Public Enemies (19 page)

In 1928 Nelson went to work at a Standard Oil station that was a hangout for neighborhood toughs. Two doors north was an auto-parts store run by a man named George Vande Houten, and Vande Houten’s twenty-eight-year-old son, Albert, began organizing the kids hanging around the station into roving crews of tire thieves known as “strippers.” Nelson joined up. He and his pals roamed the streets of Chicago, stealing tires they resold to the Vande Houtens and others. In this way Nelson met scores of crooks. One gave Nelson work as a driver hauling bootleg whiskey all across the Chicago suburbs and as far afield as Iowa. For the first time Nelson came to know the back roads and taverns of towns like Summit, Cicero, and Wheaton.
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It was during this period that Nelson took up weekend stock-car racing at tracks outside of Chicago. One of his mechanics, a Polish kid named Clarence Lieder, would be at his side in later years.

With a wife and children to support, Nelson began looking for ways to make more money. He fell in with a group of burglars, including a thief named Harry Lewis; together they conspired to move up in the world. The year 1930 was when Nelson went from petty thief to armed robber. He has long been credited with two jewelry robberies and two bank jobs in 1930; FBI files indicate these incidents amounted to but a fraction of the crimes he committed in a yearlong rampage.
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It began at a brick mansion on Lake Shore Drive early on the evening of January 6, a month after Nelson’s twenty-first birthday. Five men, led by Nelson, pushed their way into the home of a magazine executive named Charles M. Richter, then rounded up and used adhesive tape to bind Richter’s family. After cutting phone lines, they ransacked all twenty-two rooms of the house, returning downstairs with jewelry valued at about $25,000.
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Two weeks later Nelson’s gang struck again, posing as decorators to gain entrance to the suburban home of an attorney. After binding two maids with adhesive tape, the gang made off with $5,000 in jewelry.
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A Chicago newspaper christened them “the tape bandits.”

Two months later Nelson’s gang served as guest stars in a soap opera that Chicago society had been following for months. Their victim, Lottie Brenner Von Beulow, was the widow of a wealthy manufacturer who had married a mysterious German count during a Mexican vacation. When the count turned out to be an imposter, Mrs. Brenner filed for divorce. The case was heading for trial on the evening of March 31 when Nelson and two partners, posing as census takers, appeared at the front door of Mrs. Brenner’s brick mansion at 5539 Sheridan Road. Buzzed upstairs, they pulled pistols and swiftly bound and gagged Mrs. Brenner, her sister, and four servants. They searched Mrs. Brenner’s bedroom and found $50,000 in jewelry. But before the gang could flee, their work was interrupted by the arrival of “Count” Von Beulow, who also was bound, gagged, and robbed; added to their take were $95 and two watches.
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The Nelson gang’s crimes grew steadily more ambitious. On April 21, Nelson robbed his first bank, making off with $4,000. Then on May 16, a Chicago jeweler named Walter Lynne Akers returned to his suburban Danville home to find four men with pistols waiting inside. Addressing Mr. and Mrs. Akers by their first names, gang members threw a blanket over his wife and two-year-old son. “I guess you know what we are here for,” one told Akers. “We have come for the keys to the store and the combination to the safe, and if we get them without trouble none of you will be harmed.” Akers turned over the information, and two of the robbers left for the store, the other two guarding the family. After the robbers ransacked the store, stealing jewelry valued at $25,000, they returned to the Akers home and forced the family into its car.

On the drive into Chicago, the gang’s leader, apparently Nelson, noticed that the infant was shivering. “We wouldn’t hurt that kid for the world,” Nelson said. “I’ve got two of my own.” The gang unloaded the Akers family on Mannheim Road and drove away, telling Akers, “Well, Lynne, we hate to impose on you this way, but this is as far as we can take you.” The family returned home without incident.

The first signs of trouble came after one of Nelson’s partner’s girlfriends was arrested and told police about his little gang’s exploits. Arrest warrants were issued, forcing Nelson to adopt the alias “George Nelson” more or less full-time. The warrants didn’t stop him from working, however. On October 3, Nelson led the robbery of the Itasca State Bank outside of Chicago; the gang made off with almost $4,600. Afterward a teller identified Nelson.

Three nights later, Nelson pulled off his most brazen robbery to date, the sidewalk mugging of the wife of Chicago’s mayor, William “Big Bill” Thompson. On the evening of October 6, Mary Walker Thompson was returning to her Sheridan Road apartment building from an evening at the theater when two men accosted her on the sidewalk, thrusting pistols against her chest and side; a third robber slugged her bodyguard and put a gun to his stomach.

