy Frechette, John Dillinger's girlfriend, a simple soul, a hat-check girl, basically, who didn't ask too many
20:10questions as long as John Dillinger took care of her.
20:12You also found women like Ma Barker, who was the mother to any number of criminal bank robbers, who was
20:20more than happy to just go along with it because the alternative to them was abject poverty, living as Ma
20:27Barker did in a tar paper shack.
20:42Shoot him, Herman! Shoot him, Herman!
20:54No!
20:54No!
21:05And then you had women like Bonnie Parker, who was Clyde Barrow's girlfriend, who I find far less sympathetic because
21:12she could have continued working as a babysitter or a waitress, but she was just bored.
21:24You know, it wasn't so much poverty. She wanted excitement. In her diary, she wrote things like, you know, Tuesday,
21:30nothing happened. Why won't something happen?
21:33She read movie magazines and gangster magazines and wanted her life to be exciting.
21:38So there were those women, too. Poverty drove a lot of women into the beds of gangsters, but there were
21:44always going to be people like Bonnie Parker who, frankly, did it for the excitement.
22:04At the beginning of 1934, Dillinger and his gang take just a few days' vacation. Very soon, they are back
22:12robbing banks again.
22:13When they got tired of Florida, they decided they'd go out west. They'd go to Arizona, to Tucson. So they
22:18all went separately.
22:20Dillinger actually went back via Chicago, where he stupidly tried to rob a bank with one other person.
22:27And during that robbery in East Chicago, killed a police detective, the one confirmed murder that Dillinger clearly is guilty
22:36of.
22:39Afterward, he and Billy Frechette headed out Route 66 through Chicago, through St. Louis, to Tucson, and unfortunately, in Tucson,
22:49members of his gang were recognized by the local police, not the FBI, the local police.
22:58And the local police arrested them, one by one. Pete Pierpont, Charles Magley, each of them. And finally, they took
23:06in Dillinger, and none of them, Dillinger, any of his pals, could believe they'd been arrested by a bunch of,
23:13you know, local yokels.
23:15And, of course, Edgar Hoover was beside himself in anger, in anger, because if Dillinger was to be arrested, it
23:22should be by the FBI, but no.
23:24And they then extradited John Dillinger back to the state of Indiana to stand trial for the murder of this
23:31police detective.
23:32And it was really there that some of the greatest exploits, some of the greatest moments of Dillinger's criminal career
23:39took place.
23:40How many of you have to go there to the police to fight that?
23:51Once Dillinger is returned to the state of Indiana in January, early February of 1934, he is put in the
23:59jail at Crown Point, and it's an absolute mob scene when they take him from the airport to the jail.
24:04people lining the roads wanting to get a look at this master criminal, more famous than Al Capone now.
24:21And they ultimately, when they get him to the jail with flashlights popping and people yelling,
24:25Johnny, Johnny! And all the reporters crowd into the jail and there's this famous,
24:31in fact, one of the most famous photographs of an American criminal ever
24:34was when Dillinger put his arm on the shoulder of the local prosecutor
24:40and answered all the reporters' questions with a smile on his face, easy going.
24:44He was nothing like a criminal.
24:47He seemed, to the eyes of millions of Americans who saw him in newsreel footage of this moment,
24:54of these interviews, he seemed like just another farm boy.
24:58He didn't deny that he robbed banks. He didn't deny that he'd broken his friends out of prison.
25:03He said, basically, anybody would have done it for their friends.
25:08He didn't seem dirty or threatening at all.
25:11And so to an America, to a country that was so angry at the banks, that wanted the banks hurt,
25:19and Dillinger was doing that, he didn't seem to be like such a bad fellow at all.
25:23So that interview, the interviews that he did at Crown Point really took Dillinger out of the mold of just
25:31a criminal
25:32to a national figure and an international figure.
25:35After this, he's being written about in the papers in London, in Paris, in Frankfurt, in Hamburg, everywhere.
25:42He really becomes the world's most famous criminal.
25:51One thing that irritated J. Edgar Hoover was hearing about bank robberies in this country.
26:00There, at the time, bank robberies was the easiest way for someone to get access to cash.
26:05It was a war.
26:09And like in any war, there were legends, glorifying heroes and villains alike.
26:16Yeah, all my buddies wanted to be firemen or farmers or policemen, not me.
26:21I just want to steal people's money.
26:26Gangsters through Chicago were legendary.
