by Earley, Pete
“I want the truth out,” he explained. “I really don’t know how anyone is going to be able to write very much bad about me if they are objective and report the whole picture and tell all the facts about my life and not a bunch of lies.
“Except for this one black mark,” he continued, “I’ve led a very impressive life.”
Within the hour, John was telling me why he had become a KGB spy. This is what he said:
“Everyone makes a big deal out of the fact that I became aspy. It’s because spying is such an unusual crime, but what they don’t understand is that I became a spy because that is what I had access to. If I’d worked in a bank, I would have taken money. If I’d had access to dope, I would have sold drugs. The fact that I became a spy is really insignificant. The point is that I became a spy because I needed money. It was as simple as that.”
John paused and asked if my tape recorder was dose enough to the wire grill to pick up his voice clearly. “When I was working as a private eye, I had a three-hundred-dollar recorder, not one of those cheap ones like you have there,” he told me. I assured him that the recorder was reliable.
“You got to understand what I was going through at the time. My job
in the Navy was extremely arduous duty. It was the worst duty I ever had in the military and for the first time I was having trouble keeping up. Meanwhile, I’m getting zero cooperation from Barbara. The marriage is vegetating. I was in Norfolk and the family was in Charleston, where we owned a small bar, so I’m running down to Charleston every weekend and Barbara is the pits. At this point, she is a problem drinker. God, I can see her now, a cigarette in one hand and a fucking glass in the other with her legs crossed at the end of this stinking line of bar stools.
“Sex between us is stopping and I mean stopping fast. There is no intimacy. I know that she is having an affair with someone. I don’t know who, but I know. A husband always knows. A wife knows too. Your wife knows what you do and you know what she does without asking. You just know such things. You can sense them. I’m not the kind of person who would confront someone. If I walked in the house and caught my wife in bed with some guy, I would have backed out the door and laughed at the fucking dummies. I’m not the kind who would shoot them, that’s for sure. I’m not saying it didn’t bother me. Sure, it did, she was my wife, but I would have overlooked it. I didn’t know at the time that it was my own goddamn brother who was screwing her. If I had figured it out I would have confronted him.”
John paused and then grinned. “I would have said, ‘Hey Art, I know you’re fucking Barbara. Goddamn, I thought you had better taste.’ “
He laughed and watched to see if I smiled. I did and then he said, “That’s not really true. I was just trying to be funny, but this wasn’t a funny situation. The truth was that my life sucked, really sucked.”
Suddenly, it seemed as if John had become exhausted and a great burden had been placed on his shoulders. His speech slowed.
“Anyway,” he continued, “that’s when I began to feel like I was back in the same hole that I had come from. I had an alcoholic father, and I saw the horrors of that and I promised myself that I would never be an alcoholic because I knew how destructive they were to the family and I didn’t want to submit my kids to that bullshit, This is where the depression happened. Every chance that I got, I was trying to find some way to generate enough money to keep the bar going and Barbara wouldn’t let up. . . . Nag, nag, nag. Yack, yack, yack. Where is the money coming from?
“I had a trailer behind the bar, sixty feet by twelve feet. It was the biggest you could get, so she wasn’t living bad, but really strange things started happening. The kids were running wild. Things were out of control.
“It got to be too much. I was sitting in my goddamn room in the BOQ [Bachelor Officers’ Quarters] in Norfolk, this shitty little room that the Navy gave me, and I was cleaning my pistol.
“It’s hard to explain, it’s irritating really because I’m a very rational person. You will find that out about me the more we talk. But I just couldn’t handle another argument with Barbara. I was off submarines, which I missed, and I was stuck working on a desk and I really missed submarines, I mean, God I loved submarine duty, and Barbara had become a nagging bitch and a fucking alcoholic. I kept thinking, ‘How can this be happening? How can my life be so screwed up?’ I had a small insurance policy, ten-thousand-dollar whole life, I think, maybe more, but it was enough to payoff the bar debts and keep the place going for a while and I kept thinking about that money and how killing myself would get Barbara off my back too. It would have been more logical to divorce the bitch. I mean, the wife that I married at twenty was not the same person at thirty. I mean, I never would have considered even dating her if we’d met when we were both thirty.
