Anyone You Want Me to Be (2 page)

I
n 1919, Al Capone had first arrived in Chicago from Brooklyn. He’d been sent there by Mafia boss Johnny Torrio, who wanted him to take over the rackets in the Windy City. The following year Prohibition was instituted across the United States, and Capone seized this opportunity to turn illicit booze into an empire. His home base was Cicero, a western suburb of Chicago, and prostitution rings, gambling, and bootleg-liquor operations were run from his headquarters in the Hawthorne Arms Hotel on Twenty-second Street. If Cicero had long been known for its buying and selling of police and politicians, the action inside the Hawthorne Arms solidified its reputation for Mob corruption. At the same time, clean cops were aggressively starting to pursue Capone and his gang. Five years after coming to Chicago, Capone got into a gun battle with the authorities on Cicero Avenue, which left his brother Frank dead.

John Robinson’s father, Henry, was eight when the violence erupted. The image of Frank Capone getting killed in the neighborhood—and then Al Capone repaying the favor the next year by dumping the corpse of Assistant State’s Attorney General William H. McSwiggin on a Cicero street corner—was extremely vivid in the memories of local people. They often talked about the bloodshed and spoke with awe of Capone’s headquarters, with its armed guards, metal windows, and impenetrable doors. Stories of the gangster and his crew were handed down from one Cicero generation to the next, part of a living oral history. On December 27, 1943, John Robinson entered a world where tales of legendary gangsters were common to every young boy.

In this neighborhood, having power and using it in illegal ways commanded respect. The streets were full of anecdotes about famous criminals who’d made up their own rules and lived by their own laws. Some locals admired those who could beat the system and make good money doing it, and a few old-timers regarded Capone as a hero. John Robinson heard these stories and absorbed them into his makeup, into his ideas about what was good and what was evil. He would not grow up to be a large boy or a strong one. He would not impress others with his physical prowess or good looks. As a youngster and later as an adult, he looked soft and round, friendly and harmless. If he was going to have power, he would have to find creative ways of getting it and using it. Al Capone had once said that you could go a lot further in life with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word. Robinson only absorbed half of this adage—he would use kind words and smiles throughout his life to get what he wanted, but guns were not part of his routine. He didn’t need them in his line of work.

He grew up with four siblings: an older brother, Henry Jr., whom he did not like at all; a younger brother, Donald, of whom he was quite fond; and two sisters, JoAnn and Mary Ellen. He was much closer to JoAnn than to Mary Ellen (this swinging back and forth between intense personal likes and dislikes would mark him for life). The Robinson family lived in a well-kept but modest home at 4916 West Thirty-second Street. They drew little attention to themselves, and decades later, after Robinson became infamous, nobody in the neighborhood could even recall the people who’d once lived at this address. John’s father, Henry, worked as a machinist for Western Electric. When sober, he was a steady presence in the family, hardworking and law-abiding, totally unlike the gangsters from Cicero’s colorful past. From time to time, according to Robinson’s prison records, the older man went on bad drinking binges that disrupted everything. Despite this, his middle son had warm memories of him.

John did not feel that way about his mother, Alberta, who held the family together and kept the kids in line. When one of them misbehaved, she meted out the discipline and punishment. Five decades later, Robinson’s wife would testify to her coldness to John. Alberta demanded that her children be clean and neat, and she pushed them to better themselves. John seemed to respond to this prodding and was the most promising and ambitious of all the Robinson kids, the most eager to break out of their constraining blue-collar environment.

By thirteen, he’d channeled some of that ambition into becoming an Eagle Scout and was a senior patrol leader of Boy Scout Troop 259, sponsored by the Holy Name Society of Mary Queen of Heaven Roman Catholic Church in Chicago. A picture from that time shows a round-faced boy in his well-pressed Scout uniform; he’s offering a cherubic smile to the camera and giving a patriotic three-fingered salute. He’d recently been accepted into downtown Chicago’s renowned Quigley Preparatory Seminary for boys who were interested in becoming priests. He’d already told a number of people that he would eventually go to work in service to the Vatican.

A few weeks after making Eagle Scout, Robinson and 120 other Boy Scouts traveled to London to give a royal command performance for the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II. Robinson, dressed in a bright red outfit, led all the others out onto the Palladium stage, becoming one of the first Americans to sing for Her Majesty and the youngest of his countrymen to appear at this acclaimed venue. The event made the front page of the
Chicago Tribune,
in an article headlined “Chicago Boy Scout Leads Troop to Sing for Queen.” His troop put on what they called “The Gang Show,” and after singing for the monarch, the boys gathered backstage to look at the celebrities who were also there to perform. When Judy Garland moved past him, Robinson boldly pursued her and caught up with the movie star, reaching out and shaking her hand.

