Infamous America - DILLINGER Ep. 2 | "Three Midnights"

Episode Date: January 22, 2020

Fast cars and machine guns become vital tools for gangsters, including Al Capone's mob in Chicago. A German thief pioneers modern heist tactics before his violent death. And after a brutal massacre, J. Edgar Hoover changes the policies of the Bureau of Investigation to enable it to fight an unprecedented crime wave. All this happens while John Dillinger sits in prison. As his sentence winds down, he prepares to enter a whole new world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My relentless sleep problems have always come from an overactive mind. I lay in bed at night with my mind racing from one thing to another, and then, of course, I have a brainstorm about something new. That lights the fire, and then I'm in real trouble. To calm my mind, the only things that have ever worked with any consistency are sleep gummies. Sleepy Time Advanced Gummies from Mood.com come in various combinations of THC, CBD, and CBN, so you can get something that's very low in THC, but higher in CBD, which helps turn off the stress,

and CBN, which is the thing that makes you sleepy. The brain shuts up, the racing thoughts stop, and it's off to sleep. Mood is federally compliant. The gummies are legal and delivered right to your door. At Mood.com, get 20% off your first order with our promo code, Infamous. Go to Mood.com and use the code infamous to get 20% off your first order. your first order, and they have a 100-day satisfaction guarantee. Mood.com promo code infamous. It was almost noon on September 16th, 1920, and the lunch rush was starting in New York City.

The streets were packed with people, despite the threat of rain. Messenger boys darted between stockbrokers and bank clerks. Cars and wagons snaked through the congestion. On Wall Street, across from the J.P. Morgan building, a man parked his horse-drawn cart along the curb. He stepped down and disappeared into the crowd, abandoning his cart in front of the U.S. assay office. The bells of Trinity Church began to chime. It was 12 o'clock. As they finished, the cart exploded. 100 pounds of dynamite erupted in the middle of the street.

shrapnel and debris tore through everything in their path. 38 people died that day, and 300 were injured. It was the worst terrorist attack in American history, until it was surpassed by the Oklahoma City bombing 75 years later and then dwarfed by the September 11th attacks in 2001. Today, almost 100 years after that September afternoon, you can still see traces of the damage to the damage to the dead. J.P. Morgan Building at 23 Wall Street. In the aftermath of the 1920 Wall Street bombing, the government

turned to a 25-year-old bureaucrat to help lead the charge against the surge of violence from anarchist groups. He was the head of the General Intelligence Division inside the Bureau of Investigation, and his division was more commonly known as the Radical Division. His name was John, like that of the man who became his nemesis in 1933. But unlike John Dillinger, the Bureau of Investigations John abbreviated his first name and used his middle and last names as his signature. Today, virtually every reference calls him Jay Edgar Hoover. From BlackBarrel Media, this is Season 4 of Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer.

In this season, we're telling the story of the most notorious bank robber in modern American history. It's the portrait of public enemy number one. John Dillinger. This is Chapter 2, 3 Midnights. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge officially appointed John Edgar Hoover as the fifth director of the Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C. Hoover was 29 years old. He was a native of Washington. He lived just a mile from the Library of Congress, where he got his first job when he was 18.

The library trained him to be methodically organized. and his fanaticism for organization and detail became his trademark at the Bureau. During the nine years John Dillinger was in prison, J. Edgar Hoover overhauled the Bureau of Investigation and remade it in his image, and according to his standards and ideals. In 1908, when President Theodore Roosevelt wanted to investigate massive cases of land fraud, there was only one government agency he could turn to, the United States Secret Service.

The Secret Service had to loan agents to the Department of Justice because the Department of Justice had no detective force of its own. Roosevelt was repeatedly unimpressed with the reports produced during the investigations. He instructed his Attorney General to create a new unit within the Justice Department. He wanted an investigative unit that was beholden to no other department. It would report only to the Attorney General. In July of 1908, the Bureau of Investigation was formed inside the Department of Justice. Nine men from the Secret Service transferred to the new Bureau, and they became the first special agents.

