Ana Cumpănaș

Ana Cumpănaș (1889 – April 25, 1947), also known as Anna Sage, Anna Suciu, and nicknamed the Woman in Red, was a Romanian prostitute and madam who was active in the American cities of Chicago and Gary, Indiana. She is best known for having assisted the Federal Bureau of Investigation in tracking down gangster John Dillinger.

Biography Cumpănaș was a native of Comloșu Mare, a village in the Banat region of Austria-Hungary, in what is now Romania. She married Michael Chiolak in 1909, and the couple moved to the United States either the same year, in 1914, or in 1919, settling in East Chicago, Indiana. They had a son, Steve Chiolak, in 1911, but their marriage did not last. By the end of the decade, Cumpănaș worked as a prostitute, and later became a madam. Her first brothel was in East Chicago, and in 1923, she opened a second one in Gary.

Cumpănaș married attorney Alexandru Suciu, and the couple used Sage as their surname (this was an anglicization of Suciu, reputedly preferred by Immigration and Naturalization Service officials).

On July 4, 1934, John Dillinger began frequenting Cumpănaș and her circle of friends. Cumpănaș was reportedly close to Polly Hamilton, who was Dillinger's lover. Once Cumpănaș became aware of Dillinger's real identity, she considered turning him in as a way of obtaining permanent US residence. As Dillinger was rumored to have killed two East Chicago Police Department officers on May 24 of that year, a large reward had also been offered for his capture. On July 22, after contacting the Federal Bureau of Investigation through the Chicago Police, Cumpănaș fingered Dillinger to the FBI agent Melvin Purvis, resulting in Dillinger's shooting outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago. Despite the nickname and her alleged promise to wear red as a distinctive mark,

The FBI moved Cumpănaș first to Detroit and then to California. She received a US$5,000 reward, only half of what she had been allegedly promised. In 1935, she informed reporters of the deal to keep her in the country, but deportation proceedings had already begun. Allegedly, the FBI told her they could not stop the procedures, due to bureaucracy or poor communication between branches of the federal government. Making a point of shunning further publicity, Her story was integrated into a series of Dillinger myths, entertaining the public during the Great Depression. According to this popular interpretation, the gangster had been betrayed by his own weakness for women (an idea first circulated by the newspapers covering her role in the 1934 events). On the night of Dillinger's death, an unknown chalked a pavement near the Biograph Theater with the epitaph:

Stranger, stop and wish me well, Just a prayer for my soul in Hell. I was a good fellow, most people said, Betrayed by a woman all dressed in red.

In Romania, interest in the career of Ana Cumpănaș was sparked by Mircea Veroiu's film Femeia în roșu ("The Woman in Red", 1997). The latter is a fictionalized account, depicting real or imagined events occurring after her return from America. The narrative moves beyond genre boundaries, mixing the account with metafictional elements and accounts of unrelated episodes (involving, among others, writer Elias Canetti and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud). Nash, whose version of events is deemed "quaint" by crime historian Jonathan Goodman, further argues that her deportation was part of a cover-up.