26:31They not only were very successful, they were very popular.
26:37The fact that there was somebody named Pretty Boy Floyd and Machine Gun Kelly drove Hoover up a wall.
26:45He saw children emulating these gangsters, these bad guys.
26:51And he was all about straight up right, righteous, and decided to go after them with a vengeance and did.
26:58He put all the efforts of the Bureau of Investigation to apprehending these people.
27:03And more than that, he turned it into a publicity campaign.
27:09Another part of his genius, and I don't hesitate in using the word, is that Hoover understood that he was
27:17doing battle plays.
27:19He was doing battle not only in the battlefield of guns and bullets, but of ideas and images.
27:31Hoover and the FBI were very, very effective in elevating the image of the FBI agent,
27:37both in terms of J. Edgar Hoover himself and later one of his top agents, Melvin Purvis,
27:42as clean-cut, effective men you can trust, men you'd have your daughter's date.
27:48And that's basically who FBI agents were, as a matter of fact.
27:52They were men cut out of the same cloth as Hoover.
27:56Well-educated white men, always.
27:59Very few Jews who worked tirelessly to bring in criminals.
28:03That really was not an overstatement.
28:06The FBI was full of eager, ardent young men, who perhaps couldn't find any other type of job at the
28:12moment,
28:13who were thrown into the war on crime, really without knowing too much about how to do it yet.
28:22The G-Men. This is a Bureau of Scientific Crime Detection.
28:26New, modern, up to the minute, in action, day and night.
28:30The FBI never sleeps. The G-Men have become a legend.
28:34Touch you, G-Men!
28:36On the covers of magazines and on the front pages of the newspapers, G-Men became a thing to be
28:45reckoned with.
28:46You didn't want to fool with a G-Man because a G-Man was even more romantic and successful than
28:51the gangsters.
28:52And one after one, these gangsters fell and were apprehended.
29:06It was extraordinary because throughout the country, people were afraid and enamored of these G-Men.
29:15And it's because of J. Edgar Hoover that they became heroes.
29:20And they started to show up in movies.
29:24The no longer was the bad guy the one to win at the end.
29:29It was the G-Men who won at the end of the day and literally did put this country on
29:35the path of law and order in a major way.
29:38I'll kill you!
29:55While Hoover's search for the gangsters intensifies, Dillinger pulls off his most spectacular exploit to date by escaping from Crow
30:02Point County Jail.
30:04Movie news of the exploit covers the whole story to the delight of the American public.
30:12In spite of all this guard, he escaped once more using the sheriff's car.
30:16By driving this stolen car across the Indiana state line to Chicago, he violated a federal law for the first
30:21time and that put the G-Men on his train.
30:29Only four days after his escape, Dillinger resumes his criminal activities.
30:54Day by day, the Dillinger legend grows.
30:56It is rumored that he pretends to sell alarm systems to the victims when he is planning a robbery.
31:01A story even circulates about how he and his gang passed themselves off as a movie crew on location to
31:07a publicity-hungry bank in Ohio.
31:19It wasn't really until after the Crown Break jailbreak that J. Edgar Hoover told his agent, his top agent, Melvin
31:27Purvis, who was a young man, 29, with not a lot of law enforcement experience, that he wanted him to
31:34bring in John Dillinger.
31:35And in those early weeks after Crown Point, Purvis and the FBI found that saying you wanted to bring in
31:43John Dillinger was a lot easier than doing it.
31:45In fact, Purvis himself knew very little about how to do what he needed to do.
31:49When he wanted to put wiretaps on the phones, he literally had to call a lawyer in Washington and ask
31:55how to do it.
31:55His information was bad. His information was bad. He had very few informants on the streets of Chicago.
32:00And so, I guess there's no accident. For a solid month, the FBI found no trace of Dillinger.
32:11The FBI ultimately found Dillinger entirely by accident. Dillinger, of course, had moved to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, which
32:20was a real haven for bank robbers, kind of an open city, if you will, where he had formed the
32:25second Dillinger gang with a character named Babyface Nelson, real name Lester Gillis.
32:31And Babyface Nelson was a psychopath. Not to put too fine a point on it. He was a psychopath. He
32:38was a character out of the movies, a young man who literally cackled or laughed when he was shooting his
32:44Thompson submachine gun up and down the street.
32:47Dillinger was a cool character. Didn't want to kill unless his own life was in danger. Babyface Nelson didn't care
32:54who killed.
