Roger Touhy, Gangster

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Roger 1932

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Roger Touhy, film rights available

Contract Barricade Books, New York

Roger Touhy

William Hamm of Hamm Beer

The Touhy gang on trial

Jake the Barber Factor and his wife Rella

stardust casino

The Judge

Federal Judge John Barnes

Clara and Roger Touhy and his sister Ethel

Touhy (right) and his lawyer

"teets" Battaglia

One of Touhy's three killers, Sam Battaglia

Battaglia before Kefauver

Roger 1959

Factor and his bodyguards

Zangara

Roger Touhy circa 1958

Capone

Capone and his son

Nitti

Roger 1959

........."the court is of the opinion and finds and holds that thewrit issued out of the Criminal Court of Cook County,Illinois, whereunder Relator Roger Touhy is held for theperiod of ninety-nine years for the crime of kidnaping forransom is void because issued on a judgment of that courtwhich is void because the proceedings in that court ante-cedent to said judgment and said judgment were violativeof the Due Process of Law Clause of the Fourteenth Amend-ment of the Constitution of the United States in that saidjudgment was procured by means of the use of testimonyknown by the prosecuting officers to be perjured and be-cause the Relator was deprived in a capital case of theeffective assistance of counsel devoted exclusively to pro-tection of Relator's interests and compelled against his willand over his protests to accept the services of counsel whowas compelled to serve adverse interests." Judge John P. BarnesUnited States District CourtNorthern District of IllinoisAugust 9, 1954

The Roger Touhy Story

Tuohy, Roger: AKA Terrible Touhy: "Roger Touhy," wrote the Chicago Tribune, "is one of those rare cases in which the man measured up to the legend...he was born in a lawless time in a lawless neighborhood."

That lawless neighborhood, the Valley it was called, is gone now, and, largely forgotten, except by a scant few descendants of the tens of thousands of Irish immigrants who huddled there, for a time, making that brutal slum the largest Irish ghetto west of New York.

It was located in the very heart of Chicago, a flat stretch of land, partial to flooding in the winter with water filled with human waste from the nearby canals. It was insufferably humid in the summer and always a dreary place of ancient wooden warehouses, overcrowded and stinking tenements, stores with near empty shelves and saloons packed with men who had long since given up their dreams of a better life.

Roger Touhy was born here, in 1898, the last of seven children in one of the thousands of working poor families jammed into the poverty of the Valley. While still an infant, Roger's mother was burned to death when the kitchen stove exploded, a remarkably common occurrence of the times, leaving his father, James, an Irish immigrant and lowly, but otherwise honest, beat cop, to raise the family. James Touhy eventually lost his four elder sons to a local thug named Paddy "the Bear," leader of the notorious Irish, Valley Gang.

There is a story, a story that became underworld legend, how one stormy night in 1909, Patrolman Touhy was walking his beat when he confronted his namesake, called Jimmy, leaving Paddy the Bear's saloon, a burglar's bag over his shoulder.

The normally quick tempered Touhy remained uncharacteristically calm. "Open the bag," the father said. When the young man did as he was told, out rolled burglary tools and a bottle of nitroglycerin, an explosive used on difficult safes around the turn of the century. The elder Touhy cuffed his son and then called a paddy wagon to have the boy taken to the station for arrest. "You book him," he told the cop behind the wheel, "it's bad enough to arrest my own son without going to court to testify against him."

Touhy gave up on his elder sons, and, in 1906, moved his two daughters, and his 10-year-old son Roger to what was then the tiny farming village of Downers Grove, just northwest of Chicago.

Roger attended St. Joseph's Roman Catholic church and school. In 1915, Roger graduated the eighth grade as class valedictorian and went job hunting in Chicago. Talkative, ambitious and charming when he had to be, he found work quickly, first as an office boy and stockroom clerk, and later, as a cookie taster in a biscuit bakery, before landing a position with Western Union for $12 a week.

A good student, Roger learned Morse code and was assigned to a midtown office as an operator, where he opened a bookmaking operation on the side.

"A really important thing happened to me--back then in 1915--was that a dark haired Irish girl went to work for Western Union in the company branch office in Chicago's finest hotel, the Blackstone. She was 16 and fresh out of telegraph school. From the main office I sent the Blackstone messages to her and received the ones she transmitted back. She sent better than she copied, but she wasn't good at either. I tried to help her."

The real important thing was 16-year-old Clara Morgan, and Roger fell hard for her. A romance blossomed, and, six years later, they would marry. Overall, life was good for the young man. He was learning an honest profession and being paid well for it, then, one day in late 1916, Roger was spotted reading one of the union's pamphlets during a break. Called into the supervisor's office for the standard accusation/denial interrogation, the manager asked, "So do you intend to take a union card?" "Maybe, maybe not," was Roger's defiant reply. He was fired on the spot. "I should have lied to that superintendent," he wrote. "Honesty was my downfall."

An organizer for the Commercial Telegrapher's Union came by his apartment later that day and explained that he was already blacklisted in the industry and talked him into working as an organizer. He soon tired of organizing, the hours were long, the pay was low and often the work was brutal and dangerous.

Except for a still blossoming romance with Clara Morgan, Roger had nothing to hold him in Chicago, and, like thousands of young men before him, headed west to the Great Plain States where he found work as a railroad brakeman and telegraph operator for $185 a month on the Denver & Rio and Grand Railroad in Eagle County, Colorado.

