The fourth person on the trip was Edward
Thomas Chicken McFadden, a labor racketeer from the old days. McFadden worked
as a food and poultry inspector for the Hoover administration during the first
World War. For seventeen years he had been employed as a poultry inspector and
contract loader on Water Street in Chicago.
According to Willie Sharkey, McFadden was a
friend and business associate of Big Tim Lynch before Lynch was killed. In
fact, the 1930 Lincoln Sedan that McFadden drove and registered in his own name
was actually owned by Lynch. They were both members of the same union, the
Chauffeurs and Teamsters Union of Maywood, Illinois. Sharkey said McFadden stayed
on in the union as the business manager but was forced to withdraw in the last
part of 1931 after the syndicate made several attempts to kill him.
In his labor organizing days, McFadden was
called "Father Tom" since he was prone to try and reason with his
quarry in soft, soothing tones before resorting to violence with them.
McFadden had been a friend of Roger's father
back when he walked a beat in the Lawndale district. His record dated back to
1901 when he was locked up for intent to rob. Other arrests included police
impersonation and labor slugging. In 1931, McFadden was sixty-seven years of
age and in ill health. His hearing was gone and he had just recently been
released from the Cook County Hospital for a gall bladder problem. Still, McFadden
had deep contacts in the labor union field and was the person most responsible
for bringing the Teamster unions over to Touhy's side in 1931.
The fifth and sixth persons on the trip were
more than probably August J. LaMarr (also known as Jimmy Lamar) and Leroy
Marshalk, one of Roger Touhy's best gunmen.
The group took Touhy's car-the same car used
by his hoods when they broke up The Dells casino. Touhy had purchased the car
on July 13, 1931 at Marquett Motors at 44 North Larmie Avenue with an initial
deposit of $695 and returned later in the day with $2,400 and paid the car off.
It was wrongly reported, by Melvin Purvis of the FBI, that the car had a
special gas tank to make a ten hour trip. It didn't. But it did have an iron,
almost bullet proof sheet that covered its engine block.
Rohrbacher later identified all the Touhys
as having stayed at his place in a rented cottage although he was adamant that
there were five persons in the party and not four. They had registered under
the names of F. McFarland, Chicago; J. Clark, Chicago; Sam Jones, Chicago; E.
Davis, Chicago; and Roger as Robert Morgan, Chicago. Robert Morgan was Touhy's
father-in-law. Before settling on Rohrbacher's, the group went to the Bayview
Cottages, stood on the edge of the lake and then
drove away, telling the owner,
A1 Shape, that they would be back the next day.
They stayed at Rohrbachers Resort for five
days and ate all their meals there. According to Rohrbacher, Touhy, sometimes
joined by McFadden, did most of the fishing and all of the others told him that
it was their first time at the resort area. He said that Sharkey and Schafer
were gone in the car most of the day and although they drank enormous amounts
of beer "they were agreeable to all other guests at all times" and
that they sent back the Milwaukee brand beer he sent up, taking only Hamm's
beer telling him that it was the only kind they ever drank.
Walter Kerslake, the Hamm Beer
representative for the area, reported selling "many, many cases of
beer"to a group of men at Rohrbacher's after George Rohrbacher told him
"they were the Touhy gang and had plenty of money and paid for things as
they got them."
Rohrbacher remembered Touhy catching a sev-
enteen-pound muskellunge one morning but he gave the fish to another guest, a
Doctor Reese of Chicago. An Indian guide named Frank St. Germaine later told
the FBI that Touhy went out in the boat fishing alone except on one occasion
when he was joined by Schafer. St. Germaine repeated the story frequently that
Touhy shot a muskellunge four times before bringing it into the boat and one
night at dusk Touhy threw six bottles of beer in the water and fired six shots
directly into the necks of all six bottles. Many years later another guide in
the region named Jim Ford, said that he had taken Touhy out fishing once and
watched as Touhy took a Tommy gun with him to the lake and fired it into the
water.
"Tuohy stood up in the
boat one day when they were out fishing and unloaded his Tommy gun on the
waters. That old machine gun blasted away. It was good for a laugh. And if I
remember, he did get a fish or two."
Fishermen carried pistols to shoot the
twenty- five pound muskie because once they were pulled into the boat, they
tended to flip around and with their huge, sharp teeth it was better to just
shoot them. It was legal to carry a pistol when fishing in those days. However,
pistols were outlawed after one too many drunken fishermen shot holes in the
bottom of boats or themselves.
