Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (4 page)

Chapter 4

Washington, D.C., is much more glamorous than Scranton, and Johnny and Peggy soon were happily settled into a modest apartment at 43 R Street Northeast, a tidy section of row houses. Johnny worked at the Department of Commerce as a clerk in the National Recovery Administration, one of the overnight bureaucracies President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had created to help pun America out of the depression. Peggy took care of Arthur and soon found herself pregnant again. On July 28th, 1937, Peggy gave birth to John Anthony Walker, Jr.

From the beginning, relatives recalled later, Peggy favored her second-born. Perhaps it was because her pregnancy with Arthur embarrassed her. For whatever reason, Peggy developed a special bond with John, whom everyone called Jack as a child, that grew stronger through the years.

It didn’t take long before John Walker Sr., grew tired of being a government clerk. Meetings and shuffling papers were not for him, he told Peggy. So when a better paying and more demanding job opened at the Bituminous Coal Commission, he accepted it and moved his family to Altoona, Pennsylvania. But before Peggy had a chance to unpack, Johnny quit this job to take an even better one in New York City. “Could there be a better place for an ambitious young man and his family than New York City?” he asked Peggy.

Johnny had been offered a job by his father’s cousin, Frank Comerford Walker, a prominent attorney, former Montana state legislator, Democratic Party official, and pal of FDR. On December 10, 1938, a group of Democratic stalwarts had formed a private corporation to raise money for construction of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, the first presidential library. Frank Walker had been elected president of the group, and he wanted Johnny to be its liaison with the Philadelphia construction company hired to build the library and with Dr. Fred H. Shipman, the library’s first director. It was challenging and heady work.

An album of family photographs shows a beaming couple poised in the living room of an attractive fifth-floor apartment on Seventy-seventh Street in Manhattan. Johnny is pictured with his jacket tossed casually over his right shoulder, his left arm draped around Peggy. He is dressed in a crisp white shirt, tie, suspenders, carefully pressed trousers) and spit-polished shoes. Peggy is wearing a store-bought dress with matching hat and gloves. Peggy and Johnny spent hours keeping their family album current, she meticulously arranging each snapshot and Johnny drawing white ink doodles on the album’s black pages. It was more than a scrapbook of family snapshots. It was a primer of a couple on the move.

Nearly all of the relatives visited the young couple in New York, and Arthur Scaramuzzo, in particular, was generous in his praise. The United States really was a land of unlimited opportunity, he proclaimed. He had arrived a poor immigrant, and his son-in-law had actually met the President of the United States!

Peggy and Johnny enjoyed not only the city, but also each other. There were occasional arguments – both were stubborn – but spats were rare. Peggy gave birth to James Vincent Walker, the couple’s third son and last child, in New York City in 1939.

Some of Johnny’s correspondence to the library’s corporate board still exists in the archives at Hyde Park. The documents reveal a certain brashness. At one point, FDR’s cronies asked Johnny to write a history of the library. His twenty-one-page account included not only compliments to FDR and the library’s backers, but also several harsh criticisms. The board chose not to circulate it widely.

When his job with the library ended in 1941, Johnny turned once again to his politically powerful cousin for help. Frank Walker liked Johnny and thought he was bright and talented. He also knew that Johnny was a good salesman, an excellent musician, and a lover of the theater, so he helped Johnny get a job with Warner Brothers as a salesman/publicist. He was sent to Richmond, Virginia, to cover movie theaters in the Washington, Virginia, and Maryland region. The Walkers didn’t like leaving New York, especially for a town as sedate as Richmond and a job that just didn’t seem as exciting as the old one. But it was more glamorous working for the movies than for the federal government. The couple bought a bungalow at 712 Pensacola Avenue in a middle-class area of Richmond in a quiet, close-knit neighborhood.

“I remember the heat in Richmond,” Arthur Walker recalled later. “I had been up north all of my life and I thought it was really hot in Richmond. Life was good there. We assimilated quickly into the neighborhood. “

Because of his association with Warner Brothers, Johnny was regarded as a neighborhood celebrity, a glitter that gave Peggy and her three sons a special status too.

“Dad was really making decent money,” Arthur recalled. “If a person made fifteen or twenty bucks a week back then, they were happy, and he made much more than that. . .. I remember him opening up a Christmas bonus check of a thousand dollars.”

The Walkers’ life might have seemed idyllic, but it wasn’t. Johnny and Peggy fought constantly. The exact cause of their unhappiness isn’t clear. At the time, Peggy complained that johnny’s work took him away from the family too much and he wasn’t helping around the house as much as she wanted. But as in many marriages, the most obvious complaints were just signs of deeper unrest. One night after suffering through one of Peggy’s harangues, Johnny exploded and slugged her in the face. The next morning, after he had cooled, he apologized.

“He was so upset that he began to cry,” Peggy recalled. But the altercation was not an unfortunate aberration.

Some people can look back over the years and pick an incident that marked a dramatic change in their lives. Johnny Walker could cite the exact day his life turned topsy-turvy: September 19, 1944. While returning home from booking a movie in Emmitsburg, Maryland, his car and another vehicle collided in a spectacular accident. The only particulars about the mishap come from memory, and everyone who remembers the event tells a different story. But there is one thing that they all agree upon: Johnny Walker nearly died.

