Do you remember your first bank?
“I robbed banks all over. All small branch banks. Never nothing downtown, Loops and all that–too big. Chances are very slim that you will get away. You can do it, like you hand a note to the teller, but I didn’t go that way.
“I was successful because I didn’t stay in one thing. I was a burglar, then I went into banks. I was a bank robber, and then I went into jewelry stores.” He was a stickup man and then an arsonist. He was an enforcer for the crime syndicate and then a con artist.
He cheerfully lists his other great juvenile crimes. He stole a horse from a fruit peddler and rode it around his backyard for a couple of days, telling his parents the horse’s owner had asked him to take care of it. At the age of nine he stole a beer truck, and a few years later he walked into a transit garage and stole a streetcar. He took a violin from a tenant who lived upstairs, and he and a friend, armed with tin cups, pretending to be blind, tried to play the instrument at an el station. At 11, in the course of taking another child’s marbles and money, he split his victim’s head open with a two-by-four. When he was still an adolescent a judge, reviewing Rini’s criminal history, predicted he would someday be strapped into the electric chair. “The judge,” says Rini, “was not far off.
And with that James Rini’s formal education ended. He was 15 years old. He had never learned to read.
“During the elections I used to break windows for him. Anybody that supported anyone opposing him, I’d break their windows. Give them flat tires. We used to call ’em: ‘Take that sign down. You better have Paddy Bauler’s picture up.’
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“All burglars are scared of dogs. Ain’t that funny? They will go in and stick up a place and not be scared of a gun, but they are scared of a dog. Human nature, you know. I wasn’t scared of ’em. Soon as I go into the kitchen, I see a dog, I pick up a chair. A dog will not attack you right away. He backs off to see what you gonna do. So I get my chair. And I just wheel him around just like they guide the lions at the circus, and soon as I got him to a toilet or bedroom I close the door on him. Then I go ahead and do the apartment. I like to get him in the toilet, because if I get him in the bedroom, I can’t find my goods, what I am looking for–’cause I ain’t going to be looking for nothing in the toilet. And I never been bit. If the dog is in the yard, it’s not nice to say, but I would get some meat and, if I wanted that house bad enough, I would poison the meat, put it in the yard. You put rat poison in it, and it burns his stomach. And if he goes for water it is just like a rat–he blows up, bang, that’s it. Some dogs won’t eat what you throw in the yard. Some dogs are trained not to touch nothing. They eat at a certain time and that’s it. And if that dog don’t bite, that means you ain’t goin’ in that house. Forget about it.
