I almost peed myself.
Almost exactly 5 years ago this very night– on July 30, 2019 – I came across the headline of online news story announcing “Body of notorious gangster John Dillinger to be exhumed 85 years after FBI agents killed him”
I had a good reason for nearly losing bladder control at the sight of these words, even though I was only freshly 49 years old at time. I had been hoping to see a headline like this since I was 11 years old.
But let’s jump back much further.
Exactly 90 years ago this very night – on July 22nd 1934 – something happened in Chicago that would become a point of fixation and minor obsession in my life for decades, even it far predated me (I was born until 1970).
At about 10:40pm on that steamy summer night in 1934, John Dillinger, the famous bank robber of the 1930s midwestern crime spree, was shot by FBI agents outside the air-conditioned Biograph movie theater on Chicago’s north side after watching the film Manhattan Melodrama starring Clark Gable, William Powell Myrna Loy.
Or so the official story goes.
Ahem.
Dad, Dillinger, and a late summer night
During the summer of 1981, when I was 11 and going into the sixth grade, my father and I watched the 1974 Dillinger movie with Warren Oates. By that point I had a minorly tempestuous relationship with my dad, who was 66, since I resented his waning in vigor and steadiness during the time I was growing into a very chubby adolescent animal that could yell and break things with more irritation just about every month. I hated his approaching elderliness and what it constantly threatened for the future as much I hated being increasingly overweight, unathletic, awkward, and frustratingly impotent in finding any ways to turn being book smart and facile with dates and history facts into some sort of relevant currency with other young boys and girls at school who I felt increasingly antagonized me.
The most peaceable point of connection I had with father involved the past. I always had a peculiar interest in it, and he had lived it – which trumped the piss out of my interest and allowed me defer to him without reluctancy or malice. During summer nights in 1981, after 11pm when my mother would go to bed, he would sit in his chair to watch TV and I would busy myself on the couch with my collection stamps or coins, or a massive Time-Life illustrated history book or my Boy Scout Handbook or a 1930s encyclopedia or a magazine, or about seven pocketknives that I endlessly oiled and sharpened in preparation for outdoor use that they rarely saw.
After the 11pm news ended, we watched “The Million Dollar Movie.” The film was usually a color movie from the sixties or seventies, one that had at least one lead actor you’d heard of, but it was rarely a film most everyone would put in the “definite classic” category, like Casablanca or The Graduate. This may have been due to the availability of films, the preferences of the TV staffer doing the choosing, rights issues, cost, or God knows. But early seventies movies with a hardness and violence that clocked in somewhere beneath The Wild Bunch but above what you might see in most, say 1950s western or noir films were standard “Million Dollar Movie” fare.*
And in the early seventies, as you may recall, American moviemakers seemed to stroking off fairly feverishly to the nostalgia of the gangster crime spree of the early thirties. You know, the years of Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd. Ma Barker, Bonnie and Clyde, and off course, Dillinger. Maybe in the 1970s they were nostalgic for bloody, lawless period 40 years earlier because it seemed like you could just Tommy-gun some lyin’ sonofabitch and leave him in ditch rather than have endless senate hearings.
Melvin Purvis: G-Man. Thieves Like Us. Dillinger. All from 73’ and 74, and all played a few times on the Million Dollar Movie as I loosely recall now. On Channel 6 in Philly in 1981, after 11:30 pm, you got the theater leavings of the Nixon years, which in turn, was fondly looking back to the Depression and Dust Bowl. This may also be an error of memory, as I also recall watching The Jolson Story or Jolson Sings Again with my father, which were made in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But my brain is telling me I recall a lot of muted “golden hour” color shots of meadows and skies, on-a-dime transitions from laughing men to violent death, a little too much everyday cursing for a TV movie, banjoes, and gunshots meant to sound like profane invectives against any idea of a benevolent God. These mean early seventies films to me.
