From pillar to post, the law has chased John Dillinger.

The entire crime-fighting resources of the nation have been united for months against one man,

and he has continued to strike and vanish at will with apparent immunity. Arrested, he walks spectacularly to freedom whistling the last roundup as he waves a wooden pistol.

Newspapers and law enforcement agencies are swamped with letters from thinking citizens asking why, why, why, why?

How is it possible, they ask ask for one man to flaunt his

criminality in the face of the nation and to flout at the law at every encounter

how is it possible how can he disappear so completely this is no sparsely

settled frontier as in the old days when the bandits of the Santa Fe Trail

had merely to ride into the wilderness to be beyond the law. This is a densely populated, highly

civilized community, crisscrossed with telephone and telegraph lines and concrete pavements.

There is a radio set in every home and in every police car. Police have

machine guns, bulletproof vests, speedy automobiles. Every policeman and every school child

of the Middle West has Dillinger's facial characteristics graven in his mind. And yet, John

Dillinger is as loose and as free as ever, and two others of his

gang who escaped from the Indiana State Prison last September have never been captured.

Dillinger's ability to thus shoot and run away and live to shoot another day has led the

public to believe that he is a mastermind,

a supernatural of brilliant intellect, a sort of American fu-manchu.

And in the public mind, the police agencies in comparison consist of a gang of organized

nitwits who fall over each other like a gang of drunken acrobats in their efforts to keep from

meeting up with this Dillinger person. Neither of these ideas is founded on fact. I met and talked

with this Dillinger fellow when he was safely behind the bars in Tucson, Arizona, and with various

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