Young Nussbaum was smart. He competed in chess tournaments by mail from his Ohio jail cell. While in prison, he took correspondence courses in locksmithing, gunsmithing, and chemistry. Nussbaum was a pilot and an airplane mechanic. He was a welder and a draftsman.

Within a year of leaving Chillicothe, Nussbaum and Wilcoxson connected in Buffalo, New York, and devised a plan to rob banks. The FBI eventually labeled Nussbaum "the brains" of the team while Wilcoxson was marked as "the brawn."

 The two men knocked over a few local stores and service stations in Buffalo to raise seed money for an arsenal of weapons they would eventually use robbing banks. Nussbaum and "One Eye" Bobby Wilcoxson committed seven bank robberies as a team, operating between 1960 and 1962. The pair hauled in at least $248,000 - the rough equivalent of $2 million in 2008.

Along the way, Nussbaum and Wilcoxson built their cache of weapons from deactivated military weapons called "Dewats." With parts they acquired by mail order, the bandits refurbished the weapons. Their arsenal included revolvers, shotguns, submachine guns, hand grenades, M1 carbine military rifles and military style armor piercing anti-tank guns that could annihilate pursuing police cars or pierce bank vaults.

Nussbaum was a self taught bomb maker. He and Wilcoxson posed as "Mad Bombers," planting and setting off two bombs in Washington, D.C., in June, 1961. They made several telephone calls pretending to be Southern white supremists bombing the capitol city in protest of integration and the civil rights movement. The bombings were planned to distract law enforcement manpower near the White House so a Washington, D.C., bank could be easily robbed on June 30, 1961.

A bomb built inside a camera case was intended to explode just before the June 30 robbery. When the device failed, police lifted Nussbaum's fingerprints from the camera case and its other components.

On December 15, 1961, Peter Columbus Curry, Jr., joined Wilcoxson and Nussbaum to rob a branch of the Lafayette National Bank in Brooklyn, New York. Wilcoxson entered the bank and killed guard Henry Kraus with four quick rounds from a Thompson submachine gun.

Curry was arrested in front of his mother’s Brooklyn house by the FBI in February, 1962.

The FBI named Wilcoxson to the famous "Most Wanted List" in late February, 1962, adding Nussbaum in early April. Over 1 million "wanted" posters picturing the bandits were circulated. The FBI declared the pair as dangerous, warning they were armed with hand-grenades and submachine guns. 600 FBI agents searched worldwide for Nussbaum, Wilcoxson and Wilcoxson’s 19 year old "paramour," Jacqueline Ruth Rose of Delray Beach, Florida, and Paoli, Indiana.

On November 3, 1962, Nussbaum’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Sylvester Majchrowicz, telephoned the FBI, telling them Nussbaum was in Buffalo to secretly visit his wife, Alicia, and their 19-month old daughter, Alison.

More than 30 FBI cars surrounded the Statler Hilton Hotel at 1:30 a.m. on November 4, 1962, as Nussbaum arrived, expecting to pick up his wife. Alicia Nussbaum's reaction somehow signaled her husband, and he raced out of the hotel parking lot, leading a parade of FBI agents on a 100mph chase through the cold, wet streets of Buffalo.

A police K-nine unit, unaware of the chase but hearing the sirens, rammed Nussbaum’s car. Twenty-five minutes after Nussbaum fled parking lot of the Statler Hilton Hotel, he was captured by the FBI.

On Saturday morning, November 10, 1962, Wilcoxson and Rose were captured by the FBI at their rented apartment in Baltimore, Maryland.

By May, 1963, Nussbaum pled guilty to the murder of bank guard Kraus and seven bank robberies.

On February 8, 1964, Nussbaum was sentenced to a total of 40 years in prison with eligibility for parole in 1971.

While running from the FBI, Nussbaum read "The Name of The Game is Death," a mystery crime novel by Dan J. Marlowe, a popular pulp fiction writer of the day. Nussbaum, using the name "Carl Fisher," phoned Marlowe’s agent and sent Marlowe letters praising the realness of the book.

Marlowe and Nussbaum remained friends while Nussbaum was imprisoned. Marlow encouraged Nussbaum to write and the two often collaborated - Nussbaum suggesting to Marlowe professional criminal techniques that added even more realism to Marlowe’s body of work. Nussbaum was paroled in the early 1970’s and connected with Marlowe. The two shared an apartment for a time  in Southern California. At one point, Nussbaum became his mentor's care taker when a sudden illness left Marlow with little memory of his past.

Nussbaum wrote a lot. He published as Al Nussbaum and at least a half-dozen pseudonyms. Nussbaum authored many short stories published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s anthologies of short stories, Harper’s Magazine, and others.

Nussbaum wrote several novels. "Gypsy," the most well known, was published by Scholastic Press under the title "Motorcycle Racer."

In the mid-1970’s, Nussbaum wrote television scripts for "Swicth," a CBS crime series featuring Robert Wagner and Eddie Albert. In the 1980’s, Nussbaum put on workshops for mystery writers at USC, and he was elected president of a Southern California Chapter of the Mystery Writer’s Association.

Albert Frederick Nussbaum died in 1996.

An incredible insight into the artistic criminal working of Nussbaum’s mind can be found his short story "Collision."

Wanted: Any information regarding Albert Frederick Nussbaum.