Edition: U.S. / Global  America's Most Wanted  By Mark Costello
Published: August 1, 2004   America's Greatest Crime Wave  and
the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34.  By Bryan Burrough.  Illustrated.
592 pp.  The Penguin Press. $29.95.  One hot day in June 1934,
John Dillinger, an Indiana nobody turned bank robber, jail
breaker, sex symbol and internationally celebrated fugitive from
justice, was feeling bored. He had become too famous to
comfortably rob S.&L.'s in Podunkia, Ohio, his prior bread and
butter. He was hiding in Chicago. His expenses were not small.
He liked the nightclubs and he tipped like Robin Hood. He was
bribing cops in three jurisdictions and had an idle gang to
support. He had just undergone, with impressive stoic courage, a
round of gruesome and hideously painful plastic surgery at the
hands of a back-alley abortionist, and this surgery, though not
particularly effective at making Dillinger look like anything
but Dillinger, also cost a chunk of change. Feeling caged and
pressed for cash, John Di