When Dillinger walked out of the Biograph Theater, he saw a bunch of men staring at him and reached for his .38.

The moonless night was pitch dark but the G-men shut off their headlights as they approached a rural Wisconsin inn called Little Bohemia. They didn’t want John Dillinger and his gang of bank robbers to see them coming. When the feds slipped quietly out of the cars, guns ready, they spotted three men hustling out of the darkness and into a Chevy coupe. The Chevy’s lights flashed on, music blared from the radio and it took off.

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“Stop!” the G-men yelled. “Federal Agents!”

The car kept going. The feds unleashed several bursts of fire from their Tommy guns. The Chevy’s windshield shattered, its tires popped and it rolled to a halt. Inside, one man was dead and two were badly wounded. None was Dillinger. The three men were local workers who happened to stop at the inn for a drink.

At the sound of gunfire, the real bank robbers inside Little Bohemia bolted, darting out doors and leaping from windows, shooting as they fled. The G-men responded by blasting the lodge, then turning to fire at the cars as they raced away from the site.

When the shooting stopped and the smoke cleared, one federal agent was dead and two lawmen lay wounded while Dillinger and his cronies slipped away unscathed.

John Dillinger. Courtesy of FBI

It was April 22, 1934, and once again the elusive John Dillinger had escaped his pursuers, making monkeys of the cops who’d been chasing him for months.

Seventy-five years ago this summer, Dillinger and a dozen other outlaws were the stars of the Great Depression’s greatest show—a cops-and-robbers soap opera complete with blood, sex, death, money and amazing, hair-raising escapes. Newspapers, eager to cover their exploits, invented colorful nicknames for them—“Gentleman Johnny” Dillinger, “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, “Ma” Barker, Bonnie and Clyde, and “Baby Face” Nelson.

They were bank robbers, which was not an un-popular occupation in 1934. In the depths of the Depression, bankers were even less beloved than they are in 2009. In the ’20s, banks speculated in stocks, then went bust, leaving depositors high and dry. In the ’30s, banks foreclosed on farmers who’d been devastated by drought, forcing thousands off their land. By 1934 many Americans smiled when banks got robbed, and in movie theaters, audiences applauded when newsreels showed pictures of Dillinger.

“You robbed the bank, did you?” a North Dakota farmer asked a member of Ma Barker’s gang. “Well, I don’t care. All the banks ever do is foreclose on us farmers.”

The savviest bank robbers knew how to capitalize on their Robin Hood appeal. When the governor of Oklahoma offered $1,000 for Pretty Boy Floyd’s capture, Floyd wrote a letter of protest: “I have robbed no one but the monied men.”

The famous criminals of the ’30s differed from the celebrated crooks of the pre­vious decade. The gangsters of the ’20s were men of the sinful cities, many of them immigrants. The bank robbers of the ’30s were country boys and girls, all-American bands of homegrown sociopaths from the heartland.

Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd was an Oklahoma farm boy who robbed small-town banks, survived several shootouts with lawmen and liked to hide out with his Oklahoma relatives, drinking Choctaw beer and baking pies.

“Ma” Barker was a short, dumpy Oklahoma farm wife who wore overalls, liked jigsaw puzzles and raised four sons, all of them criminals. J. Edgar Hoover described her as a “vicious, dangerous and resourceful criminal brain” but that was just propaganda. Neither Ma nor her sons were very bright. The real brains of their gang was Karpis, a Kansas kidnapper with a scary stare that earned him the nickname “Creepy.”

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