TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century

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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> (May 7, 1934) 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. 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. 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. (July 30, 1934) 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. 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. 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. (June 4, 1934) 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. 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." 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. 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." (October 22, 1934) 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. 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. [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.] (August 5, 1935) 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. 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. 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. 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. "Why did you give up without a fight, George?" asked an agent. "Why, you G-men woulda killed me!" "You what?" "You G-men--Government Men." </body> </article> </text>