Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (5 page)

Chapter 6

Johnny and Peggy moved across town in 1951, into a house in the same West Scranton neighborhood where both of them had grown up. Neither Arthur nor John wanted to enroll at St. Patrick’s High School. They had heard stories about the strictness of the nuns and priests there, and it was much smaller than the public schools that Arthur and John liked. But Johnny Walker didn’t care what his sons wanted. He had graduated from St. Patrick’s and felt the rigid discipline would be good for his boys. Peggy also liked the idea because she was turning more and more to the Church for solace, returning to the teachings that had sustained her parents.

The school was run with absolute authority. Answers were black and white; actions were good or evil. There was no room for gray, whether it was a question of school rules or Catholic dogma. Physical punishment, a crack on the knuckles with a ruler or a swat with a wooden paddle, came quickly and often. Students were required to say the rosary every day. A photograph of Pope Pius XII was displayed next to a picture of President Harry Truman in the principal’s office. The three-story brick school building looked more like a fortress than a school.

To John it became a prison.

He developed an intense distaste for organized religion, but while he shared his feelings with his brother, John was cagey enough to conceal them at school. Open confrontation with the priests and nuns would have been catastrophic. Instead, he resisted tacitly, doing as little homework as possible and showing no interest in any school function. He even refused to have his picture taken for the yearbook. He wanted no part of St. Patrick’s.

Meanwhile, Arthur thrived at the school. Academically, he had his ups and downs, but he excelled in sports, particularly football, scoring three touchdowns and averaging four yards per carry as a running back for the Paddies during his senior year. Arthur also was into basketball, baseball, and track, played the trumpet in the band, and was the hero in a senior class play. Just before graduation in 1952, his classmates named him the most popular student in the school.

John and Arthur had always depended upon one another – each filling in for the other’s weaknesses – but after the move to West Scranton they began to grow apart. The separation was partially because of girls. John wasn’t interested in them; Arthur was obsessed. Years later, Arthur would claim that he was a virgin when he married and was rarely unfaithful to his wife. Others, including John, would recall how Arthur had had a string of girlfriends and how he had, in fact, lost his virginity as a teenager when the family lived in Richmond. At St. Patrick’s in 1952, he met Rita Clare Fritsch, a prim and proper blonde pixie with large black-rimmed glasses and a pug nose. Rita fell in love with Arthur, but not with his family. She had heard from her mother that Johnny was a drunk. Rita also had trouble getting along with Peggy, who seemed jealous of her son’s new interest. The more serious Rita and Arthur became, the more time Arthur spent at the Fritsch home.

Arthur was not the only member of the Walker family spending less and less time at home. Johnny had quit his job at the Roosevelt and gone to work as a disc jockey at radio station WARM. The most popular radio deejays in Scranton were on the air in the afternoon and early evening. Being a newcomer, Johnny was stuck with the graveyard shift. But he didn’t mind the schedule because it gave him the opportunity to experiment with different formats. Within a few months, he had developed a show called
The Night Walker
. Johnny played soft music and read love poems over the Scranton airwaves. Sometimes he would whisper into the microphone as if he were confiding in an unseen lover. The show was an overnight sensation and Johnny was, once again, a celebrity, especially among women. The circuits overloaded whenever Johnny asked listeners to phone in and request “that special song for someone you love.” Soon he was earning $4 an hour, at a time when some workers in the Lackawanna Valley were earning that amount for a full day’s work.

For a while, Johnny’s success made family life much easier. The tranquility did not last, however. Trouble seemed to follow Johnny. Merchants began to complain that he was not paying his bills. There were shocked whispers that he had been seen around town with various women. Gossip escalated after a loud public argument between him and a bartender ended in Johnny’s being kicked out of a popular nightclub. Johnny and Peggy began fighting physically again. Some of the brawls were so violent the police were called in by neighbors.

When Arthur graduated from St. Patrick’s, Johnny took him aside and told him that he was going to college. Arthur didn’t want to go, but his father insisted. Perhaps he had failed his boys, but he wasn’t the first father to get mired in alcohol, and his problems didn’t mean that he didn’t want his sons to succeed. Arthur dutifully enrolled at the University of Scranton, but by the end of the first semester it was obvious that he was in over his head. Without telling his parents, he went downtown to see a Navy recruiter. He chose the Navy, he confided to me later, because he liked the uniform.

Johnny was furious when Arthur broke the news, but there was little he could do. Peggy was certain that Arthur would be killed. Arthur listened to them complain for nearly an hour, then went over to Rita’s. To Arthur’s irritation, it was nearly a year before he was called to active duty. Rita saw him off.

By the time that Arthur left, John, too, had found a means of escape from the family. He had used some of the money he had saved from working various jobs to buy a baby blue 1949 Ford for $590, a hefty sum in 1954. Johnny had hoped that his son would use the money for college tuition, but John showed even less interest in a college degree than Arthur had.

John loved his car, in the way that only teenage boys can. He washed and waxed it faithfully, shampooed its interior, and fidgeted with its engine. On May 27, 1955, John was sitting in a soda shop on Jackson Street with a boy nicknamed Smiley, who suggested that if John needed money for new tires, they could break into a gasoline station and either steal some money or tires for his car. John agreed, but the first station they broke into didn’t have anything worth stealing. The next few hits also turned up little. Frustrated, they decided to go after a bigger score – Cuozz & Gavigan’s, a men’s clothing store.

John and Smiley removed the cover from a ventilator and lowered themselves inside the rear of the building, but found the door into the main store barred. After several minutes, the two boys began climbing out of the store, only to be met by Patrolman William Shygelski, who had heard noises from the rear of the clothing store while walking his beat.

Shygelski ordered John and Smiley to stop, but neither did, and the foot patrolman drew his revolver and began firing at them. John ran to his car and sped away. Undeterred, Shygelski flagged down a passing car and gave chase. It never occurred to John that Shygelski might commandeer a car, so he assumed he was home free. Slowing down to avoid attention, he stopped at a red light at North Hyde Park and Jackson. Before the light turned green, Shygelski’s car sped up, and he jumped out, gun in hand.

“Stop! Police!” he yelled.

John jammed the gas pedal to the floor as Shygelski dropped to his knee and fired twice more. He had taken aim at the Ford’s gas tank, but his shots hit the bumper. Shygelski chased John at speeds up to eighty-five mph until John finally lost him.

A few days later, the police captured John on the basis of a tip from his mother. During several hours of questioning, John confessed to the attempted burglary and told about Smiley. The police called Johnny Walker to see if he wished to post his son’s bail. “No, he might learn something if you keep him in jail a few nights,” Johnny replied. John was taken to the Lackawanna County Jail and locked in a cell with adults. The next morning, Johnny Walker took Jimmy to see John.

“Now you take a good look at your brother,” Johnny told Jimmy. “See what happens to bad boys?”

John begged his father to post bail, but Johnny declined. John Walker, Jr., claimed years later that an adult in the jail attempted to rape him that night. The attack was stopped by others in the cell. “I hated my father so much that night,” John said. “He had left me there knowing something like that might happen.”

One week later, John appeared before Judge Otto P. Robinson. The Reverend John W. Casey, pastor of the Walkers’ church, spoke on John’s behalf. “John Walker,” he said, “is an exceptional student and, it is hard to say this under the circumstances, but in school he has been a fine student.”

Mother Vincent, principal of St. Patrick’s High School, was not quite as enthusiastic. John had missed fifteen out of 180 days of school, she reported. His conduct was “generally good” and his scholarship was “fair.”

The judge was unmoved by statements of the pastor and the principal. John and Smiley were sentenced to indefinite terms at the state correctional institution at Camp Hill.

“I can’t see anything in favor of either one of you. You are just two crooks,” Robinson said. But because this was the first time that either boy had been to court, Robinson suspended the sentences and put the boys on probation. “This is a chance for you fellows to go straight,” Robinson lectured. “Don’t make another mistake. You’ve got to be honest or you go to Camp Hill. Learn the Ten Commandments and obey them and you won’t be in further trouble.”

