If it hadn't been for my association with the notorious criminal John Dillinger, I wouldn’t be president of the First National Bank of Littleville, Illinois today. 

I first met John Dillinger in a diner in Chicago in July of 1933. I was fresh out of grad school and was interested in a career as a bank robber, having majored in economics. I had used my Bar Mitzvah savings to purchase a striped three-piece suit and a fedora, which I wore rakishly cocked over both ears.

When I walked into that diner and saw Dillinger, he was eating a club sandwich and taking off his bib, which was decorated with colorful unicorns. I sat down at his table, facing him.

I’d seen photos of him in the papers, but I wasn’t sure it was him until he wiped the mayonnaise off his nose. He told me to get lost because he wanted to eat alone, but I just sat there. He responded in a cryptic way by fracturing my left index finger with a salt shaker.

We met again in October. The cops were hot on his tail.  I’d made a name for myself by then for kidnapping a wino for ransom. So when Dillinger and I met again, I had a feather in my cap, which made me look like an Austrian mountain climber. But Dillinger remarked that the feather was very becoming and matched my eyes.

Despite our first meeting, I could tell I’d earned his respect because this time he said “please” when he asked me to leave him alone. But I stayed and we had falafel for dinner that night and talked about Rachmaninoff. I reminded him that he had fractured my left index finger in July, and he laughed and I laughed and then he fractured my right one. This is why I was later known as “Fingers” Blumenthal.

So I joined up with his gang. Dillinger and I became close friends, so close in fact, that we often took baths together, although he insisted I sit on the drain side. We praised each other frequently, me saying he was the greatest criminal of all time, he saying that my suit needed to be altered.

Except for Joe "The Nose" Ribezzo, I was the only person in the gang with a Master’s Degree, so I became the brains of the outfit, which involved plotting the robberies, planning the escapes and, of course, determining which buildings were banks and which ones were police stations.

I was good at it, and while we worked together, we robbed many a bank and escaped the law time and again, although once, when I stayed home with a runny nose, Dillinger inadvertently robbed a dog pound.