32:54In any case, Dillinger and Billy Frechette had rented a room under a fake name in a very nice, lovely
33:01neighborhood of St. Paul, and their landlady got suspicious because they came and went at odd hours.
33:08They had odd-shaped luggage. And she literally went down to the FBI office in St. Paul and says, I
33:14have a bank robber living in my apartment building.
33:18And the FBI kind of went, ugh. But, you know, she wouldn't leave without being listened to. So the man
33:24in charge sent two young agents in St. Paul. They went and knocked on the door.
33:29Billy Frechette initially said, just a second, my husband's indisposed. And after a few moments, Dillinger didn't come to the
33:36door, but his Tommy gun did.
33:45The FBI agents ran as fast as they could. And at that time, another member of Dillinger's gang drove up,
33:53and there ended up kind of a wild gunfight there in front of the apartment building.
33:56As it happened, Dillinger and Billy Frechette managed to get away. But as they were driving away, Dillinger found out
34:03that he'd been shot in the leg, apparently by one of his own bullets, a ricochet.
34:12In the wake of Crown Point and St. Paul, Dillinger's fame was higher than it would ever be.
34:20My little girl, you know I love you. And I long for you each day. My little girl, I'm dreaming
34:30of you.
34:31And all the pressure, all the focus of finding him fell on Melvin Purvis, the Chicago FBI. And Purvis' fame,
34:41as a result, arose in parallel with Dillinger's.
34:45Purvis enjoyed talking to the press. He had an ego. He was a fine, a sharp dresser. At least initially,
34:53Hoover didn't mind that too much because he liked Purvis a lot.
34:56But two things ultimately caused Hoover to sour on Purvis. One was the fact that Purvis was so awful at
35:03tracking down Dillinger, as we now know.
35:06But the fact that Purvis' fame was growing as high as J. Edgar Hoover's. And while I think Hoover's jealousy
35:13can be overstated, I think it's pretty clear it was there.
35:18So, as Dillinger's fame rose, so did Purvis'. Ultimately, the longer Dillinger was at large, the tensions grew between Purvis
35:27and Hoover.
35:28And if you go back and read their memorandum, their phone calls. I mean, it's all right there.
35:33It's pretty clear that while a lot of people think Hoover was jealous of Purvis, and I think there's probably
35:38something to that.
35:39I think that can be overstated. The fact was, Hoover was a series of blunders, raiding the wrong apartments, letting
35:50Dillinger get away.
35:51Of course, the famous battle at the Little Bohemia Lodge in northern Wisconsin was just about the straw that broke
35:59Hoover's back.
36:10The climax, really, the moral and the narrative climax of the entire war on crime is probably the infamous battle
36:18of the Little Bohemia.
36:19In which, after a series of bank robberies and escapades, Dillinger and Babyface Nelson and the rest of their gang,
36:28and girlfriends,
36:29decided they need a weekend away to kind of get their heads together, plan their next move.
36:34And so they gather at a small inn in far, far northern Wisconsin called Little Bohemia.
36:49Dillinger and Nelson and his gang kind of took it over for the weekend.
36:53The problem was, their fame had become so widespread that their faces were in front of all the newspapers, including
37:01the Chicago Tribune, and the inn's owner saw it.
37:04The man called Dillinger into his office, showed him his picture in the paper, and said,
37:09You're John Dillinger.
37:14And Dillinger turned to him and said, Don't worry. I'm John Dillinger, but I'm not here to hurt you. We
37:19just need some quiet time.
37:22Well, the man did not not worry. He was quite worried. He had his wife. He had extended family who
37:29worked there.
37:30And basically what happened was, members of his family called the FBI in Chicago, put forward directly to Melvin Purvis,
37:38who put together a team to go to Little Bohemia.
37:49So, on a, you know, a cold Sunday afternoon in April of 1934, you get two dozen FBI agents, led
37:58by Melvin Purvis,
37:59descending by automobile and airplane from Chicago and St. Paul, because they are fairly confident they have John Dillinger,
38:07baby-faced Nelson, holed up in this little inn.
38:22At this point, FBI agents had been carrying guns for basically six or nine months.
38:28Very few of them not only knew how to use guns, but had ever fired a gun at someone.
38:34And here they were going to be taking on the nation's leading gangsters who had Thompson's submachine guns.
38:50Unfortunately, the moment they do that, there are some dogs outside that begin barking.
38:55So Dillinger sees, oh my goodness, the FBI is coming after me.
