Roger never accepted his conviction for kidnapping John
Factor.
After seven years in prison, he became a jail- house lawyer,
pouring over his court transcripts, and as a result became something of an
expert in the writ of habeas corpus.5 He wrote his own appeals to the governor
but after a while they were returned unopened.
Of his frustration Touhy wrote, Denied without a
hearing...denied without a hear¬ing... denied without a hearing....How could I
get justice if no court would listen to me? I was nailed in a box and I had no
hammer to batter my way out.
Then, in the latter part of August, 1942, Touhy decided to
escape from prison for a somewhat pecu-liar reason.
I stayed awake until dawn in my cell, thinking. I was
without hope. I was buried alive in prison and
5. Not all of
his time was spent in the prison law library. Prison officials sus¬pected Touhy
was the boss of Stateville’s enormous Irish gang which ruled over the
facility’s black market. Gambling belonged to the Italian gangs. In fact, on
Touhy’s first month in prison he was disciplined for sanctioning and
supervising the beating of another prisoner.
The inmate who came to him with the idea of escaping was
Gene O’Connor, who had probably known Roger on the outside, since O’Connor had
been the business agent of the Chicago Awning and Tent Makers Union—or at least
he was until he was arrested for intimidation after firing a shot at a union
member who opposed him in a race.
Now, O’Connor was serving a life sentence for a May 1932
robbery in which a Chicago policeman had been gunned down in cold blood.
Escaping for O’Connor was a way of life. In 1936 he escaped
from Statesville after he found his way into the central electric room, pulled
the main power switch and then scaled the walls to freedom. He was captured and
escaped again a year later only to be caught within a week.
The time seemed ripe again for escape. The war had taken
away the younger guards, leaving mostly older men, some coming out of
retirement to resume duty. Since they were paid starvation wages, O’Connor had
primed the escape by bribing the tower guards with items lifted from prison
kitchen storehouses where Touhy worked. These foods were almost impossible to
get during wartime rationing: 100 pound sacks of sugar, bags of coffee, slabs
of bacon and quarter sides of beef all of which could be resold on the outside
for big money. Adding to the plan’s credibility was the fact that E.H. Stubenfield, an
old time political hack, was now warden. He had replaced the far better
qualified Joseph Ragen, who had resigned in protest against political meddling
inside the prison. As a result, the prison’s once tight security had gone lax.
The keys to the escape were guns. Two pistols were left at
the base of the prison’s flagpole by the brother of another inmate, Eddie
Darlak, who was in on the break. A trustee had brought two guns into the
prison, carried inside wrapped in the American flag which he lowered each
evening outside the prison walls.
On October 9, 1942, Roger stood at the prison bakery door
with an enormous pair of scissors stolen from the tailor shop, hidden inside of
his blue prison-issue shirt. Several minutes later, driver Jack Cito, a convict
with mob connections,6 pulled the prison laundry truck up to the door and Roger
leaped up onto the driver’s door and yanked Cito out on to the ground and
screamed for the keys. When Cito moved too slowly, Touhy cut him with the
scis-sors, yelling “Give me the Goddamn keys!”
Cito told Touhy the keys were in the ignition and Roger
leaped into the truck and drove to the mechanic shop where the other escapees,
O’Connor, Mclnerney, Darlak, Stewart and Nelson were waiting.
Touhy leaped out of the truck and O’Connor handed him a .45
caliber automatic. He rushed into the mechanic shop where he was confronted by
a guard, Lieutenant Samuel Johnston, who asked
6. Jack Cito's
first arrest came in distinguished company. Cito and legendary labor goon Maxie
Eisen, on May 29, 1927, were arrested for carrying concealed weapons. Actually
the two pistols were later found in a secret compartment of Cito’s car. But,
since they didn’t have the guns on their persons the judge dropped the charges.
Cito’s brother was an enforcer in the Capone organization.
Touhy “Why are you here, what are you doing here?”
Roger didn’t answer but began snapping the prison telephone
wires with his long scissors. As Johnston was about to club Touhy into
submission, Basil Banghart came through the window with a pistol at ready and
ordered Johnston to unlock a set of ladders. At that same moment, guard George
Cotter arrived on the scene and was overpowered and beaten to the floor.
