Byline: Richard Gid Powers
T he greatest case in FBI history was its hunt for John Dillinger during the spring and summer of 1934. The Dillinger case was also Hoover's greatest achievement in shaping a complex, unstructured news event into an incontrovertible FBI triumph.
Dillinger's crime spree began in May 1933 and lasted just over a year. During that short time he captured the public imagination as no criminal had since Jesse James.
Dillinger was giving the bureau a run of bad luck. On March 31, two of Hoover's agents had him trapped in a building in St. Paul, Minn., but they let him escape through an unguarded rear door (they did, however, wound him in the leg). Another fiasco quickly followed. On April 22, Special Agent in Charge Melvin Purvis, the chief of Hoover's Chicago field office, got a tip that the Dillinger gang was hiding out at a northern Wisconsin resort called Little Bohemia. Purvis chartered a plane and set off with a squad of agents, while another squad (under Inspector Samuel Cowley) flew in from St. Paul with reinforcements. Hoover summoned newsmen to his office and told them he had Dillinger trapped and this time he couldn't get away.
The raid was a disaster. Watchdogs began barking when they heard the agents blundering through the woods. FBI agents and gangsters fired blindly at each other, and Dillinger and his gang slipped out an unguarded rear door - again. A hotel guest was killed in the crossfire, and a new and particularly murderous member of the gang, Baby Face Nelson, ran into two agents and killed one of them.
Meanwhile, the country had gone Dillinger happy. He was being spotted everywhere, even overseas, and front- page cartoons poked fun at the …
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