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CHAPTER 6

The Station Wagon Gang

The Mormon Trail was a thirteen-hundred-mile trek that the members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints embarked on when they emigrated west. Their journey to forge new settlements started in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1846. Thirty-eight years later, Council Bluffs became the birthplace of Harry Philmore Langdon, a comic whose deadpan expression and feeble grin made him a legendary Hollywood silent screen star. It was also in Council Bluffs where the teenage William Ettleman kicked off his criminal career.

Today, Council Bluffs and Omaha are united by Interstate 480. But originally, a truss bridge, the Ak-Sar-Ben Bridge—Nebraska spelled backwards—was the first road bridge to cross the Missouri River connecting the two cities. The teenage Ettleman stole a car on the Nebraska side of the Missouri River and drove it for less than six miles, taking it over the Ak-Sar-Ben Bridge to Iowa where an observant policeman stopped and arrested him. He received a five-hundred-dollar fine and the first mark on his criminal record.¹

“He gave our parents a lot of grief growing up,” Ettleman’s younger brother, James—now deceased—once stated.² The family moved frequently to avoid the embarrassment his delinquency caused them. And when Ettleman was twelve, his brother added, “He almost got me killed when he talked me into sneaking off with him to train hop. He grabbed my hand and pulled me up just in the nick of time, before I could fall under the wheels of a box car. Our parents were beside themselves when they found out afterwards from someone they knew who saw us.”

At age seventeen, Ettleman joined the army. He was caught stealing an automobile and driving it from Colorado to Iowa with a group of buddies. As a result he was dishonorably discharged and locked up for three years in a medium-security facility at the Federal Reformatory in El Reno, Oklahoma, for violating the Dyer Act—transporting a stolen vehicle across state lines.³

More skirmishes with the law followed Ettleman after his release from El Reno. At twenty-one, he was picked up on a morals charge in Nebraska, and at twenty-five he was arrested for possession of burglary tools. This time, he was sentenced to five years in the state penitentiary. But approximately two years later he was a free man again, heading an operation that involved a series of ongoing burglaries in California that targeted businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Ettleman’s criminal activities were operating almost flawlessly until he popped up on police radar three years after he went west, when a member of his crew identified him as the “brains” behind a Northern California group to whom the local police attached the moniker “The Station Wagon Gang.” The name was given to them because a brand new station wagon was spotted several times leaving the scene of their crimes. The vehicle turned out to belong to one of Ettleman’s hoodlums, forty-three-year-old Myron Walker, a one-time heavyweight prizefighter and former pre-med student. Walker was quoted in an Oakland Tribune newspaper article telling the police he got involved with the gang only after Ettleman shoved the nozzle of a gun inside his mouth and said, “From here on, you’re gonna come along with us on these jobs.”⁴

One can easily picture Ettleman, who then looked like a taller version of the young James Cagney, saying it. As for Walker, his excuse did not get him off the hook. He was still charged with the burglaries the Station Wagon Gang committed.

Ettleman had started recruiting his team of burglars during the time he was in prison at the El Reno Reformatory, thirty miles west of Oklahoma City. That is where he met Donald H. Stoner and Max Decker, who, like Ettleman, were young crooks in the making. After their release, Decker went to work as the operator of a Berkeley automotive repair shop, using it as his cover. Stoner moved to Indianapolis.⁵

San Francisco Bay Area police believed Decker was the fence for the Station Wagon Gang. As for Stoner, he worked as a freelance photographer, often riding in an Indianapolis police identification truck to take photographs of crime scenes. Once California law enforcement identified him as a member of Ettleman’s gang, it was not hard for the Indianapolis police to find him. After they arrested him, he waived extradition and was brought to California to stand trial. One can only imagine how angry the Indianapolis police were at Decker for breaking their trust. He was probably more than eager to get out of their jurisdiction and face whatever was waiting for him in California.

The arrest of Stoner in Indianapolis demonstrated how widespread Ettleman’s gang was. Police soon learned that he also imported hoodlums from Omaha, Nebraska, guaranteeing them one thousand dollars per job if they came out west to work for him. By this time, police estimated that Ettleman’s so-called Station Wagon Gang had taken in hundreds of thousands of dollars. And this included only the crimes they were able to link them to.

San Francisco Bay Area police got wise to Ettleman and his Station Wagon Gang when the twenty-two-year old Wing Law bragged to undercover cops about his association with Ettleman, describing Ettleman as an expert safecracker. Law’s proclivity to talk too much led investigators to identify a pattern of crimes that went from Contra Costa to Alameda to San Francisco and then up and down the peninsula and back again. They all had the same MO. Ettleman became an expert at spotting where alarms were located in businesses and circumventing them, as well as searching for those without one.

The gang took whatever they could get their hands on. In addition to the cash Ettleman got from safecracking, his gang stole heavy power tools from construction sites, liquor, cigarettes and television sets. Their primary targets were private shops and warehouses.⁶

When Ettleman’s men, Walker, Stoner, Law and Decker, were first arrested in connection with the Station Wagon Gang, authorities did not know where to find Ettleman. An intensive search was mounted to locate him and they soon found the young thug in Pueblo, Colorado, where he had gone to meet with Scotty Spinuzzi.

Spinuzzi, at the time, was identified as the number three Mafia man in the state. Less than three years later, Spinuzzi was arrested with his son, Samuel, and two ex-convicts from New York. One of the ex-convicts, Anthony Riccio, had links to Al Capone and Frank Costello’s criminal empire. The charge was an alleged $47,000 extortion involving a downtown casino in Las Vegas. The group, however, was soon out on bail and the case was eventually dropped.⁷

A connection between the Colorado mob and the California mob was also made when the Los Angeles Police Department, under Chief William H. Parker, carried out a campaign against organized crime figures. They seized records of Southern California boss Jack Dragna. Dragna, whose real name was Anthony Rizzoti, was known as “the Al Capone of the West Coast.” Los Angeles investigators found links to Scotty Spinuzzi and his brother among the confiscated material.⁸

But the fact that Ettleman had ties to Spinuzzi as far back as the 1950s indicates that they formed an attachment early on. It was a relationship that served Ettleman well for over a quarter of a century.

A psychological evaluation of Ettleman that was done when he was serving time in the California state prison system found him to be of “superior intelligence.” He was also listed as very cooperative, soft-spoken and realistic. The interviewer found that he displayed no bitterness or hostility toward authorities and that he seemed “to have matured somewhat during the past few years in his general behavior and attitude.” Tests administered to Ettleman while he was locked up in state prison showed the following:

…there continues to be in his personality structure a noticeable inconsistency between his willingness to accept responsibility and his very high social goals. It is felt that in the future if his work is not lucrative, he may again attempt to secure income illegally. He is a person who maintains considerable control over his reactions, rarely doing things impulsively or with any display of excitement. The test indicates he is somewhat of an egocentric person, who is not entirely aware of his own feelings. He has fairly good control over his aggressive feelings and he seems to be able to channel them along socially acceptable lines.⁹

Three years later, Ettleman was released from the state prison and was placed on parole. At the time he was living in Cupertino, California, employed at a drapery company in Oakland. During this period, he split from his first wife with whom he had a child. His parole ended on December 30, 1958. It was around this time that he disappeared from police radar and he did not pop up on the screen again for over a decade.