Sinner and saint

My inspiration to be a journalist and writer came from a convicted murderer.

The first time I saw J.J. Maloney was in Dave's Stagecoach Inn on Westport Road. He was hunched over a bourbon and Coke at the bar. To most, Dave's was -- and remains -- a dive, full of people pushing a cheap hustle or nursing a pain of some sort. It also was a place crammed with stories, a place where Maloney felt comfortable.

Maloney was not a big guy, maybe 5 feet 9 inches or so. He had coal-black hair -- a little grayer when he got older -- and dark eyes, sometimes ringed with black circles like some sort of a raccoon mask. His skin was olive tinted. Maloney was sometimes mistaken for being of Italian or Mexican descent.

He always dressed well, a fit one almost could place in the late 1950s or early 1960s -- slacks, dress shirt, jacket, rarely a tie. Only in the early 1980s, during the release of his first book, I Speak for the Dead, did Maloney give in to the current fashion. He got a his hair permed and wore brighter colored clothes.

But then, in Dave's, it was the late 1970s, a few years after Maloney had left The Kansas City Star. The buzz about his reporting on the Mafia and their infiltration of the River Quay (the River Market area) earlier in the decade still was loud. Yet more people knew of him than had read his stuff. He knew that.

A woman named Harriette, in whom we both had a romantic interest, introduced me to Maloney. I was still a wannabe writer, full of nothing more than talk, without discipline or drive. I'd rather party. When I gave that away to Maloney, he was quickly bored by me. After that, I learned to be satisfied with only a nod of recognition from him. A few years later Maloney would tell me how he once didn't say one word to a guy for the year they shared a cell together at the Missouri State Penitentiary. Obviously, Maloney didn't like him.

Maloney was born in St. Louis. He never knew his natural father. In 1944, his mother married Julius "Dutch" Gruender, an ex-con who had done a 16-year stretch in prison. That same year, Maloney's brother Bob was killed by a hit and run driver just before his 7th birthday. Maloney was 4 1/2 years old at the time. His mother had a nervous breakdown. Maloney went to live with his stepfather's brother. They wanted to keep the boy. It ended up a dispute and the court sent Maloney to a Catholic boys' home. Gruender then contacted Buster Workman, an East St. Louis gangster for help. Within a year Maloney was out of the Catholic home.

Gruender drank and he could be cruel. "Dutch was capable of actual brutality," Maloney told me during a series of interviews I had with him in 1982. "But he didn't see it that way -- he was just punishing me, that's how he was raised.... He'd stomp ya, had an enormous temper, a very dangerous man in the short run."

When Maloney was 11, the family moved to a 50-acre farm south of St. Louis. Gruender painted houses for a living, kept his criminal friends, and drank. At 14, Maloney stole a car and headed for the Ozarks. He had with him a .38 revolver. He was caught, kicked out of school, and sent to the Missouri Training School for Boys in Boonville for an indeterminate sentence. "I don't think I was particularly afraid," Maloney said. "I wasn't Superman but I had my share of guts."

For the most part, Maloney behaved, even developing a good relationship with the superintendent, a man named Sweeney. Maloney cleaned Sweeney's office, and he told Maloney that he would be going home soon. Maloney believed him. But Gruender got in the way, though not on purpose. He contacted Workman, who used some leverage with the St. Louis sheriff's department, to help get Maloney released from Boonville. Sweeney didn't like an East St. Louis mobster butting in. So the day Maloney's mother and Gruender came to pick him up, Sweeney said Maloney would have to stay at Boonville. The times gave the superintendent that power. Maloney felt Sweeney had betrayed him.

After that, Maloney escaped four times from Boonville. By the time he was captured after the final escape, Boonville authorities were tired of the insult. It was payback time.

"I got a beating that night; it was impressive," said Maloney. "They took one of those damn highway patrol gun belts -- it was one state trooper, a couple of guards, and a couple of deputy sheriffs -- and handcuffed me to the bumper of a car (parked) under a Missouri River bridge.

"(They) took all the stuff off a brown belt and beat me, like, almost two hours. And it didn't even hurt, that's the worst part -- the belt was so heavy, it couldn't really hurt. It just bruised you and fucked you up ... from my neck to my ankles. What they wanted me to say was that I wouldn't run away, and I wouldn't say it, you know."