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In the lobby, Nelson was working himself into a lather. Just then a motorcycle cop named Hale Keith pulled up beside the bank. Spotting him through a window, Nelson leaped a low railing, scrambling atop a loan officer’s desk, and let loose a deafening burst of gunfire through a plate-glass window. Women screamed as Keith fell, struck by four bullets. “I got one! I got one!” Nelson cried.

As Dillinger and Van Meter finished in the vault, the crowd outside was still growing. People were hanging out of second-story windows, watching Tommy Carroll pace up and down in the street, his gun trained on the policemen he had taken hostage. A sheriff and several deputies headed onto rooftops, hoping to pick off one of the robbers as they tried to escape. Inside, Dillinger and Van Meter were finishing up. Just as the first Dillinger Gang had done at Racine, they grabbed a bank manager and four tellers and herded them out onto the sidewalk to the car. As they left, Nelson shot out the bank’s front window.

Scattered gunshots rang out as the gang loaded the bank manager, Leo Olson, and the tellers onto the Packard’s running boards. The car had just begun to move when a patrolman fired a shot into its radiator. Steam began to rise from the hood. The car stopped, and the hostages jumped off. One of the women began to run.

“Come back here!” one of the robbers shouted. A minute later, the hostages back on the running boards, the Packard again moved forward slowly through city streets, south toward the frozen prairie at the edge of town. Once they hit Route 77, the main road south, Dillinger reminded the others to toss roofing nails behind them. With the Packard’s engine coughing and sputtering, he could see it was only a matter of time before a posse caught up with them.

A few miles later the Packard began to falter, and everyone jumped out, hailed an oncoming Dodge, and sent the frightened owner scurrying out into the fields. They shoved the hostages out onto the highway and began transferring a set of gas cans to the new car.

Just then Sheriff Melvin L. Sells, in pursuit with three men in a squad car, spotted the cars parked on the highway. Sells stopped a hundred yards back, not wanting to jeopardize the hostages. One of the robbers, probably Nelson, fired a volley their way. The officers saw Dillinger grab Nelson and pull him into the car.

The gang sped off south. Years later Sheriff Sells insisted he chased the speeding bandits for two hours, giving up only after he lost them somewhere in Iowa. In fact, the next morning’s newspaper reported that the sheriff and two other cars turned back the moment the robbers opened fire. The gang’s fleeing car was last seen in southwestern Minnesota, heading toward St. Paul, but the local sheriffs who gave chase were unable to catch up to it.4

“Was it Dillinger?” a headline in the Daily Argus-Leader of Sioux Falls asked that evening. Several eyewitnesses, including the bank president, insisted it was. Almost no one believed them, including the FBI. The idea that Dillinger could strike three states away from Crown Point only three days after his escape was considered outlandish. A St. Paul agent arrived in Sioux Falls the next day, but the Bureau investigation went little further.

The gang returned to its apartments in the Twin Cities to count the haul. It came to roughly $46,000, nearly $8,000 a man. What Dillinger thought of Nelson’s crazed display is unknown, but the day’s events were a clear indication of the two gang leaders’ philosophical differences. Whatever he thought, Dillinger needed Nelson’s gang. For the first time, he had bills to pay, to Piquett, and to attorneys representing Pete Pierpont, Charles Makley, and his other former gangmates, whose trial for the murder of Sheriff Jess Sarber opened that week in Lima, Ohio. He needed more money, and fast.

The hunt for John Dillinger would become the most important case in FBI history. More than any other single event, it would validate the Roosevelt administration’s push for a national law-enforcement authority and enshrine