Infamous America - BABY FACE NELSON Ep. 4 | “The Dillinger Connection”

Episode Date: January 3, 2024

After the messy Grand Haven job, Baby Face Nelson looks for a new crew. It’s the fall of 1933 and newspaper headlines are dominated by the most infamous criminals of the era: Bonnie and Clyde, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Alvin “Creepy” Karpis and the Barker Family, John Dillinger, and Baby Face Nelson. Dillinger stages an improbable escape from a jail in Crown Point, Indiana, and then teams with Nelson for the first of two rip-roaring robberies. Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial. On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons. Hit “JOIN” on the Infamous America YouTube homepage.  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm4V_wVD7N1gEB045t7-V0w/featured For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. To purchase an ad on this show please reach out: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the winter of 1932, the young man born Lester Gillis escaped his guard while being transferred back to state prison in Illinois. He had just received his second sentence of one year to life for one of the bank robberies he had led during a successful crime spree the previous year. Known in Chicago's underworld as Jimmy and known to others as George Nelson, the 23-year-old had eluded capture and headed west. In Reno, Nevada, and the San Francisco area, the crafty, loyal, notoriously quick-tempered outlaw had worked as a private chauffeur to the gambling czar of Reno and as a driver for one of the biggest bootleggers on the West Coast. Though short in stature, the man whom history would remember as baby-faced

Nelson had been a good lieutenant to both men. But it was clear to anyone who crossed Nelson's path that he wanted more. When his restlessness got the best of him, he headed back to the Midwest. In St. Paul, Minnesota, he aimed to form his own gang and make a name for himself as a bank robber. Under the tutelage of the notorious outlaw Alvin Carpus, Nelson filled the ranks of his gang. Carpus, who had pulled off dozens of successful robberies with his partners, the Barker family, connected Nelson to the illustrious Eddie Bens. Benz was an oddball in the criminal underworld. He was an intellectual with a fondness for first editions of Robert Lewis Stevenson's books and rare coins.

He was known to meticulously plan his heists. Benz thoroughly scouted his banks. He profiled bank employees and knew the ins and outs of the small town politics where the banks were located. He mapped multiple escape routes and had contingencies for everything. Nelson's fearlessness and Benson's attention to detail seemed like a great combination for a bank robbery team. But as they were about to learn, a plan might look good on paper, but its execution was another story. When Nelson, Benz, and four others tried to knock over the People's Savings Bank of Grand Haven, Michigan, in August of 1933, the well-laid plan had gone south fast. A bank employee had tripped the silent alarm, and both law enforcement and armed locals had begun to surround the bank.

The crew of robbers had grabbed more than $100,000 in cash and bonds. They had plenty of firepower and were using the employees and customers as human shields. But as the robbers pushed the hostages toward the backdoor of the bank, they soon discovered the one thing they didn't have anymore, their getaway car. The wheelman, Freddie Monaghan, had ditched them all at the first sign of trouble. The robbers would not allow themselves to be caught, which meant there was about to be a lot more shooting than Eddie Bence with his perfectly detailed plan had hoped for.

From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. In this season, we're telling the story of Lester Gillis, better known as Babyface Nelson, one of the wildest and most intriguing gangsters of the Depression era. This is episode four, the Dillinger Connection. Veteran bank robber Eddie Bence was 39 years old the afternoon he walked into the People's Savings Bank of Grand Haven, Michigan. In his 20-plus years robbing banks, Benz had done jobs from eastern Texas to eastern Washington,

with the likes of the now infamous George Machine Gun Kelly. Some believed Benz was part of the crew that knocked over the Lincoln National Bank and Trust Company in Nebraska's capital city. That heist had netted a mind-boggling $2.7 million in cash and securities. Some historians believe Bents had orchestrated and participated in nearly 150 jobs without being caught. With that many successful heists under his belt, Eddie Bence thought he had seen it all, but he was wrong.

In all the heists he had ever pulled, he had never had to deal with being abandoned by his getaway driver. The five robbers in the bank had herded eight civilians toward the rear entrance. Nelson yelled at Bence about their next move. The police hadn't arrived, but the townsfolk were mobilizing. Bence stated the obvious. They needed a car. He then reminded the crew that they did not have their maps with his carefully marked escape options. The maps were in the getaway car.