Thirteen investigators joined them, as well as 12 examiners. They were the first 34 employees of the agency that would eventually become the FBI, and they did not get off to a good start. Over the next 15 years, the Bureau developed a reputation for corruption and nepotism. Its agents often acted as minions of politicians or sometimes outright criminals. Gaston Means, a notorious early employee of the Bureau, was known for blackmailing members of Congress and auctioning off presidential pardons to the highest bidder. The Bureau soon earned a nickname, the Department of Easy Virtue.

The United States Senate conducted a probe into the Bureau's conduct in 1924. The investigation produced indictments that brought down the chief of the Bureau and the Attorney General. The agency was blasted by newspapers, and its reputation was dismal. President Calvin Coolidge needed someone to clean up the mess. In May, 1924, around the time John Dillinger was getting married, Coolidge appointed Jay Edgar Hoover. to be the chief of the bureau. When Hoover took office, he never left.

He stayed in power for the next 37 years. Hoover initially mandated that agents were to be men like himself. He wanted clean-cut white men from good families, 25 to 35 years old, with law degrees. He got rid of female agents, and he instructed his subordinates to weed out anyone who was deemed incapable or untrustworthy. Hoover said,

I want the public to look upon the Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice as a group of gentlemen. If the men here engaged can't conduct themselves in office as such, I will dismiss them. Hoover was remaking the image of the Bureau and rebuilding its workforce according to what he thought it should be. But he would eventually learn a hard lesson. He stalked the agency with men who were mostly investigators,

not crime fighters. and they were thoroughly unfit to catch the new breed of criminal who emerged from the roaring 20s. America's history of bank robbery dates back almost to the founding of the nation. The first recorded robbery took place in 1798. The next happened in 1831, though they were technically both burglaries. The perpetrators snuck into the banks under the cover of darkness and used keys or other inside knowledge to steal money without using weapons or force. At the time, most banks didn't even have safes.

The mass adoption of safes as security tools didn't really begin until 1834. And then came the Civil War and the era of armed robbery. Both armies, Union and Confederate, robbed each other's banks at gunpoint. Some of it was greed, of course, but it also made strategic sense. If the other side didn't have money, it couldn't buy weapons, or pay its troops, were by provisions. And then, in 1863, the first armed robbery by a civilian happened in Malden, Massachusetts.

Three years later, a bank in Clay County, Missouri was robbed by a gang of armed men on horseback. The Civil War was done, and this was the first daylight bank robbery in peacetime America. It's long been credited to Frank and Jesse James. That event ushered in the era of the American outlaw, and the Old West is filled with legends of bank robbers and bandits. But as men like Frank and Jesse and Butch and Sundance developed new systems to commit their crimes, the same thing happened on the other side. Bank owners and security firms and law enforcement agencies developed new techniques to stop the bandits.

But as the Old West faded and the 20th century began, the robbers took major steps forward, had left lawmen scrambling to catch up. The man who changed the game was Herman K. Lamb. Herman Lamb is considered the father of modern bank robbery. He was from Germany and thus nicknamed the Baron during his criminal career in America. While serving prison time in Utah, probably around 1917, he developed a system for robbing banks that remains mostly intact to this day. pioneered surveillance, escape routes, getaway drivers, and specific jobs for each member of the

gang. Instead of assembling a group of ne'er-do-wells to take a bank by force, Lamb's system gave everyone in the gang a defined role during the robbery. One guy controlled the crowd, one guy focused on the safe or the vault, and one guy was the getaway driver. Lam was responsible for spreading the idea of casing a joint before robbing it. He studied the bank. He noted security measures and alarms and the number of employees and guards. Then he developed a plan based on that information. It seems obvious now, but it was revolutionary at the time. He was also the master of the planned getaway. He mapped out different routes. He did test runs and timed the options with a stopwatch. He attached detailed maps of the best escape routes to the dashboard of the getaway car.

And the getaway car was the responsibility of one person, the getaway driver. Lamb created the designated driver, for bank robberies anyway. But even with all of Lamb's meticulous planning, his luck ran out, as it did for every gangster of the era. As the year 1930 came to a close, so did the career of Herman Lamb. But his demise led directly to the education of John Dillinger. At the end of 1930, Herman Lamb and his gang robbed a bank in Dillinger's home state of Indiana. Dillinger had been in prison for six years by that point, and he'd spent the past year in the state penitentiary in Michigan City. Lamb's robbery of a bank in Clinton, Indiana, went horribly wrong.