In 1918, he enlisted in the Navy and was eventually stationed at Harvard University where he worked as a wireless operator and taught officers the Morse code. Opting for an early out with the Navy Reserve, Roger was back in Chicago by 1919, but set off for the West again, landing in Drummund, Oklahoma where the oil business was in full boom and fortunes were being made overnight.

He landed a job as the driver for the world famous geologist, Dick Raymond, who had been brought in to determine which wildcat wells was producing the most oil and from that, decide which land was worth leasing.

"There was nothing," he wrote, "against my buying leases that Raymond recommended." Learning everything he could about the oil business from Raymond, Roger took $1,000 out of his savings and purchased a 150-acre site that Drummond recommended. Within a month he resold the lease for a 200% profit.

He returned to Chicago with $25,000, a respectable fortune in 1920. "And," he said, "it had taken me less then a year to earn it." In 1923 he married Clara. Working with his brothers, Roger returned to the Valley and invested most of his cash into a used car dealership, not far from the house where he was born.

The brothers, Johnny, Eddie, Tommy, and Joe were already working around the edges of the booming bootleg business, but mostly as hired enforcers who occasionally hijacked a syndicate beer truck or two. It wasn't long before Roger entered the bootlegging business, but, through the back door, leasing a small fleet of trucks, and drivers, to syndicate boss Johnny Torrio's enormous bootlegging operation. Using the money he earned from those leases, Roger and his brothers bought a franchise from Torrio for the beer delivery routes to rural northwestern Cook County.

The brothers knew that peace would never reign in Chicago's underworld with so many different...and violent...street gangs vying for a limited amount of business. But, that wasn't the case out in the rural northern portion of the county. In fact, when the brothers first started peddling the syndicate's beer out there, they were stunned at the amount of business, both existing and potential, that was out there. Better yet, there was barely any competition for the market and there were scores of people willing to operate speakeasies for them.

By 1926, they were selling 1,000 barrels of beer a week at $55 a barrel, with a production cost of $4.50 a barrel, which they sold to two hundred roadhouses outside Chicago. The brothers punched, shot and sold their way into a considerable portion of the upper northwest region of the city, which, for a while anyway, was buffered against Capone's empire by the Moran gang.

The gang had its own Priest, Father Joseph Weber, whom Roger had met back in 1923 when Weber was an Indiana State Prison Chaplain while Tommy Touhy was serving time for his role in an Indianapolis department store burglary. Weber had always been politically active in Indianapolis, where he kept his parish, and argued that the Klu Klux Klan, which had its regional headquarters in Indianapolis, included some of the states and city's leading families and politicians.

As a result, Weber said, the Black citizens of Indianapolis were denied even the most basic of city services. One day, as a passing part of a conversation, Weber mentioned to Tommy Touhy that if he had the Klan's secret membership files, his could confirm his suspicions and break their power. A few days later, on April 1, 1923, a moonlit Easter Sunday, a burglar broke into the Klan's headquarters and stole the organization's state membership list, some 12,208 names.

The next day parts of the list were published in the Catholic newspaper Tolerance, under the headline: "Who's who in Indianapolis." The Klan offered me," Roger wrote "$25,000 for the records, which I turned down."

To the newspapers, the public, the police and the politicians, Roger's Des Plains operation looked exactly the way he wanted it to look...a hick, two-bit operation that grossed, maybe, a few hundred thousand dollars a year. But, while the public, the press and the police may have been fooled by Roger's small-time image, Al Capone knew exactly how much money Touhy and Kolb were earning out on the dusty back roads of Cook County and he wanted a piece of it, a large piece of it.

As he always did, Capone first tried to talk his way into a partnership explaining the benefits of working within his operation. When that failed, Capone tried a different tactic; he would push Touhy to see how far he could get before a shooting war broke out. Starting in the early summer of 1927, he tried to push his way into Touhy's territory by opening several whorehouses just inside Des Plains. That same day, Roger and Tommy Touhy, backed by several truckloads of their men and squads of Cook County police raided the bordellos, busted them up and chased the women back to Chicago.

All the while, Capone kept sending his beer salesmen into Touhy's territory where they achieved a fair amount of success by drastically undercutting Touhy's prices, but the ever-shrewd Touhy recognized Capone's ploy and refused to be prodded into a price war that they couldn't win. Instead, he responded by sending a simple message to any saloon keeper who sold Capone's beer inside their territory. If the bar owner sold Capone's brew, they busted the place up. If he continued, they would burn it to the ground, and that was the way Joe Touhy, Roger's older brother, died, in June of 1929.

Eyewitnesses said that Joe and his crew were busting up a speakeasy that the Capone’s had opened in Schiller Park, when a waiter reached for something under the bar. Joe Touhy's own man, a hood named Paul Pagen, fired off a warning burst from his machine-gun, accidentally killing Touhy.

Johnny Touhy, the third eldest brother, didn't call it an accident. He killed Pagen for Joe's murder and was sent to prison for ten years to life but was out in four, his brothers having purchased his freedom with bribes. "And that's what money," wrote the Chicago Tribune of John's release, "well spent in Chicago will do."