Benz also reminded them, especially Nelson, who was holding their only machine gun, that all of their extra ammunition was also in the car. Right then, any hope Benz had to avoid gunplay vanished. When Arthur Welling, a cashier, had triggered the silent alarm by pressing a button under his workstation with the toe of his shoe, the alarm had sounded at the police station, but it also sounded at the furniture store next to the bank. The store owner had grabbed a shotgun

and positioned himself behind a parked car across from the bank. A 21-year-old assistant manager at a nearby store had grabbed a revolver and hunkered down next to the store owner. The robbers started to exit the bank with their hostages, and the store owner and the assistant manager opened fire. They fired over the heads of the terrified hostages, and their opening salvo heightened the robber's confusion. The robbers moved for cover in different directions, some still clutching their human shields. Nelson fired back. The rounds from his machine gun scared the two men into retreating

from their station behind the parked car. Nelson and Benz moved south down Franklin Street intending to stop the first car they found. Fellow robbers Gannon and Fisher were close behind. The remaining robber, Earl Doyle, got separated.

He became disoriented in the clouds of gun, smoke, and dust, and he ran in the opposite direction. Just then, the first officers of the Grand Haven Police Department showed up. They leapt from their cars with revolvers and shotguns and exchanged fire with Nelson. Nelson, Benz, Gannon, and Fisher

made it around the corner of the bank to a position they could defend. Nelson kept firing at the officers while the other men stopped a car. They pulled two women and their children out of the car and began to load everyone else in. It was then that they realized they only had one of their two bags of money, and they were missing one of their crew.

Doyle had realized his mistake and tried to backtrack to the rest of the gang. In the process, he received a scary wound. An officer opened fire with a shotgun, and some of the buckshot tore across Doyle's forehead. He was alive, but disoriented and staggering. Ted Bolt, the bank's head cashier and one of the hostages, had broken away and ducked behind a a parked car when the shooting started. When Doyle stumbled past Bolt, Bolt jumped on Doyle. As the two men struggled for Doyle's pistol, it went off. The bullet hit Doyle's hand. He fell back onto the curb and broke his leg. Nelson hated leaving Doyle behind, but Benz convinced him they had no choice. Nelson, Benson, Benz, Fisher, and Gannon raced out of Grand Haven and headed

south toward the Michigan state line. They swapped their getaway car two more times that night, leaving unsuspecting people stranded on back roads. Grand Haven Police, state troopers, and even sailors from a nearby Coast Guard base quickly mobilized to track the robbers. But the gang eluded them and crossed into Indiana in the middle of the night. The four robbers huddled in Eddie Bence's cottage on the banks of Lake Michigan in the early morning hours of August 19th and counted their money. After all that, each man walked away with barely $600. The failed job drove Eddie Bentz into semi-retirement. Earl Doyle survived his wounds and ended up getting life in prison. The harsh sentence had a great deal to do with the fact that Doyle refused to cooperate

and name his accomplices. Nelson made sure Doyle's wife, Hazel, received Doyle's cut from the Heist, and Nelson's family welcomed Hazel into their home. Nelson felt responsible for the job's failure. It had been his idea to let Freddie Monaghan drive the getaway car. Eddie Bentz later recalled that Nelson claimed to have stalked and killed Monaghan. There's no evidence to corroborate the killing, but at the same time, no one ever heard from Freddie Monaghan again. The relative failure of the Grand Haven job, and the abrupt end to his short-lived partnership with Eddie Bentz, had not discouraged Nelson in the slightest. It actually emboldened him. Nelson spent the autumn of 1933, bouncing up and down the western shore of Lake Michigan, recruiting a new and hopefully

improved team. One of Nelson's favorite haunts was a club known as the Crystal Ballroom. It had a motel next door, and Nelson and his wife Helen often stayed at the lodgings and enjoyed the nightlife of the club. The businesses were owned and operated by Louis Sarnaki and his family. Sernaki had made a name and a fortune by catering to the criminal element traveling between St. Paul, Minnesota and Chicago, Illinois. During this time, Nelson befriended crooks named Homer Van Meter and Tommy Carroll. Van Meter was an experienced bank robber who had done time with John Dillinger, a criminal who was on the verge of becoming an icon. Nelson had met Carol through Alvin Carpus. Nelson also recruited John Paul Chase, one of the men he had worked with

in the California bootlegging business. The group could often be found together at the Crystal Ballroom. Nelson was encouraged by the group's chemistry and was anxious to try another heist. Many who knew Nelson at the time would say the headlines of the summer of 1933 had only fueled Nelson's ambitions. The heyday of the Depression-era outlaw may not have lasted long, but in the summer of 33, it hit full stride, and newspapers couldn't get enough. The action began in early spring. Two young lovers named Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker had been running amok and robbing banks, mostly in Texas, since Barrow had been paroled. the previous year. In April of 1933, they grabbed big headlines when one of their jobs led to a shootout that left a detective and a constable dead in Joplin, Missouri. Less than six weeks later,

