I will be the meanest bastard you ever saw when I get out of here.

That is what John Herbert Dillinger supposedly said shortly after being sent to prison for

a failed attempt at robin a local grocer after assaulting the man when he was sentenced to 10

to 20 years in prison at the age of 21.

He'd served nine and a half years, get out and immediately set upon a violent and short

and insane 14 month long crime spree full of prison breakouts, shootouts with law enforcement,

and multiple instances of stealing the police's own weapons to use against them.

Dillinger was an American bank robber during the Great Depression in the United States who

let a gang that robbed roughly two dozen banks and numerous other businesses.

During his brief crime spree, Dillinger would escape from jail twice.

He would also help bust numerous other bank robbers and murders out of prison in Indiana.

He was shot multiple times, had face altering plastic surgery, and became one of the most famous

men in all of America. He would become public enemy number one and also become one of the most

notorious depression era outlaws of all time. He even stood out against more violent criminals of

his day, men like babyface Nelson, pretty boy Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde. The newspapers of his time

exaggerated accounts of Dillinger's bravado and daring, the media loved John, and so did huge swathes

of regular Americans. The government was not so stoked about him. He and his gang reshaped the

nation's law enforcement tactics and level of authority. The government demanded federal action

to stop the wave of lawlessness that he was a part of. J. Edgar Hoover, longtime head of the FBI,

beefed up the federal Bureau of Investigations powers substantially in response to the wave of

organized crime in the early thirties that Dillinger and his gang represented. So strap in. Let's get

ready for a very revel without a cause. Tommy gun blast and gangster's miles and coppers edition

...