Rise and Fall of the Dillinger Gang by Jeffery S. King

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Synopsis

As the roaring twenties faded and the Great Depression began, several inmates of the Indiana prison system began an association that eventually erupted into violence and death across the Midwest. One of the members of the group, John Dillinger, spent time at both the Indiana State Reformatory at Pendleton and the state prison at Michigan City from 1924 to 1933. History of a sort was in the making, and the idea of the Dillinger gang was born behind these walls.

Paroled in May 1933 after serving a prison term for attempted robbery, Dillinger organized a gang that spread terror across the Midwest from 1933 to 1934, perhaps killing as many as 16 persons and robbing as many as 20 banks. He escaped jail twice and was declared “Public Enemy No. One” before being killed by FBI agents in front of the Biograph Theater in Chicago on July 22, 1934.

The Rise and Fall of the Dillinger Gang is about the nine major members of the Dillinger Gang: John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Homer Van Meter, Eddie Green, Harry Pierpont, Charley Makely, Russell Lee Clark, John Hamilton, and Thomas Carroll. With the exception of Clark, who received a life sentence behind bars, all of the gangsters met violent deaths before the end of 1934. While several serious full-length biographies have been written about Dillinger and one on Nelson, there are no major biographies of the other gang members.

The Rise and Fall of the Dillinger Gang corrects this oversight. Utilizing FBI files, court records, prison records, local newspapers, and books as sources, Jeffery S. King provides insight into crime conditions in the 1920s and the war on crime in the early 1930s. The rise of the FBI and bureau officials Melvin Purvis and J. Edgar Hoover is an important part of the story, as is background information about the extensive criminal activities of the Dillinger gangsters before they joined the gang and the ultimate fates of the Dillinger-era lawmen and criminals.

Biography

Jeffery S. King was a reference librarian at the U.S. Bureau of the Census at Suitland, Maryland, for twenty years. In recent years he has been writing on American history, specializing on Lincoln’s relationship with the Indians as well as the gangster era, including The Life and Death of Pretty Boy Floyd. He lives in Washington, D.C.