On the last Saturday of September 1935, a woman walked into the Chicago office of the immigration superintendent and gave herself up. Her name was Anna Sage. She was scheduled to be deported that night, sent by train to Ellis Island and then by ship to Romania.
Her lawyers moved quickly. They went before Federal Judge John P. Barnes and asked for a writ of habeas corpus, an old legal tool that orders the government to bring a person before a judge and justify holding her. Barnes signed it. The writ was served on the immigration superintendent, and for the moment, the deportation stopped.
According to the Chicago Tribune, her lawyer told the court that his client had done her part and the government should now show its good faith. That was when Barnes asked a plain question: Who had the authority to promise her anything?
The lawyer named Melvin Purvis, the man who ran the bureau's Chicago office. The government's lawyer, assistant United States attorney Austin Hall, said he knew nothing about any promise. Barnes set a hearing for the following Thursday and released her on $1,000 bond, about $24,000 today.
The New York Times carried the story the next morning. Its headline said her tip on Dillinger had halted her deportation. The statement her lawyers put forward was the first time Anna Sage had said in public that she set up John Dillinger.
It was not the first time someone had asked her. Fourteen months earlier, at the Sheffield Avenue station, Captain Thomas Duffy had questioned her. Accounts of that interview say she told him she had not known who the man was until after the shooting. She denied giving the agents any information at all. To stay in the country, she now had to take it back.
The road to that courtroom began in a village in what was then Austria-Hungary, with a girl named Anna Kanach. She was born in Naji Kumlush, a village in the Banat, a region of flat farmland in the south. The village sits inside Romania now and goes by the Romanian name Comloșu Mare. Her birth year depends on the record. Most give 1889. PBS American Experience gives 1892.
In 1909, she married a man named Michael Chiolak. The records disagree about when the couple crossed the Atlantic. One account puts it that same year. Another puts it five years later. They agree on where the couple settled: East Chicago, Indiana, a mill town on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. There was a son. His name was Steve.
According to Barry Moreno's history of Ellis Island's immigrants, she made the crossing more than once. In the early 1920s, she went home to visit her mother and came back to New York on board the liner Majestic.
The first marriage did not last. According to PBS American Experience, Chiolak divorced her after she began seeing a local police officer. His name was Martin Zarkovich, and he comes back in this story more than once. Years later, she married again, to a Romanian immigrant named Alexandre Suciu. In English, the couple went by Sage. According to the historian Harold Seagull, immigration officials reportedly preferred that spelling. It is the name the newspapers would print.
Across the ocean in Fargo, North Dakota, another girl had been born on June 23, 1908. Her name was Edith Hamilton. Her family called her Rita. Later, most people called her Polly. Polly would marry an East Chicago policeman named Keel, and the marriage would end. She would work for Anna in Gary, Indiana, and at 26, she would walk out of a Chicago movie theater with Anna on either side of the same man.
One of them was born an American citizen in Fargo. The other was born in a village in the Banat. That difference decides the second half of this story.
In East Chicago, Anna went to work in a house run by a man known as Big Bill Subodich. According to PBS, it was a house in the vice trade. When Subodich died, she took over the management. Then she opened more. One in Gary, Indiana. Later one on Halsted Street in Chicago.
The police raided them, and the raids went into the record. According to the Chicago Tribune, she was convicted twice in Indiana of keeping what the law called a disorderly resort. That was the legal phrase for a house the authorities wanted shut. Late in 1932, Indiana's governor, Harry Leslie, signed two full pardons with her name on them. Two pardons, clean paper.
In Washington, her file went somewhere else. Federal immigration officials opened proceedings to send her back to Romania. The label they put on her was the phrase the law used in those years for people it wanted gone: an alien of low moral character. The Tribune later put it in one sentence. The pardons had been granted, and the government started deportation proceedings anyway.
By the summer of 1934, she was running out of room in that case. She had a grown son. She had a house on Halsted Street. She had spent most of her adult life in the United States. And she had one friend with a badge.
Martin Zarkovich wore the badge of the East Chicago Police Department. By 1934, he was a sergeant. His superior officer was Captain Timothy O'Neal. He and Anna had known each other for years. After Zarkovich's own wife divorced him, the Tribune later wrote, Indiana authorities heard rumors that he had married Anna or meant to. The paper printed the rumor and left it there.
