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July 3, 2009

MARK BENNETT: ‘Public Enemies’ brings back memories of John Dillinger, his imprint on Valley

By Mark Bennnett

TERRE HAUTE — Seventy-five years from now, Americans won’t flock to see “The Bernard Madoff Story” in movie theaters.

A greedy ripoff artist captures the imagination of no one. Aside from fellow Ponzi schemers, Madoff had nobody rooting for him to escape justice.

The Great Recession lacks characters, drawing the fascination of the troubled country. Instead, we get political zealots on TV snarling at each other like rabid Chihuahuas, and soap operas starring philandering, hypocritical governors.

Instead, this summer, a nation turns its lonely eyes to the Great Depression. No, we don’t want to trade a 9.5-percent unemployment rate for the 33-percent disaster of the 1930s. In fact, the rational sector of the populace doesn’t long for any of today’s ills — crime, foreclosures, plant closings — to be three times worse, as they were three-quarters of a century ago.

Yet, we might spend some of our tight money to see Hoosier gangster John Dillinger revived on the big screen.

The interest in the new film “Public Enemies,” which debuted Wednesday, centers on Dillinger (played by Johnny Depp), his narrow escapes, anti-hero fame and casual reputation. But the retelling of the Dillinger story also reminds people of the differences, and similarities, between life then and life now.

Perhaps no one, in 1934 and 2009, knows that better than Hoosiers. Folks in Elkhart and Kokomo have felt the current economic misery more so than most Americans. And 75 years ago, Indiana was the site of many incidents involving Dillinger and his gang of robbers.

Dillinger left his infamous imprint on Terre Haute and the Wabash Valley, specifically. Two members of the “first” Dillinger gang had lived in Terre Haute — Russell “Boobie” Clark and Edward Shouse. The notorious Harry “Pete” Pierpont, reputedly Dillinger’s criminal mentor, lived in Clay County as a young man.

They even had at least one Terre Haute hideout, and perhaps more. In September 1933, Dillinger paid a Kokomo brothel owner, Pearl Elliott, $27,000 to buy and equip a refuge house at 2531 Fenwood Ave., according to Terre Haute historian and attorney Mike McCormick. That November, 150 men from the Indiana National Guard, Terre Haute Police and Indiana State Police raided the Fenwood Avenue house and another on Second Avenue, but the Dillinger gang was already gone.

When law enforcement officers finally nabbed Shouse, his confession and testimony placed some Dillinger gang members in Terre Haute before robberies at a Peru police station and a Greencastle bank in October 1933, according to McCormick, the author of “Terre Haute: Queen City of the Wabash.”

Hollywood depictions of Dillinger and his gang members often romanticize their personalities. But in reality, the gun-toting men behind their furious 13-month crime spree from 1933 to ’34 were not the kind of people you’d like to have as neighbors. Especially, the three gangsters from the Wabash Valley who met Dillinger as fellow inmates at the Michigan City state prison.

Shouse, an amateur boxer who lived with his mother, was “probably never too much of anything,” McCormick said.

By contrast, Clark “was pretty sharp” intellectually, good looking and had a Terre Haute girlfriend, McCormick said. Clark “scared the [daylights] out of people,” McCormick added, “but his bark was worse than his bite.”

And then there was Pierpont. In many ways, Pierpont was the real leader of the gang, “because Dillinger wasn’t mean enough” in the eyes of the others, McCormick said. “[Dillinger] was probably over-sentenced [for his earlier crimes]. But Pierpont was a nasty [guy].”

Pierpont’s brutality surfaced often, especially when he and the gang went to a Lima, Ohio, jail to free Dillinger. When Sheriff Jesse Sarber asked to see the men’s credentials, Pierpont said, “Here’s your credentials,” fatally shot Sarber in the chest, according to Bryan Burroughs’ book “Public Enemies,” which is the basis for the new movie.

That killing by Pierpont angered some of the other gang members, who thought it was unnecessary. Clark and Shouse began to hate Pierpont, McCormick explained. “He was too nasty.”

Not surprisingly, Shouse’s confessions helped convict and execute Pierpont, who died in the electric chair Oct. 17, 1934, in Columbus, Ohio.

Dillinger’s escapades also came to a deadly, but more fabled end. The elaborate police sting, with the legendary Lady in Red serving as Dillinger’s betrayer, nabbed the fugitive as he walked out of the Biograph Theater in Chicago on July 22, 1934. He died in a spray of FBI gunfire.

The Dillinger crime wave caught America’s attention all those decades ago. It will again, for a few weeks or months this summer. But when it comes to the harsh truths of what happened then, not many people would trade life in 2009 for that of 1934.



Mark Bennett can be reached at (812) 231-4377 or mark.bennett@tribstar.com.

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