Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [57]
5
THE KID JIMMY
August 18 to September 25, 1933
The house Alvin Karpis rented for the summer lay on a secluded thread of dirt road that snaked along the southern shore of Lake Michigan east of Michigan City, Indiana. In the woods behind the dunes lay scores of bungalows, many the summer homes of wealthy Chicagoans. Karpis rented his from a Cicero politician connected to the Syndicate. Located on a rise above the lake, the house was a striking Spanish mansionette, with white stucco walls and a red-tile roof. The sunken dining room featured a brass chandelier and a Steinway piano.x
Most days Karpis and his teenage girlfriend Delores Delaney lazed on the beach or barbecued with friends, chief among them the old yegg Ed Bentz, who had parted with Machine Gun Kelly before the Urschel kidnapping. For amusement they watched Bentz teach the fine art of robbing banks to another neighbor, a small, blond twenty-four-year-old from the rough Polish neighborhoods around Chicago’s Humboldt park. It was the same kid who until that spring had been a gangland chauffeur in Reno, and whom Karpis had introduced around St. Paul. Everyone called him Jimmy—Jimmy Burnell, Jimmy Burke, Jimmy Williams, whatever alias he was using at the time. His real name was Lester Joseph Gillis.
History would know him as Baby Face Nelson.
Seven decades after he entered American public life, Baby Face Nelson remains the least known of the Great Crime Wave’s major figures. Overshadowed by Dillinger, his eventual partner, Nelson and his background were long cloaked in mystery; for years what little information detective magazines gathered was riddled with myths and half-truths. Writing in 1963 John Toland introduced Nelson simply as “a young man the [Dillinger] gang . . . met in an underworld tavern.”
In fact, by the time he joined forces with Dillinger in 1934, Nelson was an up-and-coming gang leader in his own right, his exploits notable for both their geographic diversity—he was equally at home in San Francisco, Reno, and Chicago—and their gratuitous violence. He was a figure of contradiction: a family man who traveled with his wife and sometimes their two small children, he was to earn—and wholeheartedly deserve—a reputation as the most violent of the Depression-era outlaws, a manic multiple murderer who drew disdain even as Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd attained the status of folk heroes. At his worst, Nelson was a caricature of the public enemy, a callous, wild-eyed machine-gunner who actually laughed as he sprayed bullets toward women and children in at least two of his robberies. Nelson’s behavior was so clichéd that it was as if he were acting out scenes from a gangster movie, perhaps Jimmy Cagney’s 1931 hit Public Enemy.
Gillis, or Nelson as he will be referred to hereinafter, was tiny, just over five-feet-four, which begins to explain the boulder-size chip on his shoulder. He was born on December 6, 1908, the seventh and last child of Belgian immigrants, Joseph and Mary Gillis. His father, described as a brooding man who drank heavily, worked in a tannery. The Gillises were upstanding people, with no history of problems with the law. The high hopes they had for their blond little boy would be dashed again and again. From an early age, Nelson was headstrong and insecure, the kind of boy who picked fights with teenagers a head taller. By the time he was eleven he was running with a gang of teenage toughs, leaping over soda counters to yank money from cash registers and stealing cars. Among his friends was a kid named Jack Perkins, who would be at his side in 1934. In time, Nelson’s truancy became so chronic he landed at a school for wayward boys.
On July 4, 1921, when Nelson was twelve, he found a pistol in the