FILM RIGHTS AVAILABLE
FILM RIGHTS AVAILABLE
Chapter 4 My Father was a Cop
My father was a Chicago policeman. An honest one.
Otherwise, he would have had a hell of a lot less
trouble getting up the grocery and rent money. And I might
have managed to get farther in school than to squeak
through the eighth grade.
I was born in 1898, although the prison records say '97,
in a house at 822 South Robie Street, not far from one of
the places where I hid out while on the lam in 1942.
There were seven of us kids, two girls and five boys.
We lived in an area of working people, big families and
low incomes. My father's pay as a policeman wasn't enough
to keep the wolf off the front porch but, at least, he never
made it in to eat the potatoes and meat—when we had
meat, that is—off the table.
Some of Chicago's most notorious gangsters came out
of that part of the city. So did business leaders, college
professors, clergymen and a couple of mayors. I was doing
all right myself until the big Factor frameup came along.
My mother died when I was ten. She was fatally
burned when a kitchen stove exploded. After that, my
father, my two sisters and I moved to Downers Grove, a
suburb. The older boys stayed in Chicago, living with rela-
tives and friends. I graduated from the_£L._Joseph Roman
Catholic Parochial School i^TJowners Grove" when I was
thirteen. U"
It was a good enough boyhood. I played baseball and
raised the usual amount of the devil and got teased because
my hair was curly. If I had anything to gripe about, I
didn't realize it, because other boys didn't have any more
than I did, generally speaking.
I often thought in prison of the priest in charge of the
school, a Father Goodwin. My family couldn't afford to
pay tuition for me, so I was a sort of handyman around
the school and the church. I mowed the lawns, served mass
as an altar boy, tended the furnace, ran errands and did a
little janitor work. It was fun.
Once or twice a week, Father Goodwin rented a horse
and buggy from a livery and went calling on his parishion-
ers. I was his driver. At whatever house we stopped, there
would be refreshments—apple pies, lemonade, thick sand-
wiches, salads, pickles, ice cream. Father waved the food
away, but I ate fit to bust a gut.
In the church there was a big oil painting, a copy of The
Last Supper. Father Goodwin explained it to me, saying
that a man called Judas had betrayed Jesus Christ for
thirty pieces of silver. A thing like that can have a re-
markable influence on a kid.
I began thinking of Judas as a stool pigeon, a word I
knew, as did all youngsters. While sweeping up the church
and dusting the pews, I would stop and look for a long
time at the painting. I picked out the face of a man I
figured was Judas, and I would stand there hating him.
I thought of cutting the face of the man I concluded to
be Judas out of the picture, but that would have ruined
the painting and Father Goodwin would have been un-
happy. So I just went on despising Judas—something which
I never told the "bug doctors," which is what psychologists
and psychiatrists are called in prison.
My contempt for informers grew on me as the years
passed. When I later got into the labor union movement, I
despised the company finks. After a few years in prison, I
got to distrust everybody around me, except for a few
convicts. Too many inmates are stoolies; the bug doctors
can call my attitude antisocial if they want to.
My feeling about informers can be summed up by an
anecdote which seems very, very apt to me. Funny, too.
I once knew a confidence man called Yiddles Miller. He
spoke with a Weber and Fields Dutch accent, but he was
a shrewd operator. Con men are, I learned in prison, the
elite of all lawbreakers, in the opinion of other felons. They
never tattle on each other.
Well, Yiddles and another bunco expert, Gus London,
were sharing a twin-bed hotel room in Pittsburgh. Each
of them folded his pants across the back of the chair near
his single bed. E£ch fell asleep, but in the middle of the
night Yiddles, a light sleeper, was awakened by a prowler
in the room. London slept on, snoring a bit.
The thief took London's pants from a chair at the bed
nearest the door. He then moved toward the second chair.
Yiddles, feigning sleep, stirred and pretended to be awaken-
ing. The burglar left, taking only London's pants, with $3,-
000 in the pockets. Yiddles got out of bed, double-locked
the door, propped the back of a chair under the doorknob
for added security and went back to sleep.
In the morning London awakened, demanded to know
whether his pants had walked away with his $3,000, and
was told by Yiddles: "A burglar came in and stole your
trousers." London was indignant, demanding to know why
Yiddles hadn't awakened him, summoned the hotel house
officer, or called the police.
Yiddles propped himself up on an elbow, stared in as-
tonishment at his comrade in larceny and demanded:
"What do you think I am, a stool pigeon?"
London thought over the questionable ethics involved,
agreed that Yiddles was right, and apologized for having
suggested calling in the law.
Whatever the moral, or immoral, angles of the story
may be, I always have despised stoolies, and I always will.