“We Americans gotta stick together,” he told her.

“You’re right,” she said, laughing and kissing him on the cheek.

Another actress, the British singer Gracie Fields, hugged Robinson and told him, “You’re a mighty handsome youngster.”

The kid from Cicero loved the attention and being in the spotlight, but he soon returned to the seminary and quietly resumed his studies, still thinking of becoming a priest. He was a good student but not a great one. He wouldn’t be remembered there for his academic success but for his shrewdness: he always seemed to be thinking about what he would say or do next. He appeared to be calculating the effect he had on others and often acted as if he were smarter than everyone else. Yet he didn’t leave behind a negative image at the school. He graduated from Quigley at seventeen, not having distinguished himself at all.

Rumors had begun to surround Robinson suggesting that he was involved in a lot of things besides pursuing a religious education. Growing up in Cicero, he’d been exposed not only to stories of legendary gangsters but to people with ongoing connections to the Mob. He’d watched his father trudge off to the smokestacks at Western Electric each day and watched the older man labor tirelessly to support a family on a workingman’s wages. He’d watched his father seek escape from the grind in alcohol. By late adolescence Robinson knew that there were other, faster ways to turn a buck. His first exposure to crime came through meeting low-level underworld characters he did favors or legwork for, in exchange for money. By the close of his teenage years, his life had already become more complicated and entangled than it would have been on the narrow path toward the priesthood.

In 1961, he attended Cicero’s Morton Junior College, and in later years he would claim to have become a fully trained medical X-ray technician there. He would also brag about receiving more medical training at West Suburban Hospital in Oak Park, Illinois. With these limited credentials, he was able to land a job in the X-ray department of a Chicago hospital. His career was launched, but it was not a career in medicine.

In 1964, Robinson met an attractive young blonde named Nancy Jo Lynch and she was soon pregnant. They rushed into matrimony in a Catholic ceremony and he went back to work at the hospital. The young couple were starting a marital dance that would last through every imaginable kind of turmoil—and survive into the next millennium. From the beginning, they were locked together by mutual need, a need so deep that apparently nothing could break it. Robinson had avoided legal trouble, but almost as soon he got married, this changed. His living expenses were increasing and he was under pressure to take care of his wife and his about-to-arrive child. He didn’t respond to this by working harder or more hours. Before long, he was accused of stealing money from his employer.

Robinson’s marrying a pregnant woman had been an embarrassment to his family, but this was worse. The young man whose life had seemed so promising just a few years earlier, when he’d earned the title of Eagle Scout and sung for the queen of England, was on a downward spiral, but maybe he could learn from his mistakes and not repeat them. When confronted by his bosses with the suspicion that he’d embezzled from the hospital, he asked for their help, begged for another chance. If they would not tell the police about his transgressions, he would pay them back everything he’d taken. They agreed to this arrangement and he was not charged with a crime. What he’d learned from his mistakes was that he could get away with doing illegal things—even when he’d been caught doing them.

F
ollowing his troubles at the Chicago hospital, Robinson decided to restart his career in another location, a couple of states to the west. He and Nancy relocated to Kansas City, where the couple began raising a family that would eventually include four children: John Jr., Kimberly, and twins Christopher and Christine. By touting his medical training, Robinson found a job performing pediatric X-rays at Children’s Mercy Hospital and X-rays on adults at General Hospital, later known as Truman Medical Center. He’d shown his new employers letters of recommendation that he said came from Morton College and other documents stating that he was a medical lab technologist, a nuclear medical technologist, and a radiographic technologist. Robinson was quite good at talking about this kind of work and seemed knowledgeable. His colleagues thought he was outgoing and friendly, and initially many of them liked him—until they saw him perform his duties. He was clumsy with babies and pediatric patients. He spoke to infants as if they were grown-ups and handled them awkwardly. He could barely take an X ray or read the results, but still…this was the pediatric health care field and he was dealing with infants and small kids. This wasn’t the sort of work one would be doing unless one was trained and competent, wasn’t the sort of job that anyone told lies about. Maybe he was just nervous because this was a new job in a new hospital and a new city. Maybe his performance would improve with time and experience.

Neither Missouri nor Kansas required that X-ray technicians be licensed, so when Robinson had told his employers about his extensive medical training, they believed him. The American Registry of Radiologic Technologists, however, had no paperwork showing that he’d ever been certified in any of the areas he’d claimed to be. No records backed up his insistence that he’d received training at Chicago’s West Suburban Hospital. At Children’s Mercy Hospital, he’d covered the walls of his office with official-looking documents detailing his credentials (nobody at the facility realized that all of them had been forged from a boxful of blank certificates; whenever he needed a new degree or other qualification, he simply pulled one from the box and wrote on it whatever he wanted to). If no one had yet caught on to his scam, among his colleagues he was building a reputation as something of a wild man, a night owl who left his wife at home with their young son, John Jr., while he roamed the Kansas City nightclubs or tried to start up affairs with female coworkers. He seemed obsessed with human sexuality. He had a taste, people were saying, for one of the most notorious spots in K.C., the Jewel Box, a club that featured male transvestites. He was curious about the violent side of sex, a subject that was absolutely hushed up in the Midwest in the 1960s. That curiosity was not being satisfied inside his marriage, so he went looking outside of it. Between his glaring incompetence on the job and his extracurricular activities, his time at Children’s Mercy was running out. When management fired him, he began searching for another position in the medical field.