A few months after his parole was granted, Johnny was arrested again for attempted murder of a Capone goon, was sent back to Stateville Prison where he died of consumption in a barren hospital room. The remaining brothers, Roger, Tommy and Eddie, declared war on Capone after Joe was killed and Johnny was jailed, and from 1928 until 1930, the dusty back roads of northern Cook County ran red with gangster blood from an otherwise quiet gang war that went largely unnoticed until 1931, when all hell broke loose.

Early that year, Capone started his push against Chicago's labor unions, and picked them off, one by one. Patty Burrell, the Teamsters International Vice President, called a meeting of all the locals threatened by the syndicate and gave them a choice; they could stand alone against Capone and lose their unions and probably their lives, or they could band together and move their operations into Touhy's camp.

Most of the bosses already knew Roger and decided he was the lesser of the two evils and pitched into a $75,000 protection fund that was handed over to Tommy Touhy. In exchange, the union bosses were allowed to keep their locals, and the treasuries that came with them, and live under the Touhy’s' protection. Roger Touhy was a cautious man, not prone to mistakes or leaps in judgment, especially when it came to defying a man as dangerous as Al Capone.

In fact, the only reason he would have entered a shooting war against Capone and his massive criminal organization, was based on his absolute certainty that he could win. That, and his little known agreement with Chicago's powerful Mayor Anton Cermak, made the bootlegger positive that he could pull Capone off his throne.

After Roger was murdered in 1959, the sociologist and writer Saul Alinsky, who was a member of the Joliet States Prison Parole Board, said that Touhy had told him that in 1932, Cermak and he entered an agreement, a partnership, to run Chicago's underworld. In the meeting in the mayor's office, Cermak urged Touhy to wage a war with the mob but Roger was reluctant. A defensive position against the mob was one thing, but an all-out war was something else again. The Syndicate could, Touhy pointed out, muster at least 500 gunmen in a few days, Cermak responded, "You can have the entire police department."

Eventually, Roger agreed to go along, and Cermak sent word down to his police commanders that the Touhy’s were to be cooperated with in the war against the syndicate. Over the next few months, the sporadic gun battles between the Touhy’s and the Capone’s that had been held on the empty back roads of Cook County were brought into the city streets of Chicago.

According to the Chicago Tribune, in 1932, nearly one hundred gangsters were killed. By the spring of 1933, the impossible was happening, the mouse was eating the lion, the Touhy’s were beating the syndicate. Then the mob killed Anton Cermak and gunned down the gang's field Marshal, Tommy Touhy, and one by one the union bosses surrendered to the syndicate.

Without Cermak's guns and the Teamsters' financial support, Roger knew that the war was lost. The best thing to do was to hold off the syndicate for as long as he could, make as much money as he could, fold up his operation and leave Chicago forever, perhaps living out his dream to retire to the wilds of Colorado.

Enter John Factor, aka, Jake the barber. John Jacob Factor is probably the most successful swindler of all time. He was born Iakow Factrowitz, the second son of Rabbi, the youngest of ten children. Jake, as he preferred to be called, was born in England and taken to Lodoz, Poland before his first birthday where he lived until he was 11 years old.

In or about 1900, the family moved to St. Louis Missouri and then to Chicago. Although not illiterate, Factor could barely read or write. "I have," he said, "a hazy recollection of several months of schooling in Poland." The family was desperately poor and it was Factor's mother who supported the family through various menial jobs, mostly as a street peddler. Jake's half brother, Max Factor, eventually made his way out to California and settled in West Los Angeles where he found work as a makeup artist with the major studios, and where he helped to invent pancake make-up and establish Max Factor International. Jake Factor took a different route to success. Sometime in late 1923, Factor convinced New York's master criminal, Arnold Rothstein, to put up an initial cash investment of $50,000 that Factor needed to pull off the largest stock swindle in European history, swindling an estimated £1,619,726, or about $8,000,000 dollars, an incredible sum of money in 1930.

Then, Jake the Barber, as he was known, fled to the States but was arrested in Chicago on demand of the English government for receiving property knowing it to be fraudulently obtained, but was freed on a $50,000 bond. Factor's lawyer managed to bring the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court, but it was generally agreed in legal circles that Factor had a weak case and would be extradited before the spring. Factor was an exceptionally smart and practical man, he knew no matter how many shrewd lawyers he could buy with his stolen money that he was going to lose his case before the court and be deported.

In August of 1933, Factor paid off several members of Roger Touhy's gang to assist him, and then, in effect kidnapped himself, even going so far as to collect a $70,000 tax-free ransom for his own return. When Factor reappeared several weeks later, he accused Roger Touhy of the crime. Touhy's trial for kidnapping Jake the Barber was scheduled to start in November of 1933.

There were two trials, held by a politically corrupt judge. At the end of the second trial, the jury took less then four hours to decide his guilt and six hours to decide the penalty. Half of the jurors wanted to impose the death penalty, and half wanted life in prison. As a compromise, Roger was sentenced to 99 years in Joliet State Prison.

On October 9, 1942, Touhy and four others went over the 30-foot walls of Stateville prison in a daring daylight escape. However, the transition back to living with the others didn't go well. There was drinking, which led to a fist fight, and Matlick Nelson, one of the escapees left the group to visit his mother in Minneapolis. She promptly turned him into the FBI just hours after he arrived and collected a $5,000 reward for it as well. Within minutes after his arrest, Nelson told the agents everything he knew about the escapees.