The only thing worse is a perjurer. I have had more than
my share of troubles from both.
When I got out of the eighth grade, it was hunt-a-job
for me. Only rich kids went to high school back then, and
I didn't qualify. I had a little edge on other youngsters,
because my hobby was ham radio, or wireless as it was
called. I had built my own set at home, and I knew the
International code.
I tried for a job as a wireless operator, but there wasn't
a chance at my age. Too young for responsibility, I was
told. So I ran my feet down halfway to my ankles as an
office and stockroom boy for a few months and then hooked
on with Western Union. They made me manager of a little
residential section branch office. A real big dealer, I was.
Salary: $12 a week.
I lied about my age to get the job, but it was easy to get
by. My hair was gray at the sides of my head —maybe I
worried as an infant—before I got out of knee pants, and
every day I would have a five o'clock shadow by lunch time.
Western Union gave me a chance to learn the Morse code
which wasn't too difficult because I already knew the In-
ternational. They moved me to the main office downtown
and I was an operator.
My father went into retirement about that time, and he
liked to play the horses. He would bet fifty cents, or one
or two bucks on a race, and only one race a day, when he
had the cash to spare. And now I was in a position to be
his personal tout.
The stable owners, trainers and jockeys would send
messages on the chances of their horses over the wires. I
tipped off my father. He had nine winners, mostly long
shots, in a row. He would have broken half the bookies in
Chicago if he had started with ten bucks and parlayed it.
But no, he never risked more than two.
But the really important thing that happened to me—
back then in 1915—was that a dark-haired Irish girl
went to work for Western Union in the company's branch
office in Chicago's finest hotel, the Blackstone.
She was sixteen, and fresh out of telegraph school.
From the main office, I sent the Blackstone's messages to
her and received the ones she transmitted. She sent better
than she copied, but she wasn't so good at either. I tried
to help her.
Since she worked from four p.m. to midnight, I could
drop in and see her evenings after my day shift ended. The
first time I called only to help her with telegraphy. After
that I courted her by the Western Union's wires between
the main office and the Blackstone. And in person, too.
I'd take her home now and then when she finished work
at midnight, but she always had a chaperon. Another
pretty girl, Emily Ivins, was night telephone operator at the
hotel and she made certain that everything was proper on
those late-at-night-ride-home dates.
Miss Ivins, incidentally, was to be an important witness
in trying, many years later, to keep me out of prison on
the Jake the Barber hoax. She was to tell the truth, but it
wasn't good enough against the screen of lies behind
which Factor and his friends stood grinning.
I would have been a telegrapher for the rest of my life
but, odd as it sounds, I was too damn honest. The Com-
mercial Telegraphers Union of America was trying to or-
ganize Western Union and the Postal Telegraph Company.
I didn't know anything about unionization and I wasn't
interested, but I knew some of the operators in the office
had joined.
Every hour, the operators got a ten-minute "short," or
relief, and we would go into the men's lounge for a smoke.
One of the CTU boys scattered organization pamphlets
around the room. I picked up one and, like a dummy, read
it right out in the open. A company fink saw me and
within an hour I was on the pad in the superintendent's
office. He had a lot of questions to ask.
Did I belong to ther union? No. Did I know any men who
did belong? Yes, I did. Would I give him their names?
No, I would not. Did I have any plans for joining the
union? "Well," I said, "if I decide the union is a good
thing, 1 probably will take out a card."
Whammo! I was fired and out on the street. A company
guard escorted me to the door and told me never to come
back. Now, I'm not rapping Western Union after all these
years. Every employer fought the unions then, and the
National Labor Relations Act was nearly 20 years in the
future as the bosses' nightmare. I would have been fired
anywhere for giving the same answers about unionization.
I should have lied to the superintendent, of course.
Honesty was my downfall. A CTU organizer came to visit
me at home that evening. He brought along an armful of
union literature and a paid-up card in the union for six
months.
"You're all through as a telegrapher, Touhy," he said. "By
this time, your name is on the blackball list. No telegraph
company or brokerage office will hire you. But if you want
a job with us as a union organizer, we'll hire you."
I didn't believe him about the blackball, but he was
right. Nobody would accept an application from me, much
less give me a job. The hiring boss at the Associated Press
needed operators, but he turned pale and looked ready to
climb the wall when he heard my name. I could have been
a bearded bolshevik with a bomb under my coat.
I read the union literature and got impressed with the
rights of the working man. I took the job as an organizer,
which was a lot of hard work and a smattering of prankish
fun. We would call up Western Union and Postal, dictate
long telegrams to fake addresses in distant cities and send
them collect. We kept the companies' messenger services
jumping with requests to pick up telegrams from vacant
lots.
