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Dillinger grinned. “I’m not denying it,” he said.

“How did you get them in?” a reporter yelled.

A smile creased Dillinger’s face.

“You’re too inquisitive,” he said.

Reporters traded glances. This was something new, a headline-making criminal with charm, a bank robber who could crack wise on his way to the electric chair. A Lake County prosecutor, Robert Estill, who had accompanied Dillinger from Arizona and experienced firsthand his disarming friendliness, was standing beside him. A photographer yelled for Estill to put his arm around Dillinger; forgetting himself for one fateful moment, Estill did. As flashbulbs popped, Dillinger propped his elbow on the prosecutor’s shoulder. The resulting photograph was widely reproduced around the country. It outraged many people, including J. Edgar Hoover, who publicly condemned Estill for fraternizing with a man he was scheduled to prosecute.

Sensing a friendly crowd, Dillinger freely unspooled his life story. “I was just an unfortunate boy,” Dillinger said. “Back in Mooresville, the old hometown, I got drunk ten years ago and held up a grocery. I got $550 and then I got caught . . . In the prison I met a lot of good fellas. I wanted to help them out. There’s no denying that I helped fix up the break at Michigan City last September, when ten men got away. Why not? I stick to my friends and they stick to me.”

One could sense the reporters’ excitement as Dillinger spoke. “How long does it take you to go through a bank?” someone asked. Dillinger chuckled. “One minute and forty seconds flat,” he said.

The unhurried way he chewed his gum, the easy quips, the lopsided grin, the poise, the obvious charisma—it all made a powerful impression on a group of reporters accustomed to tight-faced syndicate gangsters. But then John Dillinger, more than any other Depression-era criminal, had star quality. “He had none of the look of the conventional killer—none of the advertised earmarks of the crook,” a starstruck Chicago Daily News reporter wrote the next day. “Given a little more time and a wider circle of acquaintances, one can see that he might presently become the central figure of a nationwide campaign, largely female, to prevent his frying in the electric chair for the murder of Policeman Patrick O’Malley.” The Daily News went on:

John Dillinger stood there in his shirt sleeves, his soft collar open at the throat, as informally as if he had been talking over crop reports with a visitor to his father’s farm, the farm from which he came many years ago in Mooresville, Ind. His diction was amazing—better in many instances than that of his interviewers—his poise no less so.

His hands, freed of manacles for the first time in many hours, hung at his sides. His weight rested as prescribed in the military formula upon the balls of his feet. His chin jutted forward, the muscles of his face working as he chewed his gum between strong jaws.

It was difficult to realize that here was one of the most ruthless killers of a period that has produced plenty of them. There was no hint of hardness about him save for the set of his mouth—no evidence save in the alert presence of armed policemen that he had spent his formative years in a penitentiary. He had none of the sneer, the blatant toughness of the criminal . . . The whole business seemed to be a joke to him . . .

One versed in the ways of gunmen, looking at him for the first time, can hardly realize that in a very few days, a month or two at the outside, this cheery, affable young man will probably be a corpse, and a very good one. For, though the finger is definitely on Mr. Dillinger, he rates in the eyes of calloused observers as the most amazing specimen of his kind ever seen outside of a wildly imaginative moving picture.

For a national press that uniformly painted criminals as “rats” and “cold-blooded killers,” this and similar reviews were unprecedented. It was a turning point in Dillinger’s career, the moment he molted the skin of a regionally notorious yegg and emerged as a true national figure, an accessible, amiable,