By that time, there had been so many bank robberies in the area that cops and citizens had begun to work together to stop the bandits, just like they had in the Old West. So when Lamb and his crew left the bank, they were chased by a posse of more than 200 people. The bandits stole a series of cars and fled across the state line to Illinois. Such a move used to mean safety, but not on that day. During the heyday of the gangsters, bank robbery was not a federal crime. Typically, all a robber had to do was run from one state to another to avoid being caught. Local police in the town where the bank had been robbed had no jurisdiction in another state. And even if they had, it was almost impossible to coordinate a dragnet with other cops

at the speed that was necessary to stop the bandits. So when Herman Lamb and his crew robbed a bank in Indiana and fled across the state line to Illinois, they might have thought they could get away. But not this time. Lamb's men stole four different cars during the wild chase. but they couldn't shake the posse. Lamb's last car finally broke down in a tiny town just inside the Illinois border. The posse surrounded the bandits.

A massive gunfight erupted. Lamb's getaway driver died in the shootout, and it quickly became clear that the gang could not escape. Herman Lamb committed suicide rather than return to prison. That left just two gang members alive, Walter Dietrich and James Clark. They surrendered to the posse. They were tried and convicted in Indiana courtrooms

and sent to prison at the Indiana State Penitentiary in Michigan City. And they were the two protégés of Herman Lamb who taught all his techniques to a willing student, John Dillinger. While John Dillinger served time in prison, the outside world advanced in two areas that would be vital to his success as a bank robber, cars and guns. Up until the 1920s, automobiles were relatively new and rarely used in bank robberies.

But by 1924, they were critical to the outlaws. One crime rider observed that, 75% of all crimes now are perpetrated with the aid of the automobile. Automobiles and good roads have done much to increase certain types of banditry, whether it is to perpetrate a hold-up on a bank or merely stick-up pedestrians in rob Holmes. As the 20s and 30s progressed, cars became sturdier and more reliable, and faster. Bank robbers flush with cash could buy new cars with huge engines. Their eight-cylinder beasts tore up the roads and made escapes much easier. Local police could barely keep up in their aging four-cylinder model A's or six-cylinder chevies. And, probably worst of all for the police,

not have two-way radios. That technology wasn't available until the 1940s. In the 30s, police vehicles had radios in their cars, but they were one-way devices. Headquarters could send messages, but the cars couldn't respond, or talk to each other. And at the same time the cops learned they were outclassed in terms of cars and communications, they discovered a more lethal deficiency. They were badly outgunned. John Thompson was born in Kentucky on the eve of the Civil War. His father was a lieutenant colonel in the Army, and John followed in his footsteps. He graduated from West Point and joined the Army's Ordnance Department.

He deployed to Cuba for the Spanish-American War, and his Gatling Gun unit played a major role in the Battle of San Juan Hill. After the war, he helped develop two iconic weapons, the 1903 Springfield Rifle, and the the 1911 handgun. A few years later, during World War I, he recognized the need for a new type of weapon. Soldiers needed a powerful, high-capacity gun that could sweep the trenches fast and hard. Thompson designed a rapid-fire weapon with a short barrel and incredible stopping power. In 1920, he filed a patent for the Thompson submachine gun. But by that time, World War I was over, and the army chose not to widely incorporate the gun into its ranks. So Thompson sold a few to the Marine Corps,

and even to the Postal Inspection Service. But unfortunately for the general public, the gun was far more popular with a different set of men. It retailed for around $200. The price was too high for the average person, but not for the gangsters of the era. With bags of cash from robberies or other rackets, They bought Thompson submachine guns in droves.

Each was sold with a 20-round clip, but a 50-round circular drum was also available. It cost $5. The Tommy Gun became the favored weapon of Al Capone's mob. It was famously used in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago in 1929. Two men with Tommy Guns murdered seven members of a rival gang as Capone completed his takeover of Chicago. The local police carried pistols with a maximum load of five or six rounds.