Robinson was soon hired as a lab technician and office manager at Fountain Plaza X-Ray, a thriving business owned by Dr. Wallace Graham, President Harry Truman’s personal physician. Dr. Graham, like many others, was quickly impressed with how Robinson presented himself, but the physician was an easy mark. President Truman himself had once warned Dr. Graham that while he was diligent and gifted in his work, he was naive about the darker side of human nature. In 1946, the president wrote a letter to Graham’s father, lauding the physician but adding that he “is entirely too accommodating…the young doctor will work himself to death if he lets all the chiselers take advantage of him.”

At his new job, Robinson once again tacked up a handful of medical certificates on his wall, proudly displaying them to all visitors. He also tried to seduce female patients in the X-ray lab and immediately saw an opportunity to exploit Dr. Graham. By late 1966, the office was losing so much money that it couldn’t afford to give its employees Christmas bonuses, but nobody could figure out where all the missing funds had gone. Reports were surfacing about Robinson’s bungling performance as a medical technician; one doctor complained that in his haste to complete a project, the young man had poured a urine sample down a sink. A few months later, a coworker alleged that Robinson was embezzling. He was not only using Dr. Graham’s signature stamp on checks, but after he’d x-rayed patients, he asked them to pay him cash on the spot instead of making out a check to the office. Some people complied. Robinson was nothing if not brazen—stories were circulating through the office that he’d made love to a couple of colleagues and had seduced a patient, engaging her sympathy by telling her that his wife was terminally ill.

Those running Fountain Plaza X-Ray estimated that over $100,000 and perhaps as much as $300,000 was missing from their business. Dr. Graham also noticed that Robinson had taken an office chair that did not belong to him. When confronted with these accusations, Robinson tried to talk his way out of them by saying that he hadn’t stolen anything but was only transferring money from one account to another. When that explanation failed, he offered to pay back all the funds he’d stolen. Dr. Graham would not hear of that and called in the Kansas police. Robinson was arrested and led away from the medical building in handcuffs. In August 1969, he was prosecuted and found guilty of “stealing by means of deceit,” but remarkably, he served no time, receiving a sentence of three years probation.

In most jurisdictions there is a significant gap between time served for physically harming a human being and the leniency shown to those who engage in monetary or white-collar crime. Robinson’s criminal career would underline this gap again and again. His first run-in with the law had resulted in little more than public shame and humiliation, but as he would repeatedly demonstrate in the years ahead, he could not be humiliated into changing his behavior. Each time he went to court, his wife, who now had two small children at home, would come to his aid. She would testify on his behalf as a character witness and praise his virtues as a husband and father. She would do whatever she could to bring him home. This pattern—of him committing offenses and her rallying to his side—would grow deeper and stranger in the years and decades ahead. It would stretch the definition of love far beyond what most people would consider the snapping point.

In some ways, Robinson worked in reverse from the many criminals who have trouble establishing long-standing human relationships. He stayed married and kept expanding his family and his traditional roles as father, husband, and provider, but domestic stability did not settle him down. It appeared to bring out his wildness and his desire to break the law and to generate money any way he could. The more conventional one part of his life became, the more he explored the darker side of himself and others. The more his wife tried to help him, the more he violated the codes of marriage. He seemed to need the stability of marriage in order to give free rein to his deviancy. Once he took on adult responsibilities, he began searching the landscape for vulnerabilities in people and in the places that employed him. He was now under pressure to support his wife and children, and like most people, he constantly needed more income. He was never interested in working steadfastly for others, in getting raises and promotions and in gradually moving ahead. All that took far too much time. Routines were boring and pay increases lay in the distant future. He was lazy and ambitious at the same time. He enjoyed looking for weaknesses and hunting for criminal opportunities, using his natural intelligence and cunning to observe things carefully and to find areas to exploit.

Getting caught stealing from Dr. Graham didn’t deter Robinson, but only made him more determined to get better at being a thief. On probation, he worked as the manager of a television rental company. When the owner learned that Robinson was lifting merchandise, he was fired but not arrested or prosecuted. He went back on the street looking for another chance—eager to convince someone new that he was something he was not.