His injuries were so severe that when the police arrived on the scene they didn’t think anything could be done to save him. “The county coroner had already started filling out my death certificate when he discovered I was still breathing,” Johnny told me later. He was rushed to the hospital in Gettysburg, where Peggy hurried to his bedside. The boys were left behind to be cared for by the family’s live-in housekeeper, Emma Evans. The subsequent hospital bills and lawsuit against Johnny filed by the other driver drained the Walker family bank account.

After he recovered, Johnny lost his prestigious Warner Brothers’ post and went through a series of other jobs – he sold pots and pans door-to-door, worked as a department store clerk, and drove a taxi – but none of them paid all the bills. Peggy was forced to find work. During the day, she labored at the Franklin Uniform Company; at night, she took photographs of couples at the Tantilla Garden, a nightclub that claimed to have the “South’s finest ballroom.” By 1947, the Walkers’ home was a shambles.

“I remember my father coming home from work and drinking himself into oblivion,” John Walker, Jr., said. “My mother would start on him, bitching endlessly about money or shooting her mouth off about how he didn’t do anything and couldn’t care for the family, and pretty soon he’d punch her, and then all hen would break loose.”

All three boys recall being awakened at night by the sounds of their parents yelling and cursing each other. The boys shared a large upstairs bedroom in Richmond and during lulls in the fighting downstairs, one of them – usually John, the most adventuresome of the brothers – would creep down the staircase and peek around the corner to see what was happening.

One night John saw his father passed out drunk in a chair and Peggy lying on the floor amid broken dishes. She was sobbing. “Is she dead?

“Did he kill her?” Arthur demanded when John came scampering back upstairs.

“Naw, she’s still alive,” John said, “but he got her good.” Jimmy began to cry.

“Shut up!” John shrieked. “You want him to come up here and beat us?”

It was a confusing time for Arthur, John, and Jimmy. They had always been proud of their father and, like most boys, had seen him as a larger-than-life figure and a role model. Before the accident, the boys had waited anxiously for Johnny to come home on weekends from his sales trips. Not now.

“Suddenly, I wasn’t talking about Dad like other kids did,” Arthur recalled. “I wasn’t proud of him anymore.”

As a boy, John became furious when Johnny beat Peggy. “I didn’t understand what was happening,” John said later. “I didn’t really appreciate my father’s sober days because I was too little. My mother would tell me that he was a good man and that she loved him, and when he was sober, he was good to us, but it was a fucking horror movie when he wasn’t.”

Loud arguments, slammed doors, brawls, and drunken lectures were the norm. Arthur received the brunt of Johnny’s anger toward his boys, but John was the one who became outraged by his father’s behavior. After a confrontation, Arthur would hide in the woods near his home and simply wait for Johnny to go to bed. John seethed and plotted.

“I decided I had no choice but to kill him,” John recalled. “I was probably ten or eleven years old, but I was serious. I was going to do it. In fact, I wanted to do it. I was going to kill my father because I hated him for what he was doing to my mother.”

John spent a week planning the murder, considering various methods, rejecting them one by one. Finally, he hit upon an acceptable plan. “We had a cast-iron bed, a rollaway that was heavy. It probably weighed seventy or eighty pounds. Jesus, it was a monster, and I decided to use it to kill him.”

The next time his father came home drunk, John intended to push the heavy rollaway to the edge of the stairway. When his father began climbing the steps, John would push the bed down on top of him. “Either the fall would kill him or he would be pinned under the bed and I could go down and hit him with a baseball bat and finish him off.”

A few days after John had decided on his murder plan, Johnny came home drunk and got into an argument with Peggy. John quietly pushed the bed into position at the top of the stairs. He sat down and waited. The next morning Peggy found her son asleep next to the rollaway bed. Johnny had passed out in a living room chair and had never made it up the stairway that night.

On November 12, 1948, the Realty Industrial Loan Corporation foreclosed on the Walkers~ house after Peggy and Johnny failed to make the $50 mortgage payment for the seventh month in a row. Peggy’s swank studio couch, Johnny’s piano, the boys’ maple bedroom set, were dragged outside and sold to the highest bidder by the loan company to recover a $2,600 loan.

The glamor days of the $1,000 Christmas bonus and live-in housekeeper were long since over. Peggy had no choice but to telephone her father.

“Papa, we need someplace to live,” she said.

Heartbroken over his daughter’s financial plight, Arthur Scaramuzzo suggested that she and Johnny return to Scranton. He would find a place where she, Johnny, and the boys could live with relatives until they got back on a good financial footing. Peggy turned scarlet as she spoke with her father. She had never felt so humiliated in her life. John saw his mother sobbing as the family prepared to move to Scranton, and it made him angry.

“I wished,” he told me later, his voice filled with anger, “that I’d never fallen asleep on the stairs that night and that my father had tried to come up them.”

