In The Shadow of Yesterday

On the evening of September 6, 1924, two men crouched in the dark outside a grocery store in Mooresville, Indiana, waiting for a man named Frank Morgan to come home with the week’s receipts.

Their plan was not complicated. Their weapon was a bolt wrapped in a cloth. Their expected haul was roughly fifty dollars.

This is where the story of John Dillinger actually begins.

Forget the newsreels. Forget the wooden gun and the “escape-proof” jail and the hat and the smirk. That’s the ending.

The beginning is this: a twenty-one-year-old man with no criminal record, no job, and no particularly good ideas, waiting in the dark in a small Indiana town with a bolt wrapped in a rag.

Mooresville was the kind of place fathers moved their families to escape the city. That’s exactly why Dillinger’s father had relocated them there from Indianapolis three years earlier. The city, he’d decided, was corrupting his son.

Whether the countryside improved things is debatable. Dillinger had already quit school, worked a machine shop, stolen a car, and deserted the United States Navy before he was twenty.

By the spring of 1924 he was back in Mooresville, newly married to a sixteen-year-old named Beryl Hovious, and unable to find steady work. The marriage was genuine. The prospects were not.

His partner that night was Ed Singleton; pool shark, ex-convict, and, it turned out, the smarter man in the room. Singleton had been around. He knew how these things tended to go.

Frank Morgan was a grocer returning home with the week’s take. The two men jumped him. Dillinger hit him with the bolt. A gun one of them was carrying discharged, and missed.

Morgan was shaken and bruised but not badly hurt. The robbers fled with around fifty dollars, which in 1924 amounted to roughly what a working man might earn in a week. Not nothing, but not a fortune either.

They didn’t get far. A local minister recognized them leaving the scene and reported them to police. The next morning, both men were in custody. The whole operation, start to finish, had lasted less than twenty-four hours.

Fifty dollars. A bolt. A minister who happened to be watching.

That’s what it took to manufacture Public Enemy No. 1.

The Deal That Wasn’t

Here is where John Dillinger’s father makes his entrance; and where the story takes the turn that changes everything.

John Wilson Dillinger Sr. was a deacon. A grocer by trade, a man of standing in Mooresville, the kind of father who believed that a son who’d made a mistake should face it squarely, take his medicine, and come out the other side a better man.

He’d already moved the family once to save his boy from bad influences. He wasn’t done trying.

He talked to the prosecutor, a Morgan County man named Omar O’Harrow, and came away with what he believed was a reasonable understanding. Plead guilty. Show remorse. Throw yourself on the mercy of the court. No lawyer was needed. The court would see a young man owning up to his mistake and respond accordingly.

Ed Singleton did not take this advice. Singleton hired a lawyer, pleaded not guilty, and went to trial. The court sentenced him to two to fourteen years. He was paroled in under two.

John Dillinger did what he was told, and pleaded guilty. The court sentenced him to ten to twenty years, the maximum, in the Indiana State Prison.

Think about that for a moment. The man with the prior record who fought the charges: less than two years served. The first-time offender who confessed and cooperated: ten to twenty.

Dillinger had no lawyer. No trial. No appeal. The father had made a deal that wasn’t a deal, and his son was going to spend the better part of his twenties in a cell for it.

The sentence hit hard. The community was stunned. The prosecutor who had taken the plea seemed to believe the outcome was harsher than the crime warranted; a fact that would surface again, years later, in a way nobody expected.

Dillinger himself said very little of use in that courtroom. But upon his arrival at the Indiana State Reformatory in Pendleton, he is reported to have made exactly one statement about his intentions.

“I will be the meanest bastard you ever saw when I get out of here.”

The court had been offered a young man’s contrition. It determined the man’s fate.

His wife, Beryl, filed for divorce in 1929. She’d waited five years. Dillinger later said the divorce broke his heart, and that it pushed him further than anything else. He’d gone in with a marriage, a father who believed in him, and a slim but genuine chance at an ordinary life. The institution had taken care of all three.

The father, to his credit, never stopped fighting for his son. He would eventually help organize a petition, signed by over a hundred Mooresville residents, to secure Dillinger’s release.

One of the names on that petition was Frank Morgan’s. The man Dillinger had hit with a bolt thought nine years was punishment enough.

The court, apparently, had not.

The University of Michigan City

The Indiana State Reformatory in Pendleton was where Dillinger started. Michigan City — the Indiana State Prison, maximum security, fifty miles east of Chicago — was where he finished his education.

He requested the transfer himself in 1929. He told the officials it was because Michigan City had a better baseball team. It didn’t, particularly. What it had was Harry Pierpont.

Pierpont was thirty years old, Indiana-born, and by any reasonable measure the most professionally accomplished criminal in the state prison system. Before his arrest he had knocked over banks across Indiana with a methodical efficiency that impressed even the lawmen chasing him.