Harvey Bailey, known as the Dean of American Bank Robbers, led a 10-man prison break from the state penitentiary in Lansing, Kansas. Rumors had long lingered that Bailey was a trigger man at the St. Valentine's Day massacre, the bloody execution of members of Chicago's North Side Gang in 1929 during Al Capone's attempt to control the city. The antics of George Machine Gun Kelly, a one-time associate of Nelson's former partner Eddie Bentz, also made front-page headlines across the country. Kelly led the kidnapping of Charles Ershall. Erchell, a wealthy oil man, was pulled from his Oklahoma City home and and held for a $200,000 ransom. And then George Babyface Nelson and his new outfit added to the action when they knocked

over a bank in Brainerd, Minnesota in the fall of 1933. That job went much better than the Grand Haven job. The whole crew got out in one piece, and the hall was more than $32,000. Although Nelson and new gang member Homer Van Meeter shot up the town with Tommy guns as they made their escape, no bystanders were injured or killed. But no event dominated headlines of national newspapers, captivated readers, and shocked law enforcement more than the shootout in Kansas City, Missouri on June 17, 1933. Federal agents were transporting a bank robber named Frank Nash from his hideout in Hot Springs, Arkansas to the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas.

The group was ambushed by gunmen in the parking lot of a train station in Kansas City. Nash was killed. Three local police officers were killed, and one FBI agent was killed. The brazen daylight assassination became known as the Union Station Massacre, or the Kansas City Massacre. The FBI's top suspect was Charles Pretty Boy Floyd, and it was one of the critical events that propelled Floyd to become the FBI's public enemy number one, right after John Dillinger and right before Babyface Nelson. Babyface Nelson knew all about John Dillinger. Dillinger's exploits had transformed the outlaw into nothing

less than a matinee idol with a Tommy gun. He was described as debonair and suave. Newsmen stressed that he was handsome, well-dressed, and well-mannered. Many who knew both outlaws would later claimed that Nelson was a little jealous of Dillinger's fame. But Nelson also respected Dillinger as a bank robber who had earned his top billing. Where they first met is unclear, but the introduction was almost certainly provided by Nelson gang member Homer Van Meter. Van Meter had done time in an Indiana prison with Dillinger 10 years earlier. He had witnessed firsthand as Dillinger became the hardened criminal whose career terrorized law enforcement. In the summer of 1933, the first Dillinger gang, as it would later be known,

pulled off a series of successful heists before several of their members were captured. A couple months later, some of Dillinger's loyal gang members staged a daring and creative escape that broke Dillinger out of prison but left a sheriff dead in the process. Reunited, the first Dillinger gang went back to, work in October 1933. They hit a bank in Greencastle, Indiana, on the same day that Nelson's gang hit the bank in Brainerd, Minnesota. Dillinger's crew hit several more banks. But in mid-January 1934, a heist in East Chicago, Indiana went bust. Dillinger gang member John Red Hamilton was severely wounded, and Dillinger himself killed a police officer. The first Dillinger

gang scattered. Dillinger and his girlfriend, Billy Frischett, headed to Arizona to relax and recharge. But Dillinger became a victim of his fame. He was recognized, taken into custody, and shipped back to Indiana to stand trial for the murder of the officer in East Chicago. Via his girlfriend, Dillinger sent word to his criminal connections that he needed help to get out of the Crown Point Jail, and he didn't mean the help of more lawyers. The word, reached Babyface Nelson, probably through Red Hamilton or Homer Van Meter. Accounts from the time described the relationship as one of mutual need. Nelson wanted the experience and manpower Dillinger could provide, and Dillinger just wanted out of jail.

A plan was formed. Dillinger's lawyer, Louis Piquette, has long been suspected as the organizer. But like everything about the now legendary event to come, the details of exactly who did what and how are hazy and will probably never be known. It's believed that Nelson helped bribe some guards, and someone smuggled a pistol into the jail and into Dillinger's hands. On March 3, 1944, Dillinger and fellow inmate Herbert Youngblood overtook a janitor and a prison guard and began the escape. They made their way out of the jail and into a garage that separated the jailhouse from the courthouse where Dillinger was set to. to be tried. They stole a car that belonged to the county sheriff and hurried toward Chicago.