They were no match for the 45-caliber monsters that could fire 850 rounds per minute. And nowhere was this more evident than in Kansas City in 1933. For those who were hearing the deep dive into this era of American history for the first time, the next couple things might seem impossible to believe. but they're true. In the early years of the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner of the FBI, the agents were not allowed to carry guns.

They couldn't even make arrests. They could investigate and they could track suspects, but when it came time to arrest someone, they had to call in local law enforcement. That changed after the Kansas City massacre in June, 1933. Frank Nash was a bank robber. He was bald and portly and 46 years old. He had escaped from Leavenworth Prison three years earlier,

and he was now vacationing in Hot Springs, Arkansas, a resort town that was popular with gangsters. Bureau agents Joe Lackey and Frank Smith received a tip that Nash was there. They brought in a police chief, Otto Reed, to arrest him. The three men cornered Nash in a cigar store and took him into custody with no trouble. They stuffed him in a car and confiscated his $100 to pay. They drove out of town and made it about 20 miles before they ran into the first sign of trouble.

In front of them was a police blockade. They stopped the car and a man approached who introduced himself as the local sheriff. He said the cigar store owner had reported a kidnapping of Mr. George Miller. That was the alias of Frank Nash. The agents and the police chief explained their mission and revealed the true identity of Frank Nash as a bank robber and escaped convict. The local police let them go.

But then a similar incident happened when they reached Little Rock. Local police pulled them over and asked where they were headed. Agent Joe Lackey said their destination was Joplin, Missouri. Again, they were allowed to pass. After the second stop, Lackie pulled. over to use a payphone. He called his office. His boss advised him to forget about Joplin. They were supposed to go to Fort Smith, Arkansas instead. A train was leaving that night that would take them to Leavenworth so they could put Frank Nash back in prison. The train would make

a one-hour stop in Kansas City the next morning and then continue on to Leavenworth, Kansas. Lackie's boss said they'd receive an escort at the Kansas City Station. The three lawmen in their prisoner settled into their seats on the train, and it chugged away toward Kansas City. 30 minutes later, a report went out on the Associated Press's wire. Somehow it had the whole story of Frank Nash's capture, including the mistaken kidnapping, and the fact that the four men were now on a night train to Kansas City. However it originated, the story flew into AP offices across the country, and with the Knowledge of their destination now public, an ambush was planned.

Around 7.15 the next morning, June 17, 1933, the train arrived at Union Station in Kansas City. Agents Joe Lackey and Frank Smith, police chief Otto Reed, and their prisoner Frank Nash, stepped off the train. They were met by two more bureau agents and two Kansas City police officers. The plan had changed. They were now going to drive to Leavenworth. They would leave immediately. After the news report, it was too risky to wait for an hour in the train station. The seven lawmen marched Frank Nash through the station.

Even though the agents were not supposed to be armed, a man behind Nash held a 38-caliber pistol against the prisoner's back. They walked out of the station and moved toward a black Chevrolet coop in the parking lot. The agents would ride in the car with Nash and the police officers would escort them in an armor-plated vehicle. When the group reached the car, Agent Joe Lackey and Police Chief Otto Reed slid into the back seat. Frank Nash moved to join them.

His hands were cuffed in front of him and covered by a white handkerchief. But Lackey told Nash to get in the front so they could keep an eye on him. Nash did as he was told. He moved into the front seat. Agent Frank Smith crammed into the back seat with Lackey and Reeve. The two new agents moved toward the front of the car, and then they heard the first shout. Someone yelled, up, up, get your hands up, and then let them have it. Machine gun fire ripped through the scene.

In the front of the car, the two Kansas City cops were riddled with bullets and died instantly. Ray Caffrey, one of the two agents who joined the group in Kansas City was about to get in behind the wheel. The force of the bullets slammed him into the hood of the car, and he crashed to the ground next to the two dead officers. The other new agent, Reed Vetterly, dove to the pavement beside the car. Frank Nash's head exploded. In the backseat, agents Joe Lackey and Frank Smith were shot multiple times.

