Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [61]
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.z 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.