By nightfall, a small army of agents was slowly and carefully moving in around the gang's apartments. When two of the escapees, O'Connor and McIneray came home early, six agents, guns drawn, leaped out from behind a hallway door. "Put your hands up! We're federal officers." O'Connor turned, and according to the agents' reports, fired his .45 automatic twice, the bullets landing into the stair rail. McIneray never got to reach for his .38, the agents returned fire and pumped at least 35 shells into the two convicts.

Roger and Banghart arrived back at the apartment about an hour later. At zero hour, powerful searchlights were turned onto the windows of Touhy's apartment and then a loudspeaker cracked the silence of the night to announce: "Roger Touhy and the other escaped convicts! The building is surrounded. We are about to throw tear gas in the building. Surrender now and you will not be killed."

Roger was brought before a judge who told him, to his amazement, that his sentence was now 199 years because under a little known Illinois law, anyone who aids the escape of a state prisoner will receive the same sentence as the prisoner they helped to escape. The state of Illinois had decided that Touhy should take on Eddie Darlak's sentence of 100 years. Roger was the first person to be given this sentence under that law.

Several months after Roger's return to prison, Twentieth Century Fox began production of the film "Roger Touhy, Last of the Gangsters." The film previewed at the Stateville prison on July 12, 1943, where over a thousand state officials watched the film in the main yard. Roger refused to attend, and sat in his darkened cell he could hear the echo from the film's dialog that ridiculed him. Touhy sued Fox Studios and its distributors on the grounds that the film defamed him. He managed to get a temporary restriction on showing the film, which he argued portrayed him as "a vicious violator and gangster."

In 1948, Roger won an out of court settlement with Fox and its distributors for $10,000 for defamation of character and an agreement by Fox to destroy the film. Within a week, Touhy's lawyers had the $10,000 "for services rendered" and Fox started to redistribute the film overseas.

After his return to prison, Roger's faith in ever seeing freedom again was badly shaken, or at least it was until 1948, when his lawyer, Howard Bryant, brought another attorney into the case named Robert B. Johnstone, a 43-year-old, tough, seldom smiling, giant of a man who rarely spoke unless spoken to. Johnson was a brilliant lawyer and investigator who pushed Touhy's case before Federal Judge John Barnes. On August 9, 1954, a cool summer day, Barnes ordered Roger brought before the court to hear a summary of his 1,556-page decision with 216 pages of notes.

In summation, Barnes declared that Roger Touhy had not kidnapped John Factor but rather that "John Factor was not kidnapped for ransom or otherwise on the night of June 30 - July 1, 1933, but was taken as a result of his own convenience, that John Factor's disappearance was a hoax meant only to forestall his extradition to Europe to avoid prosecution there." Barnes also said that the Illinois statue under which Roger was sentenced an additional 199 years for aiding Eddie Darlak's escape back in 1942 was unconstitutional and that Touhy's sentence under that statue was void as a result.

When Roger heard Barnes read the words "The relator, Roger Touhy should be forthwith be discharged from custody," he stood bolt upright, trembling and then started to weep. They, the Chicago mob, probably working in agreement with the national syndicate, were going to kill Roger Touhy and it was all about money.

They had to kill him, because in order to make the Stardust deal work it would have to be done quietly, secretly, without a lot of attention. In 1955, John Factor, fresh out of prison after a ten-year stint for mail fraud, was running the Stardust hotel casino in Vegas for the Outfit. By 1959, the Chicago mob was already stealing millions of dollars from the Teamsters' pension fund, which they had more or less turned into their own piggy bank. The outfit used cash from the pensions to not only build more Vegas casinos but to rebuild and expand the Stardust and eventually to buy Jake the Barber out of the deal.

Touhy announced that he intended to enter a $300,000,000 lawsuit against John Factor and all the others who had helped to railroad him to prison for 25 years. The mob bosses, Ricca and Accardo, watched and worried. The way they saw it, there was only one answer. Roger Touhy had to die.

In the early evening of the night he died, Roger Touhy prepared to drive to a meeting with Ray Brennan, Touhy's ghostwriter of his biography, "The Stolen Years," and their book's publisher at the Chicago Press Club to discuss Factor's suit against them. At 5:00 P.M. sharp, Walter Miller, a retired Chicago cop who had once guarded John Factor and who was now acting as Touhy's bodyguard, pulled his car up to the front of Roger's sister's home and waited for Touhy. They pulled into the Sheraton Towers Hotel garage at 5:55 and took the elevator to the top floor to the wood paneled press club. There was much to discuss. Factor's suit had hurt the book's sales because the big chain department stores were refusing to carry it, fearing a suit from Factor and the teamsters had refused to load and carry copies on their trucks.

After several hours, Miller said it was 9:15 and they had to leave because Roger was on an 11:00 P.M. curfew. Brennan helped his two guests on with their topcoats. Miller's coat sagged from the heavy .38 in his right pocket. Miller drove quickly to Roger's sister's home on Chicago North side. He was worried about making the curfew so he didn't take the precaution of driving around the block once like he usually did. They were running late and it was a bitter 8 degrees outside with an ugly wind whipping across the street.

