The area where LeRoy was born and raised was in a ‘wooded or farm area three or four miles south of Salt Lake City. That area is now overgrown with miles of new neighborhoods – about four suburbs,’ he writes.
Reminiscing about those early days, LeRoy says almost with Country & Western music ringing in his ears:
I was about five years old. The big wagons that brought all the lumber and other building materials had, at the direction of my control-freak mother, who was there alone when it arrived, the men dump the loads on the side of the road, rather than down near where the house was to be built, because she didn’t want the wagon wheels making deep furrows, and hundreds of horse hoof prints in her intended garden area.
The address of that old home, which is still there, and occupied today, was so well built it seems able to last forever. A five-room home with a full attic and half basement, at: 2847 South 5th East Street, South Salt Lake. Several other newly built homes were in that same area. At least twelve families where there when our dads went off to war, all of them from that area.
To put this period into perspective, time-wise, gun-toting John Dillinger was twelve years old. Alphonse ‘Scarface’ Capone, soon to become ‘the Bootleg Emperor’ was 16 years old and Bonnie and Clyde were still eating cookies and vanilla ice cream. In 1915, Pluto was photographed for the first time, Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity, George V was King of England, and Woodrow Wilson was President. The Mafia boss, John ‘The eflon Don’ Gotti – so named because very few criminal charges stuck – would not be born for another 26 years.
‘Hey, you guys. I was fourteen at the time of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre [Thursday, 14 February 1929]’ says LeRoy, and this was the time of the Great Depression; the era of bootlegging, moonshine, speakeasies and Eliot Ness of The Untouchables fame. Joe ‘The Boss’ Masseria was the most powerful gangster in New York; buried in a $15,000 casket, he had a cortege of 40 Cadillacs.
‘But, names such as these were always front-page news, when I was young,’ says LeRoy. ‘I was one of the original “Angels with Dirty Faces’’,’ he recalls. Reeling off a list of infamous criminals as if they were imprinted on his mind: Vito Genovese, Salvatore ‘Lucky’ Luciano; Paul Kelly’s ‘The Five Points Gang’; ‘The Black Hand’; Benny ‘Bugsy’ Siegal; Peter ‘The Clutching Hand’ Morella; Ignazio ‘The Wolf’ Saietta, who ran ‘The Murder Stable’, where he systematically tortured and murdered his victims, were characters that everyone back then knew well.
‘These were not cowardly, bottom-feeding guttersnipes who steal for small change and a mobile telephone, who pass themselves off as criminals today,’ rails LeRoy. ‘All of these names and many more were familiar to me. Then there were the enforcers such as Little Davie Betillo, the beautiful dolls and molls, beautiful, voluptuous sirens, Polly Adler, the raven-haired Virginia Hill, Igea Lissoni (an Italian ballet dancer at La Scala Opera), and countless more “CLASS A” acts that fell at the feet of the organised crime figures.’
By the age of twelve, LeRoy was already robbing stores. His father was overseas in the army. ‘My family was destitute, along with about seven other families whose men were drafted into the army,’ he says. ‘None of us got any welfare or any other subsistence from the government. So, we boys joined forces when our families began starving and decided that, one way or another, our families were going to be fed. We all learned to be burglars, thieves, liars and sneaky people. There was no thought about our group violating the law. It was merely a matter of survival and to hell with anyone who didn’t like it. Careering along in a stolen Model T Ford, me and my pals were so small we could hardly see over the steering wheel, and because we committed crime to help feed our families, we were called “The Angels with Dirty Faces”.’ The exploits of these kids inspired the 1938 Warner Brothers’ movie of the same name, starring James Cagney and Pat O’Brien.
‘That attitude carried over for years,’ remembers LeRoy. ‘Even after our fathers came home, got jobs and were supporting their families. By that time I was nearly twelve years of age and despised local cops and anyone else who disliked we kids, especially after word got round about our illegal proclivities. That led, eventually to my leaving home, completely ignorant of civilised social patterns of working for wages and knowing nothing about how people used electoral or commercial methods as natural rights that everybody was presumed to know.’
