Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough Read Free Book Online

out into the Depression to make ends meet. He was a small, slender man, five-feet-seven, with close-cropped brown hair, an easygoing wiseacre with a lopsided grin who had served nine long years for the drunken mugging of a grocer in his hometown outside Indianapolis. He had promised his father, a stoic farmer, that he would go straight, but, in fact, he had a secret plan. Dillinger’s only friends were those he made in prison, and that morning he was trying to raise enough money to break them out.
    Horace Grisso reached for the drawer where the bank’s combination book lay. Dillinger grabbed his hand, then allowed him to slowly open the drawer. Stepping to the safe door, Grisso fumbled with the lock, unable to open it. He was nervous. “Let me drill ’em,” Dillinger’s teenage partner, William Shaw, said. “He’s stalling.”
    Dillinger put up his hand. “Take your time,” he told Grisso.
    Just then the front door opened. Dillinger leaped to it and intercepted the bank’s clerk as she entered. “I don’t want to hurt you,” Dillinger told her, directing her to lie on the floor. Dillinger grabbed a smock off of a chair and politely laid it beneath her, then wrapped wire around her hands and feet. By then Grisso had opened the safe, and Shaw and the third man, a teenager named Paul “Lefty” Parker, began lifting out bags of cash. Dillinger remained by the front door, corralling two more employees who entered. “You hadn’t ought to come in the bank so early,” he said with a grin.
    Within minutes Dillinger and his accomplices were back in their car, speeding toward Indiana. They counted the money and found it totaled $10,600, not a bad haul. But Dillinger wasn’t satisfied. That night he and Shaw pulled up outside a Haag’s Drugstore in Indianapolis. Inside, Shaw headed toward the main cash register while Dillinger took the smaller one at the soda fountain. He stuck his gun at the three employees. When they stared into his face, he said, “Look the other way!” The employees turned their gazes toward Shaw. “Don’t look at me!” Shaw shouted. The employees turned back to Dillinger. “I said don’t look at me!” Dillinger repeated.
    A moment later the two men, cash from the registers in hand, backed out onto the sidewalk, only to find that Lefty Parker had parallel-parked the car at the curb, snugly wedged between two other parked cars. As Dillinger simmered, Parker bumped the cars in front and behind several times before wheeling out and making their getaway. Dillinger had to explain to young Parker how to park a getaway car.
    Still, the night wasn’t over. A half hour later Dillinger showed Parker where to pull up in front of a City Foods supermarket. Robbing the store had been Shaw’s idea. What he neglected to tell Dillinger was that he had robbed it once before. The minute the two men entered the store, guns drawn, the manager hung his head.
    “Here they are again,” he said. Dillinger gave Shaw a look. “You guys have started the company collecting [our cash],” the manager said. “And the collector just left.”
    There was no money in the registers. Dillinger stalked out of the store. Shaw tarried a moment to scoop up several boxes of cigarettes. The moment Dillinger slipped into the car beside him, Parker gunned the car forward, leaving Shaw behind in the store.
    “Stop! Stop!” Dillinger shouted as Parker drove up the block.
    Parker hit the brake and drove in reverse toward the store as Shaw, breathing heavily, ran up the street to meet them before jumping in. Parker was so rattled he ran the next stop sign. “If you can’t drive,” Dillinger said, “let the kid have the wheel!” The men drove on, aiming for Dillinger’s father’s farmhouse.
    So began the criminal career of the man who would within months transform the FBI.

Near Wellington, Texas Saturday, June 10
    That same Saturday night, as Dillinger returned to his father’s farmhouse, Clyde Barrow and his girlfriend