He parked and the two old men slowly walked up the six steps of Maureen's porch, Miller's hulking frame towering over the limping and bent bootlegger. The only sound that could be heard was the occasional passing traffic on Washington Boulevard a half a block away. Then Roger heard a call from one of the two men running toward him. "Wait, hold on, we're police officers." Roger and Miller turned their heads as one. Instinctively, Miller reached for his service revolver but it was too late. The men were running toward them, leveling their shotguns as they sprinted across the frozen street. Miller aimed and fired at the men who fired back with shotguns. Miller raised his left arm to cover his face and nearly had it blown off at the elbow. Hundreds of pellets lodged into his back and legs. Almost at the exact moment that Miller was blown backwards, two huge blasts from the killers' shotguns knocked Roger across the porch and then smashed him face first into the ground. Hundreds of pellets tore a hole in Touhy's left inner leg, the other pellets dug into his right upper rib cage.
The leg was barely attached to the body.

The killers disappeared into the night. Miller crawled over to Touhy and said, "Say an act of contrition, Rog." At the hospital, doctors worked frantically, but knew he would never survive such a massive loss of life. Father Richard Birmingham was brought into the room and gave Roger Touhy the last rights of the church, which he completed at 11:23. Two minutes later, at 11:25, Roger Touhy expired.

The next morning, at 8:30 A.M., a solitary hearse bearing Touhy's body in its mid- priced coffin, slowly pulled out of the back alley of the funeral parlor. It was decided Touhy would be buried at the family's resting place at Chicago's Boot Hill cemetery, Mount Carmel. Not far from his grave site, were the tombs of Dion O'Banion, Frank Nitti, the Genna Brothers, Paul "Needle Nose" La Briola, Al Capone and by 1992, Tony Accardo.

The tombstone would bear the name TOWEY, in the Northwest corner of the burial ground where his brothers Johnny, Joe, James, and Eddie already lay.

There were no other mourners, no flowers, no pallbearers. The service ended in seven minutes and a weeping Clara was led away to a car by Tommy. A freezing wind picked up and swept across the yard as the workmen lowered Roger Touhy's coffin in its grave. Chief Detective Dan Ascher walked up to the grave site and one of the workmen paused from shoveling dirt and asked, "Is it true they only gave him 28 days of freedom?"
Ascher nodded that it was. "That hardly seems enough," the workman said. "Just doesn't seem right."

RFK pushed John Factors pardon

Available on Amazon.Com

Editorial Reviews for When Capone's Mob Murdered Touhy

From Publishers Weekly

JFK's pardons and the mob; Prohibition, Chicago's crime cadres and the staged kidnapping of "`Jake the Barber'" Factor, "the black sheep brother of the cosmetics king, Max Factor"; lifetime sentences, attempted jail busts and the perseverance of "a rumpled private detective and an eccentric lawyer" John W. Tuohy showcases all these and more sensational and shady happenings in When Capone's Mob Murdered Roger Touhy: The Strange Case of Touhy, Jake the Barber and the Kidnapping that Never Happened. The author started investigating Touhy's 1959 murder by Capone's gang in 1975 for an undergrad assignment. He traces the frame-job whereby Touhy was accused of the kidnapping, his decades in jail, his memoirs, his retrial and release and, finally, his murder, 28 days after regaining his freedom. Sixteen pages of photos. (Barricade [Suite 308-A 185 Bridge Plaza North, Fort Lee, N.J. 07024], $24.95 302p ISBN 1-56980-174-6; July)

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Roger Touhy, one of the "terrible Touhys" and leader of a bootlegging racket that challenged Capone's mob in Prohibition Chicago, had a lot to answer for, but the crime that put him behind bars was, ironically, one he didn't commit: the alleged kidnapping of Jake Factor, half-brother of Max Factor and international swindler. Author Tuohy (apparently no relation), a former staff investigator for the National Center for the Study of Organized Crime, briefly traces the history of the Touhys and the Capone mob, then describes Factor's plan to have himself kidnapped, putting Touhy behind bars and keeping himself from being deported. This miscarriage of justice lasted 17 years and ended in Touhy's parole and murder by the Capone mob 28 days later. Factor was never deported. The author spent 26 years researching this story, and he can't bear to waste a word of it. Though slim, the book still seems padded, with irrelevant detail muddying the main story. Touhy is a hard man to feel sorry for, but the author does his best. Sure to be popular in the Chicago area and with the many fans of mob history, this is suitable for larger public libraries and regional collections. Deirdre Bray Root, Middletown P.L., OH Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Emblom Reviews