Placing the guards’ white hats on their heads, they pushed
Cotter and Johnston outside and forced them to load the ladders on to the back
of the truck and ordered them to sit on the ladders to keep them from falling
off. Then Roger shouted, “Ok, go, go go!” at Stewart, who was behind the wheel,
but the truck stalled.
Touhy leaped off the back of the vehicle, pulled Stewart out
of the driver’s seat and tried to get the truck started but couldn’t. Deciding
to jump start the truck, Roger looked over to the 300 inmates crowding around
to watch the excitement. Roger yelled for the convicts to push the truck, which
they did. The motor turned over with a roar.
They sped across the yard, driving to Tower Three in the
northwest corner. At the base of the tower they forced guard Johnston to help
them put the ladders together. When he refused, they beat him, tore his shirt
off and took him up the ladder with them. Roger looked up into the tower and
could see one of the guards who they had bribed7 standing to one side of the
tower, at the end of the walkway. “He wasn’t holding a gun but he didn’t have
far to reach for one, ” Touhy said.
7. After the
escape, the Illinois Governor conducted his own investigation and personally
fired the guard, sixty-two-year old-Herman Krause.
Roger fired a single shot which blew out the guardhouse
window, striking the guard in the fore-head with flying glass and knocking him
to the floor. When they were all inside the tower, Darlak8 took the guard’s car
keys. Though it was against prison regulations, the car was parked at the base
of the prison wall, just feet away from the tower.
Before leaving, the convicts took two high-pow-ered
prison-issue rifles, a pistol and 115 to 120 rounds for each gun. They then
walked calmly down the tower stairs, into Krause’s car, and roared away toward
Chicago.
During the first three days after the escape, there were
reports of them being spotted in all of the Chicago suburbs and most of the
United States. However, by the second week news from the war in Europe had
pushed them off of the front pages and they were, for the most part, forgotten
about.
Through Roger’s contacts on the outside they were able to
rent a large apartment in a run down tenement building not far from the Valley,
where Roger had grown up. There, the escaped convicts lived quietly for two
months. By early December, they began to quarrel, largely because Nelson and
Mclnerney had begun drinking and talking about going out for women. Roger told
them to stop drink-ing and to forget about women for at least another three
months. Nelson didn’t like it; he threw a punch that started a brawl. The brawl
brought the neighbors banging on the door. The next morning Roger moved out
into his own place.
For the first few days, Roger sat around his small apartment
“admiring the loneliness."His soli¬tude didn’t last long though, he
eventually made contact with his brother, Eddie, who provided him with a
bankroll of $2,500 and a plan to send him to Arizona.
8. Darlak was
also armed with a homemade gasoline bomb that was to be used only in the event
that they were cornered in a shootout.
Using the money Eddie had given him but refus-ing to leave
Chicago, Roger took $200 of the money and was able to get a driver’s license,
Social Security card and a military draft card (an absolute must in 1942). With
these papers Touhy took on the identity of Robert Jackson who was exempt from
military service because he worked in a war plant. Touhy even had a small metal
badge that read “Inspector” which he wore on his lapel.
“I wore good clothes,” Roger said, “but nothing gaudy. My
hat came down well on my forehead. I wore glasses issued to me in prison and
the old pho-tographs of me in the paper showed me without them....”
He bought a used car and spent his days driving through the
forest preserves or going to the movies.
Six weeks went by before he saw Basil Banghart, the only
escapee who knew where Roger lived. Banghart began to visit regularly and on
one visit he asked Roger to come over to the apartment. Since Roger was lonely
and bored, he took him up on the offer on Thanksgiving and stayed the night.
The next day all seven were playing cards and drinking when another fist fight
broke out.
Touhy remembers, The time was getting close for capture. The Christmas season
came along and I spent hours walking State Street looking in the
windows...lonely as a whorehouse on Christmas eve...well I lived it...in a side
street saloon, lis¬tening to the Christmas carols on the radio and drinking
beer for beer with a white haired bar¬tender...the next day I went to the
Empire Room in the Palmer House, got a table in a corner and ate a big
dinner...freedom was beginning to pall on me, I guess.