“So I took the gun, the .38, I think, and I loaded the piece, I’m sure it was the .38, and I was in my room at the BOQ and I said, ‘Screw it,’ and I chambered a round and put that son-of-a-bitch up to my head, and I held it there and a few tears ran and I just couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t fucking do it, and I said, ‘Fuck it Walker, you are already dead, man. You are just too dumb to know it. You are totally fucked up.’”
John sat quietly for several moments and then he looked at me and said, “All I really did was commit another form of suicide. I became a Russian spy.”
I did not react.
His answer sounded too pat, too rehearsed, yet believable, as i f parts, i f not all of it, were true. I wanted to believe John Walker. I wanted to believe that he was telling me the truth. But I wasn’t certain.
We spoke a long time that night and John seemed pleased when I told him that I intended to talk to his mother, Margaret, and his father, John Walker, Sr.
“You’ll love my mother,” he said. “She’s a typical sainted Italian grandmother. My dad is another story.”
I mentioned several other persons with whom I wanted to speak, and then our time was up. But as the guard was leading him away, John turned and spoke to me.
“I know a lot of people will tell you lies about me,” he said. “I don’t know why people feel they have to do that. But they will. You’re gonna have to be careful.”
PART II
the past
For I the Lord your God am a jealous God visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation
– Exodus 20:4
I’ll meet the raging of the skies, but not an angry father
– Thomas Campbell, Lord Ullin’s Daughter
Chapter 3
At the turn of the century, Scranton, Pennsylvania became known as the Anthracite Capital of the World because it was located over the largest deposit of coal ever discovered in the United States. Immigrants seeking jobs deluged the booming industrial town, arriving from Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Italy, and Russia.
Arthur Scaramuzzo was among them. He stepped off a passenger car at the Lackawanna train depot in downtown Scranton in the spring of 1907, a sixteen-year-old boy from Italy with all of his possessions in one bag. Arthur could not speak, write, or understand English according to a note pinned to the breast of his thick wool jacket. Written by an immigration officer in New York City, the note said Arthur was seeking his father, Ralph, who worked in a stone quarry near Scranton.
Ralph had been the first member of the Scaramuzzo family to come to the United States. Like so many other immigrants, he sent for his family as soon as he could afford to. Arthur was the first to arrive. Eventually, Ralph earned enough to bring all four of his children to Scranton, but at Ellis Island his beloved wife, Rose, was declared “medically unfit” because she had cataracts. She was forced to return to Italy, where she died alone.
The quarry where Ralph Scaramuzzo worked was owned by Prospero Gaetano, another Italian immigrant. The two men had not known each other before Ralph applied for work, but their common heritage led to a quick and lasting friendship. So it was not surprising that Arthur
Scaramuzzo was directed to Prospero Gaetano’s house when he arrived in Scranton. The boy began work beside his father at the stone quarry the next day. It was exhausting, difficult labor. Arthur stood just five feet seven inches tall, but he had broad shoulders for a teenager, and strong arms. At night, he studied English.
A year later Arthur appeared again at the Gaetanos’ door. This time he had come to ask Prospero Gaetano for the hand of his daughter, Angelina. At fourteen, she weighed a scant ninety pounds and still looked a girl, but she was a good cook and had been prepared by her mother to care for a husband and home. They were married April 28, 1908, in St. Lucy’s Roman Catholic Church in West Scranton. The union lasted more than sixty years until their deaths, one year apart, in the early 1970’s.
Scranton is a town where changes emerge slowly and memories linger. Children grow up in the same neighborhoods where their parents played as youngsters. Arthur and Angelina spent most of their lives just a few blocks from the church where they were married. He is remembered in West Scranton as a hardworking, pious man who was a good provider for his wife and eight children, four girls and four boys. Many nights, after a dinner of pasta, meat, salad, and bread – always torn from the loaf, never sliced – Arthur gathered his children around and told them funny stories, fairy tales that he made up as he went along. Afterwards he went down to the fruit cellar and brought them oranges and bananas.