Author John Tuohy, who has a similar spelling of the last name to his subject Roger, but apparently no relation, has provided us with an interesting story of northwest Chicago beer baron Roger Touhy who was in competition with Al Capone during Capone's heyday. Touhy appeared to be winning the battle since Mayor Anton Cermak was deporting a number of Capone's cronies. However, the mob hit, according to the author, on Mayor Cermak in Miami, Florida, by Giuseppe Zangara following a speech by President-elect Roosevelt, put an end to the harrassment of Capone's cronies. The author details the staged "kidnapping" of Jake "the Barber" Factor who did this to avoid being deported to England and facing a prison sentence there for stock swindling, with Touhy having his rights violated and sent to prison for 25 years for the kidnapping that never happened. Factor and other Chicago mobsters were making a lot of money with the Stardust Casino in Las Vegas when they got word that Touhy was to be parolled and planned to write his life story. The mob, not wanting this, decided Touhy had to be eliminated. Touhy was murdered by hit men in 1959, 28 days after gaining his freedom. Jake Factor had also spent time in prison in the United States for a whiskey swindle involving 300 victims in 12 states. Two days before Factor was to be deported to England to face prison for the stock swindle President Kennedy granted Factor a full Presidential Pardon after Factor's contribution to the Bay of Pigs fund. President Kennedy, the author notes, issued 472 pardons (about half questionable) more than any president before or since.
There are a number of books on Capone and the Chicago mob. This book takes a look at an overlooked beer baron from that time period, Roger Touhy. It is a very worthwhile read and one that will hold your interest.

Ray Brennan

Basil Banghart

Ray Brennan and Roger Touhy in Stateville

Zangara

Red Barker

Red Barker and the Touhy Gang

Barker, George: Killed June 17 1932 Leading Capone’s assault on the labor unions was George “Red” Barker and his assistant Murray Humphreys, then a lower level street operative. When the decade of the 1930s opened, George Red Barker was, as one Chicago cop put it, “riding on top of the world.” Barker all but controlled the Chicago teamsters and was reported to be earning $200,000 a year as a result.

A West side Irishman who, before he took to a life of crime, had been an honest bookkeeper, Barker was literate, devouring every union newsletter and newspaper he could find from anywhere in the country and paid for information on locals as well.. If the union had potential, Barker recommended the takeover to Ralph Capone and Frank Nitti who talked it over with Al Capone. If Capone agreed, and he almost always did, Barker and his gang went after the union.

In early 1931, Capone urged Barker to go after the Coal teamsters. Barker approached James “Lefty” Lynch, an independent gangster who controlled the coal Teamsters local 704, which delivered fuel to the entire downtown district. Barker told Lynch that Capone expected him to turn over half the control of his union to him as well as his seat on the prestigious and important joint Teamsters council. In exchange, Barker offered not to kill Lynch. On the upside, Barker told Lynch, Capone intended to double the union’s membership and as a result Lynch’s income would double as well. Lynch tossed the hood out of his office.

Later in the month, Lynch went to his summer home with his family to Brown Lake outside Burlington, Wisconsin. The family was preparing a barbecue, and seated around a long picnic table, when Danny Stanton and Klondike O’Donnell, two of the meanest hoods in Chicago, drove into the yard and parked.

They climbed out of the car slowly. They were in no hurry. There were no cops or witnesses around for miles. They were armed with shotguns, pistols and rifles. Stanton walked over to Lynch and said, “The Big Fellow back in Chicago sends this message. You just retired from local 704. From this moment on, you stay away from the Union hall. You stay away from the office. You stay away from the joint council. You understand?”

Lynch nodded his head and Klondike added, “Well, just so’s you don’t forget what was said ...” and pulled out his pistol and shot Lynch through both of his legs while his wife and children looked on in horror. Lynch fell to the ground, groaning in agony. Stanton bent over Lynch to make sure he was alive and said, “You got balls, and I’ll give you that.” He stood up and turned to Lynch’s daughter and said, “Get him to a doctor and he’ll be alright.” At the next meeting of the joint council, Red Barker and Murray Humphreys appeared at the door with a dozen heavily armed Capone hoods.

Barker, carrying a baseball bat, stood in the center of the room and asked, “Which one is Lefty Lynch’s chair?” Somebody pointed to a large leather chair in the middle of the room and Barker sat there. He looked around the room and announced that he was now running the Coal Teamsters Chauffeurs and Helpers Union Local 704 and that everything would remain just the way Lynch had left it.

The only difference was that the entire treasury was turned over to Capone except for $1,000, which was left to cover administrative payrolls. After that, Barker went to the fuel dealers in the district and informed them that they were only hiring union members and that they were giving all of their drivers a massive pay rise or else Capone would see to it that not a lump of coal was delivered downtown.

The dealers had no choice but to agree and passed the cost along to the real estate developers who raised the price of office space in the area to make their money back. Capone kept Lynch on the payroll to avoid a revolt in the ranks. However, he never appeared at another union function for the rest of his life. As a reward, Capone gave Barker control over the Ushers union with orders to exploit it to its full potential.

Barker sent word to every theater owner in the city that they were to use his ushers for every political and sporting event held, indoor or outdoor, and said they would have to pay for “crowd control,” a service only his union could provide at a rate of $10.00 per usher. Movie theaters avoided the hike by paying Barker off in cash, $5.00 per usher, since that was less expensive for them, as they were only paying their ushers 25 cents an hour.

Within weeks, Barker was being paid off by every strip show, opera, ballet, symphony, prizefight and ball game held in the city. He was making a fortune until one prizefight promoter named Walter George decided to hold out. Barker waited until the promoter had sold out the entire Coliseum on South Wabash Avenue for a major prizefight. Then, just before the fight was to begin, a half-dozen cabs pulled up to the coliseum and let out building inspectors, fire marshals, electrical inspectors, plumbing inspectors and health inspectors, all led by Red Barker.

