Eighty Years Ago Today, John Dillinger Helped Create the FBI

Gangster John Dillinger’s lifelong career of
crime—he robbed at least 12 banks and four police departments and
was accused of shooting and killing an East Chicago police officer
while escaping one bank robbery—ended, with his life, eighty years
ago today outside the Beacon Theater in Chicago, Illinois. Agents
from the Division of Investigation (DOI) of the Justice Department
(DOJ), a predecessor to the FBI, surrounded the theater based on a
tip from an informant and then shot and killed him when he resisted
arrest outside. The FBI’s official history
explains:

[Special Agent in Charge William] Cowley also phoned [bureau
director J. Edgar] Hoover for instructions. Hoover cautioned them
to wait outside rather than risk a shooting match inside the
crowded theater. Each man was instructed not to unnecessarily
endanger himself and was told that if Dillinger offered any
resistance, it would be each man for himself.

At 10:30 p.m., Dillinger, with his two female companions on
either side, walked out of the theater and turned to his left. As
they walked past the doorway in which Purvis was standing, Purvis
lit a cigar as a signal for the other men to close in.

Dillinger quickly realized what was happening and acted by
instinct. He grabbed a pistol from his right trouser pocket as he
ran toward the alley. Five shots were fired from the guns of three
FBI agents. Three of the shots hit Dillinger, and he fell face down
on the pavement. At 10:50 p.m. on July 22, 1934, John Dillinger was
pronounced dead in a little room in the Alexian Brothers
Hospital.

 The feds avoided a “dynamic entry” and tried to get their
man outside the theater. There were no reviews of law enforcement
shootings back then, but even a review process that didn’t always
justify every police shooting would likely find this one
justified.

As for that informant, Anna Sage, she was a Romanian immigrant
being threatened with deportation as an “alien of low moral
character” and provided the government with information hoping it
would prevent deportation. Afterward, the FBI told her it didn’t
have enough influence at the Department of Labor and she was
deported anyway, though she did receive $5,000 in reward money. In
a 2008 write-up of “spies and snitches,” CNN offered a possible
“more devious motive” proposed by crime author Jay Nash.
Via CNN:

In Jay Robert Nash’s book “Dillinger: Dead or Alive,” the author
suggests the whole episode was a setup. Because the FBI’s failure
to capture the elusive Public Enemy No.1 was a source of
considerable consternation, Nash believes the scene outside the
theater that night was the shooting of an innocent man staged by
Sage, Zarkovich, and the FBI. The goal? Alleviate pressure on the
FBI and help keep the “Lady in Red” in the country.

Sage herself was never reported to have presented a theory like
this although as someone kicked out of a country she thought she
was helping she likely would’ve if it were true (and might have
even it if weren’t).

Nevertheless, the nationally-publicized campaign to capture John
Dillinger—he was the feds’ first “Public Enemy Number One”—helped
bring Hoover and his “G-Men” to prominence. The next year Congress
approved the creation of the FBI, an independent DOJ agency. In a
column for Roger Ebert where Nash tried to explain his Dillinger
theory, he
points out:

Hoover personally announced or personally approved of all press
announcements on all cases. He totally controlled the public mouth
and words of the FBI. To build the image of an invincible Bureau,
Hoover relentlessly spent much of his time controlling that public
image and manipulating the press-newspapers and radio in those
days. He cheated and lied to build that FBI reputation, such as
creating out of whole cloth the image and actual words of the
“G-Man”; for instance, he issued a statement and reiterated that
statement later on in an article for the American Legion magazine
that FBI agents captured George “Machine Gun” Kelly in a rooming
house and when they burst through the door of his room, Kelly,
according to Hoover, stood quaking in his underwear, pleading:
“Don’t shoot, G-Men, don’t shoot!” This was a lie. Kelly was
captured by Memphis, Tennessee police detective sergeant William
Raney, who slipped into Kelly’s bedroom on the night of September
26, 1933, put an automatic to the kidnapper’s head and awoke him
with a nudge of that cold instrument. Kelly awoke and said: “Well,
I’ve been expecting you fellows.” Raney marched him down to Memphis
police headquarters where he was booked and then turned over the
FBI agents who were waiting at those headquarters-none were present
when Kelly was captured and Kelly never said “G-Man” to them or
anyone else. That was Hoover’s invention. He knew that only local
police had the authority to make official arrests before suspects
were turned over to his agents to face federal charges–in Kelly’s
case a kidnapping charge.

The only federal charge ever made against Dillinger was that he
drove a stolen car across a state line (the sheriff’s car he stole
when making his escape from the jail at Crown Point, Indiana and
driving it into Illinois), and it was upon that charge alone that
Hoover made Dillinger Public Enemy Number One-simply because he was
getting more publicity in 1934 than was Hoover and his FBI.

Hoover was director of the FBI from its founding until his death
in 1974. He had also been the director of the predecessor agency
since 1924. Hoover presided over a bureau that transformed from an
agency meant to enforce the anti-prostitution Mann Act and other
“interstate commerce” crimes to one that conducted widespread
surveillance and counterintelligence operations against various
dissident groups in the 60s and 70s.

In a way the FBI was returning, and continues to keep coming
back, to its roots. 
After the assassination of President McKinley by a Polish
anarchist, Congress passed a number of laws banning anarchists from
entering the country and the feds began to track suspected foreign
radicals—it was the first seed of what would become the FBI. Today
the agency lists its number one investigative priority as
terrorism. According to a Human Rights Watch report, nearly all
of the domestic terrorism plots foiled by the FBI were
planned by the agency too, in sting operations.