On Sunday Touhy, McFadden, Schafer and Sharkey
walked into Harry's Place, a saloon run by Harry Bowman and asked for
directions to the Minocqua Heights Golf and Country Club.
That testimony was tainted because Bowman
had known Eddie McFadden years before. They were also identified by the bartender,
Joe Streich. However, the more reliable summer police chief of Minocqua, Jay
Jossart, recalled seeing them in the area, as did Deputy Sheriff Titus of
Midlake who spotted McFadden at the Chicago Tavern which was owned by Tony
Renelli on the southwest side of Lake Delavan. The Touhys had shot and killed
Renelli's brother at The Dells two month before.
After Roger and the others were arrested,
Renelli told the FBI "that he had heard rumors that he was to be
"bumped off' by the Touhys and he appeared to be in great fear. He made
the remark during the interview that, "You have the big shots" or
"you have the main ones" and that "the others are only barrel
pushers for the leaders."
The report went on to say "He also made
the remark that the right parties were being held but would not enlarge on the
statement and even said
that he could not see why Touhy
would go into that racket (kidnapping) as he was making good money and also
that it was a surprise to him that McFadden would get so involved as he never
appeared to be that sort."
Buck Gordon of Gordon's Place, a tavern on
the southwest side of Lake Delavan said that he knew Sharkey and that Sharkey
had been around there as well. It was Gordon who told Tony Renelli that Sharkey
had been around looking for him and had asked Gordon where Renelli was located.
Gordon had bought his beer from the Touhys for years. An FBI report read,
"He was made to admit that he bought beer from this gang for many years
and that regularly once a week, a man would come around to collect. He was shown
the photographs of these parties and picked out the photograph of George Wilke
as the party who had collected for this beer. He told the story which is not
believed by this agent, that he had bought this beer for years but never knew
just who he bought from and never questioned the collector or asked for his
name. Gordon is known around the region as a braggart."
O.E. Heissler, the manager of the Minocqua
Golf and Country Club identified all four of them as having played golf there
on two separate occasions but couldn't recall a fifth person, Marshalk, who had
been seen with them in most other places around the resort area. After golf, a
bathing-suit clad Roger Touhy came into Parker's resort, about mile and half
from Rohrbachers. He had arrived in a boat equipped with a Johnson high-powered
motor. Parker tried to strike up a conversation with Touhy and said "I
know most of the boats on the lake but I can't recall that one, who does it
belong to?" He said that Touhy looked at him and asked "What's it to
you?" The boat could have
belonged to anyone of Touhy's old friends. The area was saturated with
bootleggers and other undesirables including Rudy Kreigel, a little known but
successful rum runner and Fred Ullrick who ran Ullrick's Resort in Webster, Wisconsin.
Ullrick's was a known gangster hideout and suspected by the FBI as being the
place where millionaire William Hamm was held during his kidnapping.
Ray Henderson, a bootlegger from Burlington,
Wisconsin kept a summer cottage on Lac du Flambeau as did "Bugs"
Moran. In fact, Moran's sister, Cassady, lived in the region full time. Sam
"Golf Bag" Hunt and Frank Nitti had a place in the north woods, as
did Ralph Capone and most of Chicago's mayors. John Dillinger was said to have
buried $200,000 in Eagle River and after Jimmy Hoffa disappeared, rumors
abounded that Hoffa was buried near a summer place that he owned with Alan
Dorfman.
But most important of all, Terrible Tommy
O'Connor was said to live in the region where he had been running Touhy's
bootlegging operation from a small cabin in Elkhorn, Wisconsin since his
disappearance twelve years earlier.
With all of the serious muscle that Touhy
had gathered for this retreat, it was clear to everyone that something was
afoot. After four days in the lake region, the group left for Chicago on July
19, 1933, a Wednesday morning at about 6:30 A.M. They stopped at Harry Newman's
restaurant on Highway 12 near Lake Geneva at 11:00 A.M. and paid their checks
separately, each one using clean crisp ten- dollar bills. McFadden purchased
the gas with a ten-dollar bill and Touhy wore his alligator slicker that he
purchased in Florida in 1931 for "a whole
lotta Jack." They stopped
for gas once again at Wagner's station just outside of Elkhorn, Wisconsin,
where a second car that had been following them waved off, turned around and
drove back toward the lakes. It is assumed by many that Terrible Tommy was the
second driver.
