Americans love outlaws—we love to mythologize them, romanticize them, idolize them. None more so than the bank robbers of the early 1930s, when the Great Depression impoverished . millions of Americans and made a tiny handful of gun-toting outlaws rich. Here’s a brief look at :the even briefer career of John Dillinger, bank robber extraordinaire:

MYTH: Dillinger and his gang terrorized America with an endless string of armed bank robberies. REALITY: Their spree lasted all of 10 months. He spent the last two months of his short life hiding out in Chicago, with the FBI closing in on him daily. BUT: During those 10 months they hit 24 banks and four police stations, netting $300k in cash (equal to $7 million today), plus a cache of police weapons, including machine guns, To paraphrase James Brown: Dillinger was the hardest-workin’ man in crime biz.

MYTH: He and his gang never harmed anyone during their crime spree. REALITY: They killed 10 men and wounded seven. Dillinger was charged with personally killing a bank guard butt never stood trial. BUT: Law enforcement was almost as careless once the bullets started flying. The FBI killed a tourist and wounded two others during an incredibly botched raid on Little Bohemia, a Wisconsin resort where Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and other gangsters were holed up. They all escaped.

MYTH: Dillinger was a genius at evading arrest and confinement. REALITY: Most pf his getaways were due to law enforcement’s incompetence, lack of funds and personnel, and inability to cross state and even county borders to chase the gang. Dillinger and his gang weren’t immune from stupidity either. They rendezvoused in a Tucson hotel to plan their next series of bank robberies. Fire broke out, and they tipped firemen $10 each to carry their bags downstairs. When the firemen looked inside the suspiciously heavy bags, they saw the gang’s weapons. One of the firemen had seen their pictures in True Detective Magazine and alerted police. Dillinger and his entire gang were arrested without a shot fired. BUT: Dillinger was sent to the Crown Point Indiana jail to await trial for killing a bank guard. Machine-gun-toting Sheriff Lillian Holley bragged that her lockup was “escape-proof” and surrounded it with cops and sandbags. Dillinger fashioned a “gun” out of a washboard blackened with shoe polish. He overpowered a guard, took his keys, freed four prisoners, locked up the warden and most of the staff, and made off with two Tommy guns and four pistols—and Sheriff Holley’s V8 Ford, which outran pursuing law enforcement. News media referred to “Clown Point Jail.”

MYTH: He “robbed from the rich, gave to the poor.” REALITY: Most of the money he stole was deposited by farmers and small business owners. The bulk of it was unrecoverable, because FDIC didn’t start insuring bank depositors until well into his spree. And, he lavished his ill-gotten gains on cars, clothes and prostitutes, BUT: Even his victims lionized Dillinger because bankers were among the most hated men of the Great Depression—demonized as greedy foreclosers of farms and stores.

MYTH: He destroyed mortgage and loan records while robbing banks. REALITY: Get serious! While serving a long stretch for a petty theft as a youngster, Dillinger studied the career of Herbert “Baron’ Lamm, “father of modern bank robbery,” who advised that gangs had no more than three or four minutes to fill their bags with money before The Law arrived. BUT: Pretty Boy Floyd, one of his bank-busting contemporaries (who was later lionized by folk singer Woody Guthrie), gained an (unverified) reputation as a bank records-destroyer, and that glow attached to Dillinger.

MYTH: He died in a blazing shootout with brave FBI agents. REALITY: FBI agents never gave him a chance to shoot. He was betrayed by Anna Sage, a Romanian immigrant (and madam to Polly Hamilton, Dillinger’s girlfriend), who told Special Agent Melvin Purvis that she would identify Dillinger in exchange for not being deported. Eighteen FBI agents and Chicago cops staked out the Biograph movie theater as he, Hamilton and Sage left. When the two women fell behind, Dillinger, sensing the trap set for him, began to run. He was shot three times and died, face down, on the pavement. BUT: In “Manhattan Melodrama,” the movie that was playing in the crowded Biograph Theater, Blackie (Clark Gable), a gangster and convicted murderer, goes to the electric chair rather than confess and have his sentence commuted. Gable’s movie “courage” rubbed off on the crowds that surrounded Dillinger’s body—some even dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood.

MYTH: Dillinger had a huge penis. REALITY: His body was laid out on a table, on his back, with his arms at his side. Due to rigor mortis, Dillinger’s left forearm rose up at under the sheet, giving the thousands of curious Chicagans who lined up to see him that he went out in a blaze of, uh, manhood.

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BUT: What more fitting myth to cap the end of America’s most mythologized outlaw?