The Biograph Theater, The Cigar That Signaled Dillinger's Death

The signal to kill the country's most wanted man was a lit cigar. On the night of July twenty second, nineteen thirty four, federal agent Melvin Purvis stood by the front door of this theater, ahead on your right, waiting for bank robber John Dillinger to come out from a showing of the gangster picture Manhattan Melodrama. Dillinger had spent the evening inside with two women, Polly Hamilton and a brothel owner named Ana Cumpanas, better known to history as Anna Sage, the woman the newspapers would soon call the Woman in Red for the dress she wore that night to mark herself for the agents watching. Cumpanas had tipped off the bureau herself, trying to buy her way out of deportation back to Romania.

When the film let out around ten forty that evening, Purvis lit his cigar as the agreed signal, and Dillinger started walking toward an alley, reaching for the pistol in his pocket. He never got it clear. Three agents, Clarence Hurt, Charles Winstead, and Herman Hollis, opened fire, hitting him four times. The fatal shot entered through the back of his neck and exited below his right eye. He died on the sidewalk without saying a word. The Biograph kept showing movies for decades afterward, the marquee and the alley alongside it drawing a steady trickle of visitors who came, and still come, less for whatever was playing than for the thirty seconds of nineteen thirty four that happened right outside its doors. The theater itself survived as a working stage long after the shooting became local legend, a reminder that most of what made this stretch of Lincoln Avenue famous took place not inside the building at all, but on the sidewalk you are passing right now.