He was not impulsive. He was not reckless. He was, by the account of nearly everyone who encountered him, the most disciplined man in any room he occupied; including a prison full of men with nothing to do but think.

He ran the clique that controlled Michigan City’s population the way a foreman runs a shop floor. When Dillinger arrived, Pierpont looked him over and apparently decided he was worth the investment.

What followed was nine years of education the state of Indiana paid for.

Pierpont’s circle included Charles Makley, Russell Clark, John Hamilton, and Homer Van Meter; collectively, a faculty of working bank robbers. Through them, and through a man named Walter Dietrich, Dillinger was introduced to something that would define the gang’s entire operation: the Lamm Method.

Herman Lamm was a former officer in the German army who had emigrated to the United States and applied military doctrine to bank robbery. Case the target in advance. Assign specific roles; the lobby man, the vault man, the outside man, the driver. Time every phase of the operation to the second. Rehearse the getaway route, including alternate routes if the primary was blocked.

Lamm had been operating this way since the 1910s. It was disciplined, systematic, and remarkably effective — until it wasn’t, and Lamm died in a 1930 shootout. His methods, however, survived him. Dietrich had worked with Lamm directly and carried the tradecraft into Michigan City, where it passed to Pierpont, and from Pierpont to Dillinger.

The state of Indiana had handed a twenty-one-year-old with no criminal sophistication whatsoever a ten-to-twenty-year sentence and placed him, for nearly a decade, inside a room with the best bank robbers in the Midwest. It is difficult to imagine a more efficient system for producing exactly the outcome it was meant to prevent.

Dillinger worked the shirt factory. He produced double quotas. He helped less capable men with their work. He was, by every institutional measure, a model prisoner; which is to say he had learned, among other things, how to make people see what he wanted them to see.

He was paroled in May 1933 after nine years, the petition from Mooresville finally carrying enough weight with the governor to get him out. He shook hands, walked out the door, and immediately began planning.

He already had the list. Pierpont and Makley had prepared it themselves; the best banks in Indiana and Ohio, ranked by expected yield and ease of access. All Dillinger had to do was rob enough of them to fund what came next.

What came next was a jailbreak. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

The Grocer’s Signature

By 1933, Mooresville had made up its mind about John Dillinger.

Not the John Dillinger the newspapers would soon invent; the grinning, hat-cocked desperado mugging for the camera with his arm around the sheriff. The one they knew.

The deacon’s boy who had made a terrible mistake, gotten a sentence that shocked the community, and spent a decade paying for fifty dollars and a wrapped bolt while the man who’d actually had a record walked free in a matter of months.

His father organized the petition. Over a hundred names from Mooresville and the surrounding area; neighbors, church members, community figures, people who had watched the whole thing unfold in 1924 and never quite gotten over what the court had done.

The Morgan County prosecutor, Omar O’Harrow, the same man who had taken the plea, the same man whose understanding with the elder Dillinger had turned out to be worth nothing, signed it. He had watched the sentencing too. He knew what it had been.

And then there was Frank Morgan.

Frank Morgan, the grocer. The man who had been walking home with the week’s receipts on the night of September 6, 1924. The man Dillinger had hit with an iron bolt. Morgan had recovered fully from his injuries, gone back to his store, and lived his life.

He had also, apparently, spent nine years watching what the state of Indiana did with his attacker and arrived at a conclusion.

He signed the petition.

The victim thought it had gone on long enough. That fact alone says something the court never quite managed to; that the sentence had stopped being about justice, if it ever was, and had become something else entirely.

It had been punishment for its own sake. A sentence used, perhaps, to bolster a judges reputation. An example made of a young man who had trusted the wrong advice at the worst possible moment.

The governor granted the parole. On May 10, 1933, John Dillinger walked out of the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City.

He was twenty-nine years old. He had gone in the summer after his wedding. He came out with his marriage gone, his youth behind him, and a decade’s worth of accumulated bitterness and criminal education he hadn’t arrived with.

He wrote his father a letter from jail near the end of his sentence. One line has survived the decades and earned its place in the story not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s plainly true:

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.

The court had made him a promise in 1924. He’d kept his end of it.

What Indiana Made

Six weeks after his release, Dillinger robbed his first bank.

He hit the First National Bank in New Carlisle, Ohio, on June 10, 1933. Ten thousand dollars. Clean in, clean out, no one killed.

He robbed another in Bluffton, Ohio, in August. Then another. Then another. By the time the calendar turned to 1934, he had hit more than a dozen banks across Indiana and Ohio, escaped from two jails — one of them billed as escape-proof — and become the most wanted man in the country.

The FBI declared him Public Enemy No. 1. J. Edgar Hoover, who had been angling for years to expand federal jurisdiction over interstate crime, finally had the villain he needed.