One of the union men telephoned the non-union Asso-
ciated Press, posed as the AP's reporter at Rockford,
Illinois, and turned in a long, fake story about a hotel fire
that had killed twenty people. The story would have got
on the wires, too, but some smartie called Rockford to
check it.
It wasn't too difficult to sign up telegraphers in the un-
ion. The working hours were long, the pay was skinflint
and the bosses were nasty. The trouble was that as soon
as a key-pounder signed a secret union application card he
was fired. I figured we had a stool pigeon in the CTU of-
fices and I suspected one of our office secretaries.
So we forged the names of ten Western Union finks to
application blanks and gave them to the secretary. Sure
enough, all ten of the informers were fired, including the
one who had squealed on me. We got rid of the girl we
suspected and things went better.
Unions didn't have big enough treasuries to hire meeting
halls, so we usually met in saloons. I got to know the big,
tough, two-fisted pioneers of unionism. There were Pete
Shaunnessey of the bricklayers, Tom Reynolds and Tom
Malloy of the movie projection operators, Steve Sumner of
the milk wagon drivers, Umbrella Mike Boyle of the elec-
tricians, Big Tim Lynch, Con Shea and Paddy Burrell of
the teamsters, Bill Rooney of the flat janitors, and Art
Wallace of the painters.
Those men were to figure, innocently, in my being rail-
roaded to prison. Their names will crop up later in this
story. Some of them were honest enough to get murdered
and others were so crooked they could sleep comfortably
only on a circular stairway.
Their faces were scar-tissued from fighting hired strike-
breakers on picket lines. Their skulls were permanently
creased from bumping their heads on the tops of police
paddywagon doorways. Their knuckles, sometimes, were
driven halfway up to their wrists from past impacts. I
admired their courage and I made lifelong friendships with
them—short as some of their lives were.
Con Shea was an erudite character who delighted in us-
ing fancy words. I recall his saying to me one night at the
bar at the Ansonia Saloon: "Roger, a divided or deviated
septum is an occupational hazard of the profession of un-
ion organization." I nodded wisely, not wanting to appear
dumb. When I got to a dictionary, I learned that he was
talking about a busted nose.
Union organizing was fascinating, but there didn't seem
to be a secure future in it. Anyway, I liked telegraphy. I
joined the Order of Railroad Telegraphers, went west and
wangled a job from the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad.
The pay was magnificent—$185 a month.
Everywhere the Denver & Rio Grande went, it seemed
to parallel streams alive with big, fighting mountain trout.
I learned about game fishing there. Also, I became
acquainted with ranching, horseback riding and financial
security. I worked in small towns where living costs were
low, and I sent half my pay home to help out the family.
I wrote long letters and sent small gifts to Clara, the
girl telegrapher back in Chicago who was going to be my
wife. I was sure of that even then, although I never had
proposed to her.
I worked in the depots, with their round-bellied wood-
burning stoves in Buena Vista, Glenwood Springs and
Eagle, Colorado. In Eagle, I got my first warning of
western bad-man danger when a local merchant told me:
"You won't be here long, sonny. We got a rancher, Clyde
Nottingham, who runs depot agents out of town. He carries
a gun. Guess he don't like you depot agent dudes."
It was cold that first night in Eagle and I had the stove
red hot as I jiggled the telegraph key, handling freight car,
stock car and personal messages. The waiting room door
opened and in came a big man in cowboy clothes and a
sheepskin coat. He spat on the potbellied stove. Sizzle, siz-
zle, the stove went.
I walked to the ticket window, looked out and saw the
caller was carrying a .45. He didn't look pleasant, but
damned if he was going to run me out of town. "Mr.
Nottingham?" I asked. He nodded and I said: "Mr. Not-
tingham, any time you want to spit on the stove, go right
ahead. But come back next day after the stove cools, and
polish it. I ain't going to do it."
He stared at me for a long time. My proposition was
reasonable to him, I guess. He came to my window,
reached into an inner pocket and handed me a half dozen
letters. He asked me if I would put them in- the slot of the
mail car on the late train.
I made another proposition: "I put your letters on the
train and you stop spitting on the stove? Right?"
"That's the idea, young fellow," he said. "Only reason
I been running depot agents out of town is they don't want
to mail my letters for me."
A fine friendship started right away. He invited me out
to his ranch. He had a ten-year-old daughter called
"Toots," and I always get along well with kids. The three
of us went fishing and hunting and horseback riding to-
gether.
Meeting Nottingham taught me a lot, as a young fellow
away from home. I learned from the incident in the depot
that the town bad man—or later, the rioting con in prison
—pretty often isn't bad at all. His trouble is that he can't
make himself understood to the depot agent, or the yard
screw, or to his family—and he gets sore at people as a
result.