* * *
In those days, the Depression had crippled the country. After the worldwide flu epidemic had devastated the country along with most of Europe, there were millions of Americans out of work and hundreds of thousands of unemployed people, mostly men and boys, either living in the hundreds of hobo camps, spread across the USA, or riding the rails from town to town.
‘There was a rule, at the time,’ says LeRoy, ‘that, if a father, or any breadwinner in a family had lost his job and had deserted his family, then that family was entitled to welfare, especially if children were involved.’
LeRoy is at pains to point out that they knew nothing at all about the US Constitution, or its attached Bill of Rights, back then, ‘nor that we had as many legal rights as anyone else’. He adds: ‘So, it should be no surprise that at least eight of the twelve boys in our “kid group” eventually were known convicts. Most of them became hobos or tramps, experienced at being down and out, homeless predators, rouges, vagabonds, common beggars, who felt complete contempt for the law, because of the brutality that many had experienced, or witnessed, while in various prisons.
‘So, when a breadwinner lost his job and couldn’t find employment, he deserted his family so that they could at least get welfare. That was one of the main reasons that thousands of men and boys were on the road. Every one of the major cities in America at that time had one or more “hobo jungles”’.
And many of those hobo jungles were of such a nature that the activities within them, seldom regulated by police, made them into some of the most degraded and lawless places in America.
Wishing to dispel any myths surrounding the hobo camps, LeRoy has this to say: ‘The general public, at that time, and many still do, even today, had the romantic notion that there hobo jungles were places where impoverished men would share and share alike, in some fraternal style. Disenfranchised men who share equally? Wow! Not true. The only ones who shared were those who gathered together, in small groups, mostly for protection from crazed hopheads, mentally ill people or brutes of one kind or another. Many were sick dope addicts, many of whom were also active homosexuals. Hoboing, at that time, was considered by many people to be a marginally viable lifestyle for the intermittently employed. Towards the end of the Depression thousands of ignorant American youngsters joined the hobo life. Few recovered.
‘However, the same wasn’t true for the majority of Americans and tens-of-thousands starved to death during this era, many disappearing without trace, having perished from despair, hunger and exhaustion, separated by hundreds of miles from their homes and families. Homelessness was at epidemic proportions with banks foreclosing on mortgages and loans and repossessing houses and farms across wide swathes of the country. This was the era in which bank robbers, such as Bonnie and Clyde, and Pretty Boy Floyd were, for a time, regarded as folk heroes by much of rural America, enjoying the sort of status generally afforded to legendary figures such as Robin Hood.’
Thanks to his upbringing, if it could be called that, LeRoy was better able than most to adapt to living and surviving in the teeth of such adversity.
Some time during 1929, LeRoy returned home to his family on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. He was fourteen, but had already experienced life in a way that would have seemed daunting to men thirty or forty years older. There was little or no conventional work available at the time so he earned a living by becoming a bounty hunter, shooting mountain lions and other predators, in return for which the cattle ranchers of Utah paid good money. Eventually, however, after about a year, the wanderlust proved to be too strong and, when circumsta
nces presented themselves, he embarked on another odyssey. This time, he headed out for the tents and shanties of the construction camps on the Colorado River: camps that housed the thousands of men who sought to work building the Hoover Dam.
LeRoy writes:
In 1930, I had gotten an old Model T Ford that had been rolled over and the body wrecked. I had just been paid bounties for two mountain lion skins, by the cattle ranchers association, up in central Utah, so I felt rich enough to buy that wrecked Ford and put a second body on it from another wreck. And then the good news came.
The 1929 Great Depression was sweeping across America. Everybody was broke. Thousands of men were heading out West toward the huge new dam that was being built, where Arizona and Nevada meet. They said it was to be the highest dam in the world, so they needed a lot of workers.