When she needed a way to reach federal agents, he was the one she called. In her later statement, Anna said she told him she thought she knew where to find John Dillinger and that in return she wanted to avoid being deported.
Years later, that sergeant would run the whole East Chicago department. His department had its own history with Dillinger. In January of 1934, a bank robbery in East Chicago ended with officer William O'Malley losing his life. John Dillinger was charged in that case. He was never tried for it. About seven weeks after the robbery, he walked out of the jail at Crown Point, Indiana, before any trial could begin.
Six months after O'Malley's death, Captain O'Neal and four East Chicago officers would be standing on a Chicago sidewalk waiting for Dillinger to come out of a movie. The Tribune printed their names the next morning: Captain O'Neal, Sergeants Walter Conroy, Martin Zarkovich, and Glenn Stretch, and Detective Joseph Sopsik.
In the early summer of 1934, none of that had happened yet. Zarkovich was a sergeant in an Indiana mill town. Anna was a woman with a deportation case. The man they would talk about was still walking around Chicago under a false name.
To see how a promise could fail, it helps to know who held what in the summer of 1934. The manhunt belonged to the Department of Justice. J. Edgar Hoover ran its bureau. Melvin Purvis ran the bureau's Chicago office. Inspector Samuel Cowley had been sent to take charge of the search for Dillinger.
The power to deport belonged to a different department entirely. The Immigration and Naturalization Service had been formed in 1933 inside the Department of Labor. The Secretary of Labor was Frances Perkins. One department could hunt a man. The other decided who was allowed to stay in the country.
On June 23, the Justice Department put two prices on Dillinger. $10,000 for his capture, about $250,000 today. $5,000 for information leading to his arrest, about $125,000 today. The wanted notice printed both figures.
That June, Polly Hamilton was 26 and living in Chicago. She started seeing a man who said his name was Jimmy Lawrence, a clerk at the board of trade. According to Anna's later statement, Polly brought him to her home, and the two began using it as a place to meet. After a while, Anna said she recognized him as Dillinger and told Polly not to bring him again. Polly answered that she had nowhere else to see him. The visits went on.
The most wanted man in America was using Anna's home as a meeting place.
Thursday, July 19, 1934. Anna Sage sat down with Sergeant Zarkovich and Melvin Purvis. She had something to trade. She knew the man who kept coming to her home. By most accounts, she wanted two things back: the reward and an end to her deportation case.
What Purvis said next is where the accounts split. In Anna's version, given a year later and printed in the Chicago Tribune, Purvis said he would call off the immigration authorities. He gave her a secret telephone number. He told her to use it the next time Dillinger came by. In the version PBS draws from the record, Purvis promised to do everything he could. He also told her he could not guarantee anything.
Every account agrees on the rest. The deportation case was on the table, and she would call the moment she had something. By the end of that Thursday night, the deal was set in two different versions.
Sunday, July 22, 1934. Dillinger and Polly were at Anna's apartment on North Halsted Street. He talked about taking the two women to a picture that evening. He did not say which theater. Anna said she would step out to get something for dinner. Outside, she called the number Purvis gave her.
On that call, she told the agents what she would wear: an orange skirt and a white blouse. The color was in their hands before a single agent took up a position.
At about 8, the three of them walked into the Biograph Theater at 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. The picture was Manhattan Melodrama with Clark Gable. A little after 10, they walked out. Purvis later told the Tribune he was standing in the doorway of a tavern just south of the theater when Dillinger passed him. By Anna's account, she caught sight of Purvis from the corner of her eye. Then Zarkovich. She stepped aside. The agents fired.
That was Sunday night, the 22nd of July. John Dillinger lost his life in the alley beside the theater. He was 31 years old. Two women walking past on Lincoln Avenue were struck by stray bullets that night. The Tribune named them as Eda Natalski, 45, and Theresa Paulus, 27, and reported their injuries were not serious.
By Anna's account, the woman on Dillinger's other arm was Polly, who had once worked for Anna. Polly always said she had no idea what was coming. PBS notes she had a reason to say so, since knowing would have left her open to a harboring charge.