Angelina was equally devoted to her family. She was always doing something for someone else: baking bread for a sick neighbor, mending clothes for her children, helping collect a basket for the needy at Christmas.
The Scaramuzzos were devout Roman Catholics, so much so that when Arthur added on to his simple, two-story frame house on Geraldine Court, he erected two shrines to the Virgin Mary in the entryway. It was not unusual, the children recall, to see Arthur and Angelina pray before the shrines at night before retiring, thanking the Virgin for what they considered to be an abundant life.
But one of their children, Margaret Loretta Scaramuzzo, looked at her parents’ life a bit more skeptically than they did. Born in 1913, Peggy was a beauty. She had auburn hair, ebony eyes, and an unbridled sense of adventure. “Peggy wanted more from life than most of us,” a cousin remembers. From the time she was a little girl, Peggy attacked life with a vengeance.
As a teenager, Peggy developed a beautiful singing voice and was soon a frequent vocalist at St. Lucy’s. But while singing at church functions pleased her parents, Peggy sought a bigger stage.
Her mother and sisters sometimes had trouble accepting Peggy’s passion for life. Once, when her mother asked Peggy to run an errand to the corner market, Peggy snapped, “No. There are some things a young lady just doesn’t do.” Angelina was forced to make the trip herself.
Peggy saw how hard her mother’s life was, raising eight children and running the home. She saw the toll that her father paid for working as a stone mason. As a child, she had assumed these hardships were the routine ingredients of life. But as she matured, she started to look at her own neighborhood more critically. She saw girls only a few years older than she marry and turn, seemingly overnight, from gushing teenagers into dour wives left at home to change soiled diapers while their pot-bellied husbands tossed darts and drank beer at the neighborhood bar. She began to realize that although West Scranton was her parents’ world, it didn’t have to be hers. She had beauty and talent, and she didn’t intend to settle for a young man who was content to come home each night with coal dust under his fingernails.
On a brisk December evening in 1932, Peggy met a man who also had big dreams. She had gone with her brother Frank to a nightclub called The American Beauty to hear a local band. During a brief intermission, a young man approached her.
“Hello, Miss Scaramuzzo,” he said. “My name is Johnny Walker.”
John Anthony Walker was unlike anyone Peggy had ever met. Lean and clean-cut, he was handsome by any young girl’s standard. But there was something more to Johnny Walker than good looks. He had a certain elegance that other Scranton boys lacked, a certain charm and gentleness. He also had the most appealing voice Peggy had ever heard, a distinct baritone with a certain authority to its natural cadence, a smoothness that seemed to say, Trust me, I know what I am talking about.
Johnny had grown up in West Scranton, the son of James Vincent Walker, an engineer for a mining company, and Mary Ferguson Walker. He had two brothers and a sister, all of them smart and talented, like him. When Johnny was a student at St. Patrick’s High School in West Scranton, underclassmen from the University of Scranton used to hire him to write school papers for them. Johnny was not just intelligent he was musically gifted. A love of music was just one of the things that brought Johnny and Peggy together. Fifty years later Peggy still recalled the night she met her future husband. “It was love at first sight,” she told me tearfully, as we spoke in the parlor of her childhood home, which Arthur Scaramuzzo had bequeathed to his children. “Johnny was so handsome and I was so in love with him. We were so full of life. Nothing was going to stop us, man! Nothing!”
I asked Peggy, who was seventy-four years old at the time, about her wedding. But Peggy, who was still working an eight-hour job during the week and was mentally sharp, suddenly became evasive. “I can’t remember when it was,” she said, “but you know it was here in Scranton and it wasn’t anything special.”