Along the way, people died. A police officer was killed during the East Chicago bank robbery in January 1934. Others were wounded. The Dillinger that walked out of Michigan City in May 1933 was not the fumbling twenty-one-year-old who’d crouched behind a Mooresville grocery store with a piece of hardware wrapped in a cloth.

He was deliberate, organized, relentless, and operating on a blueprint nine years in the making. The Lamm Method. Pierpont’s discipline. A list of target banks compiled by men who had spent years thinking about nothing else.

Every dollar taken, every headline, every cop who drew his weapon and found himself outgunned; all of it traces back to a Morgan County courtroom in 1924. That’s not an excuse. It’s a chain of causation the state of Indiana assembled link by link and handed to a twenty-one-year-old who had been promised mercy.

The public, for its part, seemed to understand this in some way.

Warner Brothers released a newsreel in April 1934 covering the federal manhunt. It showed Dillinger’s photograph. It showed his father, an elderly farmer, bewildered, caught between loyalty to his son and fear of what his son had become.

Movie audiences across the country watched it. When Dillinger’s picture appeared on screen, they cheered. When the federal agents appeared, they booed.

Hoover was furious. He put Mooresville under surveillance. He threatened the Dillinger family and locals with prosecution unless they cooperated.

He could not, for the life of him, understand why Americans were cheering for a bank robber; which suggests he understood very little about what the Depression had done to the country’s patience with institutions that made promises and then didn’t keep them.

Americans had watched banks foreclose on their neighbors. They had watched a system dispense outcomes that had nothing to do with fairness.

A young man who took his father’s advice, pled guilty, cooperated fully, and got the maximum sentence while his partner with the prior record walked in two years; well, that story resonated. Not because Americans admired robbery, but because they recognized the look of the injustice underneath it. They had seen that it before. They were seeing it every day.

Maybe that’s what Dillinger had become to them. Not a hero exactly, but something the country had made and couldn’t quite bring itself to disown. The system had squeezed these people for years. Here was the whirlwind it had earned.

Dillinger was shot and killed outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago on July 22, 1934. He was thirty-one years old. He’d been free for fourteen months.

What the System Built

John Dillinger is buried in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, not far from where he was born. His grave has been vandalized so many times — visitors chipping off pieces of the headstone as souvenirs — that the family eventually had it fitted with a granite slab reinforced with steel rods and concrete. Even dead, he draws a crowd.

The legend gets all the attention. It always does. The wooden gun. The lake house shootout. The fingerprints dissolved in acid.

The mythology of John Dillinger is so well-worn that the actual story, the one that explains how he came to exist, barely gets a mention. A botched fifty-dollar robbery. A father’s bad advice. A sentence that stunned a community enough that the victim eventually signed the petition to end it.

That’s the story. Not the Biograph Theater. This.

Hoover got what he wanted. The Bureau of Investigation became the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Federal jurisdiction expanded to cover interstate flight, interstate bank robbery, kidnapping.

A national fingerprint database was built. The G-Man replaced the outlaw as the hero of American popular culture; Hoover saw to that personally, feeding the press a steady diet of FBI triumphalism until the agency’s own mythology was as carefully constructed as Dillinger’s.

One frightened Indiana kid, chasing fifty dollars on a September evening, handed the architecture of the modern federal law enforcement apparatus to a man who had been waiting for exactly that pretext.

Melvin Purvis was the FBI agent who ran the manhunt that ended at the Biograph. He knew Dillinger better than almost anyone in law enforcement. He had chased him across six states, studied him, cornered him.

After it was over, Purvis wrote his memoirs. In them, he made an observation that nobody in Washington wanted to hear: that no criminal career he had encountered so clearly illustrated the failures of the American correctional system as that of John Dillinger.

The man who hunted him said it frankly. The system had built the thing it then spent a year and enormous resources trying to destroy.

None of that undoes what Dillinger did. Men died because of him. Officers with families, with nothing to do with a Morgan County courtroom, paid with their lives for a sentence handed down years before they crossed his path. That debt is real and it doesn’t disappear because the origin story is unjust.

But the origin story is still unjust. A twenty-one-year-old with no record, bad advice, and fifty dollars worth of bad judgment walked into a courtroom and walked out with ten to twenty years. His partner, older, with a record, who did not cooperate and fought the charges, did less than two.

The grocer who got hit with the bolt eventually decided enough was enough and put his name on a piece of paper saying so. The prosecutor who took the plea did the same.

The court, alone, seemed unbothered.

There’s a version of John Dillinger who never becomes John Dillinger. He gets a lawyer. He gets two years. He comes home to Beryl, finds some kind of work, grows old in Indiana.

Frank Morgan holds no particular grudge. Harry Pierpont never gets a student. The FBI gets its expansion eventually — Hoover would have found his pretext somewhere — but a different name goes on the wanted poster, and a different grave gets reinforced with steel and concrete in Crown Hill Cemetery.

That version of the story cost fifty dollars. The one we got cost considerably more.