Dillinger picked up his girlfriend, Billy Frischett, and continued north to St. Paul, Minnesota, to meet Babyface Nelson. The outlaws talked about targets that Nelson had been scoping out. One was in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and the other was in Mason City, Iowa. But as much as the meeting was to discuss personnel, firepower, and escape routes, it was also a meeting that was a meeting, for the two men to put faces and personalities to reputation. Accounts say Dillinger felt he owed Nelson, at least to some extent, for helping with the Crown Point escape. It also appears that Dillinger was unaware or unconcerned with Nelson's reputation as a

wild man who was quick to the trigger. Whatever exactly happened, it's clear that the new gang believed they could work together, and they wasted no time. Three days after the Crown Point escape, Dillinger, Nelson, and Company walked into the first of Nelson's two targets. Legend has it, when John Dillinger was asked how long it took him to Ramba Bank, he'd answer, about a minute 40. But behind Dillinger's boastfulness was the knowledge that when he led a gang, the crew was well researched, well prepared, and good under pressure. But the crew of six men who pulled up to the Security National Bank and Trust Company, of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on March 6, 1934, wasn't John Dillinger's crew. It was Babyface Nelson's.

To his credit, Nelson had learned a few things since his failure in Grand Haven with Eddie Bentz. This time, he had two men outside the bank for crowd control and to help clear a path when it was time to leave. One of them was Tommy Carroll, and the other was most likely Red Hamilton. The men were known commodities to both Nelson and Dillinger. Neither man would turn tail and run like Wheelman Freddie Monaghan had done in Grand Haven. While Carroll and Hamilton patrolled the street, the rest of the crew strolled into the bank wearing long coats and fedora hats. Nelson's adrenaline got the best of him.

He yanked out his machine gun from beneath his trench coat and immediately began yelling that they were robbing the bank and everyone who didn't want a bullet better get face down on the floor. Nelson only got more excited when the alarm sounded. He began shoving the barrel of his weapon into the faces of the bank employees and demanding to know who had tripped it. Dillinger kept his cool. He used the bank manager to open the vault without incident.

He and Homer Van Meter began to load stacks of bills into bags. Outside the bank, three officers, including the, the police chief had already arrived. But almost immediately, they met Tommy Carroll and his machine gun. Carol moved them away from the bank entrance. They watched the robbery with their hands in the air. Another officer, Hale Keith, pulled up and got off his motorcycle. He saw Carol and his subdued fellow officers.

But before he could do anything to help them, Keith was spotted by Nelson from inside the bank. When Nelson saw Keith outside, Nelson stopped screaming about the alarm and leapt up on a desk. He trained his machine gun on the bank's window and on Keith on the other side of it. Nelson fired a barrage through the glass and the customers and the employees in the bank screamed in terror. Hail Keith slumped to the pavement and Nelson shouted, I got one, I got one. Dillinger and Van Meter emerged from the vault.

As the four men made their way to the entrance, they forced a group of bank employees to go with them. The gang and the employees crossed the street to the getaway car. As Nelson moved, he stopped in the middle of the street and let loose a volley from his machine gun, shattering what was left at the bank's front windows. The six men piled into the car and forced the bank employees to ride on the car's running boards.

Before they could make it out of town, a single rifle shot tore through the hood and struck the engine. Steam whistled from the front of the car, but they were able to drive it out of town with local law enforcement trailing at a safe distance. A few miles out of town, the car's engine failed, and the gang was forced to stop and commandeer an oncoming car. As they transferred the money and weapons,

they lined up the bank employees in the middle of the street to keep their pursuers back. Nelson stepped to the side of their human shield and fired on the cops a hundred yards away. The crew abandoned the hostages and escaped in their new vehicle. A manhunt commenced, but the outlaws made it to St. Paul, Minnesota, without incident. They scored $46,000 in their first venture together, the equivalent of more than $1 million today. Though no one from the bank could positively ID any of the assailants, the newspapers all speculated that this must be the work of John Dillinger.

George Babyface Nelson wasn't mentioned. But the papers did describe one, quote, hard-boiled and cursing machine gun bandit who shot a policeman and then celebrated it. They didn't know it yet, but those reporters were helping create the wild man persona that would soon lean the FBI to make Nelson the most wanted man in America. In 1919, Missouri Congressman Leonidas Dyer introduced a bill to the U.S. House of Representatives that would bear his name. The Forward-Thinking Dyer Act was based on the belief that the automobile revolution might equal a rise in crime.

