To mark the 75th anniversary of the end of John Dillinger's crime reign–which ended July 22, 1934, when Public Enemy No. 1 was shot and killed by FBI agents near the
Biograph Theater in Chicago, the bureau's press room just issued a list of 10 myths about the outlaw given new life in a Hollywood movie starring Johnny Depp.
Among the myths the FBI list counters: that Dillinger was a Robin Hoodesque, romantic outlaw; that he was unarmed when he met his fate; that a stand-in was killed at the Biograph, not JD; that bureau thugs beat up Dillinger's one-time girlfriend after he was shot; that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover assembled a hit squad to take Dillinger out; and that he badman was betrayed by a “woman in red.”
But the FBI has obviously missed the biggest Dillinger myth of all . . .
]
. . . That he looked like Johnny Depp.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.