Dillinger Was Watching a Gangster Movie. The FBI Was Waiting Outside.

On July 22, 1934, America's "Public Enemy No. 1" walked out of a gangster movie and into an FBI ambush. The "Woman in Red" was wearing orange, got half her reward, and was deported anyway.

Chicago was cooking. A weeklong heat wave had pushed the thermometer to 101 degrees on Sunday, July 22, 1934, and twenty-three people died of the heat that day. Movie houses drew crowds by advertising that they were "air-cooled," and on the city's North Side, a line formed outside the Biograph Theater at 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. The feature was "Manhattan Melodrama," a new picture starring Clark Gable, William Powell, and Myrna Loy as two orphaned friends who grow up on opposite sides of the law. It was, of all things, a gangster film.

Among the crowd was a thirty-one-year-old from Indiana named John Dillinger. J. Edgar Hoover had declared him Public Enemy No. 1 on his birthday a month earlier. In a spree that ran from September 1933 to July 1934, Dillinger and his gang had robbed banks and police arsenals, killed ten men, wounded seven others, and staged three jail breaks. He had broken out of the "escape-proof" Crown Point jail in Indiana using what he claimed was a wooden gun he had whittled. He had undergone plastic surgery and grown a mustache to alter his face. He was hiding in plain sight, working as a clerk under an assumed name.

Beside him were two women. One was his girlfriend, Polly Hamilton. The other was Anna Sage, a Romanian-born brothel madam whose real name was Ana Cumpanas. She was facing deportation as an "alien of low moral character", and she had made a deal with the FBI: help capture Dillinger, collect the reward, and maybe they would stop her deportation. She told the agents she would wear an orange skirt so they could pick her out of the crowd.

Agents and police officers fanned out around the Biograph. Special Agent Melvin Purvis stood in a doorway across the street. At 8:30 p.m., Dillinger and the two women walked in. Purvis phoned his superior, Samuel Cowley, who shifted the remaining men from the Marbro Theater, the other possible target, to the Biograph.

Two hours passed. At 10:30 p.m., Dillinger emerged with Sage on one side and Hamilton on the other. Sage's orange skirt looked red under the Biograph's marquee lights, a detail that would earn her the nickname "the Lady in Red." As they walked past the doorway where Purvis was standing, he lit a cigar. That was the signal.

Dillinger spotted the agents closing in. He grabbed a pistol from his right trouser pocket and ran toward the alley at the end of the block. Five shots were fired by three FBI agents. Three hit him. He fell face down on the pavement. Two bystanders were wounded. At 10:50 p.m., John Dillinger was pronounced dead at Alexian Brothers Hospital. He was thirty-one, killed exactly one month after his birthday.

Within hours, spectators were sopping his blood off the alley pavement with handkerchiefs. The folk hero was dead. Anna Sage collected five thousand dollars, half the ten-thousand-dollar bounty. The FBI had promised to help with her deportation case, but the deal fell apart. Only the Department of Labor had authority over deportations, and it was not bound by promises from Justice Department agents. In April 1936, Sage was deported to Romania aboard the steamship President Harding. "I love this country and will be back some day," she told reporters. She never returned. She died of liver disease in Timisoara in 1947.

The killing made the FBI. The Bureau had been a small agency with narrow jurisdiction, and Dillinger became federal quarry only because he drove a stolen sheriff's car across the Indiana-Illinois line, triggering the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act. That obscure auto-theft law became the lever that federalized the hunt for a bank robber, and his death outside a movie theater became the founding legend Hoover used to build the modern Bureau. The Biograph still stands at 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. In 2019, Dillinger's relatives sought to exhume his body, convinced the FBI had shot the wrong man. The FBI called it a myth.

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