I had had a fight with my dad, and as a result, I packed my ragged clothes, my small box of tools and my ‘lion gun’, a model 98 Winchester 30-30 rifle, into the trunk of my 1928 Ford coupe and headed south, toward Black Canyon and the proposed Boulder Dam, later renamed the Hoover Dam. Six construction companies had joined forces to get the dam built, after Congress had authorized starter funds.
The nearest town was Las Vegas, 23 miles west of the dam site. But, the tent-town on the eastern side of Vegas was rapidly expanding, toward the river dam site. Then, another shack, tent and makeshift camp sprang up, much closer to the dam site, and rapidly became populated. They named this new settlement ‘Boulder’, and soon most of the 2,000 new dam workers were finding lodgings and meals there.
LeRoy was still only fifteen, and the employment manager called him ‘Hurry up Crow’, and refused to hire him, even at the lowest rate of two dollars a day, and told him to go back home.
I was so pissed off. I momentarily thought about shooting the big bastard. But, by the time I’d gotten back to Boulder and my little pup tent, I got another surprise. A fairly large shack had been erected near my little spot and the font of this shack had a sign on it, saying ‘CAFÉ – Three Meals a Day $1.35’, then ‘In ADVANCE’. Beneath that sign was another, which said, ‘No Niggers!!’ I walked in. It looked like a saloon, but, instead of a bar, he had a long table with benches. I asked the man with the apron: ‘How much for just one meal?’ ‘Fifty cents in advance,’ came the brusque reply. I put two quarters on the table. The coffee was 5 cents extra. He bought me a good-sized bowl of stew. I finished half of it, then asked, ‘How come there’s no meat in it?’ He says, ‘If I had meat I’d charge more.’ The light came on in my head. ‘How much would you pay, in cash, for fresh-killed venison?’
From that day onward, the young Nash shot deer, earning 10 cents a pound of meat from Big Tom.
Although he says that he has no wish to glorify his crimes, he says that his ‘history is most certainly the stuff of legends. By the age of eighteen I had already robbed two banks, lived the life of a juvenile hobo and killed my first man. I shot a hobo for squashing my pal’s watermelon.’
This first murder took place when LeRoy says he was sixteen. (in much earlier letters he says was eight). He was riding in a boxcar with a friend, a fifteen-year-old kid. The train, which was proceeding slowly through Kansas, stopped momentarily to take on water next to a farm where many small, but ripe melons were growing. ‘So, we both leapt down, grabbed a watermelon, and climbed back into the boxcar,’ says LeRoy. ‘I ate mine right there and then, being hungry, but my pal saved his.’
According to LeRoy, about an hour later, after passing through another town, where again the train stopped.
My friend cut open his watermelon and was greedily eating it, when a tall negro climbed into the boxcar. He stared and gruffly demanded a share of the melon. The tone of the big man’s voice irritated my companion, who promptly told him, ‘Go fuck yourself. Jump off the train and steal your own melon.’ The negro blew up. Without a word, he kicked the melon so hard that it flew out of the boxcar. I was sitting on the other side of the boxcar, my feet dangling outa the doorway. Realising that a second kick, that hard, could send my friend, who only weighed about a hundred pounds, flying to his death, I pulled out my pistol that was under my belt, hidden by my jacket, and turned to defend my friend. But to my surprise, he had his own gun out. And he continued firing it into the body of the big man until he collapsed – all in all six shots. Then I fired my gun because life was cheap. I went through his pockets, found photos of his wife an’ his young daughter in a ragged old pocket book. There was no address to send the stuff to…felt bad at first, then thought, ‘FUCK IT’.
We kids at the time were all dead shots with either a pistol or a rifle. My favorite guns were a .45 Colt Auto and a 30-30 Winchester saddle gun, the barrel was four inches shorter than the regular rifle.
LeRoy Nash’s adventures would fill a book on their own; in later years he escaped from two prison facilities. Aged 67, he says while serving two consecutive life sentences for murder and robbery, in Utah, he made a desperate dash for freedom. ‘I scaled a twenty-foot prison wall, crossed no-man’s land, and went through the razor wire perimeter as if it didn’t exist,’ he says. ‘Yep! Got cut really bad, but never felt a thing.’