And Dillinger with Warren Oates is a quintessential early seventies movie. This isn’t to say that I recall it being a particularly good movie; it just happened to be a movie that did a fairly rare thing; it caused my father to spontaneously utter something he remembered from his youth without me prodding or prompting or annoying him or getting an unsatisfying answer, which was often a beg-off in pleading he couldn’t remember many details anymore or never knew them in the first place. In fairness he was hard of hearing, I was easy to anger, and the combination made attempts to converse rather unpleasant.
So when he started talking briefly about Dillinger as the movie scraped and shot its way off the Zenith TV, I might have looked up from the Boy Scout Handbook (where I was probably reading yet again how to shape biscuit dough with dirty hands by using two big, green leaves as makeshift barriers*) and regarded him with a start. He said something like:
“Every day there’d be something in the newspapers about John Dillinger, people wanted him to get way. But he got betrayed. He was set up by a woman in red, who double-crossed him.”
He said something like this. I no longer have the actual words in my mind, or his voice saying them, and I wish I did. “Every day” and “woman in red” come through in his salty, light-and-medium hoarse baritone, but I could be piping that into my head.
Though I had 27 years with my father before he died, and a 20 twenty years during which respective age and health let us talk, I can only summon about seven or eight sound bites of his voice from my memory at will. I’d venture—I hope—thousands more are still in my gray matter, waiting to be reassembled by a trigger. But from this night in 1981, I only retain a few glints of the sensory images from his opening gambit to say something to his 11-year-old son when the quiet of later night and the day’s spent energy made me more placid, and the sounds and sights from the TV spoke to his time and not mine. People reading a newspaper, the feel of newspaper in my hands, a woman with thick lipstick wearing something red and unidentifiable. She’s foully perfumed and laughing. My mind kicked up these thoughts as he spoke, or later assembled them. He was 19 when Dillinger was on the loose in 1934, robbing banks and making headlines and movie newsreels. He remembered. I knew he remembered.
I was fascinated with the 1920s through early 1950s no doubt because they housed a human I badly wanted to know in a state I badly wanted to see; my father in youth. I think that something in my brain reasoned that I could find him by employing a Swiss cheese method of extraction; if I sought out all that was interesting in those time periods that left residuals able to be explored, I’d reveal him as a matter of deduction, like Michelangelo getting rid of stone to find Davide. Once I wended happily through everything else, he had to be there, set bold in relief. Maybe a little of him would even be hiding right there in the details of those other things; all the better. Perhaps I’d see him in the stands in a photo of 1928 Yankees game, or see some scene or dialogue in a 1937 film. Metaphorically, you understand.
I never found him. But still, anytime I watch a historical documentary on something in the 20thCentury, or see any kind of footage or recording whatsoever of the 1920s through early 1950s, I always have the split-second thought of my father pedestriating about the earth somewhere when this sensory imprint was made. (Artifacts from the 1960s never interested me, perhaps because I envisioned that, by then, my father was already turning into the human that resembled the one I first met in the mid 1970s, thus there was less of an untouchable angle to fuel my interest in his yeoman goings-on in the post Ike years.)
Anyway, Dillinger. After my father said these few words to me, I probably peppered him with questions about life in the early 1930s and why a bank robber was a figure people rooted for, and he probably answered them as best he could, which would have left a gulf of mystery for me to grope over in the wake of his responses.
I didn’t find the Warren Oates character in the film appealing or worth delving into historically. I would have likely forgotten the entire subject, and perhaps even what little of the living-room conversation my brain bothered to retain (even though my father’s instigating it gave it a specialness thousands of other exchanges lacked) except for two moments of discovery. One was fairly piddling and one was major.
The first came that September (again, 1981) when walking the epic 1.5 miles to the secondary school along a busy road with my friend. I walked along the dangerously trafficked Browning Road in stiff new jeans or corduroys, going to 6th grade in a school new to me, where a seeming billion new faces still swarmed in massive, locker-lined hallways that had the threatening officiousness of a state prison and the smell of new cleansers and new plastics and cologned kids still hit my nostrils as novel.
