On September 26, 1933, even while "Machine-Gun" Kelly was being
captured, ten convicts broke out of the Indiana State Prison at Michigan
City, using guns smuggled to them by a recent parolee, and began a Midwestern
crime spree that soon had the entire country's attention.
The weapons for the Michigan City breakout were supplied by a thirty-year-old
Hoosier named John Herbert Dillinger, who had been released from Michigan
City four months previously, after having served nine years for a bungled
holdup in 1924. It was this stiff sentence for a first offense, many believed,
that turned Johnnie Dillinger from a restless but likable farm boy into
a hardened professional criminal.
True or not, over the next fourteen months, Dillinger and the FBI would
make one another famous--or maybe infamous. Dillinger humiliated his pursuers
all the way to the Biograph, jeopardized Hoover's job and cost Melvin Purvis
his. Dillinger's spectacular robberies, jailbreaks, gun battles, elusiveness,
and impudence provided Americans with an exhilarating game of cops 'n'
robbers and made J. Edgar Hoover a household name, creating a legend of
the FBI. The Justice Department did the same for Dillinger, who demonstrated
that if Crime Does Not Pay, it can still be a shortcut to immortality.