Elkhorn police officer Harry Ward, a
slightly built rookie cop who did motorcycle duty near Highway 12-the road
Touhy was using on his way back to Chicago-had just finished his shift and was
on his way home when the town bell, an alarm system used to notify police of an
incoming call at the station, pierced the air.
Ward answered the call reluctantly. Driving
at a high speed, Touhy had knocked over a telephone pole on private property
just inside the Elkhorn town line. The owner wanted the car stopped and
restitution made for the cost of repairing the damage. The night marshal said,
"It's a big Chrysler sedan on Route 12."
Ward stopped Touhy, who was driving seventy
miles per hour, because he noticed that the car's left front fender was badly
dented. Touhy denied hitting the pole and after a brief, sharp exchange Ward
ordered Roger to drive to the police station. It was probably at that point
that all of the men in the car slid their guns out of their pockets and into
the seat folds. Roy Marshalk, the most wanted of the group, managed to slip out
of the car and disappear.
At the police station, Roger was told that
the cost of replacing the pole was estimated to be $22. Pay that amount, Roger
was told, and he could leave. Roger, who was carrying $2,500 on him, refused to
pay, arguing that he had just had placed two phone poles on his property for only
$18. An argument broke out that lasted for forty minutes.
Meanwhile, Deputy Ward conducted an illegal
search of Touhy's car. Digging his hands deep under the seat cushions he found
six pistols, three of them rigged to fire. That was all Ward needed to hold
them. Wisconsin was one of the few states to have a law forbidding citizens to
carry machine guns, which, technically, the pistol was.
The town Sheriff called Touhy's mortal
enemy, Tubbo Gilbert, the States Attorney's Chief Investigator in Cook County.
In turn, Gilbert called Melvin Purvis, the FBI's Special Agent in charge of the
Chicago office to tell him that Roger Touhy had been arrested in Elkhorn,
Wisconsin. Gilbert also said that he felt strongly that Purvis should arrest
Touhy for the kidnapping of William Hamm, the St. Paul Brewer who had been
snatched off the street several days before.
Purvis agreed, but before leaving for
Elkhorn, he held a press conference and declared that "The Touhy gang is
being held in Elkhorn by the FBI, where they have positively been identified as
being the kidnappers of William A. Hamm."
Roger Touhy had never heard of William Hamm.
Nor did he know that several days before his arrest, Hamm had been kidnapped by
Alvin Karpis and the Barker gang as he was walking home from his office in St.
Paul. Exactly why Karpis decided to kidnap Hamm will probably never be known.
Certainly Hamm's wealth was one factor, but there were whispers in St. Paul
that while the respectable Hamm's prestigious brewery was selling legal near
beer out the front doors, Hamm and the local underworld gang, the Keatings mob,
were also selling bootleg beer out the back door.
It was rumored that Hamm, in a moment of
stupid ambition or greed or both, double-crossed the Keatings. The kidnapping
and $75,000 ransom it is suspected, was their way of recouping their losses.
Another interesting aspect of the story was
that at some point, the Keatings-Hamm operation started to compete with Roger
Touhy's own bootleg operation in the Wisconsin area. Threats were made on both
sides and tensions ran high. Also interesting was that Roger knew Alvin Karpis.
In fact, Karpis had worked for both A1 Capone and Frank Nitti as a labor goon
in 1930 and 1931, terrorizing and perhaps even killing the same union men that
Touhy was being paid to protect. And now Karpis was about to frame Roger Touhy
for the Hamm kidnapping. No proof has indicated that the mob ordered Karpis to
frame Touhy for the kidnapping, but it seems apparent that they did.
A few days after Hamm was kidnapped his
mother died, leaving behind an estate valued at $4,411,647. The public was
outraged over her death and blamed the shock of her son's abduction as the
cause.
"There was a national hysteria and
rightly so against the crime of kidnapping," Touhy wrote. "Clergymen
ranted against it from their pulpits and so did editorial writers in their
columns. The noisier politicians in Washington tried to outshout each other in
being against the crime that everybody loathed...the FBI set up and trained
special crews of experts to fly to any section of the country upon a report of
a ransom kidnapping. U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings appointed a special
aide, Joseph B. Keenan, to supervise the prosecution of kidnappers. No effort
was being spared, or money either, to put an end to kidnapping. Every police
officer and prosecutor in America wanted to solve a kidnapping. Anyone of them
who put a kidnapper in the electric chair would be a hero. I, Roger Touhy, and
two co-defendants were going to have the murky distinction of being the first
men convicted."
