Career criminal Montos dies at 92
Nicholas George Montos was once one of the nation’s top burglars and safecrackers, a career criminal from Chicago who had his own set of rules to avoid the cops, including changing his brand of beer every few months.
The 5-foot-5 “Little Nick” was also brutal, once labeled by legendary Sun-Times mob reporter Art Petacque as one of the Chicago Outfit’s top hitmen, although he was never convicted of murder.
(Sun-Times file)
And he holds the title of first man to twice make the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. Prisons couldn’t hold him — by 1956, he had broken out of five.
The 92-year-old crook escaped his last prison cell by dying of natural causes in a Massachusetts hospital Sunday. He was serving a 33- to 40-year sentence for a botched armed robbery that put an embarrassing end to his life on the streets.
He was 78 years old in 1995 when he went into an antique store in Brookline, Mass., pulled out a silencer-equipped .22-caliber pistol and stuck up the 73-year-old woman behind the counter.
But the woman slipped out of the plastic strips Montos bound her with, grabbed an aluminum bat and cracked Montos over the head. She alerted police and whacked him with the bat again when he didn’t go quietly.
“I don’t take any crap from anybody,” the store owner, Sonia Paine, told local reporters at the time. “I beat the hell out of him.”
At the time, Montos had been on the lam for nine years — including a stint in Greece — to avoid a 40-year sentence imposed in absentia for a Hammond jewel heist.
"His FBI rap sheet reads like a book," John Burke, an assistant prosecutor in Lake County, Ind., said in 1995.
Montos' first arrest came at age 14. When he died, he was Massachusetts' oldest inmate -- an accomplishment considering he was sentenced to death in Georgia in 1956 for whipping and robbing a 74-year-old farmer of his $1,000 life savings.
Montos was 18 when he made his first escape from jail in Miami in the 1930s. He ran from a chain gang in Alabama in 1942 and escaped again in 1944.
During World War II, Montos lived in suburban Broadview, where his 23rd Avenue neighbors knew him as Arthur Brown. He was the guy who puttered around his lawn and carried around a suitcase. But his neighbors learned in 1945 the suitcase was filled with burglar's tools, and he'd been carrying them to Tennessee and Alabama for burglaries.
He made the Most Wanted list in 1951 for the Georgia beating. While on the loose, the pockmarked, 170-pound Montos was described as "one of the top safecrackers in the country. Likes gambling. Italian food. Tips liberally. Has a 'big shot' complex. Armed."
He was wanted in a 1953 robbery of $153,000 from a Florida bank. In 1954, he was implicated in the robbery of inventor and art collector Oscar U. Zerk. Montos led two other men into Zerk's Kenosha estate, and one held a gun to Zerk's head. They made off with $200,000 in jewels and art, including a ivory tusk carved to depict a gorilla stepping into a beehive.
Later that year, while sitting in his car on Cermak Road in Westchester, waiting for a freight train to pass, the feds caught up. He had .38-caliber Colt pistol in a cigar box next to him on the front seat when arrested.
An ex-con caught with Montos told the feds that Montos had confided in him his eight rules to avoid the cops:
1) He only went out in the daytime, except when on a burglary job.
2) He stayed away from taverns where hoodlums congregated.
3) He changed his brand of beer every few months.
4) He stopped smoking cigars.
5) He never drove more than 5 mph over the speed limit.
6) He never used a hotel or fictitious phone number for an address.
7) He drove on diagonal streets whenever possible.
8) He hired pickpockets to get new identification papers from men his size.
Montos, however, didn’t appear to be following his no-speeding rule. After his arrest, FBI agents found his car in a small Berwyn garage. Montos had been trying to soup up the 120-mph car because he’d recently been passed by several cars on the road.
The car was also equipped, according to the Chicago Daily News, with a “spring device on the license plate holder to speed up any change of license plates.”
Also arrested in 1954 was Montos’ 22-year-old girlfriend, Lila Mae Nail, also known as “Doodlebug.” She was accused of harboring Montos.
Following her arrest, Montos agreed to plead guilty to possessing 234 pieces of Zerk’s art — in exchange for Nail’s release.
The Sun-Times described the courtroom scene in 1954 when “Doodlebug” was released. “When she heard Judge Walter J. LaBuy order the charges dismissed, she looked gratefully at Montos, who already had received his sentence, before leaving the courtroom.
"Montos, in turn, gave her an understanding, though morose, look as he was led off to prison."
He was sentenced to seven years in prison, to run concurrent with a pending sentence in Mississippi for a safe burglary. But in January, 1956, he and another inmate used a hacksaw to escape a Mississippi prison. That landed him on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for the second time.
Both fugitives were collared that March in a Memphis motel, where they were holed up with an arsenal of weapons, including a submachine gun. They “surrendered meekly after agents fired tear gas bombs into the motel room,” according to a Sun-Times account of the arrest. Each man was carrying more than $2,000 in cash.
In the 1970s, Montos continued to make the newspapers. The Sun-Times reported he was wanted after skipping a court hearing to question him about his Outfit ties. The Sun-Times reported at the time he had risen to “a position of importance in the Chicago mob.”
When he was arrested in Indiana in 1985, the Sun-Times reported he was in big trouble with the mob. The arrest violated a probation that his syndicate buddies put him on in 1982, when he botched a free-lance burglary they did not approve.
Making matters worse, police had heard Montos talking over police radio frequencies while burglarizing the jewelry store in Hammond.
At the time of his death, Montos was the only Massachusetts inmate in his 90s. The next oldest is 85. Montos had been waiting on a request to Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick to commute his sentence. The state Parole Board had turned down a request for parole earlier this year.
“I realize that my criminal record is extensive,” he wrote in the letter to the board that was obtained by The Boston Globe. “I suspect there may be some who will suggest I deserve no mercy or compassion. I can understand their feelings. But there is no way I am going to live to serve out my sentence.”
Contributing: AP