The Rise and Fall of the Dillinger Gang

Jeffery S. King
Cumberland House Publishing (2005)
ISBN 1581824505
Reviewed by Paige Lovitt for Reader Views (8/06)

“The Rise and Fall of the Dillinger Gang” is really interesting.  Author, Jeffrey S. King, extensively researched the background of the Dillinger gang.  He offers pictures, references, quotes from people and letters and the personal history of each person in the gang. 

Dillinger himself was either seen as “Public Enemy Number One” or he was viewed as a modern day Robin Hood.  The later comparison was actually really sad because while he wasn’t robbing from the poor, he was responsible for the beatings and or deaths of several people, including many law enforcement officers. This gang robbed stores, theaters, banks, and raided police stations to help some of the members escape including Dillinger himself. 

Dillinger’s criminal career started early.  He was locked up from 1924 to 1933.  He got out and continued his crime sprees.  Some of his family members felt that he continued his life of crime because his first prison sentence was unfairly too long.  His numerous attempts at escaping prison continued to add to his sentence.  His family should have looked at why he was locked up in the first place.  He was truly a career criminal and did not seem to want any other life.

From his prison release in May of 1933 to when he was gunned down on July 22, 1934, Dillinger’s gang was responsible for killing about 16 people and robbing 20 banks.  Eleven of these people were law enforcement officers. 

Other members in the gang’s lives are also reviewed in this book.  This includes:  George “Baby Face” Nelson (Lester Gillis), Harry Eugene “Eddie” Green, Homer Van Meter, Harry Pierpont, Charley Makley, Russell Lee Clark, John Hamilton, and Thomas Carroll.  You will learn everything about their upbringings, their relationships, and their demises. 

Included in some of the photos are pictures of several of gang members after they were killed.  This includes Dillinger’s photo. It is unsettling to see these pictures, but what I feel was more unsettling are the smiling faces of several of the people posing in the background photos around the bodies.  Because of his notoriety, Dillinger had 15,000 people view his body at the morgue.

I highly recommend this book to history or biography buffs.  In addition to learning about the career criminal lives of these men, you get a really good feel for what society was like at the time.  You also learn about how the FBI got start and J. Edgar Hoover’s role at the time.   

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