The department was not persuaded. In April 1936, less than two years after the Biograph shooting, Anna Sage was deported to Romania. She settled in Timișoara, the city she had come from before emigrating to the United States. She died there in 1947.
Sage’s story is a useful corrective to any romanticization of the Dillinger narrative. She was not a heroine, not a villainess, and not a romantic figure. She was a woman in a desperate legal situation who saw an opportunity and took it, calculated her odds incorrectly, and lost. She gave information that was accurate and actionable. She got some money and a deportation order.
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## The Probasco Home and the Aftermath of Surgery
The location where Dillinger’s plastic surgery and fingerprint procedures were performed — the Chicago home of James Probasco on Crawford Avenue — became part of the FBI case against the people involved in hiding and assisting Dillinger.
Probasco, the bar owner who provided his home as a safe location for the surgeries, was arrested by FBI agents in July 1934, shortly after the Biograph shooting. Under questioning at the FBI’s Chicago office, he gave up details of the surgery. He then fell — or jumped — from an upper-floor window of the FBI offices and died. The circumstances of his death were investigated but never fully explained.
Dr. Wilhelm Loeser, who had performed the surgeries, was arrested and prosecuted. He had served time in Leavenworth before the Dillinger case; he would serve additional federal time afterward. Dr. Harold Bernard Cassidy, the assistant who had participated in the procedures, was also prosecuted.