Crime & Safety
Las Vegas Shooting: Gunman's Dad Claimed He Played For Chicago Bears
Benjamin Paddock lived in Chicago as a teen in the 1940s, and he started his criminal career in the city.
CHICAGO, IL — Before making the FBI's most wanted list, the father of Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock spent his late teenage years on the Northwest Side of Chicago, where he began his criminal career, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Historical records and newspaper articles show that Benjamin Paddock lived in the city in 1940s, served two prison terms in Joliet in the 1950s and claimed to have played for the Chicago Bears. His son is responsible for killing at 59 people and wounding more than 500 when he opened fire Sunday night on a country music festival in Las Vegas.
Born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, in 1926, Benjamin Paddock and his parents were living in Chicago by 1940, Travis Gross, the Sheboygan County Historical Society's executive director, told the Sun-Times. He lived at different apartments and went to high school during his time in Chicago, but it's not known if he graduated.
The first mention of any criminal involvement with Paddock was in a 1946 Chicago Daily Tribune article, the Sun-Times reports. In that story, he confessed to using military stationery to steal a dozen cars and resell them all for $14,400, a scheme that earned Paddock a prison sentence at the Illinois State Penitentiary in Joliet, a facility popularized thanks to its depiction in "The Blues Brothers." (Get Patch real-time email alerts for the latest news for Chicago — or your neighborhood. And iPhone users: Check out Patch's new app.)
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He was jailed at the prison a second time for check fraud, according to the Sun-Times. It was during this incarceration that Stephen Paddock was born in 1953 in Iowa.
RELATED: Las Vegas Shooter's Dad 'Psychopathic,' 'Suicidal': FBI
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After Benjamin Paddock's release from prison, Stephen and brother Eric lived with their father in Phoenix until a series of bank robberies and an attempt to run down an FBI agent put the patriarch back behind bars in 1960, Gross told the Sun-Times. In 1968, he escaped from a Texas prison, which landed him on the FBI's most wanted list until 1977. While on the list, Paddock was described as "psychopathic" and "armed and dangerous" with "suicidal tendencies."
Paddock lived in Oregon under an alias — Bruce Erickson — until 1978, when he was paroled for his prison escape. Although he would stay a free man after that, Paddock wouldn't stay free of legal complications. He faced civil racketeering charges for an illegal bingo operation and criminal charges for illegally rolling back car odometers, cases he was able to settle by paying fines, according to a 1998 column in Oregon's Eugene Register-Guard written a month after Paddock died in Fort Worth, Texas, at age 77.
"Supposedly, in addition to illegal activities, he claimed he'd been a Dixieland band singer, pilot, auto racing crew chief, Chicago Bears pro football player, survivor of the World War II mine sweeper sinking, and a wrestler named 'Crybaby' who traveled with Gorgeous George, the Creswell man who was pro wrestling's first superstar," wrote Don Bishoff, who knew Paddock under his assumed name. "Some of that may have been true. With Bruce, you never knew."
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