The legend started in the first morning's paper. Chicago policemen at the scene told the Tribune that Dillinger had arrived with two women, one of them dressed in red. Purvis told the same paper he had seen no women with him at all. The Chicago police had been told nothing in advance.
Within three days, the Tribune reported that the girl in red had been found. Officers brought Anna to the Sheffield Avenue station, and Captain Thomas Duffy began to question her. What she told him comes back later in this story. According to Anna, Inspector Cowley arrived at the station, stopped the questioning, and took her with him.
The bureau then moved Anna and Polly out of Chicago. They spent about two weeks in a hotel in Michigan, and the government paid the bill. PBS gives the city as Detroit, and the reason is protecting the two women's identities.
Her half of the bargain was done. Now she waited for the government's half.
From Michigan, Anna told the agents she had relatives in California, and she was sent there. In her own account, Inspector Cowley came to see her and handed her $5,000, about $125,000 today. She asked about the deportation. Cowley, she said, told her it had been taken up in Washington.
The size of that payment has been argued about ever since. On the night of the shooting, Purvis told the Chicago Tribune the rewards came to $15,000, about $375,000 today, two-thirds of it from the government, the rest from Indiana and Minnesota. He said it would go to the person who gave him the information, and he would not say who that was.
The federal wanted notice tells a narrower story. It listed the two separate amounts from June, a larger one for a capture and a smaller one for information. Anna gave information. The smaller amount is what she received.
A year later, the Tribune added one more line. It said Sergeant Zarkovich and Captain O'Neal were known to have divided a $5,000 reward between them, about $62,000 each in today's money. What every source records is the payment that reached Anna, the one handed over in California. Where the rest went, the surviving record does not say.
In her own telling, money was never the point. The price she said she had asked for was permission to stay.
When she pressed Cowley about it in California, she said he told her he did not think Hoover would see her. She could go to Washington if she wanted. So she went to Washington to see J. Edgar Hoover in person. Hoover would not see her. By her account, she ended up talking to his stenographer.
Back in Chicago, she went to Purvis again. In her account, he said he did not understand why Washington had not stopped the case. He told her Hoover had taken it up with the Department of Labor and that everything would be all right. PBS records Purvis's side in plain terms. He said he had done everything he could by informing immigration officials in Washington.
Both versions lead to the same door: the Department of Labor. Anna walked up to that door herself. She met the Chicago district's immigration superintendent, a man named Schlotfeldt. By her own account, she never told him about her bargain. She assumed he would hear about it from Purvis or from Washington.
The months went by, and the men around her moved on. Hoover gave Inspector Cowley a new target, Babyface Nelson. In July of 1935, Melvin Purvis left the bureau. Years later, the Tribune reported that friends of his counted the Sage case among his reasons for leaving. The man she said had made her the promise was now a private citizen.
That September, Anna was out on bond in the deportation case. The terms required her to surrender on a Saturday morning at Schlotfeldt's office. A group of people was being sent out of the country that night, and her name had been added to it.
Which brings the story back to that Saturday morning, September 28, 1935.
Her new statement ran to the small details. On the night of the Biograph, she said she hurried home, changed her clothes, and walked back to the corner to look. Two nights later, Zarkovich took her to the bureau's offices in the Bankers Building. There, she said, Inspector Cowley told her the government appreciated her help.
The Tribune's reporters saw the problem right away. Federal prosecutors, the paper wrote, would say her admissions were being made for her own benefit. Her own lawyers conceded what they were trying to prove: that government men went back on a bargain.
The new statement brought new trouble. Captain John Stege of the Chicago Police told the Tribune he was certain she smuggled a real pistol into the Crown Point jail before Dillinger's escape. Indiana's Attorney General Philip Lutz said he still believed she had a hand in that breakout. Both were accusations, and both remained theirs. Even so, Lutz told the paper she was expected at his office in Indianapolis. She wanted Indiana's help with her case.
From Washington, J. Edgar Hoover insisted in the Tribune's account that no deal was ever made to let her stay in the country. Melvin Purvis, now in private life, refused to comment. Her lawyer, Johnson, was trying to serve him with a subpoena.
