In January 1934, Dillinger and several members of his gang found themselves in Tucson, Arizona (per the Tucson website). They had made their way across the country robbing banks and even stealing weapons from a pair of police armories, per the FBI. They figured that Tucson would make for the perfect place to hide from police and also avoid the frigid northern winter.
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What appears to be a complete coincidence ultimately led to the gangsters’ capture. Two members of Dillinger’s gang, Charles Makley and Russell Clark, checked into Tucson’s Hotel Congress under assumed names. During their stay, on January 23, a fire broke out in the hotel’s basement. The two criminals asked a pair of firefighters to retrieve their bags from their third-floor rooms. The firefighters obliged, although they noted that the bags were particularly heavy, according to the Pima County Public Library.
The men tipped the firefighters $12 for their troubles, which was exceptionally generous for the time. That act of generosity would ultimately be Makley and Clark’s undoing, as the firefighters remembered their faces, and even recalled having seen them in the pages of True Detective Mysteries magazine. They alerted the police.
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