Public Enemy No. 1

Jeffrey Scalf still hopes to convince his neighbors in Mooresville to embrace Indiana's infamous native son. That would be John Dillinger, Scalf's great-uncle; but the idea hasn't gained much traction. "We make far more of a deal that Mooresville is the hometown of Paul Hadley, who designed the state flag," says librarian Bill Buckley.

For now, there's no statue or plaque in Dillinger's honor. No streets are named after him or mark his escapades. At one point, city leaders even told a local McDonald's to take down posters and other artifacts honoring Dillinger, or hawk its burgers and fries elsewhere.

That attitude still exists today, to Scalf's amazement. "There's a market in this," he says. Indeed, so many souvenir hunters have chipped pieces from Dillinger's headstone at the Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis that the family has replaced it five times. People have showed up uninvited at the Dillinger farm house just outside Mooresville and dug up the lawn, searching for loot stolen more than seven decades ago.

It has made Scalf so nervous that he has hidden all of his Dillinger memorabilia -- a handwritten jailhouse letter, a favorite straw boater hat, the fragile black leather belt the bandit wore the night he died.

He's storing it in the one place that would make Dillinger howl.

Inside a bank vault.