• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2317 0

a sweltering night, the temperature in the low nineties; Chicago was in the midst of a record-setting heat wave. Out at the lake beaches, hundreds of people were still thronged, trying to catch a breeze. On the stoops and corners of the North Side, mothers fanned themselves with newspapers and children begged for ice cream. At about nine-thirty, as the four men sat in their cars waiting, Ana Sage appeared on the sidewalk beside them. She walked past, surveying the situation. After a minute she returned and got into Purvis’s car. They drove east, toward the lake, eventually pulling up in a secluded spot overlooking the water. Cowley remained in O’Neil’s car behind them.

Sage demanded Purvis show proof he was an FBI agent. Purvis took out his badge. Satisfied, Sage said she was prepared to tell everything she knew. She wanted only one thing: to stay in America. She asked if the FBI could make her deportation proceedings go away. Purvis said he had limited authority in such matters, but promised that if Sage helped apprehend Dillinger, he would do everything he could to help her.

It was enough for Sage. The following week she repeated the story she told Purvis for an FBI stenographer. At the very least she dissembled; she said only that Dillinger visited her apartment to see Hamilton, denying he actually lived there. “He did stay at my house while Polly was ill as a result of an automobile wreck about two weeks, and then only stayed there till about daylight, five or six o’clock in the morning,” Sage said in her statement.8

According to Sage, who would always deny arranging to hide Dillinger, she first met him when Polly Hamilton brought him to her apartment in June, introducing him as Jimmy Lawrence.dn “He kept his head down but I looked at him and got a glimpse of his profile and immediately recognized him as Dillinger,” Sage said. “I told him immediately that his name might be Jimmy Lawrence, but he was John Dillinger. I made the remark in front of Polly and I called Polly out in the bathroom and told her that her boyfriend was John Dillinger. I told Polly that I was going to make that man, meaning Jimmy Lawrence, admit that he was Dillinger or he could leave.”

This account is unlikely on its face, and it contradicts everything Polly Hamilton later said about her unknowing courtship with Dillinger; in all likelihood both Sage and Hamilton were lying. In any event, Sage said she then returned to her living room and confronted Dillinger again. Again, she said, he denied he was Dillinger.

“I told him to wait a minute,” Sage went on, “and I went out in the other room and got several pictures which appeared in the newspapers and showed them to him and told him then that if he was John Dillinger he would have a gun on him and if he had no gun he was not Dillinger. He did have a gun in his pocket.”

According to Sage, the matter was left unresolved. It was not until the next night, she claimed, that Dillinger admitted to Hamilton who he really was. As Sage told it, Hamilton didn’t care if he was Dillinger or not; she loved him. Sage didn’t. She told Purvis she began thinking of ways to alert the police. If so, it took her several weeks to summon the courage. From all available evidence, it was not until July 13 or 14 that she made an effort to betray Dillinger. What Sage didn’t tell Purvis was that on July 12 she had received a letter from the U.S. immigration service. In it she was informed that her appeals to remain in America had been denied. A warrant was issued for her deportation. Almost certainly it was this letter that spurred Sage’s betrayal.9

At first, Sage said, she was unsure how to proceed. Initially she was inclined to approach her immigration attorney. She said she arranged a meeting, then backed out, unsure whether she could trust him. It was then, she claimed, she thought of Martin Zarkovich. “I called Martin Zarkovich and talked to him in a casual conversation and told him I wanted to talk to him sometime about something,” Sage said. Zarkovich promised to telephone on Sunday, July 15, the day Dillinger watched