During that morning walk to school with my friend, Chris, I must’ve mentioned the Dillinger movie.
“They say he didn’t get shot, that another guy was killed. Did you ever hear that?”
My friend said something like this in response to whatever arcane point I was probably trying to make by torturing whatever four tidbits I thought had internalized about 1930s bank robbers.
“That’s not true,” I said reflexively. My brain stopped. He had jumped ahead of me by about nine leagues by saying something I did not know about a topic I had likely chosen, of which he was supposed to know nothing. I must have walked in blinking silence for five beats. My father had said nothing about this twist. The movie showed nothing about it. There was no ambiguity in the ending. The cunning hero bank robber gets shot to shit by FBI henchmen outside a movie theater after that bitch wearing a red dress set him up. That was the story. That was the history. Now my friend was uttering some baseless bullshit that challenged my status as the information officer of the galaxy, which included resident expertise on how the 1930s bank robber dude got shot outside a movie theater.
The subject probably changed. We had long talks about the new television show “Knight Rider” during those long walks. I graciously ceded some intellectual room to muse on this subject because I sensed Chris actually knew more about cars than I did and he had seen the fucking pilot episode, which I had missed. The idea that an extremely fast, impervious-to-all-forces car that talked like a funny little over-educated guy most people could beat up would somehow empower its driver – who typically had to get out of the car to do any goddamn thing – to humiliate every richer bad guy packing teams of armed men not only seemed wholly plausible, it seemed restrained. The driver guy was passing up countless opportunities to make hot women take their bras off in light of the fact that he had that car, so he had to be funneling that power into something.
Dillinger: Dead or Alive?
The second moment of discovery – and a far more impactful one, which actually changed the course of my life – came while it was still autumn, likely in October of 1981. I was in Mr. Quemore’s classroom, for spelling class.
Mr. Quemore was an eccentric-looking, long-legged, sixty-something jazz-daddy of a dude who probably ran under the rain tarp of teaching in the 1950s to get benefits and some steady bread. He had a taut, sprouty salt-and-pepper goatee and wore zoot suits and saddle shoes, remnants from a former life he allegedly spent playing sax. But he was also quiet as a church mouse and fairly distant. Tall and thin and iron-haired, he wase disarmingly docile with kind, small eyes set in his thin, Lincoln-like face. He only interacted with the class when he absolutely had to, and he let the spelling book do the work the rest of the time; like an older relative being resigned to watch unruly kids for forty minutes. He was a grandfatherly to the sixth-grade hellions around me, of whom he had not a whit of control, but fatherly to me. I would have likewise peppered him with questions, except he wasn’t the talking typed. During the first spelling class, he pointed to the first letter in his last name, written on the chalk board. “That’s a Q” he said. “It’s kwee-more, not queer-more.” We shortly began calling him “Mr. Q” or just “Q,” which seemed to be his preference.
Things were running amuck in his pre-lunch spelling class, as usual, and I moseyed toward the books lining the shelves under his windows. It was a sunny day, and I had to shield my eyes as I scanned titles. I spied one book with a dirty, pale lemon-yellow spine and the words, “Dillinger: Dead or Alive?” and quickly pulled it out. As I opened the cover, several pages of one of the three photo section inserts had detached from the binding and it fell into my hand.
I immediately saw the black and white photo a bloodied dead man. A man with his face all shot up. Laying on bloody steel table in a morgue with a large crowd gathered around him. I probably stared at that photo for ten seconds before rifling through the book to see if there were any that would surpass it in wholly real, morbid, cool-as-fuck gore. None did.
I went back to that photo. And whoever this shot-to-shit thoroughly dead man was supposed to be was…allegedly, not dead? I needed to know all about this.
The book came home with me. I never considered it stealing for the briefest second. It was just put there for me to find it and have it. What the fuck would a book like that be doing on Q’s bookshelf? It had no purpose until I found it. It was just an out-of-place treasure trove of fascinating mysterious potential that couldn’t be properly appreciated by anyone but me and therefore belonged to me well before I found it. It had always been my book, even if I didn’t find it until right then.
Anyway, I stole that book and devoured it like it was oxygen smothered in peanut-butter in the next month. And then over and over again during the next two years. I fucking loved that book. It split the past wide open for me like an over-ripe cantaloupe and spilled out diamonds and gold nuggets I could stuff in the pockets and crevices of my brain.
That book almost singlehandedly made me want to become a writer. I had no inclinations toward writing before this that I can recall. I would have thought that “writers” were men who impressed people and got girls because of how well they said things on paper; the fluttering quill dude, made all drunk and deep when quills went out of style. Poets who didn’t write poetry and could sit and keep writing for a really, really long time. After reading that damaged, pale yellow book I nicked from Q’s bookshelf in October 1981, I thought writers were men who found shit out that nobody else knew, men who knew the real story, and they could change the motherfucking world any time they wanted. While the regular idiots who tinkered around in their lives believing all the bullshit they thought was “true,” a writer could give you the eye, crook his finger at you all secretive-like, look around for unwanted ears (a phrase I first read in the Dillinger book) and say, “that’s not even close. Here’s what reallyhappened.”
I wanted in on that.
Dillinger: Dead or Alive? was written in 1970 by crime writer Jay Robert Nash and Ron Offen. In short, it posited the theory that John Dillinger, the Indiana bank robber who staged dozens of well-orchestrated heists and even a couple of theatrical jail escapes with a gang of similar roving thieves in the Midwest during the Depression—and was popularly troublesome enough to make J. Edgar Hoover name him “Public Enemy Number One”—was not shot to death by the FBI agents outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago on the night of July 22, 1934 after being fingered by the infamous “woman in red.” As famously reported nation-wide on July 23. Rather, the FGI killed a patsy named Jimmy Lawrence, a dolt who looked a lot like the 31-year-old Dillinger and had the poor luck of befriending a prostitute from Rumania facing deportation charges named Anna Sage. She contacted the FBI through a cop friend shortly after this Jimmy guy moved into an extra room in her apartment, and worked out a deal with “G-Man” agent Melvin Purvis to reveal Lawrence in a capturable spot if the FBI would help with her legal troubles. On that hot Sunday afternoon in July, 1934, when Lawrence suggested that he take Sage and her friend Polly Hamilton (who he was dating) to an air-conditioned movie theater to get out of the 100-degree Chicago heat that evening, Sage got word to Purvis, and even availed herself to wear a brightly-colored dress so Purvis could spot her in the crowd. Her orange dress looked red under the amber marquee lights, and a new name for betrayal was born (the “woman in red”).
Killers and robbers we can relate to
Most Americans have at least a glancing familiarity with a few of the Depression-era thieves who became famous during a brief, bloody crime spree in the U.S. during the early and mid 1930s, due to some of the colorful names I’ve already mentioned and the films made about them. Dillinger, certainly, but also Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker and her boys Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, and the like. These criminals captured headlines in 1933-1935 and most rocketed to national fame in newspapers, movie reels and radio news reports in because they had interesting nicknames or fit a premade fable that seemed poetic or tragically irresist9ble. Like a young couple in love and on the run. Or a tough mother just trying to keep her wayward boys safe. Or a short, little guy who got pushed around so much he started killing everybody who crossed him. Who can’t relate?
