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- <text>
- <title>
- (1930s) Bank Robbers & The FBI
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1930s Highlights
- </history>
- <link 00043><article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- Bank Robbers & The FBI
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>(May 7, 1934)
- </p>
- <p>In four short months John Dillinger had become a famed
- desperado, a bad man no jail could hold and police everywhere
- were hunting him. In November they caught him coming out of a
- doctor's office in Chicago but he drive away through a hail of
- bullets. He began raiding small-town police stations in Indiana
- for arms and bullet-proof vests while his bank robberies
- multiplied. Then with his plunder he dropped out of sight until
- last January when officers arrested him and three of his gang,
- quietly vacationing in Tucson, Ariz.
- </p>
- <p> On March 3, with a wooden gun, John Dillinger bluffed his way
- out of jail at Crown Point, escaped in the woman sheriff's car.
- From Crown Point in seven weeks Dillinger's bullet-strewn trail
- wound and rewound through half a dozen states. He arrived in St.
- Paul with a shoulder wound, got a city health officer to redress
- it. Few days later three Federal agents trapped him in a St.
- Paul apartment with his sweetheart, Evelyn Frechette. Whipping
- out a machine gun, he sprayed his way to freedom but not before
- he had been pinked just above the knee. At the point of a gun
- he forced another doctor to treat him and stayed three days in
- the home of a nurse before resuming his travels. These finally
- took him back to Mooresville and his old father's home where he
- ate a quiet Sunday dinner with the family.
- </p>
- <p> At Sault Ste. Marie his pursuers were only three days behind
- their man. At Mercer, Wis. they actually caught up with him.
- There Dillinger and five of his henchmen, with three women, had
- rendezvoused in a roadhouse called Little Bohemia. Federal
- officers advanced on it in the night. Two big collies bayed a
- warning to its inmates. The Federals rushed forward. Three
- strangers, driving away in a car, failed to stop on command.
- Federal guns blazed. One man fell dead, two wounded, but none
- of them was Dillinger. From Little Bohemia came a machine gun
- volley and, behind it, Dillinger & gang made their getaway
- through a back window. Later one Federal agent crossed their
- trail and was shot dead. After that the north woods swallowed
- them.
- </p>
- <p>(July 30, 1934)
- </p>
- <p> To see Clark Gable as Blackie Gallagher in M-G-M's Manhattan
- Melodrama many a cinemaddict one night last week went to the
- Biograph Theatre on Chicago's North Side. One of them was a
- slight, dark-haired, harmless-looking little man in shirt-
- sleeves, wearing a white hat and gold-rimmed spectacles.
- As he walked up to the box office, a man sitting in a parked
- car at the curb gave a start. Chief Investigator Melvin Purvis
- of the Department of Justice in Chicago had, for the first time
- in a four-month manhunt, clapped eyes on Desperado John
- Dillinger.
- </p>
- <p> He was not the John Dillinger of the newspictures. His sandy
- hair had been dyed black. He had grown a mustache. His eyebrows
- were plucked, his pug nose straightened, his face "lifted." But
- these disguises did not fool Investigator Purvis.
- </p>
- <p> Thanks to a woman's tip. Investigator Purvis and 15 Federal
- agents were ready for Desperado Dillinger when he strode
- jauntily out of the Biograph Theatre two hours later. At the
- sight of men closing in on him from nowhere Dillinger whirled,
- reached for his gun, darted for an alley. A volley of lead cut
- him down in his tracks, one bullet through the head, one near
- the heart. Down the street two women were shot by mistake.
- </p>
- <p>(June 4, 1934)
- </p>
- <p> Red-haired Dallas girl Bonnie Parker's distinguishing
- characteristics were a lightning trigger finger, a fondness for
- cigars, and a heart bearing the name "Roy" tattooed on her
- thigh. Roy Thornton was the name of her husband, but since he
- began serving a long sentence at Houston, Tex., her companion
- has been the other person for whom Captain Hamer was looking--Clyde Barrow.
- </p>
- <p> Clyde Barrow's youth in Dallas was devoted to stealing
- automobiles. In 1930 he was sent to prison, paroled in February
- 1932. Thereafter he still stuck to petty thievery, never got
- more than $3,500 at one haul, but he did begin to find sport in
- shooting down, without provocation, people who got in his way--filling station men, constables, plain citizens. In two years
- he, Bonnie Parker & gang were credited with twelve murders,
- including one when he staged a prison farm delivery near
- Crockett, Tex. An awe-struck Press magnified him into one of
- the "worst killers of the Southwest."
- </p>
- <p> One morning last week Captain Frank Hamer, who had been
- following Barrow from hide-out to hide-out, received a tip that
- Parker and Barrow would soon pass down a road near Arcadia, La.
- He and his five companions went there, lay in ambush, all on one
- side of the road to avoid a cross-fire.