Roger’s landlady had left him a Christmas gift in his room,
so he stopped by her apartment to thank her. While he was there, one of her
guests spotted him and Roger, with a convict’s sixth sense, knew he had been
made. That night he moved back in with Banghart and the others.
The transition back to living with the others did-n’t go
well. There was another fist fight and Nelson and Stewart left the apartment
shortly after Touhy’s return. Nelson went to Minneapolis where his mother turned
him in to the FBI just hours after he arrived. Within minutes after his arrest,
Nelson told the agents everything he knew about the escapees and by nightfall,
a small army of agents was slowly and carefully moving in around the gang’s
apartments.
J. Edgar Hoover arrived on the scene to person-ally
supervise the raid because he felt that Touhy had sullied the Bureau’s
reputation when he escaped conviction from the Hamm kidnapping case built by
Special Agent Purvis back in 1933. To Hoover, the FBI’s capture of Touhy would
justify the Bureau’s original campaign to put him behind bars. Legally, Touhy
and the others hadn’t done anything wrong. Incredibly there was no law in the
state of Illinois against escaping from prison nor would there be one until 1949.
Even if there were such a law, as a feder¬al agency, the FBI still had no
grounds to enter the case. Hoover needed a reason to lock Touhy up so his brain
trust created one. It was decided that Touhy and the others had violated the
federal law which required all men of military age to notify their draft boards
when they had changed addresses. The fact
that Roger was well over draft age and had already served
his country and that the others as convicted felons weren’t required to
register were only facts that clogged the theory.
The FBI’s Chicago office had the entire arrest procedure
planned out days in advance of Hoover’s arrival. Agents and snipers already
surrounded the building and undercover agents had rented several apartments in
the building.
When O’Connor and Mclnerney came home, six agents, guns
drawn, leaped out from behind a hall-way door.
“Put your hands up! We’re federal officers!”
O’Connor turned, and according to agents’ reports, fired his
.45 caliber automatic twice, with the bullets ending up in the stair rail.
Mclnerney never got to reach for his .38 caliber; the agents returned fire and
pumped at least thirty-five shells into the two convicts.
Roger and Banghart arrived back at the apart-ment about an
hour later. Recalling the incident Touhy wrote, “We went to the Kenmore flat
and up the back stairway after I had parked the car a block away...the joint
felt creepy to me, and I prowled around uneasy as an alley tomcat at midnight
mat-ing time and peered out the windows.”
At zero hour, powerful search lights were turned on to the
windows of Touhy’s apartment and then a loud speaker cracked the silence of the
night with “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.”
Banghart wanted to shoot it out, but Roger negated this
move. They debated over what to do for the next ten minutes before Banghart
shouted out the window “We’re coming out!”
“Then come out backward with your hands high in the air!
Banghart, you come out first.”
Banghart, wearing only his pants, appeared at the front
door, his back to the agents. Roger, clad in fire-engine-red pajamas, followed
him.
The agents leaped on each of them as they came out of the
building and knocked them to the freezing cold pavement and handcuffed them.
A dozen agents rushed into the apartment and found five
pistols, three sawed off shotguns, a .30.30 rifle and $13,523 in cash which
they handed over to Tubbo Gilbert who was still the Chief Investigator for the
States Attorney’s Office.
When Gilbert returned the cash to the prisoners at
Stateville prison, he said that he had only been given $800 by the FBI.
After Touhy and Banghart were handcuffed, J. Edgar Hoover,
surrounded by a dozen agents and a dozen more newspaper reporters, strolled up
to Banghart and said “Well, Banghart, you’re a trapped rat.”
Banghart burst out into a huge smile. “You’re J. Edgar
Hoover aren’t you?” he asked.
‘Yes,” Hoover beamed, “I am.”
Banghart nodded his head and said, ‘You’re a lot fatter in
person than you are on the radio.”
Later the next day, Warden Joseph Ragen came to the Cook
County criminal courts building to col-lect his prisoners. When Touhy, who had
chains around his waist, ankles and wrists saw him he said, “Well Warden, looks
like I got you your old job back.” Ragen nodded and smiled at the irony ‘Yes,
Touhy, it looks like you did.”