Dillinger became the most interesting and persistently famous of these murky figures in the usual way; through completely random, meaningless happenstance. There was really nothing special about him to start with; he was just another teenage lowlife from bumfuck (actually Mooresville, Indiana), sent to prison for a violent theft, with quite quick and serviceable intelligence directed toward all the wrong things, on his way to being a shitty little degenerate neither regarded nor remembered. He spent his twenties locked up with scores of other pissed-off ne’er do wells badly deficient in book learning and self-control, from both better and far worse families and economic conditions. He was simply one young-buck asshole in prison among thousands of others in the 1920s, including several he’d go on to rob banks with in 1933-34.
But chances are, you’ve never heard of any of the other dozen men who came in and out of his gang (except for Baby Face Nelson, who was killed by FBI agents four months after Dillinger was shot).
Ever hear of Harry Pierpont? Or Charles Makely? Eddie Green? Russell Clark?
Bueller?
Dillinger stuck in societal memory for several reasons. The first is one is the result of a tactical campaign; the FBI singled him out and told the press that he was the leader and brains of “the Dillinger gang,” which he wasn’t (they were all more or less equal, and different criminals flowed in and out of the gang for reasons mundane and homicidal). This was supposed to make the other bank robbers pissed off and create infighting, which might make them get sloppy or rash or easier to catch.
Why’d they pick Dillinger? Probably for the second reason we remember him: “John Dillinger” is a poetic name. It hits the brain and ear and eye a certain way, and probably would be the only name a human wholly ignorant of him and his times would recall 30 seconds after reading a list of all the gang members. The third reason, I believe, is purely aesthetic; Dillinger’s most famous mugshot was a goddamned great picture of him, seeming to mix Clark-Gable handsomeness with a “fuck you” smirk that likely made vaginas lubricate across the land. That shot was a one-off; John Dillinger was an okay-looking dude, but he didn’t look nearly that cool or cutting in other photos. So the most prominent and frequently used image of Dillinger is a lucky awesomely-good shot, with a bit of Farrah-in-the-red-suit quintessence (minus the nipples).
Plastering Dillinger’s name and face on newspapers and movie newsreels seemed to fail to cause any useable ruckus in the gang, from what I’ve gleaned, but it did make Dillinger dinner-table famous during his brief run during the Depression. And a lot of Americans who were broke, scared, and getting hassled and foreclosed on by the bastards at the bank were (a least in casual spirit) rooting for him to fuck those sons of a bitches hard and keep getting away.
Further, Dillinger’s actions seemed to fit the part of a jibing, mocking, authority-fighting anti-hero perfectly. He reportedly taunted some police precincts and the FBI by mailing in short notes with photos of him standing with cops and smiling, though some of these may have been fakes.
Witnesses of his bank jobs would describe him as athletically vaulting over bank counters, making jokes while moving with business-like efficiency, sometimes treating the “just in case necessary” hostages taken during the slow getaway ride kindly (occasionally dropping them off at their homes or handing them a $100 bill), and generally being an irresistibly good poster-man for everyone’s inner cool-bad-guy yearnings, then and now. He also made some highly theatrical, infamous escapes from both impossibly tight spots and jails, with others in his gang and alone, that read like fiction. All of these elements became interwoven in his reputation and legacy, and his death by female betrayal struck a final perfect note that oozed with eternal universality (with a twinge of misogyny) that fixed him forever in the societal imagination.
The Dillinger presented in the 1970 Jay Robert Nash book was a good person. A smart-as-a-whip, small-town farmer’s sone who got a raw deal, embittered because he given a too-harsh sentence for a petty act of arm robbing and thuggery (his counterpart used a lawyer and got a much lighter sentence), hatefully embittered because he wasn’t let out of prison in time to see his dying mother, and—this is important—he never killed anyone.
All are more or less true in Dillinger’s case. He had one murder charged pinned on him, committed during a jail escape. He was never tried for it, but the evidence implicating him has some holes and there’s a fair chance he didn’t do it. (That said, his lack of being a solidly-proven murderer is likely due in no small part to luck and circumstance; he was a thief, a criminal, and man who’d readily shoot at cops, lawmen and other paycheck-earning types if it would help him avoid a jam. People who idolize Dillinger – and there are still many; just look at the Facebook groups – should probably save their imaginary honorary “good guy” medals for other long-dead humans who didn’t do any of those things).