(The origin of Nelson’s nickname, “Baby Face,” has never been confirmed, but it almost certainly arose from Mrs. Thompson’s description of the young robber who poked his gun to her chest and snapped, “Throw ’em up!” According to an October 8, 1930, article in the
Chicago Herald,
Mrs. Thompson said of her attacker: “He had a baby face. He was good looking, hardly more than a boy, had dark hair and was wearing a gray topcoat and a brown felt hat, turned down brim.”
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)

Nelson shoved Mrs. Thompson into the lobby and demanded she hand over a six-carat blue-diamond ring, a bracelet lined with 40 diamonds, and a brooch set with 140 small stones; the three pieces were later valued at $18,000. When Nelson ran for their car, Mrs. Thompson fainted.

 

 

Not until years later would FBI agents, after debriefing Nelson’s former partners, link him to a pair of bloody unsolved crimes in late November 1930. According to Stanton J. Randall, a member of the Nelson gang interviewed by the FBI in 1934, Nelson was the leader of a group of eight men who entered a roadhouse on Archer Avenue in suburban Summit in the early-morning hours of Sunday, November 23. Mary Brining, a twenty-two-year-old University of Illinois student, was singing “The Kiss Waltz” to a roomful of dancers in a smoky back room when the men burst in the front door, shotguns and pistols drawn. The gang’s leader, later described by newspapers as an “unmasked youth of about 18”—presumably Nelson—pushed the bartender and another man into the back room, where Nelson stood in the middle of the dance floor shouting, “Everyone up! Face the walls!”

As his men began to rob the patrons, Nelson shoved the tavern’s owner against a wall. Nelson then yelled for a gang member to turn up the lights, but in the confusion the gang member apparently hit the wrong switch: the room went completely dark. Just then, the owner’s dog, a Great Dane, attacked Nelson, biting him in the leg. Nelson fired at the dog. Other gang members panicked and began firing wildly in the darkness. A railroad detective named James Mikus emerged from the bathroom and began firing at the robbers.

Chaos ensued. In less than a minute three young women were dead or dying, including the singer, Mary Brining; three others were badly wounded. “Let’s get outta here!” Nelson shouted, and the gang ran out the front door. Mikus, though wounded, limped to his car and gave chase, but lost Nelson’s gang in traffic.

Three nights later Nelson’s gang burst into a tavern on Waukegan Road in the northern suburbs. Only three men were in the bar: the owner, Frank Engel; a waiter; and one of Engel’s friends, a twenty-seven-year-old stockbroker from a prominent North Shore family named Edwin R. Thompson, who had stopped by for a late dinner after visiting his sick wife in the hospital. When Nelson ordered the trio to raise their hands, Thompson made the mistake of smiling nervously. “Don’t smile, you!” Nelson snarled, then raised his shotgun and fired a single blast into Thompson’s chest. Thompson fell dead. “Guess we ain’t tough, eh?” Nelson said as he stood over Thompson’s body. He turned to Engel, who stood, stunned. “Now open that safe!” Nelson shouted. Engel did as he was told, handing Nelson the $125 inside. “Come on, let’s go!” Nelson shouted, and it was over.

 

 

Police finally arrested most of the gang in February 1931. Nelson was arrested at an apartment in Cicero. In the single article the
Chicago Tribune
devoted to his arrest, he was identified as George “Baby Face” Nelson, the first time his new nickname made it into print.
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Convicted of one robbery, Nelson drew a sentence of one year to life in the state prison at Joliet.

In February 1932, Nelson was taken in handcuffs to the town of Wheaton, just west of Chicago, where in a quick trial he drew a second sentence of one year to life. Late on a Wednesday afternoon, February 17, a prison guard named R. N. Martin led Nelson to the train back to Chicago. Reaching Chicago an hour later, they transferred to the southbound train. At Joliet, Martin pushed Nelson into a yellow cab for the short ride to the prison. Just as the cab approached the prison on Collins Street, Nelson produced a pistol; apparently someone had slipped it to him on the train. “If you move I will kill you,” he told Martin. “Now unlock the handcuffs.”

Nelson put the pistol against the cab driver’s temple and said, “You continue on to Chicago and do exactly as I tell you.” In the suburb of Summit, Nelson ordered the driver to pull to the side of the road beside a cemetery. He forced Martin and the driver out of the car and took Martin’s wallet.
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Nelson knew he could no longer remain in Chicago. He reached out to old friends in Roger Touhy’s gang, which is how he found himself several weeks later on a train to Reno, Nevada, holding in his pocket the phone number of a man the Touhys had said could take care of him: William Graham, the gambler who, with his partner, James McKay, all but controlled the city of Reno.

Nelson stepped off the train in Reno in March 1932. Using the alias “Jimmy Johnson,” he phoned Graham and told him who he was. After several weeks Graham sent Nelson on to San Francisco, where he arranged for him to work for a Sausalito bootlegger. Nelson worked as a guard on liquor shipments for six months. He and other men would meet ships in secluded coves in Marin County, watch as the crates were unloaded, then ride the trucks into San Francisco. On these missions he made two friends, a handsome simpleton named Johnny Chase and a roly-poly Italian named Joseph “Fatso” Negri. At the height of Nelson’s notoriety in 1934, the two men would be his most trusted associates.

In the fall of 1932 Nelson left the Bay Area. According to Negri, his departure came after Negri saw Nelson’s photograph in a detective magazine. Nelson fled back to Reno, where he sought refuge with Bill Graham. Graham hired Nelson as his driver. It was in Reno that winter that Nelson met the vacationing Alvin Karpis. Karpis told Nelson vivid stories of the Barker Gang’s yearlong bank-robbing spree across the Upper Midwest and volunteered to introduce him to the right people if he returned east. Nelson slipped back into Chicago that spring, taking a room at the Inland Hotel in East Chicago in May. As fate would have it, it was the same hotel John Dillinger frequented that summer; the two future partners had several mutual acquaintances and may have met, though there is no confirmation of this. Nelson began hanging out with Karpis at Louis Cernocky’s Crystal Room in the northwest suburb of Fox River Grove, hoping the gang would invite him on a robbery.

But Karpis, after hearing of Nelson’s temper from friends in Reno, had second thoughts. Instead of asking him to join the Barker Gang, Karpis introduced him to Ed Bentz, the Jazz Age yegg, who agreed to teach Nelson the ins and outs of robbing banks.
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A few days later, Nelson, along with his wife and his mother, Mary, moved into a bungalow next to Bentz’s on the Indiana lakeshore, just across the road from Karpis’s stucco mansionette. As Bentz recalled twenty years later, he and Nelson walked into the dunes to talk. “I know you’re hooked up with the best troupe in the country and that it’s impossible for an outsider to get in,” Nelson said. “I’m not asking you to try and get me in the troupe. What I want is some experience.”

“In what line?” Bentz asked, teasing.

Nelson laughed. “You know damn well—in your line, of course.”

“You mean bank—”

“Absolutely,” Nelson said.

“You can’t do that alone,” Bentz said. “You have to organize a troupe first. You have to buy equipment, a car and what not. It would take at least three thousand for you to start properly.”

“Supposing we left out the car. I can get that in Chicago. How much for equipment?”

“You shouldn’t try to rob a bank with a stolen car,” Bentz said. “You should buy it like any businessman would. But that’s your business. You can use a hot car but it increases the danger.”

“I know that,” Nelson said, “but I’ll take my chances.”

“All right, then about a thousand will do for your other essentials. But your troupe—where are you gonna recruit them?”

Nelson mentioned he had friends in St. Paul. “How about ‘gits’?” Bentz asked, mentioning yeggman slang for a getaway map. “Can any one of you run a safe git?”

“No, none of us know a darn thing about roads.”

Bentz sighed. “Here you are proposing to go out with a four-man inexperienced troupe, to rob a bank, and none of you know the operation. It just isn’t done—unless you want to get killed.”

“Wait a minute,” Nelson said. “I was just telling how I stood. I want your help. I figured that you could help us get started. Get us a mark, plan the getaway and select what equipment we’d need. I don’t mean for you to go on the actual robbery—just line it up for us. We’ll give you an even split.”

Bentz agreed.

With a target selected, on June 8 Nelson drove to St. Paul, where he recruited three yeggs to join his new gang. When one was late arriving on the Indiana lakeshore, Bentz suggested he be replaced with two parolees from the Michigan City prison he had met at an underworld hangout in Indiana Harbor.
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“They’re as bad as you fellows,” Bentz said with a grin. “No experience.”