A parade of eight cars filled with four heavily armed States
Attorney’s detectives drove the prisoners back to Stateville. Each was sent to
solitary con-finement where they survived on bread and water with a full meal
every third day.
Roger was taken out of solitary several days later and
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 abets the
escape of a state prisoner receives the same sentence as the prisoner they
helped 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 sen-tence under
that law. State authorities had had enough of Banghart and his death-defying
escapes. He was becoming a convict legend. A week after he was returned to
Stateville, Banghart was hauled out of solitary confinement and shipped off to
the island prison at Alcatraz. It was a stroke of bad luck for Banghart,
because although he could fly a plane and drive a car better and faster than
most mere mortals, he had never learned to swim.
Several months after Touhy’s return to prison, 20th-Century
Fox began production of Roger Touhy, Last of the Gangsters which was released
in 1948 as Roger Touhy—Gangster.
The syndicate couldn’t get the movie done quick-ly enough.
Touhy’s escape was a godsend. He had dug his own hole and through their
enormous influ-ence in the film industry, they were going to provide the
celluloid coffin for him.
The film’s producer would be Bryan Foy, and like some people
associated with the film industry then, he was a man with a past. From a
creative stand-point, he was a logical choice because he specialized in gritty
realistic film noir, but he wasn’t, as he so often said, “married to the higher
concept of film as art.” Foy would and did shoot whatever would turn a dollar
from PT 109 to Women’s Prison.
Foy’s actual standing was somewhere in between important
films and “B” films. In fact, by 1935 Foy had produced so many “B” films that
he was known as the king of “B” pictures. He often joked that he made the same
film 100 times using different loca-tions and different actors. Still, almost
every one of Foy’s low-budget movies were box-office money makers.
Foy is still considered one of the most prolific film
producers in Hollywood’s history. He had helped to bring the industry into the
sound age while he was at Warner Brothers, then nothing more then a collection
of buildings and second-hand film equipment. Foy produced the first all talkie
for Warners in 1928, Lights of New York and became popular for turning out
program films.
A Chicagoan, Bryan Foy was the eldest son of vaudeville
comedian Eddie Foy whose seven chil¬dren became the traveling stage act “The
Seven Little Foys.” Bryan moved to Los Angeles in 1922 and grew up with the
film industry, eventually becoming a film producer, sometimes producing as many
as thirty films a year
Like anyone else who grew up in show business at the time,
Foy learned early on that it was to his best advantage to rub shoulders with the
hoods who dominated the industry and night clubs across the country. As a
result, Foy’s Beverly Hills houseguests would often include Chicago’s political
boss Ed Kelly or Allen Smiley, a shadowy L.A. figure whose fingers were in a
dozen different pies. As an FBI informant working inside Hollywood reported to
Washington, “Foy has a reputation within the industry for hiring ex-convicts or
hoodlums who come out to Hollywood in search of work.”
“Brynie,” said a friend, “was always close to people who
lived on the edge of right and wrong.”
Interestingly, John Factor and Foy had been friends for
years and Factor had once been a house- guest at Foy’s estate. There he met a
young actor named Ronald Reagan, whose films Foy produced at Warners. Over the
years, Foy’s younger brother Eddie Jr. was featured in three of Reagan’s
movies. “I soon learned,” Reagan wrote, “that I could go in to Brynie and tell
him that I had been laid off, but couldn’t take it at the moment because of all
my expenses. He would pick up the phone, call a couple of henchmen and actually
get the picture going on four or five days notice—just to put me back on
salary.”
Foy left Warner Brothers after a dispute with Jack Warner.
After his stint with Warner he was named president of Eagle-Lion Studios, a
British- based film production company. One of Foy’s first acts as boss was to
hire Johnny Rosselli—Chicago’s west coast contact—as a producer. This happened
as Rosselli was released from Atlanta federal prison where he had served only
two years of a six-year sentence.
