Dillinger in Tucson: The Gang the FBI Couldn't Catch

John Dillinger's gang arrived in Tucson in late January of nineteen thirty-four looking for somewhere quiet to disappear. The FBI had been hunting Dillinger for months. He was the most wanted man in America, having led a series of bank robberies across the Midwest and broken out of an Indiana jail. Tucson, in the depths of the Depression, seemed far enough from everything to be safe.

They checked into the Hotel Congress, a railroad hotel on West Congress Street that had opened in nineteen nineteen. Four members of the gang took rooms on the third floor. On January twenty-second, a fire broke out in the hotel basement. Guests were evacuated. Firefighters working the rescue noticed something about two of the men they pulled down a ladder from the third floor: they recognized them from photographs in detective magazines. The men matched descriptions of members of the Dillinger gang.

The firefighters reported their suspicions to the Tucson Police Department. Within the next four days, all of Dillinger's associates were located and arrested. Dillinger himself, who had moved to a rented house elsewhere in the city, was arrested at sundown on January twenty-fifth as he and a companion walked up to the house. The Tucson police had accomplished with a firefighter's memory and a few days of detective work what the FBI's nationwide manhunt had failed to do.

The Hotel Congress is still operating, still a hotel, still a music venue, still one of the more atmospheric spots in downtown Tucson. The hotel celebrates the capture annually with a Dillinger Days weekend each January. The FBI caught up with Dillinger six months later in Chicago.