[Guns America Digest] Lester Gillis was born in December of 1908 in Chicago, Illinois. His first arrest came on Independence Day at age 12. Young Lester discovered a handgun and inadvertently shot a pal in the jaw. He served a year in reform school before being released to steal his first car at age 13. This bought the lad another 18 months in the boys’ penal facility.Gillis was a great many dichotomous things. He was a natural leader, a committed husband, and a doting father. He married Helen Wawrzyniak at age 20 and sired two kids he adored. By 1930, however, Gillis was making serious bank in the burgeoning field of armed robbery.
The press referred to his gang as the "Tape Bandits" after their propensity to truss up robbery victims with tape. On one of his first major scores, Gillis and his troops made off with $205,000 in jewelry from magazine-executive, Charles Richter. That would be more than $3 million today. After several more lucrative home invasions, Gillis robbed his first financial institution. While the $4,000 he stole was dwarfed by his previous jewel heists, Gillis found in bank robbery his true calling.