In that era of ethnic challenge, nationalities huddled with their own. Neighbors were generally old-country the elders didn't understand the walk nor talk of urbanity, but their kids picked it up as their major language. Wherever one walked he walked in the shadows of their smokestacks. The neighborhood brooded in the lower depths of Chicago's sanitation canal district, tilting between a milieux of freight yards, water towers, viaducts and a series of constantly flooding city sloughs, fed by factories that fenced in the entire area. Little Lester was born to poor Highland Scot immigrant parents Josef and Mary Gillis, from Margaree, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, who could not comprehend nor adapt to American ways of life they were pathetically naïve in the realities of the urban pavement. Richard Lindberg, author of Return to the Scene of the Crime, adds, "Standing only five feet four inches, Gillis compensated for his physical limitations with a murderous temper and a willingness to employ a switchblade or a gun without hesitation or remorse for the intended victim." "His angelic, pear-smooth face never betrayed his instant ability to kill." "Where outlaws such as Pretty Boy Floyd and the Barkers would kill to protect themselves when cornered, Nelson went out of his way to murder - he loved it," apprises Jay Robert Nash in Bloodletters and Badmen.
Even his criminal peers were wary of his path.
He was to emerge from the kick 'em-hard Chicago Stockyards district as Baby Face Nelson, one of the toughest, and definitely the most heartless, of the Depression-era gangsters. A social commentator would later describe Lester Gillis as "something out of a bad dream". He bore the pout of a devil-child and the cruelty of one of Milton's Inferno torturers. Lester Joseph Gillis came into this world a chronic child who, it was said, never lost the bleating ill-temper of a spoiled brat.
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