Now, when you add the final big brick, the notion that Dillinger actually did not get killed by the FBI outside the Biograph Theater on July 22, 1934 as famously report—meaning, the fucker got away with it—the whole thing just becomes too much to take and trips over into the equivalent of anti-authority porn for an adolescent history geek’s imagination.
Of course, Jesse James had essentially the same story, but he lacked the connection with my father. So Dillinger was just the man to front my “cool past” imagination as an 11-year-old. And become extremely intimate and empassioned with the concept of it did not happen the way they say it did hit my wet-clay brain at just the right time. I became a conspiracy theorist, at least in my mental approach to giving the benefit of the doubt to almost every it did not happen the way they say it did notion I encountered.
Now, in the 1980s, I could find next to nothing on the old legend that John Dillinger was not killed at that Chicago movie theater in the news or even in libraries; the July 22 anniversary of the shooting every year was a lone exception when you’d find a small “on this day” write-up that might quickly mention the dusty intrigue. On round-number anniversaries ending in 0 and 5 (the 50thanniversary in 1984, 55th in 1999, 60th in 1994, etc.), you’d often find slightly lengthier treatments in newspapers.
Other times heaven would issue a serendipitous dispatch that wasn’t tied to the calendar. I believe it was in the spring of 1984 when I came across a newspaper story in the Philadelphia Inquirer that says a copy of Dillinger’s long-lost autopsy had been found in a brown bag somewhere in Chicago’s Cook County Coroner’s office, where it was originally filed in 1934. The autopsy had seemingly gone missing almost immediately, which provided one of the key I-beams of support to the “it wasn’t Dillinger” notion for many doubters and people skeptical of the FBI’s official story, both fanatics and casual observers alike.
The brief newspaper article contained nothing I didn’t know. Because I had already read the autopsy in Jay Robert Nash’s book. Dillinger’s autopsy report had been located more than a dozen years before. Why didn’t Jay Robert Nash get credit for finding the autopsy? I’ve wondered that my entire life. The article did talk about the famous discrepancy in eye color; Dillinger’s eyes were known to be gray or blue, while the autopsy specified that the corpse had brown eyes. But this was quickly explained way by a quote from the current (in 1984) coroner, saying that the corneas can become clouded after death, making it hard to distinguish eye color. I remember thinking, “even 50 years later they’re still trying to cover it up.”
Still, I had a problem. The Dillinger thing was fucking arcane. I was convinced that Dillinger was not the man shot outside that Chicago theater due to Nash’s book, and my own romantic need to believe it, and I had very few people to talk to about this because no one fucking cared.
So the JFK assassination had to serve as a poor Dillinger-not-dead proxy for me. Now, the whole Kennedy thing captivated me far less because it was already carpet-bombed with attention, I would occasionally meet people who (infuriatingly) knew more than I did about it(which meant they were usually assholes or mentally troubled), and – perhaps most fatally – it held no connection to my father. I could readily find my dad in the home movies in 1963, and while he was a damn sight stronger than the older man who occupied the comfortable chair in our living room, that wasn’t the black-haired young man I was searching for.
But the JFK stuff would have to suffice, because materials on these conspiracy theories were much more prevalent and easier to find in the pre-internet days of the 1980s, to say the least, and I had a few friends who enjoyed talking about it.
Most importantly, as a child and young adult, I never entertained the slightest possibility that Oswald acted alone.
All of this is a long, long way of saying I have a conspiracy theorist’s mind. I innately understand that perfectly logical, whole-hog buy-in of the it did not happen the way they say it did narrative, the need to believe there is something else, something unseen, that changes the entire story and makes it meaningful, profound, contrarian, or just plain cool.
More to come.