Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring by Pete Earley Read Free Book Online

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.”

Chapter 6
    Johnny and Peggy moved across town in 1951, into a house in the same West Scranton neighborhood where both of them had grown up. Neither Arthur nor John wanted to enroll at St. Patrick’s High School. They had heard stories about the strictness of the nuns and priests there, and