At almost exactly the same time across town,
Touhy's gunners, dressed as Chicago police and riding in a borrowed police
cruiser, killed a syndicate enforcer named "Fat Tony" Jerfitar, and
his partner, Nicky Provenzano. The drive by shooting occurred as the two hoods
sat in front of a store with their eyes closed, sun bathing their faces. They
never knew what hit them.
Next, Touhy's gang killed a beer peddler
named James J. Kenny. He was found in an alley dead, having had the back of his
head blown off. A few weeks before the murder the Touhys had taken the unusual
step of warning Kenny not to push the syndicate's booze inside their kingdom.
He did it anyway, so they killed him.
Four days later an unknown hood, believed to
be a professional killer imported from New York by Frank Nitti, was found dead
on a Chicago sidewalk. His face was blown off by shotgun pellets. His frozen
body was planted, literally, in a snow bank on a dead end street.
A week later, Joe Provenzo, a syndicate
soldier, was killed when two men wearing police uniforms asked him his name.
When he answered, they thanked him, shot him through the head and calmly walked
away. Five minutes later and several blocks away, John Liberto, another Nitti
hood, was shot in the head at close range by the same two men.
After that the syndicate took two more hard
hits. At the crack of dawn Cermak was in his office, surrounded by his special
squad and the Chicago chief of police, planning the day's raids against the
mob's most lucrative casinos. Over the remainder of the morning, working on
information provided by Roger Touhy and Teddy Newberry, twelve mob casinos were
closed down. Sixteen Chicago detectives were demoted, reassigned or fired for
allowing a rising syndicate hood named "Tough Tony" Capezio to
operate in their districts. The loss of sixteen cops, all bought and paid for,
hurt the syndicate badly, leaving them with very few officers on the take.
Cermak's pressure on the police
department had scared most officers off the syndicate's pad, while the others
waited on the sidelines to see who would come out on top in this war.