But Purvis and his G-men proved inept. They raided the wrong apartments in Chicago and Minneapolis, and when they hit the right apartment in St. Paul, Dillinger escaped in a blast of Tommy gun bullets. Then came the debacle at Little Bohemia, which ended with a G-man and an innocent bystander dead and Dillinger’s gang still at large. Two weeks later, they robbed yet ­another bank, this one in Fostoria, Ohio.

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“COMIC OPERA COPS,” read a headline in the Milwaukee Sentinel.

Reporters speculated that Hoover might be fired for the botched job. He wasn’t. Instead, he doubled the size of his anti-Dillinger squad and dubbed the outlaw “Public Enemy Number One,” a phrase the newspapers loved.

Hoover also offered a $10,000 reward for information on Dillinger’s whereabouts. That did the trick. A Chicago madam named Anna Sage informed Purvis that her roommate was Dillinger’s girlfriend. Sage said she was going to the movies with the happy couple the next night and agreed to wear a bright orange skirt so the G-men could pick her out of the crowd.

When Dillinger walked out of the Biograph Theater with the two women on Sunday, July 22, 1934, he looked around, saw a bunch of men staring at him and reached for his .38. The G-men instantly blew him away.

The news spread fast, crowds flocked to the Biograph and souvenir-seekers dipped handkerchiefs in the blood on the sidewalk.

In Washington, Hoover promised that the law would soon catch up with the rest of America’s infamous bank robbers. He was right. Bonnie and Clyde were already dead, riddled with dozens of bullets in an ambush in Louisiana in May. In October, G-men led by Purvis gunned down Pretty Boy Floyd. A month later, the feds killed Baby Face Nelson in a gunfight that left two G-men dead. In January 1935, the feds managed to corner Ma Barker and her son Fred in a Florida cottage and blew them away.

By then, only one of the “public enemies” was still at large—Creepy Karpis. Hoover, who’d been mocked because he’d never personally made an arrest, was determined to collar Creepy himself. In April 1936, G-men informed their boss that they’d found Karpis in New Orleans. Hoover immediately flew down so he could join the squad that nabbed Creepy as he sat in a parked car.

“Put the cuffs on him, boys,” Hoover said.

Alas, nobody had remembered to bring handcuffs. An embarrassed agent used his tie to bind Creepy’s wrists. The headline in the next day’s New York Times read, “KARPIS CAPTURED IN NEW ORLEANS BY HOOVER HIMSELF.”

The era of the bank robbers was over but their legends lived on. Like Jesse James, Billy the Kid and other Wild West desperadoes, the ’30s outlaws became part of pop culture. Hollywood has produced three movies called Dillinger and two called Baby Face Nelson. Pretty Boy Floyd’s story was chronicled in a Woody Guthrie song, a Larry McMurtry novel and at least three films, one starring Fabian. Bonnie and Clyde were immortalized in a Merle Haggard song and a blockbuster 1967 movie starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Their stolen, bullet-ridden “death car” is still displayed in casinos. Shelley Winters played Ma Barker in the 1970 movie Bloody Mama. The rock band Jesus Lizard cut a song called “Karpis.” And the Indiana Welcome Center on Interstate 80 houses the John Dillinger Museum, where visitors can buy a keychain decorated with a replica of Dillinger’s famous wooden gun.

This summer, the big-budget movie Public Enemies features Johnny Depp as Dillinger, Giovanni Ribisi as Karpis, Stephen Graham as Nelson and Channing Tatum as Floyd.

But posthumous fame is a thrill that nobody lives long enough to enjoy. The real winner of the ’30s “war on crime” was Hoover. When that war began, he and his little investigative bureau were virtually unknown. When it ended, Hoover and his newly re-named “Federal Bureau of Investigation” were famous, hailed in newspapers, radio shows, comic strips and James Cagney’s hit movie G-Men.

The debacle at Little Bohemia could have cost Hoover his job but he was a genius in the arts of bureaucracy and public relations and he convinced Congress to grant him more money, personnel and power. For the next four decades, he reigned as the undisputed dictator of a law enforcement agency that frightened criminals, spies, dissenters, congressmen, even presidents.

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