No one bothered to tell Arthur about John’s brush with the law. “I came home on leave on my birthday and when I found out, I took John outside and said, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ I could see that he was really getting screwed up because of the situation at home, my dad’s drinking and such, and I felt that the Navy was really taking care of me. I was already a petty officer and I really loved submarine duty, so I said, ‘John, you got to go into the Navy, man! You got to get out of this house.’ “

It took Arthur only thirty minutes to convince John. He marched his brother straight down to the recruiting office. “We walked in,” Arthur recalled, “and I was in my Navy blues and I said, ‘I got my brother here and he wants to join up,’ and this recruiter starts going crazy because he is so happy. Well, John went through the basic questions and when the recruiter came to the one about having committed any criminal acts.

John said that he had been arrested and the recruiter slowed down a bit, and then the recruiter says, ‘What did you do?’ and John tells him, and this guy flips out and says, ‘Sorry, we can’t take you unless you get the judge to lift your probation.’ So John and I walked across the street to the courthouse and went up and I found the judge and said, ‘Your Honor, my brother wants to join the Navy and I think it would really help him out.’ Well, we talked for a while and the judge agreed and called the recruiter, and the next thing you know, John is in the Navy. I went back to submarine duty and John went off to boot camp.”

Years later, I asked John about his troubled childhood. At first, he claimed that the only crimes that he committed were the failed burglaries that he and Smiley attempted. When I told him about Charles Bennett’s statements, John grudgingly acknowledged that he had been involved in some childish pranks, but considered them examples of “typical fifteen-year-old behavior.”

“I’m not saying that I didn’t do things that I shouldn’t have done,” he explained.

“Breaking into those places was wrong, but you got to remember that I didn’t have anything because my oId man was a drunk and that was really the big factor.

“Look, I bought the family car, not him. Talk about role reversal. He used to come to me to borrow the keys and then he never would bring it back when he promised, and when he did the back seat was filled with beer cans and whiskey bottles.

“The reason that I was breaking into a clothing store was not because I needed money, it was because I needed clothes. We didn’t have any money because my father drank it up. The same was true about glasses. One reason I did lousy in school was because I couldn’t see. I would borrow Chas Bennett’s glasses to look at the blackboard and write down the next assignment. We’d be standing on the street corner and he’d say, ‘Hey Jack, here comes a girl,’ and I’d say, ‘Quick, give me your glasses so I can see. Is she cute?’

“So I know what I did was wrong,” John concluded, “but I was just a kid and I didn’t want to ask my mother for money, and those burglaries, if you call them that, were the entire extent of my criminal career. That was it. I made a mistake and broke into those stores, but I was hardly a criminal. I don’t think most people would even call what I did a crime if they knew the facts. I was just a kid trying to support himself.”

Interviews with John’s teenage friends, as well as police and court records, give a rather different picture of John’s past. During questioning in June 1955 by Scranton detectives James Walsh and Leo Marcus, John confessed to six other burglaries besides the four that he and Smiley committed on May 27.

There is reason to believe John was involved in other crimes as well that until now have not been revealed. Three months before his arrest, on February 11, 1955, a teenage armed bandit held up a Scranton Transit Company bus at 11:25 P.M., escaping with $38 in cash. The gun-toting robber was never caught. John bragged about committing the robbery to his brother, Jimmy, and showed him a money changer that he took from the bus driver and the gun that he had used. John also showed up at Chas Bennett’s house the morning after the stickup.

“I asked him what was going on,” Bennett recalled, “and Jack said to me, ‘I robbed a bus last night. I put a mask on and I waited until it got to the end of the line and then I robbed everyone.’ “

Another person also knew that John was a thief.

“I used to come home on leave and find John peddling things,” Arthur Walker told me one afternoon during a reflective moment. “John would be selling things really cheap, like brand new Arrow shirts for one dollar, and whenever anyone asked him, he’d grin that grin of his and say they’d fallen off a truck. I knew, but I honestly thought the Navy would straighten him up.