Dodging the marksmen’s bullets and although badly injured by the steel barbs, he evaded bloodhounds and hundreds of police during one of America’s largest manhunts.
Living off the land and what I could five-finger from the locals, I was physically and mentally well equipped for life on the lam. During my second week, I came across the Highway Patrol. Casually strolling up to an officer, who was half asleep in his car, I disarmed him and tied him up. I stole his money and a .357 Colt Trooper revolver, and then drove off leaving the man sitting in a cloud of dust.
The cop just handed over his gun. It was as easy as picking up a warm pie from a stoop. He was just a fresh kid and had no right to be wearing a badge. Sure, I could have killed him right there and then. But I never killed nobody who never threatened me. That’s the Gospel truth, I doubt that any bigoted Bible-thumpers will believe that.
Three weeks after my escape, on Wednesday, 3 November 1982, I entered a coin shop in north Phoenix. I demanded money from an employee called Gregory West, and then I shot the man three times with the cop’s stolen gun. Another employee was in the line of fire but was not hit. As I fled, the proprietor of a nearby store pointed a gun at me and told me to stop. I grabbed his weapon and we struggled over it. Police soon arrived, and today I am on Death Row, and the system has finally closed me down.
At my trial, which lasted a day on 25 June 1983, before Judge Rufus Coulter, prosecutor, Gregg Thurston stated: ‘Mr Nash presents a grave risk to others, shows no remorse and only the death sentence would be appropriate.’
Bank robber, jewel thief, I was once as fit as an Olympic class athlete. Sure, I have a face etched by the wrong side of the tracks. I am still a big, powerful man for my age. Once out of my cell, broad-shouldered, I stand tall. Fuck the guards, I rarely smile, but sometimes a cynical smile spreads across my face. Fuck them and fuck you, too.
* * *
But, who is the real Viva LeRoy Nash – is he really the true stuff of legends, or is he something else?
Petitioner [Nash] described himself as ‘one of the most tenacious, jailhouse lawyers in the country’ and recounted the ‘20-year span of constant and unwavering, and to some extent devastating, legal activities’ upon which he had embarked as a prisoner in Connecticut.
US Supreme Court.
LeRoy has written over a hundred letters to me, and they are long, long, long letters. And, to be fair to this elderly man maybe we can forgive him for being vague about firm dates, and maybe his imagination does get the better of him from time to time, nonetheless, his history is the stuff Hollywood movie producer would die for.
He has no time for religion, and says that at one time he was an ‘unknown millionaire’ who helped many people who were far less well off than he at those times. He, like most incarcerated criminals, has no time for the American ju
dicial system, claiming: ‘In open court, both state and federal, I have politely but definitely kicked the verbal shit out of at least four of the perjuring bastards. But, I also admit, that in the long-run they got the best of me, judicially.’
When I took LeRoy to task over the shooting of Gregory West, which to me seemed a cold-blooded affair at best, he had this to say:
First, I did not kill him deliberately, which would have, if the killing would have been, a first-degree killing It was an accidental killing, and even under those circumstances, would have been second degree murder, or manslaughter, under our law, prohibiting the imposition of the death penalty.
The fact that Mr Nash shot and killed a man in the furtherance of a robbery, and that is a capital crime in Arizona, passes LeRoy by. He wrote nineteen pages, in a letter dated 9 March 2006, explaining how the judicial system was all wrong, that the cops and prosecutor fitted him up, and the judge was a crook, and it was all West’s fault for trying to defend himself, despite conveniently overlooking another fact: he pleaded guilty in court, the reason for the one-day trial.
In a letter that followed days later, LeRoy tries to distance himself from responsibility even further. Itemising what he needs to say:
Note 1. That the clerk [West] might have fired directly toward my heart legally is contrary to American law.
Note 2. I had no intention of allowing the store clerk to murder me in an effort to save his boss some money.
Note 3. If a store clerk has already fired his gun aimed at my heart, I would be very stupid to let him take another shot.
Dead Men Talking Page 18