Eventually, Hamm's ransom was paid and the
brewer was released unharmed and Roger Touhy stood accused of the crime.
The day after Roger and the others were
arrested, Tubbo Gilbert, Special Agent Melvin Purvis and Chicago Police Chief
of Detectives Shoemaker were in Elkhorn to retrieve him. Purvis talked with
Touhy first and told him that he was going to be arrested for the kidnapping of
William Hamm. "I recalled," Touhy said, "that I had a solid
alibi for June 15.1 told Purvis so....He looked at me with the tight-lipped,
gimlet-eyed way that FBI men had-and which detectives on television have
plagiarized."
It made no difference to Purvis. Before noon
that day Roger and the others were charged with kidnapping William Hamm and
were transported to the FBI's office in Chicago for further questioning. But,
back in Chicago, Purvis was worried. None of the money found on Roger or the
others could be traced to the William Hamm ransom. Furthermore Purvis knew
through informants that Alvin Karpis was the primary suspect in the kidnapping
and that Touhy and the others weren't regarded as kidnappers by the underworld
or the Chicago police, despite their reputation as gangsters.
"I saw Roger for the first time in
person," Purvis wrote, "when he was brought back to Chicago.
Handcuffed and under guard, he was delivered to my office. I sat behind my desk
and shot questions at him. Touhy wouldn't talk. I can still see him sitting in
the leather chair with that mouth full of protruding teeth. His curly hair was
neatly barbered, his body was lean and hard under his sports suit, his eyes
were dreamy and disarming. Touhy wouldn't say a word. When I asked a question
he laughed. When I demanded an answer he laughed. Finally I said to him,
"Well anyway, what's your name?" Touhy looked at me and grinned,
closed his lips and shook his head. He had gained the impression that we were
trying to make him talk so an unseen listener might identify his voice as being
that one of the kidnappers."
That evening Touhy and others were
questioned for hours. While Purvis was in charge, beating prisoners was
standard practice for the Chicago office of the FBI. His secretary once wrote,
"I sometimes saw the bruised knuckles of the agents who had used more
primitive arguments with refractory prisoners."
One so-called refractory prisoner met his
death that way. The day after Purvis' agents shot John Dillinger to death, a
small time bootlegger named James Probasco was brought to the FBI's 19th floor
office in the Bankers Building for questioning. Agents claimed Probasco leaped
out of the window for no apparent reason, falling nineteen stories into an
alley narrowly missing a passerby. Witnesses later said that the agents held
Probasco out the window by his wrists, but lost their grip, causing the outlaw
to fall to his death.
In his memos to J. Edgar Hoover in
Washington, Purvis said that on this day Touhy was "grilled" by FBI
agents from 1:00 P.M. to 5:00 P.M.
Now it was Roger Touhy's turn. "Weeks
of hell followed," Touhy wrote. They were kept in isolation in tiny
darkened cells. He was allowed to sleep in twenty-minute intervals and then
awakened and beaten. The entire processes was repeated twenty minutes later.
They punched out seven of his teeth, three vertebrae in his upper spine were
fractured and he lost twenty-five pounds in four weeks.
Purvis never did secure a confession out of
Roger or the others, but he formally charged them with kidnapping William Hamm
anyway.
The following day, as if just to show how
bad Roger Touhy's luck could be, President Roosevelt went on national radio and
announced the federal government's war on kidnappers.
"The Hamm trial" Roger wrote
"had a sort of 'let's pretend we're all nuts' tone to it."
The Department of Justice was so certain of
a victory in the case that it asked for the trial to be broadcast live, which
would have made it the first ever to go over the airwaves, but the presiding
judge declined. However, the government argued successfully that Roger's wife
shouldn't be able to testify on his behalf. This was just as well, since the
past several weeks had been so hard on Clara.
Purvis, whom Clara had booted off Touhy's
estate the week before, had arranged it so that she wasn't allowed into the
courtroom until the jury was seated and then she was searched every time she
entered the court. When court was over for the day, she retreated to her hotel
room, where she clipped newspaper stories about the kidnapping for Roger's
lawyer, William Scott Stewart. Lonely and scared, Clara made the mistake of
allowing a female reporter into her hotel room to chat. Grateful for the
company, Clara spoke freely about anything and everything, including her views
on the federal government, the backwoods of Wisconsin, and the jury.
In the next morning's edition, the reporter
dramatically twisted virtually everything Clara had said, more or less making
her out to be a gun moll and co-conspirator in the case. From that moment on
Clara never spoke to another reporter for the rest of her life.
