Swashbuckling in St. Paul: John Dillinger

The thing you need to know about John Dillinger is that when he robbed a bank, he leaped over the desks and chairs. This was not a guy who ghosted in and sidled out, or who quietly slid notes to tellers.

What's hard to know, says Dillinger expert Paul Maccabee, is whether this was conscious theatrics, or just the way he was. "You wonder, did he have this image in his mind that he was like Zorro?" Maccabee said. "He was a swashbuckling character."

That is, when he wasn't lying low in the Twin Cities.

It's that piratical persona that perhaps explains the fascination with these gangsters of the 1930s, and how their stories still are being told, most recently in "Public Enemies," the new movie starring Johnny Depp as Dillinger that opens Wednesday.

Some members of the St. Paul Police Historical Society, gathered recently around a bloodstained straw hat with a particular fatal bullet hole, talked about how gangsters such as Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd and Ma Barker achieved a weird sort of folk hero status even as they were committing crimes.

"You have to look at the times," said retired officer John DeNoma. "This was when the bank foreclosed on your house and the sheriff supervised the auction." Law enforcement and banks became the villains, and like Robin Hood, "the robber-hero figure was implanted in society."

People knew that Dillinger wasn't exactly taking from the rich and giving to the poor, added Maccabee, "but at least the rich were getting theirs. A few times, Dillinger even said, 'Here, you can have your money back,' which fed the image even more."

Dillinger cut a brief but intense swath through St. Paul in early 1934, an era when St. Paul was the safest place in America for gangsters, thanks to the "O'Connor system." Police Chief John O'Connor had made a deal with crooks: They would receive police protection if they checked in upon arrival, paid a small bribe and promised to commit no crimes in St. Paul. In his 1995 book, "Dillinger Slept Here" (Minnesota Historical Society Press, $25), Maccabee described a city that became not only a safe haven, but a destination for money laundering and for fencing stolen property, all with the police looking the other way.

O'Connor was gone by the time Dillinger arrived, but his system thrived under the even more corrupt eye of Chief Thomas Brown, whom the FBI suspected of leaking information to members of the Dillinger gang.

The ironic upshot of the "system" was that St. Paul's citizens lived in a safe environment, despite occasionally recognizing the face at the next restaurant table from the post office walls. Fred Kaphingst, a retired officer and now police historian, says his own mother once waited on Dillinger when he and his girlfriend, Evelyn (Billie) Frechette, came into the bakery at Lexington Parkway and Grand Avenue where she worked.

Across the street was a movie theater (now a Blockbuster) called the Uptown, where the couple often went. Dillinger's favorite, according to Maccabee, was the Disney cartoon "The Three Little Pigs."

Dillinger and Frechette lived a block away in the Lincoln Court Apartments at 93 Lexington Pkwy., which became the scene of a rare shootout. The two had drawn attention partly for his reticence, but also for her flamboyance (she wore red shorts and a halter top as she hung laundry in the yard).

Maccabee wrote that when the landlady asked police to check on a suspicious character, no one dreamed that it was Dillinger, whose whereabouts were unknown after he'd robbed a bank in Mason City, Iowa.

In quick succession, his whereabouts in March 1934 were as follows:

March 5: Dillinger and Frechette move into the Santa Monica Apartments, 3252 Girard Av. S. in Minneapolis, after he escapes from an Indiana jail and eludes a nationwide manhunt.

March 6: The gang robs a bank in Sioux Falls, S.D. Soon after the couple relocates to the Lincoln Court Apartments.

March 13: The gang robs a bank in Mason City, Iowa. That night, Dillinger shows up at the house of Dr. Nels Mortenson on Fairmount Av. in St. Paul to be treated for a gunshot wound.

March 31: FBI agents and police arrive at Lincoln Court and a shootout ensues. Dillinger and Frechette escape through the unguarded back door -- a hugely embarrassing lapse -- and drive a getaway car to Dr. Clayton May's clinic at 1835 Park Av. S. in Minneapolis for Dillinger to be treated for a gunshot wound, recuperating there for five days before heading for a family reunion in Indiana.

And with that, Dillinger's days in the Twin Cities came to an end. He was killed a few months later outside Chicago's Biograph Theater on July 22. His remaining days were spent on the run, escaping from one of the bloodiest shootouts in FBI history at the Little Bohemia Lodge in Rhinelander, Wis., where FBI agents mistakenly fired on innocent guests.

The escape was another humiliation for FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. But, as Maccabee noted from an official report, the shot-up lodge would "later prove of great financial benefit to its proprietors," which further burnished Dillinger's Robin Hood "robber-hero" figure.

Two final postscripts to the gang's days in St. Paul are in good hands. The Minnesota History Center has the ivory-handled revolver used by police officer Henry Cummings to wound Dillinger in the shootout at the Lincoln apartments.

And the bloodstained straw hat? That was worn by Dillinger gang member Homer Van Meter, who was killed on Aug. 23 at Marion Street and Aurora Avenue, just a few blocks from the State Capitol, likely betrayed by informants. Confronted by Tom Brown, now a police detective, police chief Tom Cullen and two other officers, he was shot when he turned down a blind alley.

The straw hat had long been thought lost, until a deputy chief brought it to light about a year and a half ago, Kaphingst said. Inside the brim, next to the dark smudge of dried blood and the bullet hole, are the four signatures of the men who shot him.

Kim Ode • 612-673-7185