Foy liked Rosselli. They were both tough talking, street
smart and savvy. Foy thought Rosselli was a handsome man, always dapper, who
appreciated fine restaurants and chic Hollywood parties and like Foy was a
devoted and knowledgeable fan of the film business. Sure, Rosselli was a tough
gangster. Foy knew that of course, but it was a side of his friend that he had
never seen displayed.
Foy remained close to Rosselli throughout most of the late
1940s and early 1950s. Rosselli spent weekends at Foy’s house and whenever he
could, Foy put him on the books in one no-show position after another. “They
were like the Rover boys,” Foy’s niece said. “They went everywhere together.”
Despite Foy’s financial success at Eagle-Lion studios, his
brash confrontational style irritated the studio brass so when Foy’s three-year
contract expired in 1950 he was released. He bounced back to Warner Brothers
but couldn’t take Rosselli with him since the studio had barred him from the
lot. But Foy and Rosselli stayed in close contact. In fact, Foy introduced
Rosselli to one of his favorite contract players at Warner, Bill Campbell, who
lived in the same neighborhood as Rosselli. In turn Bill Campbell introduced
Rosselli to his young wife, actress Judy Campbell, who would later have affairs
with Rosselli’s boss, Sam Giancana, Frank Sinatra and President John F. Kennedy
among many others.
When Foy’s wife Vivian was suffering with can¬cer in 1949,
Rosselli all but moved into the house. Foy’s daughter, Madeline Foy O’Donnell
recalled that, “Brynie happened to be out of the house for a while, and I guess
the kids were somewhere else in the house, but Johnny was sitting with Vivian
when she died. He closed her eyes.”
Eventually Foy and Rosselli had a falling out when in 1954,
Foy crossed one of Rosselli’s brothers in a business deal. Rosselli confronted
Foy but he refused to back down causing Rosselli to slug the producer, knocking
him to the ground. It would be ten years before the two men would talk to each
other again.
There was another mob connection to the film as well.
One of the law firms representing 20th-Century Fox was owned
by Sidney Korshak, an alleged asso-ciate of the underworld. Korshak’s brother
was a partner with Tony Accardo in a casino run out of a storefront on Rush
Street in Chicago. It was one of the most profitable casinos in the country.
Korshak’s firm had also represented George Browne, Willie Bioff, Paul Ricca,
Tony Accardo and a slew of other Chicago- and L.A.- based hoods over the years.
The film script about Touhy’s escape was written in less
than thirty days. It was written while Touhy was still at large, so the writers
centered the plot of the film on the escape and not its aftermath. Foy said
that the script was still being written when Touhy was recaptured. Fox
purchased the concept and ordered it rewritten by Crane Wilbur and Jerry Cady,
both veteran Hollywood writers and directors.
Afterward, Fox sent the executive producer, Lee Marcus, and
the director, Robert Florey to Chicago in January of 1943 just a few days after
the capture to photograph actual locations for the scenes.
Years later, when questioned about the rush to get the film
made, Fox executives associated with the film said they wanted to capitalize on
the head-lines. Fox wanted the picture rushed through pro-duction before the
public forgot about Touhy.
Robert Florey recalls, The shooting at 1254-56 Leland Avenue
had taken place just a few days before and the place was a mess. For a week at
Joliet the warden allowed us to shoot many scenes and places inside and in the
courtyard using trustees as doubles and producing the escape scene in long
shots. The Mayor and the Chief of Police helped him in every way and he was
allowed to interview Touhy and the others.
The film was completed in a remarkable thirty-three days
back on the sound stages.
For the most part, the script refrained from using any real
names except for the syndicate’s ene¬mies, Roger Touhy and Basil Banghart, and
yet Fox was threatened by a lawsuit from Jake the Barber.
Then, to Hollywood’s surprise, Roger Touhy sued Fox Studios
and its distributors on the grounds that the film defamed him. Suit or no suit,
the film pre-viewed at Stateville prison on July 12, 1943. Over one thousand
state officials watched in the prison’s main yard.
Jacob Arvey, Cook County Chairman and a “close personal
friend” of Jake the Barber and Tubbo Gilbert, had a front row seat. Roger
Touhy, who refused to attend, sat in his darkened cell where he could hear the
echo from the film’s dialogue which he believed ridiculed him.