But Clara had a few minor victories as well.
When she visited her husband in jail during the trial, two FBI agents dutifully
wrote down every word the couple uttered to each other, no matter how
commonplace.
Roger recalled: Two FBI men, each with a pencil poised above
a pad of paper sat at the ends of the table. I smiled at each of them
apologetically and said that I hadn't seen my wife for a long time and did they
mind very much if I held her hand? They nodded agreeably. Clara and I clasped
hands and began telegraphing to each other. A short pressure of a finger was a
dot and a long pressure a dash. We had practiced it often when talking secretly
in front of our sons. Vocally I talked inanely about our neighbors and such, at
the same time telegraphing instructions to her. At the end of our conversation,
we coded each other the message of "30" and "73" which
meant "that's all" and "Best regards." The listening FBI
men gaped at us. They hadn't heard enough to merit putting the pencil to paper.
In court, Roger's lawyer ripped into the
government's case and within days had torn it apart. Everything that could go
wrong for the government did. The prosecution's primary witness, taxi driver
Leo Allison, first positively identified Eddie McFadden as the man who gave him
the ransom note and then said it was Roger Touhy. After a drilling by William
Scott Stewart, Allison said he couldn't be sure at all.
Another witness who had sworn he overheard
ransom demands being made over a pay phone by Touhy changed his tune. On the
stand he said "Roger Touhy bears a close resemblance to the man" he
saw and refused to go further. A third witness took the stand and said that he
had watched Roger and the others following Hamm in a car as the brewer walked
home. Touhy hired private detectives to check the witness out and within two
days they were able to prove that this witness had been at work in a printing
plant in Chicago on the day he said he saw Touhy and the others in St. Paul.
When questioned about why he lied, the witness said that he had been pressured
into it by the FBI.
William Hamm couldn't, or wouldn't, identify
Touhy and his crew. Instead he appeared extremely evasive on the witness stand.
Nor was he any help to the FBI agents who were investigating the case. In fact,
right after he was returned by his kidnappers, Hamm flew to New York and stayed
there, incommunicado, until the trail began.
Watching their case fall apart, the
government started to play hardball. FBI agents went to an Indianapolis hotel
where Roger had stayed for one night while Hamm was being abducted. They
confiscated the hotel's registration cards and destroyed them.
A key Touhy witness named Edward J. Meany
was told by one of Purvis' men "If you go to St. Paul to testify for
Touhy, you'll be sorry and maybe you won't come back."
Vincent Connors testified that he had seen
Touhy in a night club in Des Plains on the night Hamm was kidnapped. After he
gave his testimony he was arrested by the FBI on the dubious charge of
registering in a hotel under a false name. Apparently Clara had booked Connors'
room under William Scott Stewart's firm's name, which was against the state's
moral laws but certainly not a federal offense.
When the trial was over, the United States
Deputy Attorney General George F. Sullivan, in his summary of the state's case,
mispronounced names, confused dates and lost his place, and when he accused
Touhy's lawyer, William Scott Stewart of "vituperative sarcasm and abuse
heaped upon the prosecution," Stewart smiled, waved and then took a slight
bow.
The jury found them all innocent of
kidnapping William Hamm, the first defeat for the government's war on
kidnapping since the passage of the Lindbergh law.
Right after they were declared innocent,
Willie Sharkey turned to Roger and said "Well, they went through a lot of
goddamn trouble for a $22 phone pole."Later that night, Sharkey used his
own necktie to hang himself in his cell. Sharkey had shown bizarre behavior for
weeks. One time he fell asleep during the trial. When he awoke, he stood up and
tried to walk out of the courtroom and had to be pulled back and held down by
deputies. Another time, he turned to William Scott Stewart and said in a very
loud voice, "My hair is full of electricity, I guess that's a sign,"
and then laughed uncontrollably for several minutes.
When Touhy was told about Sharkey he said
"Willie's life might not have amounted to much, but he shouldn't have been
driven to ending it."
As sympathetic as those words were, Sharkey
may have feared for his life because during the trial he had talked to the FBI,
although no one outside the Bureau is certain of exactly what he told them.
Sharkey may have been concerned that FBI agent Purvis1 told Touhy that he was
talking to them-a mean but common trick of the agency.
1. In 1960, one month after Roger Touhy was murdered, Melvin
Purvis, long since retired from the FBI, put a .45 caliber pistol to his head
and killed himself.