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car of a friend’s father. Thinking he might scare some children playing in an alley, Nelson fired the gun over their heads. A ricochet lodged in one boy’s jaw. The police arrested Nelson. It was his first encounter with the law; it also began his obsession with guns. Even at the height of his pursuit by the FBI, Nelson rarely missed an issue of Field & Stream, with its articles on the latest weaponry. A juvenile court, ignoring Nelson’s pleas that the shooting was an accident, sentenced him to twelve to fifteen months in a state reformatory.

He served a year. Back at home, Nelson was free to pursue his second obsession—automobiles. As an adult, Nelson was a car nut; between robberies, he could often be found hanging around a garage, talking with mechanics. As a thirteen-year-old the only way he could drive was to steal a car, and he did—often. The police arrested him again, and this time, in October 1922, he was packed off to the Illinois State School for Boys in St. Charles. Eighteen months later he was paroled. This time he managed to remain free five months. Caught in a stolen car, he was sent back to St. Charles in September 1924.

By the time Nelson was paroled the following summer, his father was dead. Joseph Gillis had quit his job to buy a restaurant that was now failing, and he had grown despondent. He was found dead, his head beside a kitchen gas jet. Low on money, Mary Gillis was forced to take in boarders, and Nelson tried to help out, taking a job as a mechanic at a Chrysler dealership. Three months later the cops caught him in another stolen car. Back to the reformatory he went. Nine months later he earned a parole, and went back to work at the dealership.

In early 1927 he was laid off. Nelson was eighteen now, a skinny blond brimming with nervous energy. He joined a couple of pals stealing tires, until police caught them one night inside a car dealership. He got off with a year’s probation and managed to wangle a job in the garage at Commonwealth Edison. It was while working at Commonwealth Edison that Nelson fell in love. Her name was Helen Wawrzyniak, a surname her family Anglicized to Warwick. She was a neighborhood girl, a mousy fifteen-year-old who worked after school as a clerk in the toy department at Goldblatt’s on Western Avenue. When she got pregnant, they married, signing papers at the Porter County Courthouse in Valparaiso, Indiana, on October 30, 1928. The following April Helen gave birth to a son they named Ronald, who was followed two years later by a daughter, Darlene. The family moved in with Nelson’s mother.

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.y 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.1

It began at a brick mansion on Lake Shore Drive early on the evening of January 6, a month after Nelson