- </p>
- <p> One of the Texas deputies sighted a car speeding toward them
- at 85 m.p.h. It slowed down to pass a truck. The officers
- shouted an order to halt. Barrow reached for a gun. The officers
- fired. The car careened into an embankment. The fusillade
- continued: 167 shots, 50 of which hit the occupants. Barrow was
- found with the door of the car half-open and a sawed-off shotgun
- in his hand, Bonnie Parker, wearing a red dress, was doubled up
- with a submachine gun in her lap. There were two other machine
- guns, another sawed-off automatic shotgun, six automatic
- pistols, a revolver, a saxophone, sheet music, a half-eaten
- sandwich, a bloody package of cigarets, and $507 in cash in the
- car. "I hated," said Captain Hamer, "to bust a cap on a woman,
- especially when she was sitting down, but it was her or us."
- </p>
- <p>(October 22, 1934)
- </p>
- <p> Born 30 years ago on a Georgia farm, "Pretty Boy" Floyd
- moved with his parents at an early age to the Cookson Hills
- District of the Oklahoma Ozarks. There he got the nickname
- of "Choc" and a bad reputation. At 18 he robbed a neighborhood
- post-office of $350 in pennies. A three-year apprenticeship in
- the St. Louis underworld landed him, in 1925, in Missouri
- Penitentiary for a payroll robbery. There he peddled drugs,
- struck down guards, and met "Red" Lovett, who teamed up with him
- on his release in 1929. For the next four years he robbed rural
- banks, taking on new partners as his old ones fell dead by the
- wayside. Whenever pursuit got too close, he retired to the
- Cookson Hills where he reputedly keeps a string of mountaineers
- in funds in exchange for their close-mouthed hospitality. A
- murderously cool shot, his trigger finger has already accounted
- for at least six deaths. Fond of flashy clothes, he likes to
- show his bravado by returning to his home town, Sallisaw, Okla.,
- for brief visits. He is wanted by the Federal Government for two
- murders, two mail robberies.
- </p>
- <p> Less than 24 hours after Federal agents announced that Floyd
- was wanted as one of the Union Station killers, he was flushed
- out of an Iowa farm by two peace officers. In his first brush
- with authority this year, he showed that he had lost none of his
- finesse. Jumping into a car with two companions, he led the
- police on a wild chase to an empty house at the dead end of a
- road. There he turned on them with a machine gun and automatic
- rifles, shot his way out and away.
- </p>
- <p> [All of the desperados gave an immense boost to the career of
- a man who came to epitomize the government's efforts to fight
- crime: J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of
- Investigation from 1924 to 1972.]
- </p>
- <p>(August 5, 1935)
- </p>
- <p> Today applicants must be not less than 25, not more than 35
- years old. Their characters are more scrupulously investigated
- than those of the blackest suspect under Federal surveillance.
- They must be either law school graduates, certified public
- accountants, or experienced police officers. The last are much
- in the minority. Lawyers and accountants have the advantage of
- being already trained as expert court witnesses and if the
- applicant has the sort of honest face that a jury is likely to
- trust, it is a point in his favor.
- </p>
- <p> To back up the men in the field the Bureau's laboratories
- supplement the identification department, keep on file at large
- collection of tire tread blueprints, typewriting specimens,
- bullets. The Bureau's scientists are on call 24 hours a day,
- free of charge, to any local police service in the land which
- needs expert advice on testimony on anything from a footprint
- to an inkstain.
- </p>
- <p> This was the machine that the New Deal, through Attorney
- General Cummings, dramatically turned loose on organized crime.
- In 1932 the Bureau had had the kidnapping racket dumped into its
- lap when Congress passed the "Lindbergh Law" which made
- snatching across State lines a Federal offense. And at "General"
- Cumming's request, Congress last year provided the Bureau with
- automobiles and armaments for the first time. About the same
- time the Bureau took command of another sector with the passage
- of an act enabling it to chase, catch and convict national bank
- robbers. With the passage of these laws the Federal Bureau of
- Investigation burst upon the national consciousness with the
- terrifying red glare of a "Tommy" gun's tracer bullet.
- </p>
- <p> Shelled out of existence, or "put away on ice" in Federal
- penitentiaries month after month were such lurid desperadoes as
- John Dillinger, "Baby Face" Nelson, the "Terrible Touhy" Gand,
- "Pretty Boy" Floyd. And on Sept. 26, 1933, Mr. George ("Machine
- Gun") Kelly produced a word which still rings from the front
- pages of the U.S. Press. Trapped in the bedroom of his Memphis
- hideout, the instigator of the Urschel kidnapping held his
- trembling hands high in the air.
- </p>
- <p> "Why did you give up without a fight, George?" asked an agent.
- </p>
- <p> "Why, you G-men woulda killed me!"
- </p>
- <p> "You what?"
- </p>
- <p> "You G-men--Government Men."
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-