No one had ever seen anything like this film before. It was
the pioneer of the quasi-documentary technique that two years later would
become the trademark of semi-factual exposes. The mise-en- scene of the film
was groundbreaking. The escape scene was shot entirely in long-shot. This
technique made the film look more like a newsreel than the feature films that
people were used to. Finally, the film concludes with an on-camera speech by
Statesville Warden Joseph Ragan.
Illinois state officials loved every second of the film. On
the other hand, when the FBI saw it, they hated it. In fact, J. Edgar Hoover
objected to the film before he saw it. Upon seeing it, Hoover objected to
several scenes in which local police were given cred¬it for FBI work. He was
also generally displeased with being mentioned in the film at all. Hoover
wanted the public to forget Touhy. The Hamm trial was still an ugly stench. In
fact, when Hoover allowed the official story of the FBI—The FBI Story and later
The FBI Nobody Knows—to be written, there was no mention of the Hamm case or
Roger Touhy. Despite the fact that the FBI took credit for the capture, the
agency demanded that a disclaimer be included to alert the public that the
portrayal of agents in a movie did not constitute an endorsement of the film
and should not be construed as a seal of approval. At that point, Fox
considered shelving the picture. More than a year later they finally released
it. By that time the escape was all but forgotten. Even after waiting a year to
release the film, the studio did so with caution. The producer’s press book
came complete with a statement that read, “We wouldn’t be justified in making a
picture about Touhy except that he is representative of the era and happily, a
passing of it.”
Foy said that his inspiration for the film was not the
sudden flush of money that came out of cash- strapped Fox, but rather that “it
was the dragnet for him [Touhy]; it was the most expensive in the histo-ry of
the city and when the FBI made it a nation¬wide manhunt it became the most
expansive man¬hunt in history for an escaped prisoner, and with nothing but bad
news coming from the war front in those days it [the escape] was like a return
to the old days of a decade before.”
The Hays Office (Hollywood’s self-censorship organization)
demanded and received a cut in the film. They wanted one entire reel cut on the
grounds of extreme violence. They felt it was “bad for the general public,”
said Florey.
Preston Foster, fresh off of a string of profitable films,
portrayed Roger Touhy not as a hero or a vil-lain, but as a cardboard character
who lacked any appeal in any manner. Preston’s version of Touhy is as a petty,
mean, calculating little man. The film portrayed him as a “two-bit ugly little
punk robbed of any sympathy,” as one reviewer put it.
When the film flopped at theaters under the title Roger
Touhy—Gangster!, it was renamed Roger Touhy, Last of the Gangsters, which was
actually the first title Foy had given to the film before production started.
But the film failed at the box office for more than just its title. It failed
for the same reason Touhy’s escape from Statesville failed: it failed to rally
the people to his cause.
The film attempted to define Roger Touhy as an astrology
buff who began the day of his prison break by reading a Scorpio horoscope, “A
new door opens for you, the future is assured.”
“I won’t let them forget me,” he says, assuring one and all
of his Napoleonic complex.
On August 4, 1943, Roger Touhy managed to get a temporary
restriction on showing the film which, he argued, portrayed him “as a vicious
violator and gangster.” But on August 7, 1943 Fox Studios man-aged to have the
ban lifted. Oddly enough Touhy never made a public mention of the film or his
trou-bles with Hollywood nor did he note it in his autobi-ography The Stolen
Years.
In 1948, Touhy won an out of court settlement with Fox and
its distributors. Touhy accepted a set-tlement of $10,000 for defamation of
character and an agreement by Fox to destroy the film. Within a week, Touhy’s
lawyers had his $10,000 and Fox
started to redistribute the film overseas.
• • •
Domestic security and patriotism were front and center in
wartime Chicago and in the nation. All efforts by the citizenry were devoted to
success in defeating the enemy. As a result, the gangster figure all but
vanished from the silver screen between 1941 and 1946. It was replaced by spy
and war sto¬ries featuring Nazi or Japanese villains. The failure of the film
reflected a larger cultural shift that left the old-time gangster as a relic
for the history books.