Serendipitous Psychopath

Some folks just come from the factory broken. How much of it is nature versus nurture has occupied psychologists for ages. Oftentimes, those broken people live out their lives until they do something sufficiently egregious as to earn incarceration and anonymity. Others can be a bit flashier.

The Origins of the Monster

Lester Joseph Gillis was born in December 1908 in Chicago. He shot his first man at age 12. Gillis happened upon a handgun and popped a buddy in the jaw over some perceived slight or other. He spent the next year in reform school but stole his first car immediately upon his release. This earned him another year and a half behind bars.

Such aberrant behavior has a name these days. Had Lester Gillis been born in the Information Age, he would have been diagnosed with antisocial personality disorderand put on all sorts of psychoactive medications. He then still would have pursued a life of crime and spent most of his adult life in prison.

As it was, Lester Gillis represented an odd convergence in the human species. A loving father, an affectionate husband and a born leader, Gillis was also a psychopath who came of age amidst the Great Depression. All that stuff synergistically combined to make him a legend.

Gillis learned his craft as part of a gang of “strippers.” Their MO involved stripping the tires off people’s cars and selling them on the black market. In his early 20s, he graduated to armed robbery. His gang secured their victims with tape before ransacking their homes. They became known as the Tape Bandits in the press. In a single hit on a magazine executive named Charles Richter in January of 1930, the Tape Bandits made off with $205,000 in jewelry. That would be about $3.6 million today. Once Gillis got a taste of the good life, he couldn’t stop.

One of his armed robbery victims later said of Gillis, “He had a baby face. He was good looking, hardly more than a boy, had dark hair and was wearing a grey topcoat and a brown felt hat, turned down brim.”

Gillis’ mates called him Jimmy. However, newspapermen coined the nom de guerre “Baby Face” Nelson. He carried that name with him to his grave. Thanks to his sordid profession, that didn’t take long.

The Monster Comes of Age

What really set Nelson apart from his peers was his willingness to just blow people away as the need arose. He killed his first man, a robbery victim named Edwin Thompson when he was 22. In 1933, during a getaway from a bank robbery in Brainerd, MN, Nelson sprayed a crowd of bystanders with his Thompson submachine gun. The following year he got cut off in traffic by a paint salesman in Chicago and shot the man to death.

Normally such a fulminant temper and congenital lack of conscience would be a bad thing. However, once Nelson met John Dillinger, he weaponized his psychopathy into something altogether marketable. In April of 1934, Nelson, Dillinger, Dillinger’s best mate Homer Van Meter, John “Red” Hamilton, Tommy Carroll, Pat Reilly, Nelson’s wife Helen, and three bits of female arm candy descended upon the Little Bohemia Lodge in Manitowish Waters, WI, for some down time.

Emil Wanatka owned Little Bohemia. While playing cards with Dillinger, he noticed his holstered handgun and informed his wife. She had a friend call the feds. Legendary G-Man Melvin Purvis gathered a few FBI guys and hit the place. The end result was a bloodbath.

Eugene Boisneau, John Hoffman and John Morris were just three normal guys who had dropped by for the famed Little Bohemia $1 Sunday night special. They were climbing into their 1933 Chevrolet Coupe just as the FBI agents arrived. It was dark, and somebody squeezed a trigger. Boisneau was killed outright. His two pals were shot to pieces but survived. Tragically, the gunfire also activated Dillinger and company.

Everyone but Nelson fled into the woods. Nelson just snatched up his Thompson and charged out the front door, exchanging fire with Purvis himself. His audacious assault bought him enough time to escape.

Nelson subsequently hijacked several cars and took a total of seven hostages. He winnowed the crop down to three and was climbing into yet another stolen vehicle when FBI agents Jay Newman and W. Carter Baum, along with local constable Carl Christensen, arrived. Nelson embraced the fog of war, confidently approaching their car and asking the men to identify themselves. The G-Men did so, and Nelson hosed them down with a full-auto M1911 pistol.

Gunsmith to the Stars

Hyman Lebman was a San Antonio gunsmith who serviced an eclectic clientele. He sold hunting weapons, cowboy boots and saddles upstairs in his shop at 111 South Flores Street. However, he kept the really good stuff in the basement. Back before the 1934 National Firearms Act, there were literally no rules governing firearms. Machine guns were available over the counter, cash and carry. You didn’t have to show a driver’s license because nobody had a driver’s license. Lebman thrived in this space. More than a few Chicago gangsters vacationed in San Antonio as a result.

Lebman sold Thompson submachine guns as the opportunities arose. He was also known for two custom weapons in particular. He converted the Winchester M1907 rifle to full-auto and added a Cutts compensator, extended magazine and the vertical foregrip from a Tommy gun. Homer van Meter used a Lebman M1907 to kill patrolman Howard Wagner during a bank robbery in South Bend, IN, in 1934. His masterwork, however, was what he called his baby machine gun. Hyman Lebman’s full-auto 1911 pistols raised the bar on concealable firepower.

Lebman offered these converted 1911 machine pistols in both .45 ACP and .38 Super. Some were selective fire, while others were full-auto-only. At one point, Lebman was testing an early prototype in his basement and shot a row of holes through the floor above, narrowly missing his son Marvin. The guns could be had with a modified Cutts compensator, the foregrip from a Thompson submachine gun and an extended magazine packing either 18 or 22 rounds, depending upon the caliber. These Lebman mini machine guns cycled at more than 1,000 rpm.

In 1933, Nelson, his wife, Helen and their son, Ronald, along with infamous gangster Homer Van Meter, had Thanksgiving dinner with the Lebmans in their home. Nelson subsequently left with five full-auto babies in .38 Super, four standard Colt 1911 pistols in .45 ACP and a pair of Thompsons. Nelson gave $300 apiece for the Thompsons — 50% above retail.

The Death of the Monster

Following the demise of Dillinger and Van Meter at the hands of police, Nelson became the FBI’s Public Enemy Number 1. On November 27, 1934, Gillis and John Paul Chase engaged in a shootout with federal agents Samuel Crowley and Herman Hollis at a turnout in Barrington, IL. Nelson killed the two G-Men with a Colt Monitor BAR but caught eight buckshot in his legs and a single .45 ACP bullet to the belly for his trouble.

The .45 ACP round punched through his liver and pancreas. Baby Face Nelson bled out and died later that evening in his wife Helen’s arms. He was 25 years old. It seems a fitting end for the serendipitous psychopath.

Hyman Lebman, for his part, had to stop his machine gun business after the passage of the 1934 NFA. However, he worked as a gunsmith in San Antonio into the 1970s. His son Marvin later described the visiting gangsters as “men in nice suits and hats.” Hyman Lebman, the unofficial armorer to the mob, eventually succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease in 1990.

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