9781422271032

Introduction

One minute, forty seconds … flat J ohn Herbert Dillinger told reporters that robbing a bank took only one minute and forty seconds. By the time he’d reached the age of 30, the Midwestern boy who played high-school baseball had perfected the art of armed bank robbery. Like many career criminals though, he didn’t begin life as a gentleman bandit. He came from a large family of loving parents, and although his father believed in a strict upbringing, he didn’t undergo the abuse that some criminals survived as children. The legendary criminal was born on June 22, 1903, to John Wilson Dillinger, a grocer, who later turned farmer, and a homemaker, Mary Ellen “Mollie” Lancaster. Dillinger joined his older sister, Audrey born March 6, 1889, in playing at the family residence in the Oak Hill neighborhood of Indianapolis, Indiana. He lived a typical boyhood in a middle-class residential neighborhood in a disciplined environment. His mother, Mollie, died in 1907 not long before he turned four. Some reports say she died from complications experienced during his birth. Others say she died from an extended illness. According to

John Herbert Dillinger was an American gangster of the Great Depression. He led a group known as the “Dillinger Gang.”

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Introduction

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