Chapter 5

As he had done twice before, Johnny Walker sought Frank Comerford Walker’s help when he returned to Scranton in early 1949. Frank delivered by getting Johnny a job in the business end of the Roosevelt Theater in Scranton. Everyone in the family except Jimmy, who was only eleven years old, went to work. Peggy took photographs of school-children for Prestwood’s Photo Studio; Arthur was a stock boy at Belinski’s Market after school; John sold the blue streak edition of the
Scranton Tribune
. The boys were farmed out to relatives until Peggy and Johnny had saved enough to rent a two-bedroom apartment over the theater. Johnny joined Alcoholics Anonymous and there were fewer confrontations at home. But the family had changed.

It was time, Peggy had decided, to accept the harshness of life. She no longer paid attention to Johnny’s talk of making it big and leaving Scranton. She would dream through her children now, especially through her cherished son John. Of the three, only he seemed to have what it would take to break away from Scranton and its tedious, blue-collar life-style.

On most nights, Peggy could see John through her kitchen window as he stood across the street from the theater selling papers to people leaving the last show. A determined and frugal boy, each night, he tucked aside half of the $1.25 that he averaged. Peggy helped him hide his money from his father. When he earned his first $10, she took him to the bank to open a savings account.

While John was selling newspapers on a particularly harsh February night in 1949, he saw a small boy pedaling his bicycle toward the theater. It was so cold that the boy’s wool mittens had frozen to the handlebars of his bike. Most of the color had left his face and he was puffing.

“Whatcha doing?” John asked.

“Deliverin’ the
Trib’
to people’s homes,” Joey Long answered. “Just finished. How ‘bout lettin’ me come behind your stand and warm up?”

John nodded, eager for the company. That night’s meeting was the beginning of a friendship that lasted more than thirty years. Joey Long, a year older, was a husky, uncomplicated boy who was honest, worked hard, and never got into any trouble. As youngsters, John and Joey created their own adventures.

“John and I would talk about getting away and seeing the world,” Long later remembered. “He was very aggressive, very sure of himself. He wasn’t lazy. He wanted to get ahead. He was very tight with his money. He told me he was saving it, but I didn’t know what for. He used to say that his father was a failure and he didn’t want to be that way.”

When Joey turned seventeen, he joined the Marines. John went with him to the recruiter’s office and helped Joey fill out some of the necessary forms. Afterward, Joey pestered John about signing up, but John wasn’t interested in a military career. He had other plans.

Joey was not John’s only “best friend.” A short time after the Walkers moved to Scranton, John met Charles “Chas” Bennett, a thin, bespectacled boy one year younger than him.

John’s friendships with Joey Long and Chas Bennett were completely separate. Each one was
his
friend and John never made an effort to bring them together, nor did he encourage them to become friends with each other. But there was something else about his friendships with Joey and Chas that was peculiar.

When Joey Long was with him, John was a rambunctious adventurer who was polite, respectful, and honest. But when he was with Chas Bennett, it was a different story altogether. “On the surface, Jack [John still was known as Jack during this period] was never in any trouble,” Charles Bennett recalled. “But believe me, what you see on the surface with Jack is not what you get. Trust me. I knew him like a brother, better than anyone else. Jack is cunning, intelligent, clever, personable, and intrinsically evil.”

John and Chas stole eggs and threw them at streetcars, rolled used tires down hills at cars passing below, threw rocks through windows at St. Paul’s Catholic School. They soon graduated to more serious pranks. They stole money from purses and coats left unattended during school functions and stole coins from the tiny canisters in church sanctuaries where worshippers left donations for the poor and money to pay for prayer candles.

Once they stole a tin of hosts. The next day at St. Paul’s, Chas asked several girls in between classes if they wanted to “receive communion.”

“I didn’t realize until much later,” Charles Bennett recalled, “that I was always the one passing out the hosts while Jack lurked in the shadows watching.”

Years later, Charles Bennett still talked about John’s influence over him. “It was almost hypnotic,” he said. “I can’t explain it, but he became my Svengali. There was just something intriguing about him that drew me to him. He had a certain manipulative power.”

He added, “Jack was constantly calculating, his mind was active all the time. There was no spur-of-the-moment action, no random conversation. If you said something, he was filing it away, figuring out how to use it in the future.”

The boys’ misdeeds became more and more dangerous. John made a pair of brass knuckles and got into a fist fight in order to use them. He and Chas began setting fires. In 1950 John went to work as an usher at the Roosevelt Theater and pulled a prank that terrified Chas. One of the pictures playing that summer was
Winchester .73
, a hard-driving western that starred Jimmy Stewart and Rock Hudson. As part of a publicity stunt, the studio sent theaters replicas of a Winchester rifle. John borrowed the rifle one night and invited Chas and another boy to go “shooting” with him. They hiked into the mountains overlooking the city and took turns shooting empty beer bottles and discarded cans. But John got bored and when it was time for him to shoot again, he moved to a nearby ledge and began firing at the headlights of the cars on the main highway below.

“I was terrified,” Charles Bennett recalled, “not of the police, but what my father would do if he had found out. But Jack didn’t seem to care and I remember thinking after that incident that Jack
wanted
his father to find out what he was doing. I think he really wanted to strike back at his father and embarrass his old man.”