Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock had Chicago connection

By John Dempsey WLS-AM News

(CHICAGO) It appears that Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock had a Chicago connection.    The Chicago Tribune and Sun Times report that career criminal and con man Benjamin Paddock, Stephen Paddock’s father, was born in Sheboygan Wisconsin in 1926 and spent his formative years in Chicago after moving to the city in 1940.

Chicago is where the father of the perpetrator of the worst mass shooting in American history began his own life of crime.

A 1946 article in the Chicago Daily Tribune described Benjamin Paddock as a former merchant marine seaman living on the Northwest Side, who admitted to stealing 12 cars by using stolen U.S. Army stationery to acquire bills of sale, and then selling the vehicles for $1,200 each.

Paddock ended up serving time in the old Joliet prison in the 1950’s, and was incarcerated when his son Stephen was born in Iowa in 1953.   The Paddocks later moved to Arizona where Benjamin Paddock committed a series of bank robberies, and was arrested in Las Vegas after trying to run down an FBI agent with his car in 1960.

Benjamin Paddock ​escaped from a federal prison in Texas in 1968, putting him on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list, which said he was “diagnosed as psychopathic.”

Benjamin Paddock took on an assumed name and moved to Oregon, where authorities tracked him down in 1978. After being paroled for the escape, he was charged with racketeering in 1987 for an illegal bingo operation In Oregon.

He died near Fort Worth, Texas, in 1998.

@2017 WLS-AM News

 

Tags: