Baby Face Nelson Last Updated Wednesday, 28 September 2011 20:00 Lester Joseph Gillis (December 6, 1908– November 27, 1934), known under the pseudonym George Nelson, was a bank robber and murderer in the 1930s. Gillis was known as Baby Face Nelson, a name given to him due to his youthful appearance and small stature. Usually referred to by criminal associates as "Jimmy",[2] Nelson partnered with John Dillinger, helping him escape from prison in the famed "wooden pistol" escape, and was later labeled along with the remaining gang members as public enemy number one.Nelson is responsible for the murder of several people, and has the dubious distinction of having killed more FBI agents in the line of duty than any other single American citizen.[citation nee Nelson has been the subject of several films. Nelson was shot by FBI agents and died after a shootout often termed "The Battle of Barrington". George "Baby Face" Nelson was born Lester Joseph Gillis in Chicago's Near West Side in 1908. His mother, Marie Douget, was born to a middle-class family of Belgian farmers and emigrated to the United States in 1889.[1] Douget had known Nelson's father, Joseph Gillis, a tanner, in Belgium, although he had immigrated to the United States several years earlier.[1] Joseph Gillis committed suicide on Christmas Eve, 1924, when his son Lester was 16, and already in reform school.[3] On July 4, 1921, at the age of twelve, Nelson was arrested after accidentally shooting a fellow child in the jaw with a pistol he had found. He served over a year in the state reformatory.[4] Arrested again for theft and joyriding at age 13, he was sent to a penal school for an additional 18 months.[5] By 1928, Nelson was working at a Standard Oil station in his neighborhood that was the headquarters of young tire thieves, known as "strippers". After falling in with them, Nelson brushed elbows with many local criminals, including one who gave him a job driving bootleg alcohol throughout the Chicago suburbs. It was through this gig that Nelson would become associated with members of the suburban-based Touhy Gang (not the Capone mob, as usually reported).[6] Within two years, Nelson and his gang had graduated to armed robbery. On January 6, 1930, they invaded the home of magazine executive Charles M. Richter. After trussing him up with adhesive tape and cutting the phone lines, they ransacked the house and made off with $25,000 worth of jewelry. Two months later, they carried out a similar heist on the Sheridan Road bungalow of Lottie Brenner Von Beulow. This job netted $50,000 in jewels. Chicago newspapers nicknamed them "The Tape Bandits."[7] 1 / 3 Baby Face Nelson Last Updated Wednesday, 28 September 2011 20:00 On April 21, 1930, Nelson robbed his first bank, making off with $4,000. A month later, Nelson and his gang pulled their home invasion scheme again, netting $25,000 worth of jewels. On October 3 of that year, Nelson hit the Itasca State Bank for $4,600; a teller would later identify Nelson as one of the robbers. Three nights later, Nelson stole the jewelry of the wife of Chicago mayor Big Bill Thompson valued at $18,000. She later described her attacker this way, "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 brim."[8] Years later, Nelson and his crew would be linked to a botched roadhouse robbery in Summit, Illinois on November 23, 1930 that resulted in gunplay that left three people dead and three others wounded. Three nights later, the Tape Bandits hit a Waukegan Road tavern and Nelson ended up committing his first murder of note, when he killed stockbroker Edwin R. Thompson.[9] [edit] Going west Throughout the winter of 1931, most of the Tape Bandits were rounded up, including Nelson. The Chicago Tribune referred to their leader as "George 'Baby Face' Nelson" who received a sentence of one year to life in the state penitentiary at Joliet. In February 1932, Nelson escaped during a prison transfer. Through his contacts in the Touhy Gang, Nelson fled west and took shelter with Reno gambler/crime boss William Graham. Using the alias of "Jimmy Johnson", Nelson wound up in Sausalito, California, working for bootlegger Joe Parente. During these San Francisco Bay area criminal ventures, Nelson most probably first met John Paul Chase and Fatso Negri, two men who would be at his side during the later half of his career.[9] While in Reno the next winter, Nelson first met the vacationing Alvin Karpis, who in turn introduced him to Midwestern bank robber Eddie Bentz. Teaming with Bentz, Nelson returned to the Midwest the next summer and committed his first major bank robbery in Grand Haven, Michigan on August 18, 1933. The robbery was a near-disaster, even though most of those involved made a clean getaway.[10] Gang leader The Grand Haven bank job apparently convinced Nelson he was ready to lead his own gang. Through connections in St. Paul's Green Lantern Tavern, Nelson recruited Homer Van Meter, Tommy Carroll, and Eddie Green. With these men (and two other local crooks), Nelson robbed the First National Bank of Brainerd, Minnesota of $32,000 on October 23, 1933. Witnesses reported that Nelson wildly sprayed machine gun bullets at bystanders as he made his getaway.[11] After collecting his wife Helen and four-year old son Ronald, Nelson left with his 2 / 3 Baby Face Nelson Last Updated Wednesday, 28 September 2011 20:00 crew for San Antonio, Texas. While here, Nelson and his gang bought several weapons from underworld gunsmith Hyman Lebman. One of those weapons was a .38 Colt automatic Pistol that had been modified to fire fully automatic (Nelson would use this same gun to murder Special Agent W. Carter Baum at Little Bohemia Lodge several months later). By December 9, a local woman tipped San Antonio police to the nearby presence of "high powered Northern gangsters". Two days later, Tommy Carroll was cornered by two detectives and opened fire, killing Detective H.C. Perrin and wounding Detective Al Hartman. All the Nelson gang, except for Chuck Nelson, fled San Antonio. Nelson and his wife traveled west to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he recruited John Paul Chase and Fatso Negri for a new wave of bank robberies in the coming spring. Click on this link and scroll to Dillinger Partnership! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Face_Nelson 3 / 3.