That left one witness from the Thursday meeting that her side could count on. The Tribune spelled it out. To prove the bargain, Anna would have to depend on what Sergeant Zarkovich remembered and on whether he said it in a federal courtroom.
Her lawyers had a date, a bond, and a judge who had already asked the one question that mattered. They had a client who had changed her story in public, and they had a government that said there was nothing to enforce.
That was the last Saturday of September 1935.
The hearing set for early October was pushed back. On Wednesday, October 16, 1935, the case of Anna Sage came before the federal court in Chicago. Her file, meanwhile, sat where it had always sat: in the Department of Labor, under Secretary Frances Perkins.
The question in front of the court was narrow. Her side wanted the government held to its word. The government's position, as Hoover had stated it, was that there was no word to hold it to.
To prove otherwise, Anna needed someone from the government's side of that bargain. She had named two federal men. Only one of them could ever be put on a witness stand.
To see why, the story steps back ten months, to a highway northwest of Chicago. Tuesday, November 27, 1934. Barrington, Illinois, a little after 3 in the afternoon. Inspector Samuel Cowley and Special Agent Herman Hollis were in a car. On the same stretch of road was Babyface Nelson with John Paul Chase and Nelson's wife, Helen.
By the account of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, Cowley and Hollis began to get out of their car, and Chase and Nelson opened fire. Hollis lost his life that afternoon. Nelson was wounded, and he died that evening. Cowley was taken to a hospital in Elgin. He lived through the night.
That was Tuesday, the 27th of November. On the morning of November 28, Samuel Cowley lost his life. He was 35 years old. According to a 2016 report by Fox 13 in Salt Lake City, his son was 8 months old.
Cowley was born on July 23, 1899, in Franklin, Idaho. He studied law at George Washington University and joined the bureau in 1929. In the summer of 1934, Hoover put him in charge of the hunt for Dillinger. On the night of the Biograph, according to the Tribune, Cowley was the man who placed the agents around the theater. A historical marker in his hometown says Hoover often called him the bravest man he ever knew.
His funeral was held in Salt Lake City on December 2. A second memorial service followed in Washington two weeks later. In 1935, John Paul Chase was convicted of Cowley's murder and sentenced to life.
Whatever Cowley knew about Anna's promise was buried with him. In her account, he was the man who brought her the reward money in California. He was the man who told her the case had gone up to Washington, and she named him as a party to a later promise. In the version PBS draws from the record, no federal agent ever guaranteed her anything.
Only two men could have settled that question from the government's side. By the autumn of 1935, one of them lay in a cemetery in Salt Lake City. The other had left the government and would not talk. The private number Purvis had given her that July now led to a man with no federal authority at all.
That left her side with a record full of gaps. Zarkovich was the one witness still available who had sat in the room that Thursday in July. The surviving record does not say what he told the court. Whether Johnson's subpoena ever reached Purvis, it does not say either.
What the record does show is who was missing from the government's side. The inspector who by her account carried the money could not be called. The director had already said there was no deal.
Anna Sage had helped deliver the most wanted man in the country to the bureau. Fourteen months later, the government's answer was that it had never promised to let her stay.
The ruling followed within days. In mid-October, Judge Barnes ruled against her. The New York Times reported it in a single headline. The court had barred her writ.
The reasoning ran straight through the structure of the government itself. As PBS summarizes it, the federal courts held that only the Department of Labor had authority in deportation cases. That department was under no obligation to honor promises made by agents of the Department of Justice. Chicago history archives add one more line. Barnes treated the Dillinger bargain as having no bearing on the case at all.
Two pardons from a governor. A promise from federal agents. Neither one stopped the Department of Labor. The bond had bought her time, nothing more.
The bargain was good enough for the bureau. It had no force in the department that held her file. The court looked at who held the power to deport her. What had been said at that Thursday meeting in July had no bearing on that, and the only people who could have said what was promised on the government's side were a man in the ground and a man out of office.
What remained was paperwork, a deportation order that still stood through the winter and into the spring.
April 1936, New York. Anna Sage was in the city. On April 28, the New York Times reported that the woman reputed to have pointed out Dillinger was there. Two days later, the paper reported that she had been deported.