38:58Far worse, it's very dark. This is the north woods of Wisconsin.
39:05And three men who had been drinking there in the bar that night jump into their car, and as the
39:11FBI rushes up, dogs begin barking.
39:14Suddenly this car, the radio blaring, can't hear anything, can't hear anybody saying stop.
39:19Three men in this car suddenly start turning down this long driveway, going directly toward the FBI.
39:26Purvis, all his men are yelling, stop, FBI, stop, FBI.
39:30And the FBI shoots this car to pieces.
39:41They kill one of the men, they badly injure two others, at which point, you know, Dillinger, because of this
39:47side show, Dillinger and Babyface Nelson and all the rest are able to jump out the back of the inn,
39:54and in the woods they all become scattered.
39:56Some of them, Babyface Nelson, exchange gunfire with FBI agents, but they get away.
40:02Dillinger and two others manage to get to another nearby inn where they steal a car and get away.
40:11Babyface Nelson, as luck would have it, stumbles onto a house about a mile away where a number of FBI
40:18agents then show up looking for a telephone, looking for a car, looking for help.
40:24They don't know what's going on, and they drive up, and who's standing there in the driveway?
40:30Babyface Nelson, who immediately takes them for what they are, FBI agents, now he opens up on their car.
40:40And then Babyface Nelson takes their car and gets away.
40:48By the time dawn rose, you had a number of men killed, John Dillinger and Babyface Nelson had all disappeared.
40:56Melvin Purvis had gone from being fairly well thought of to suddenly the stupidest, the dumbest law enforcement agent in
41:05the country.
41:05I mean, most of America didn't know what the FBI was.
41:08The first time a lot of Americans had ever heard of it was,
41:11oh, they're the idiots who let Dillinger get away at Little Bohemia.
41:19At that point, it was very clear Hoover was just about on the verge of firing Purvis.
41:24And then the actual straw that broke the camel's back was when the FBI had Babyface Nelson's wife under surveillance.
41:34And somehow, although Purvis was personally responsible for the surveillance,
41:38Babyface Nelson managed to go to this woman's house in the middle of Chicago
41:43and spear it her away to go robbing banks with him, right under Melvin Purvis' nose.
41:49That Hoover didn't fire Purvis, but he sent in one of his own men from Washington,
41:54a desk man named Sam Cowley, to take charge of the manhunt for John Dillinger.
42:02After Little Bohemia, Dillinger's fame had never been higher.
42:06He is on the front pages of national newspapers and international newspapers every day.
42:11People think they see him in Canada, in California, on a ship to London, everywhere.
42:16And as a result of his fame, the rest of the American press
42:20suddenly starts writing about other bank robbers
42:23and start wanting to elevate them toward Dillinger's level of fame.
42:27And one of those was Bonnie and Clyde.
42:37John Dillinger was a big-time criminal who robbed big-time banks.
42:42Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were nobodies from Dallas,
42:46who mostly bumped off drug stores and filling stations
42:49and an occasional bank if they could.
43:07But, as luck would have it, they were killed in May 1934
43:12by a posse in northwest Louisiana at the height of this Dillinger mania.
43:22Proudly posing with his G-men for the movie Tone News,
43:25Hoover is only too glad to present the brutal killing of Bonnie and Clyde.
43:40And as a result, these two-bit criminals, their deaths are suddenly, you know, trumpeted on the front page of
43:46the New York Times.
43:47The first time, of course, that they've ever been mentioned on the New York,
43:50the front page of the New York Times, um, is their deaths.
43:53But as a result, really, because of Dillinger's fame, you get fame that gravitates toward nobodies like Bonnie and Clyde,
44:01as well as people like Pretty Boy Floyd, Babyface Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, and others whose names we still know
44:08today.
44:12In the spring of, um, of 34, Billie Frechette got arrested by Melvin Purvis, of all people.
44:18One of the few people Purvis actually managed to arrest.
44:20And Dillinger was absolutely stricken, just beside himself, in tears, watching her be arrested because he was actually there.
44:27In fact, while you can say Purvis was brilliant for arresting her, it would have been a little bit smarter
44:30if you realized Dillinger was parked around the corner.
44:36After that, Dillinger was just kind of paralyzed with grief.
44:40He wanted to storm the jail and free her.
44:43And only when his buddies finally convinced him that this would be ridiculous did he give up on that.
