Test : Jimmy the Gent

No one that knew James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke ever doubted that it was his upbringing that led to his sociopathic lifestyle. Born on July 5, 1931 to a woman named Conway, Burke never knew his parents.

He entered foster care at the age of two and was shuttled from home to home experiencing beatings, sexual abuse and other unspoken horrors from a seemingly endless number of temporary parents.

In 1944, when Burke was 13 years old, he was in the backseat of a car driven by his latest set of foster parents. Burke did something to aggravate his foster father who was driving. The man, who had a short fuse to begin with, turned around to belt Burke and in doing so lost control of the car, crashed and was killed instantly. The man’s wife blamed Burke for the loss of her husband and gave him regular beatings until he was removed from her care.

Burke had gotten into so much trouble as a teenager and young adult that between the ages of 16 and 22, he spent a total of 86 days outside reformatories and jails. In 1949 Burke made a name for himself after refusing to rollover on a Brooklyn hood after he was arrested in a check-cashing scheme. Burke was given a savage beating at the hands of the police, but would not cooperate. When he arrived at Auburn Prison to begin a five-year stretch, word had already reached there that Burke was a stand-up guy. While incarcerated Burke was rumored to have committed murders for “mob chieftains” who were in prison with him.

Stories of Burke’s murderous reputation became almost legendary. In 1962, when he was planning to get married, Burke found out that an ex-boyfriend of his fiancée, Mickey, was giving her problems. Burke was said to have resolved this by chopping the man to pieces and leaving him “tossed all over the inside of his car.” In another tale that showed a bizarre side of Burke’s sense of justice, Jimmy gave an elderly woman $5,000 after he found out that her hoodlum son refused to repay her. Burke then was rumored to have murdered the son that same day.

Henry Hill would reveal in the book Wiseguy that “Jimmy was the kind of guy who cheered for the crooks in movies. He named his two sons Frank James Burke and JesseJames Burke. Later his daughter Cathy would marry Anthony Indelicato, one of three hitmen who carried out the murder of Carmine Galante in July 1979. Of Burke’s ruthlessness Hill claimed, “Jimmy had a reputation for being wild. He’d whack you. There was no question – Jimmy could plant you just as fast as shake your hand. It didn’t matter to him. At dinner he could be the nicest guy in the world, but then he could blow you away for dessert.

He was scary and he scared some very scary fellows.”