I later discovered that Peggy and Johnny were not married in Scranton, but in Rockville, Maryland, on August 15, 1934. One month after the ceremony, Peggy gave birth to Arthur James Walker. The fact that Peggy was pregnant when she married was never mentioned within the family. Even Arthur claimed not to have known.
It was the first of many family secrets to be revealed.
Chapter 4
Washington, D.C., is much more glamorous than Scranton, and Johnny and Peggy soon were happily settled into a modest apartment at 43 R Street Northeast, a tidy section of row houses. Johnny worked at the Department of Commerce as a clerk in the National Recovery Administration, one of the overnight bureaucracies President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had created to help pun America out of the depression. Peggy took care of Arthur and soon found herself pregnant again. On July 28th, 1937, Peggy gave birth to John Anthony Walker, Jr.
From the beginning, relatives recalled later, Peggy favored her second-born. Perhaps it was because her pregnancy with Arthur embarrassed her. For whatever reason, Peggy developed a special bond with John, whom everyone called Jack as a child, that grew stronger through the years.
It didn’t take long before John Walker Sr., grew tired of being a government clerk. Meetings and shuffling papers were not for him, he told Peggy. So when a better paying and more demanding job opened at the Bituminous Coal Commission, he accepted it and moved his family to Altoona, Pennsylvania. But before Peggy had a chance to unpack, Johnny quit this job to take an even better one in New York City. “Could there be a better place for an ambitious young man and his family than New York City?” he asked Peggy.
Johnny had been offered a job by his father’s cousin, Frank Comerford Walker, a prominent attorney, former Montana state legislator, Democratic Party official, and pal of FDR. On December 10, 1938, a group of Democratic stalwarts had formed a private corporation to raise money for construction of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, the first presidential library. Frank Walker had been elected president of the group, and he wanted Johnny to be its liaison with the Philadelphia construction company hired to build the library and with Dr. Fred H. Shipman, the library’s first director. It was challenging and heady work.
An album of family photographs shows a beaming couple poised in the living room of an attractive fifth-floor apartment on Seventy-seventh Street in Manhattan. Johnny is pictured with his jacket tossed casually over his right shoulder, his left arm draped around Peggy. He is dressed in a crisp white shirt, tie, suspenders, carefully pressed trousers) and spit-polished shoes. Peggy is wearing a store-bought dress with matching hat and gloves. Peggy and
Johnny spent hours keeping their family album current, she meticulously arranging each snapshot and Johnny drawing white ink doodles on the album’s black pages. It was more than a scrapbook of family snapshots. It was a primer of a couple on the move.
Nearly all of the relatives visited the young couple in New York, and Arthur Scaramuzzo, in particular, was generous in his praise. The United States really was a land of unlimited opportunity, he proclaimed. He had arrived a poor immigrant, and his son-in-law had actually met the President of the United States!
Peggy and Johnny enjoyed not only the city, but also each other. There were occasional arguments – both were stubborn – but spats were rare. Peggy gave birth to James Vincent Walker, the couple’s third son and last child, in New York City in 1939.
Some of Johnny’s correspondence to the library’s corporate board still exists in the archives at Hyde Park. The documents reveal a certain brashness. At one point, FDR’s cronies asked Johnny to write a history of the library. His twenty-one-page account included not only compliments to FDR and the library’s backers, but also several harsh criticisms. The board chose not to circulate it widely.
When his job with the library ended in 1941, Johnny turned once again to his politically powerful cousin for help. Frank Walker liked Johnny and thought he was bright and talented. He also knew that Johnny was a good salesman, an excellent musician, and a lover of the theater, so he helped Johnny get a job with Warner Brothers as a salesman/publicist. He was sent to Richmond, Virginia, to cover movie theaters in the Washington, Virginia, and Maryland region. The Walkers didn’t like leaving New York, especially for a town as sedate as Richmond and a job that just didn’t seem as exciting as the old one. But it was more glamorous working for the movies than for the federal government. The couple bought a bungalow at 712 Pensacola Avenue in a middle-class area of Richmond in a quiet, close-knit neighborhood.