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Dillinger, pistol in hand, vaulted a railing and trained his guns on the tellers, herding them into the vault. Later, the bank employees and their customers would all say they were struck by how calm and methodical the robbers were. The gang cleared the cash from drawers and counters into muslin sacks so quietly that no one at the sheriff’s office across the street realized a robbery was in progress.

When they were finished they threw the heavy muslin bags over their shoulders like a band of evil Santas and walked out to the Studebaker. In moments they were gone, easily evading pursuit. From Greencastle the gang sped to Chicago, where they counted the money; it came to almost $75,000, roughly $15,000 a man. All told, it had been an eventful two weeks. Now it was time to have some fun.6

The Dillinger Gang returned to Chicago just after the Barker Gang left to escape the dragnet spreading in the wake of the Federal Reserve fiasco. Leaving in ones and twos, the men drove across the Great Plains all the way to Reno. Karpis and Delores Delaney were the first to arrive, on September 27, after overnight stops in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Rawlings, Wyoming. In Reno, Karpis parked outside the Bank Club, gave Delaney $20 to play the slots, then went in back to meet with the city’s crime boss, Bill Graham. After backslapping hellos, Graham’s partner, Jim McKay, took Karpis aside. “You remember that kid we had out here, that Jimmy?” McKay asked. He meant Baby Face Nelson.

“Yeah,” said Karpis. He described how he had introduced Nelson around St. Paul and Chicago.

“That damn kid, he’s dangerous,” McKay said. “He’s gonna wind up real bad. I hope to Christ you guys ain’t got him with you, do you? He’s not coming back out here, is he?”

Karpis smiled. “He’s just a wild kid, Jim.”

“That’s the problem,” McKay said. “The guy’ll shoot in a minute. I was with him one time over in California up by Lake Tahoe and one of them State Patrol cars stopped us, to check our lights, and he damn near killed the guy. He was almost ready to shoot.”

The others trickled in over the following days, Dock Barker arriving with the gang’s newest member, a drunken boyhood friend named Harry Campbell. Ma was left in Chicago. She had sullenly accepted the decision, barely glancing up from her jigsaw puzzle when Karpis went to bid farewell. In Reno the days drifted into weeks. Karpis and Delaney took weekends at a dude ranch, shooting jackrabbits, taking hikes, turning in early. The others lolled in the casinos and took in movies.

At one point Karpis drove Delaney to San Francisco. They dropped Dock Barker, whose wounded finger had become infected, at a Vallejo, California, hospital run by an underworld character named Tobe Williams, a onetime safecracker whose doctors operated on gangsters from around the country. In San Francisco they looked in on a group of bootleggers Bill Graham had mentioned, who turned out to be Baby Face Nelson’s old gang. They met a bartender who claimed to know people in Hollywood, and afterward it was all Delaney talked about.

“Do you think if we took him down to Hollywood he could introduce us to some of the movie stars?” she asked.

Delaney’s pleading continued after they returned to Reno, and Karpis finally agreed to take her to Los Angeles. Promising to return in a week, they cruised south to a sleepy desert town named Las Vegas, where they looked in on a pair of Harry Sawyer’s friends who were running a desultory little casino; Karpis thought Vegas was the end of the world. After a few days they headed west to Los Angeles, found a hotel downtown, then struck off into Beverly Hills, hoping to spot a movie star. Karpis drove up and down the palm-lined avenues, looking for a recognizable face. It was no use. Delaney was crestfallen.

“How in the hell would you know these people, everyone running around with sunglasses on?” she groused. “I mean, the only way you’d know someone is a movie star is if some people would all crowd around them and start