Within minutes after entering the building the inspectors declared that the water was unhealthy to drink and ordered it turned off. The hot dog, beer and soda concessions were shut down by the fire marshal and the electrical inspector said that the wiring was faulty and ordered the stadium lights shut off. In the meantime the crowd was becoming violent because the fight was delayed. George turned to Barker and said, “All right, how much you bastard?” Barker answered that his price was up to $20.00 per usher and that the minimum ushers needed was $120 for the night. Barker was paid and the fight went on.

On June 17, 1932, Red Barker was killed, a perilous blow to the Syndicate. Barker was walking down the street surrounded by four friends, three men and one woman. It was a bright, sun filled morning. When the group stopped in front of 1502 North Crawford Street for no more than several seconds. Then there was a burst of gunfire from across the street and then another burst from a window overlooking the street.

One of the shooters was Northside gunman Willie Sharky. He was using a tripod set, rapid fire, water-cooled machinegun. Barker was hit 36 times in a matter of. His friends dragged him away and brought him to a hospital. Kicking in the emergency room door they screamed, “Take care of this man, money is no object.”

When the doctor on duty declared Barker dead, no examination was needed, the group ran off and left the staff to figure out who Barker was. Breaking their usual silence, the North Side Touhy gang, which was fighting for control of Chicago’s unions, openly took credit for killing George Red Barker in revenge for Matt Kolb’s murder.

Fur Sammons

Fur Sammons, Capone's madman

Sammons, James AKA Fur (Fur implied his love of a female body part) (Born 1883 Died May 20, 1960) In 1933, Frank Nitti's leading labor terrorist, Three Fingers Jack White, recruited Fur Sammons to help fight the Touhy gang in the labor wars of 1933. It was an excellent choice. Sammons was a certified psychopath and a killer and he took enormous pride in both of those facts. He specialized in labor terror although, like White, Sammons's record was long and varied.
In December of 1899, a 16 year old Sammons and four others kidnapped an eleven-year-old schoolgirl off the street, raped her and then beat her so savagely she almost died. The girl weighed 85 pounds. They broke her nose, punched out one of her eyes, and stabbed her in her vaginal area with a pencil.
Sammons, who showed no remorse over the attack, smirking at her parents in court, was given five years for his part in the crime and paroled in 1903. Two months later he was arrested for the murder of Patrick Barret, a saloon keeper. (At 4216 Wallace Street) Sammons was convicted and sentenced to be hanged in 1904. He sat on death row until 1917, in solitary confinement where it was said he was driven insane by the stay there. He escaped in 1917 and committed a series of robberies until he was captured.

Like Three Fingers Jack White, Sammons was paroled in 1923 by Governor Len Small after paying a small fortune in bribe money to Porky Dillon, now a Touhy gunman who was then working as one of Small's bagmen and quickly returned to the mobs working for the O'Donnell brothers. White and Sammons decided to take back the upper hand for the mob by striking out against Touhy's strongest supporter, Paddy Barrel, International Vice President of the Teamsters. Barrel's murder was a major blow to the Touhy organization. Paddy Barrel was Touhy's man in the teamsters and the key to all that teamster money hidden away in various pension funds.
On February 2, 1933, Tommy Touhy and Red Ryan took two carloads of gunners and combed the streets of extreme north western Chicago when reports came in that Fur Sammons was out gunning for them in an armor-plated car with bulletproof windows. Reports were that Sammons was wearing a woman's fur hat and coat over his blue suit. The Touhy’s and Sammons spent several hours stalking each other until Tommy had enough of the cat and mouse game and ordered his caravan to pull over at the intersection of Harlem and North Avenue where Chicago, Oak Park, River Forrest and Elmwood Park meet.
They waited and several minutes later Sammons's car slowly came towards them north on Harlem. The Touhy’s knew the car was armor-plated and as soon as it pulled up alongside their car, they leaned out the windows with machineguns and opened fire on Sammons's tires and radiator. Tommy Touhy climbed out of his car and stood on the dashboard of his car and fired into Sammons's windows. Sammons leaned out his window driving with one hand and released a clip into Tommy's legs.
Badly wounded Tommy fell onto the street and running board, as Red Ryan who was parked behind Tommy ran up and pulled him back into the car and out of the line of fire. Sammons, traveling at not more than five miles an hour, in part because his tires had been shot out from under him, pulled east into Oak Park on Le Moyne parkway with the Tuohys in hot pursuit except that at that point a squad car from River Forrest pulled on to the scene and demanded that they pull over; the Touhy’s answered by firing a clip off at the cops who returned fire but by then the Touhy cars had disappeared into Elmwood Park.
A few miles down the road Margaret Hanley, the wife of William Hanley, the business agent for the Commission Wagon Drivers union, and her sister and small son were forced off the road by Sammons who leapt from his armored car, machinegun in hand and forced the woman from the car and sped away towards the Loop.
Sammons was arrested by the FBI in Kansas City in July of 1933, for his part in a Baltimore Maryland payroll robbery. At the time of his arrest he was carrying a .45, a large quantity of hot jewelry and $8,500 in marked bills taken during the payroll robbery. He was held on $20,000 bail, at that point, one of the highest bails ever posted in Kansas.
Sammons couldn't make the bail and during his stay in jail tried to bribe one of his jailors, and was arrested on the charge. On November 29, 1933, Fur Sammons was given life as a habitual criminal. He was released on May 8,1943, on condition he be returned to Illinois to finish his 50 years sentence (31years remained) He was finally released from the prison system on December 17,1952 at age 70 and nearly blind. He died, alone, in a boarding house (Englewood Arms hotel 824 W. 62nd Street) on May 20, 1960.

