• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2169 0

’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 $25,000.2 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.3 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.4

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