Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [106]
According to Cherrington, who later told her story to the FBI, Dillinger and Hamilton left Florida on Sunday, January 14. Hamilton sent her a telegram that afternoon from Savannah, asking her to meet him in a Chicago hotel.1 Driving through the night, Dillinger reached Chicago the next morning. That same day, probably low on cash and unable to move the stolen bonds, he decided to rob a bank. It was an impetuous decision. Some would credit it to Dillinger’s growing belief in his own invulnerability, others to restlessness, a yearning to return to the limelight; he hadn’t robbed a bank in two months.
Whatever the case, that day Dillinger performed like a hungry actor on a brightly lit stage. The bank he selected was in East Chicago, the corrupt mill town where he had spent time the previous summer. There is evidence Dillinger knew certain members of the East Chicago police department, and some have suggested his decision to hit the First National Bank that day was a prearranged affair. If so, somebody forgot to tell the rest of the East Chicago police.
At 2:45 Dillinger and Hamilton stepped out of a car double-parked outside the bank. They left a driver in the car; his identity has never been established. Inside the marble lobby, Dillinger pulled a submachine gun out of what several eyewitnesses thought was a trombone case. “This is a stickup!” he shouted, startling the dozen or so customers in the bank. “Put up your hands everybody!”
A bank vice president named Walter Spencer pressed a silent-alarm button beneath his desk; a block away, it rang at police headquarters. As the customers raised their hands and lined up against a wall, one forgot his cash on a counter. “You go ahead and take your money,” Dillinger said. “We don’t want your money. Just the bank’s.”2
Hamilton stood by, apparently unsure what to do.
“Come on,” Dillinger told him. “Get the dough.”3
Hamilton hustled behind the teller cages and began clearing stacks of cash off the counters into a leather satchel. Just then a police officer named Hobart Wilgus appeared at the front door, apparently unaware of the robbery in progress.
Dillinger saw him. “Cop outside,” he said to Hamilton, who hesitated. “Take your time,” Dillinger admonished. “We’re in no hurry.” When Wilgus entered, Dillinger stepped forward and disarmed him. He emptied the cartridges from the officer’s gun and tossed it back to him. He noticed Wilgus eyeing his submachine gun. “Oh, don’t be afraid of this,” Dillinger said. “I’m not even sure it’ll shoot.”
As Hamilton worked the cages, Dillinger saw men in suits hurry toward the bank: plainclothes detectives, answering the alarm. Hamilton saw them, too. Dillinger, playing to his audience, seemed eager to display his insouciance. “Don’t let those coppers worry you,” he told Hamilton. “Take your time and be sure you get all the dough. We’ll take care of them birds on the outside when we get there.”
A few moments later Hamilton was finished. Dillinger waved his submachine gun at Walter Spencer, the vice president. “Come on out here with me, Mr. President,” he said. Spencer asked if he could grab his coat. Dillinger shook his head. “You’re not going very far,” he said. He then grabbed Officer Wilgus by the arm. “You go first,” Dillinger said. “They might as well shoot you as me. We love you guys anyway.”4
As he had at Racine two months before, Dillinger shoved the hostages ahead of him as a human shield. This time, however, he wasn’t facing a curious crowd. Arrayed outside, behind parked cars and in storefronts on both sides of the front door, were seven East Chicago policemen. As he edged onto the sidewalk, Dillinger hunched behind Officer Wilgus; Hamilton kept an arm around Walter Spencer.
For a long