Years ago, a ship carried her west into that harbor. This one carried her east out of it. That was the last week of April, 1936.
You may have read that she died 11 years to the day after she was sent away. That line depends on a departure date of April 25. The New York Times still placed her in the city three days later.
Four years after she sailed, on June 14, 1940, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was moved out of the Department of Labor. Its new home was the Department of Justice. The department whose agent had sat across the table from her that Thursday now held the power to decide who was sent away.
Anna Kanach went back to the Banat, to the city of Timișoara. She died there on April 25, 1947. The cause was reported as liver disease. According to the Timișoara city guide, she died in her house on Potočandor Street. Most records put her age at 58. The birth year PBS gives would make her 54 or 55.
Just over six months later, on November 8, 1947, Martin Zarkovich became chief of police in East Chicago, Indiana. He held the job until the first day of 1952.
Melvin Purvis died on February 29, 1960. The Tribune reported that he took his own life. His family has said it was an accident.
Polly Hamilton went back to Chicago under another name. According to PBS, she married a salesman named William Black and lived a quiet life. She died on February 19, 1969, as Edith Black. She was 60 years old.
Zarkovich died that October. Polly and Zarkovich, both on Lincoln Avenue that July night, died in the same year. By then, Anna had been gone for 22 years.
The question at the center of this story has an answer in three parts.
The first part is structure. The power to deport her sat in the Department of Labor. The promise, whatever its exact words, came from agents of the Department of Justice. A federal court held that one department could not bind the other.
The second part is people. She named two federal men. By the time a judge heard her case, Cowley had lost his life after Barrington. Purvis had left the bureau and would not comment.
The third part is the man at the top. Hoover, as the Tribune reported, said there had never been a deal to let her stay.
Her lawyers had asked a federal judge to make the government show its good faith. The court answered a different question: Which department held the power? On that question, the ruling came within days.
On the promise itself, the two versions never merged. In hers, Purvis said he would call off immigration. In the record PBS draws on, he promised effort and nothing more. Either version, followed to its end, arrives in the same place: a ship leaving New York in April.
The accounts that survive do not name a single federal official who spoke up for her in that courtroom. Everything the government could pay for in money, it paid. Two weeks in a Michigan hotel. A reward worth about $125,000 today. The one thing she asked for that money could not buy was the one thing nobody at that Thursday meeting had the authority to give.
She took the question as high as she could reach. She traveled to Washington and asked for the director by name. The one federal employee on record as listening to her there was a stenographer, taking down every word with no power to do anything about a single one.
Anna Sage kept her end of the deal on a Sunday night in July. The government paid every part of the bargain that could be counted in dollars. The part that could not be counted had no owner.
If you stand at 2433 North Lincoln Avenue today, the Biograph is still there. The city describes it as one of Chicago's oldest remaining neighborhood movie houses. Red pressed brick, white terracotta, a marquee over the sidewalk. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. Chicago named it an official landmark in 2001. It stopped showing movies in the early 2000s. Since 2006, it has been a live theater.
The alley is still beside it. The building that housed Chicago's federal courts in 1935 is gone. It was a domed federal building designed by Henry Ives Cobb, and it came down in 1965. The site is part of the Chicago Federal Center.
Now, the place where the deal was carried out is a protected landmark. The place where the deal was set aside no longer stands.
In Romania, her story found a second life. In 1997, the director Mira Veroyo released a film about her. Its title is Femeia în roșu, The Woman in Red. According to her memorial listing on the Find a Grave website, she lies in an unmarked grave in Timișoara.
The color followed her everywhere. When the Tribune reported Purvis's death in 1960, it still described her in a red dress. The record from July 1934 says an orange skirt and a white blouse.
Long before any of this, a ship carried a young woman from the Banat west toward New York. In the last days of April 1936, another ship carried Anna east out of New York. Between those two voyages sat one Thursday meeting, one phone call, and one Sunday night on Lincoln Avenue.
The girl from Naji Kumlush left for America with a husband and a new name ahead of her. The woman who left New York in 1936 had a court file, a government reward, and a nickname that got the color wrong.
The ship that brought her in carried a young wife. The ship that took her out carried the woman in red. One court filing, seven more months. That was everything the deal was worth on paper.