The Night the FBI Killed Dillinger - July 22, 1934

On July 22, 1934, federal agents shot John Dillinger dead in an alley beside Chicago's Biograph Theater, the kill that made J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and buried the humiliations of a wooden-gun jailbreak and a botched raid. This episode holds the night in full: a legitimate manhunt and a killing that ran outside the law, a bank robber the Depression mourned as a folk hero and the guards and officer he left behind, and an informant the government used and deported anyway. It asks who the state deputizes when it needs dirty work done, and who it discards once the work is finished.