Shortly before he died, Robert Wilson shook his head when his son tried to calm him by saying they'd meet again in heaven.
"He told me he'd done too many bad things," said Winston Wilson, 80, a retired machinist from Coon Rapids. "I'd heard stories but never really knew anything until after he passed."
The youngest of five siblings who grew up in Minneapolis, Winston knew his dad as a hard-working, anti-union truck driver who hauled dirt, excavated and dabbled in construction north of the Twin Cities.
"I never saw my dad cry or heard him say, 'I love you,' although I knew he did," Winston said. "Things were different. They thought they had to be manly."
After his father died at 86 in 1989, Winston started scouring microfilm of Depression-era newspapers. They told of a car-stealing bootlegger who led cops on a high-speed, gun-popping chase, who vowed never to be taken alive but ultimately wound up in the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kan.
"There are so many questions I wished I would have asked," Winston said.
The eighth child of a farm family from the central Wisconsin town of Plainfield, Robert Wilson was born in 1903. He never got past third grade, stole cars as a teenager and smoked unfiltered Camels, his son said.
Wilson was too young to fight in the First World War and too old for World War II, but the Depression hit while he was in his 30s. "They had no money and bootlegging was a way to survive," Winston said.