Dyer believed that car theft would become rampant, and his act made the transportation of a stolen vehicle, a federal crime, to be investigated by federal authorities, not state. or local cops. So, when John Dillinger stole the sheriff's car during his escape from the Crown Point Jail in Indiana and then drove the car to Illinois, he committed a federal crime. That meant the federal authorities, the FBI, could officially lead the hunt for the most famous bank robber in America. The FBI was not yet the well-funded, buttoned-up law enforcement agency that it would become in the second half of the 20th century. In 1934, it had very limited power.

Agents at the time were not permitted to carry firearms, although plenty did. And the most surprising difference between then and now was that FBI agents couldn't make arrests. They could do all the investigating, and they could be right in the thick of the action, but a state or local cop had to make the actual arrest. And in 1934, to say the FBI had its hands full, would be a state, an understatement. Agents were still investigating the Kansas City Massacre from a year earlier. Pretty Boy Floyd and his associates had just recently been named the prime suspects. There were also the high-profile kidnapping cases of two members of St. Paul's social elite,

bank president Edward Bremer Jr. and the head of the Ham's Beer Empire, William Hamm Jr. Both kidnappings had been perpetrated by Alvin Carpice and the Barker, family. On top of those cases, the FBI had recently been given jurisdiction over the crime of the century, the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr., the one-year-old son of the famed aviator. Nonetheless, by the spring of 1934, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were tasked with waging war on the crime wave of the Great Depression. They had already scored one victory the previous autumn, with the capture of George, Machiazsche, and the United gun Kelly. Kelly had been wanted for orchestrating the kidnapping of an Oklahoma oil baron.

The Bureau caught Kelly in Memphis, Tennessee, and he was sentenced to life in prison, much of which he would serve an Alcatraz. But John Dillinger's escape from the Crown Point Jail in early March 1934 made him the FBI's main target. The exploits of his daring breakout dominated the front page of newspapers. J. Edgar Hoover began to the first of the first of newspapers. J. Edgar Hoover began to feel the pressure from the president, the Attorney General, and the press to track the outlaw down. And in the spring of 1934, Dillinger was Hoover's obsession. Legions of agents were dispatched to the Midwest. One agent, Melvin Purvis, would become synonymous with John Dillinger and the Depression era outlaws. Hoover tasked him specifically with bringing down Dillinger by whatever

means necessary. Though Dillinger could claim to be the most infamous of the crew that robbed the Sioux Falls Bank, Nelson was, if only for a short time, its leader. But Nelson never showed any hostility toward Dillinger. His general hostility, on the other hand, was well known and became a point of concern with the other members of the gang. Some of his cohorts would say years later that Nelson was always asked to count the money after a score. No one wanted to face off against an unhinged baby-face Nelson if he thought the count was off. Rumors spread about a particular incident that cemented their concern. Allegedly, just before the Sioux Falls job, Nelson and his old pal from California,

John Paul Chase, were driving in a neighborhood of Minneapolis when they cut off a 35-year-old salesman named Ted Kidder. Kidder was furious and sped up around Nelson and Chase's car to return the favor. Nelson trailed Kidder's car to a drugstore. Kidder got out of his car, possibly to call the police on the drugstore's phone, but we'll never know for sure. According to the legend, Nelson rolled down the window and fired 17 rounds at Ted Kidder. Three bullets hit the salesman, and he fell dead in the parking lot. Some have alleged Kidder was connected to organized crime, and the shooting may have been a gangland hit.

Whatever the truth behind the story, Nelson's propensity for violence was about to hit its peak when the gang went for the second of his two targets that he had pitched to Dillinger in their first meeting. It would cause a rift in the gang and then another trip out west, before a reunion and a historic shootout in Wisconsin. Next time on infamous America, the Dillinger-Nelson crew get into a gun battle while robbing a bank in Mason City, Iowa, which prompts Nelson to take a trip to the west. coast to cool off. When he returns to the Midwest, he reunites with Dillinger and the gang

at a resort in Wisconsin. And unbeknownst to all of them, the FBI is there too, and the confrontation will be the stuff of books and movies for years to come. That's next week on Infamous America. Members of our Black Barrow Plus program don't have to wait week to week for new episodes. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also received exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships are just $5 per month. This series was researched and written by Jamie Lyko.

Original music by Rob Valier. I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrell Media. on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America podcast. Thanks for listening.