Police Chief Otto Reed was trapped between them, and he died immediately. Outside the car, Agent Vetterly jumped to his feet and ran toward the station. The assassins let him go. They surveyed the carnage and decided they'd done enough. Four men were dead on the ground. Three were dead in the back seat. The killers hurried to a car and escaped.

But not everyone was dead. In the back seat, Joe Lackey and Frank Smith looked dead, but they survived. Agent Vetterly called J. Edgar Hoover and told him about the horrific events that would later be called the Kansas City Massacre. Hoover sent a wire to a reliable agent in San Antonio, Texas, and told him to apprehend the assassins using every resource at his disposal. The agent responded by saying, with what? P-shooters? Hoover changed his policy about firearms on the spot. That afternoon, he instructed. Bureau agents to grab whatever weapons were available and learn how to use them.

Fast. One week later, the Bureau of Investigation bought its first two Tommy guns, and Hoover made a comment about the criminals his agency now faced. They must be exterminated, he said, and they must be exterminated by us. No one was arrested for the Kansas City Massacre, and the identities of the assassins are still unknown. The morning papers strongly hinted in the direction of another popular gangster of the era, Charles Pretty Boy Floyd.

But his involvement remains questionable at best. The most common motive for the attack is the freedom of Frank Nash. The killers were trying to break him out of custody. But after they showered the scene with bullets, that motive is also questionable. And into this new world of fast cars, machine guns, and the Bureau of Investigation, stepped John Dillinger. In May, 1933, one month before the Kansas City Massacre, John Dillinger walked out of prison.

His family had created a petition for his release, and it was signed by 188 people, including Frank Morgan, the man Dillinger robbed and assaulted. The petition said John was needed on the family farm. His father could no longer keep up with the workload, and his stepmother had been hospitalized for a lingering illness. With that, John was granted parole. But he returned to the family farm to learn that his stepmother had died from a stroke

just hours before his arrival. She was buried in the same plot as his mother. Dillinger went to see his ex-wife, who had since remarried. She said later he just wanted to know how she was getting along. She asked him to leave, and he did, without incident. John also found Frank Morgan and apologized for the attack. And while John had undoubtedly learned about some of the crazy events that had happened while he'd been inside, like the rise of Capone and the massacres and the endless robberies and shootouts,

he also would have learned about the economic devastation that was sweeping the country. The stock market had crashed October 29, 1929, and ignited a wave of poverty and unemployment unknown in America, before or since, called the Great Depression. At the same time, the economy collapsed. The weather added a new nightmare. A historic drought descended on the southern plains. Crops in Kansas and Oklahoma and Texas failed.

They simply dried up and blew away. Unprecedented duststorm swept across the land. They looked like the apocalypse. They engulfed the region in a blackness so deep that one old-timer said it was as dark as three midnights in a jug. People were desperate, and desperation fueled crime. But not all crime could be chalked up to dire straits. Some people looked at the state of the nation and saw opportunity.

Cars were faster, roads were better, and in 1932, the number of bank robberies reached 631. There were 85 in Illinois in that year alone. A good thief could buy a car that could easily outrun the cops and a machine gun that could out shoot them. And if he knew the tricks of the trade, like surveillance and planning escape routes and division of labor within a gang, then he could do very well for himself. John Dillinger had just spent three years learning these tricks from two of Herman Lam's protégés.

Dillinger was a man of opportunity. and he put his new lessons into action just three weeks after his release. But I just ain't got no way to go. Lord have mercy, but I just ain't got no way to go. Next time on Infamous America, John Dillinger robs his first bank and begins to make a name for himself as both a thief and an escape artist. And with more recognition comes more heat. The banks start to learn about this young new robber,

And so do the Indiana State Police. That's next week on Infamous America. Primary research for this season was provided by Derry Matera, author of the best-selling book, Dillinger, The Life and Death of America's First Celebrity Criminal. This season was written by Sean Paglisi, vocal editing by Molly Bach, music editing and sound design by Mike Hissom,

song at Sneaky Big Studios. Artwork by Matt Lockery of My Colorful Past. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. Please visit our website, blackbarrelmedia.com for more details and join us on social media. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrel Media on Twitter.

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