Dillinger's "Private" Enemy Goes Public
Gangster's penis rumored to be stored at The Smithsonian
CelebrityMorgue.com
The original photograph of the dead Dillinger (posted on CelebrityMorgue.com) was later touched up by newspapers to show a flattened sheet -- but what's really under that hump?
Thanks to the -release of Johnny Depp's "Public Enemies," notorious gangster John Dillinger is getting a lot of attention these days.
Perhaps too much.
Tuesday marked the 75th anniversary of the celebrity bank robber's death outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago in a spray of FBI gunfire. To mark the occasion, the Oxford University Press posted a blog entry by the author of "Dillinger's Wild Ride: The Year That Made America's Public Enemy Number One," Elliot J. Gorn.
In the item featured on the boingboing Web site, Gorn examines a piece (no pun intended) of Dillinger history that's untouched in the current film version of his escapades; his penis.
"The story of Dillinger’s legendary proportions originated with a morgue photo that circulated just after he died," Gorn writes. "There he is on a gurney, officials from the Cook County Coroner’s office gathered around, and the sheet covering him rising in a conspicuous tent at least a foot above his body ... It looked like he died with an enormous hard-on."
Gorn explains the unusual rise in the sheet as being, perhaps, an arm "rigid with rigor mortis," but the untouched picture became the basis for rumors of the gangster's huge endowment.
The writer claims that the stories that followed, along with Dillinger's inclusion in "crude pornography," are "almost certainly" based on an untruth, but there's no denying that Dillinger was, in so many ways, larger than life.
Since there's no proof that "the famed member" really exists or ever did, and there's no solid evidence that it didn't, why not give Dillinger the benefit of the doubt? Sure, he's a bad guy, but let him have that much.
Posted Thursday, Jul 23, 2009 - 8:32 AM CST