Smiling Gus Winkler

Winkler, Gustave: AKA "Smiling" Gus Winkler's motto was "Take care of Winkler first" and he had spent most of his criminal career doing just that. The day before somebody slammed 72 bullets into him, Winkler was seen in the FBI's Chicago office in the Bankers building, in a meeting with Special Agent, Melvin Purvis. Whoever it was that spotted Winkler talking with the Feds spread the word and somebody took care of Gus Winkler.

Gus Winkler, good natured, smart and smooth, had started out as a member of Eagan's Rats, and, by age 20, he was a safe-blower of some note. He did time from 1920-26 for assault and wounding with a deadly weapon. After he served his time, Winkler decided it was best to leave St. Louis and head for Chicago. Once there, he struck up a lifelong friendship with Fred "Killer" Burke, which was how he first came to the attention of Chicago detectives and Al Capone, Bugs Moran and Roger Touhy, working "side deal" with each of them. All of them considered Winkler to be gutless to pull off the crimes he planned. "No man in Chicago history ever played both ends against the middle so adroitly."

Most cops and criminals in Chicago agreed that Winkler and Burke were probably two of the shooters in the St. Valentine's Day massacre. Oddly enough, Winkler, who liked the cops (and the cops were amused by him) once told a detective that he often envisioned his own death by "lots of bullets, from out of nowhere."

In 1932, Winkler turned over bonds to the so-called Secret Six, the committee looking into means to bust the Capone mob. The bonds came from a Lincoln, Nebraska robbery Winkler had played a part in, but when the cops started to close in, Winkler cut a deal with the Secret Six, ratted on the others, and walked away safely.

That same year, Winkler took Teddy Newberry's place in the Northside gangs as an underworld financial backer, and a provider of shelter and equipment to gangsters on the run...for a very healthy sum, of course. He even moved into Newberry's old apartment at 3300 Lake Shore Drive. Teddy wouldn't be needing it. They found him face down in a pool of frozen water alongside a farm road in Indiana. He had been tied with wire and shot through the eyes.

Winkler was an egomaniac who talked insistently. Once during a poker game he bragged to Lewis and Marovitz: "You know, I'm the toughest guy in Chicago ... maybe the toughest guy in the whole country." Without looking up from his cards Marovitz threw a right cross onto Winkler's chin and knocked him out of his chair.

"Why'd you do that?" Winkler asked. "To show you that you're not the toughest guy in this room." In the last part of his short life, Winkler tried to make himself more refined and started to wear glasses to cover up his crooked, glass eye and even married a tall, gorgeous blonde. Winkler and his wife, mother he called her, had one of the strangest relationships in gangdom. She reviewed each and every illegal endeavor her husband became involved with, first chastising him about the heavenly and earthly illegalities of his work, and then for possible slip-ups in the plan. "Sure mother," Winkler would say.

Gifted with an eagle's eye for detail, she would review the plan over and over again, looking for potential problems before giving her approval. "She's the best I've ever seen," Winkler boasted. According to Joe E. Lewis, in late 1932, Winkler had his eye shot out during the mail robbery, but had made off successfully with the loot anyway, and he was convinced that the Tuohys, his partners in the crime, were out to kill him because he had "not apportioned the loot equitably."

The day before he was killed, Winkler went to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota with his lawyer Joe Marovitz and Joe E. Lewis to let the doctors have a look at Lewis's recently slashed throat. When they returned to Chicago, Winkler refused to leave his lawyer's side. "I can't go back to my hotel and I'm afraid to register for a new one. Got any idea where I can go?" he asked Lewis who gave him the extra key to his suite at the Seneca Hotel. The next day he was gunned down.

Winkler's killer had waited an hour and a half for him outside the beer plant, owned by Cook County Commissioner Charles Weber, at 1414 Roscoe Street. As Winkler strolled towards Weber's office, the killers leaped out of a green truck and fired low, into his waist. In all, 72 pellets and bullets went into Winkler in a matter of seconds, he was literally riddled with pellets from his neck to his ankles with most of them going into his back, yet not one bullet hit his head or face. "Turn me over, I can't breathe," he said, and asked for a priest before he died. Doctors found half-a-dozen religious relics pinned to his underwear; he was a big donor to Father Coughlin who sent him the medals.

Winkler died begging for God's mercy on his soul, saying the Lord's Prayer to father James Fitzgerald. The Tuohys were highly suspected of ordering the killing although hood-for-hire, Dominic Marzano, was held in questioning for Winkler's killing as was Martin Guifolye and Babe Baron, who would later become a Las Vegas "Big Shot."

It was never clearly established why Winkler was killed or who killed him. It could have been anyone, for any one of a hundred reasons. But his death was another nail in the coffin of the independent operator. The days of the lone gangster were drawing to a close.

Smiling Gus Winkler

Tubbo Gilbert (With hat)

Let's do the right thing

Let's change foster care in America

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