1934 - Crime

Crime

Clyde Barrow, 24, and Bonnie Parker die in a hail of bullets May 23 on a road 50 miles east of Shreveport, La., after a 2-year career in which they have casually killed 12 people in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Iowa. Their most successful robbery netted them no more than $3,800, and the father of one of their gang members has told police where to watch for them. Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, sheriff's deputy Ted C. Hinton, and four other sheriff's deputies have set up an ambush, Bonnie and Clyde drive into the trap at 85 miles per hour, the lawmen riddle them with 50 bullets, and they die holding a Thompson submachine gun and a sawed-off shotgun, respectively.

The National Firearms Act approved by Congress June 26 imposes an annual license tax of $200 on firearms dealers and requires that they register or be subject to fine and imprisonment. The new law makes it a federal crime to possess a machine gun or sawed-off shotgun, weapons used widely by mobsters during Prohibition; it forbids dealers to sell automatic weapons that may fall into criminal hands (see Supreme Court case, 1937).

The federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay opens July 1. The Department of Justice took over the island from the U.S. Army last year and has renovated the former military prison, installing metal detectors, chain-link fences, and barbed wire to make it even more secure, and incorrigible criminals from Leavenworth and other federal penitentiaries are transferred to the punishment facility under heavy guard (see 1909). Before the Bureau of Prisons abandons it in 1963, "the Rock" will house America's most notorious U.S. criminals, including Al Capone, George (Machine-gun) Kelly, and Robert Stroud.

John Dillinger, 32, leaves Chicago's air-cooled Essaness Biograph Theater July 22 after seeing Manhattan Melodrama with two female friends, one of them a brothel owner who has betrayed him to the Bureau of Investigation to keep from being deported to her native Romania for moral turpitude. Federal agents shoot Dillinger dead ending a brief career in which he has killed one person and robbed banks in Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin, but rumors will persist that they shot the wrong man.

New York police arrest German-born furrier Bruno Richard Hauptmann, 35, September 20 for possession of ransom money paid to recover Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. in 1932. Hauptmann says he received the gold certificates from a former partner in the fur business and denies any connection with the Lindbergh kidnapping (see 1936).

Charles A. "Pretty Boy" Floyd's car breaks down near East Liverpool, Ohio, October 28 and he is killed at age 30 by a sharpshooter in a gun battle with federal agents who fill him with 14 bullets (see 1932). Like Bonny and Clyde, John Dillinger, and others he had become a folk hero to many Depression-beleaguered Americans, and he receives the largest funeral in Oklahoma's history.