44:55During this period, he finally kind of constructed a new hideout for himself
45:01with a woman who was, uh, had run a whorehouse in northern Indiana for years named Anna Sage.
45:18The story of Dillinger's demise, like all the events in this story, happens incredibly fast.
45:24It happens in 24 hours, as a matter of fact.
45:27Dillinger is staying in the apartment of Anna Sage.
45:29She happens to be a Romanian immigrant, and, uh, she's about to be deported.
45:34And so she approaches the FBI and tries to cut a deal that she can stay in the country
45:39because she is the one person in the world who knows where John Dillinger is staying.
45:43She says, basically, that she and her girlfriend, Polly Hamilton, and John Dillinger,
45:48are going to go to a movie the next night.
45:59So the next day, all the FBI men, uh, every FBI man in Chicago gathers in the downtown office of
46:07the FBI.
46:08It's hot. It's 95. It's 98. It's 100 degrees.
46:12And these men sit there all day in their suit jackets, waiting, waiting for the call.
46:17Where is this woman? Is this woman for real? I don't think she's for real.
46:21She's another kook, like the dozens of other kooks we've had before.
46:27And finally, in the early evening, she calls.
46:35And she says that she and Polly Hamilton and John Dillinger are going to be at the Biograph Theatre,
46:41where there's a movie called Manhattan Melodrama.
46:44Melvin Purvis and a dozen FBI men are sitting directly in front of the Biograph,
46:50when early that evening, Purvis physically sees suddenly
46:54John Dillinger walk by the right side of his car door with Polly Hamilton,
46:59with Anna Sage in her famous orange skirt, and they go into the movie theater.
47:09There are, you know, two dozen FBI agents out there.
47:12There are some Indiana police. There are Chicago cops.
47:16And they wait. They wait for two hours.
47:29Dillinger finally emerges around 10.30.
47:33Purvis is standing in front of the box office, and he is to give a signal.
47:37He's to light a cigar when he sees Dillinger come out.
47:40And that's when everybody's supposed to move in.
47:43They're not too clear about what they're going to do when they move in,
47:45but it's pretty clear that they're going to shoot him.
47:56Dillinger walks out. He turns left.
47:59Purvis lights his cigar, and nobody sees it.
48:05One of them, Charlie Winstead, a Texas FBI agent who had come up to Chicago to be put on the
48:12case
48:12because he was so good with guns, mutters to his friend,
48:15that's Dillinger, the one in the hat.
48:18They walk behind him 10, 20 feet, and at some point Dillinger senses it.
48:25He turns around. He looks directly into Charles Winstead's eyes, and he knows it.
48:39Four shots are fired. Two hit Dillinger.
48:42One goes in through the back of his skull, exit through his eye.
48:46Dillinger falls right there at the base of an alley.
48:49He's dead within seconds.
48:51They got him outside this motion picture theater.
48:53Wild excitement.
48:54Dillinger killed by federal agents,
48:56commanded by Inspector Samuel Cowley,
48:58assisted by East Chicago, Indiana police.
49:01The belongings of public enemy number one.
49:04Three men couldn't carry Dillinger's collection of deadly weapons
49:07seized at various places.
49:09He had this automatic in hand when killed.
49:12His fingerprints, the infallible sign.
49:15He spent $5,000 to have them altered with acid, but it failed.
49:18Three hundred points of similarity remained.
49:21His face made over, but the G-Men recognized him.
49:25The eyes and the shape of his head.
49:48The death of Dillinger marks the end of the reign of the gangsters, and the birth of the modern FBI,
49:55headed by the now all-powerful J. Edgar Hoover.
50:00There are three needs in America today in law enforcement.
50:03The elimination of politics from law enforcement,
50:06emphasis on efficiency, and cooperation between police agencies.
50:10We should all be concerned with but one goal, the eradication of crime.
50:14The Federal Bureau of Investigation is as close to you as your nearest telephone.
50:19It seeks to be your protector in all matters within its jurisdiction.
50:23It belongs to you.
50:26That means, gangsters, you can't get away with it.
50:38The Federal Bureau of Investigation
50:39Little girl, you know I love you
50:41And I long for you each day
50:45My little girl, I'm dreaming of you
50:49Though you're many miles away
50:52I see the lane
50:55Down in the wildwood
50:57Where you promised to be true
51:00My little girl, I know you're waiting
51:04And I'm coming back to you
51:30My little girl, I know you're waiting
51:35And I'm coming back to you
52:05Where you are
52:08You