Being with Nottingham and his kid gave me a sense of
belonging, of being liked and being part of something.
Second to my own wife and sons, I thought a lot about the
Nottinghams at night in Stateville.
But nothing could be permanent back then. A war was
going on in Europe, and then the United States stepped in
and it was World War 1.
I got patriotic and headed back for Chicago to enlist in
the Navy. The Nottinghams saw me off at the station and I
tried to make Toots stop crying by promising to bring her
back half of Kaiser Bill's waxed mustache.
I didn't win the war, or have any active part in it, but the
war did something for me. It gave grounds for me, a boy
from the eighth grade, to say honestly to cops, bootleggers,
convicts, prison screws and interviewers: "I've been to Har-
vard." It was the truth, too. I taught telegraphy at Harvard
to classes of enlisted men and officers.
After my discharge from the Navy, I spent a couple of
weeks with my father, living in Franklin Park, a Chicago
suburb. I saw that cute little girl telegrapher a few times,
but I had a job of getting back on my financial feet be-
fore becoming serious about marriage.
I drifted out to a small Iowa town near Des Moines,
on a telegraphing job for the Rock Island Lines, then to
Kansas City, figuring I might go back to Colorado. But
I met one of my Morse code students from Harvard.
He was a bright young man, a lawyer, although I hadn't
been able to pound telegraphy into his head. He just didn't
have an ear for Morse signals. I'll call him Collins, for the
good reason that he had a different name.
Collins was heading for Cushing, Oklahoma, where his
brother had an interest in a hotel. The two brothers also
had a tire shop in Oklahoma, and I wound up as manager
of the store. There wasn't enough money in that job, but
it was a stopgap.
The oil business was boiling and busting and gushing
in Oklahoma. A guy could make a million overnight. That
was the line for me, particularly when I thought of my
little Irish telegrapher back in Chicago. Marriage was on
my mind.
I didn't know any more about the oil business than a
mink knows of sex hygiene, but I could learn. For a bottle
of bootleg corn, I got an oil field engineer to give me a
couple of hours of instruction in engineering. Now, all I
can remember of what he taught me is: "Don't bump your
skull against an overhead valve and smash your goddam
brains out."
I went to a field at Drummond, Oklahoma, told the
superintendent I was an engineer, and went to work. I
was short on technical skill, but long on bluff. And I
knew where to buy corn whiskey to give the mechanics
for doing my work when something went wrong with the
pumps or engines.
wildcat wells. Raymond would study those things, look over
the terrain and decide whether any of the land was worth
leasing from the owners, who were mostly Indians and cattle
ranchers.
I had about $1,000 saved, and there was nothing against
my buying leases that Raymond recommended. I took a
gamble on 150 acres at two dollars an acre in Jefferson
County. Three oil companies were bidding on my lease
within a month, and I made $2,000 on the deal. I bought
and sold about 20 leases, and never lost on any of them.
The money was good, but I was a guy who liked the
city. And my mind was on the girl at the telegraph key in
the Blackstone in Chicago. I went back home with $25,-
000 in cash, a fortune in 1920, and it had taken me less
than a year to earn it.
Clara and I were married on April 22nd, 1922. I had
figured on returning to the west, but Chicago looked too
good to me, and there was a lot of money around. Every-
body was buying cars and trucks and that was the busi-
ness for me.
A boyhood friend, John Powell, had an auto sales agen-
cy on Madison Street. He was a politician, and later he be-
came an Illinois state legislator and went blind. But at
that time he was a real rouser. Powell was a six-footer,
and he had a black bear that was just as tall when it stood
on its hind legs. When Powell went night clubbing, the
bear went along, and both of them would drink bourbon
with beer chasers. It was a race between them as to who got
drunk first.
I went to work for him (Powell, not the bear) as a car
and truck salesman, at no pay. My idea was to learn how
to buy and sell, and then go into business for myself.
My wife and I were living in an apartment in Oak Park,
a sedate suburb where every man was a municipal disgrace
if he wasn't a deacon, or at least a pillar of a church. To get
away from that mad social gaiety, and to keep my bank-
roll intact, I bought a taxicab and drove it nights in Chi-
cago. I learned things in the cab I never heard at Harvard.
In a few months, I opened my own garage and auto
sales place, with a capacity of 15 cars, and did pretty well.
I sold it and moved to a bigger place on North Avenue. I
was becoming a tycoon, in a minor league way, in the auto
business. I should have stayed in that league.
My brother, Tommy, and I bought our father a two-
flat building at California and Warren, where he could be
independent and make a small bet now and then. He died in
1926 on a trip to California, the same year Clara's and
my first son was born. That's nature's way of evening things
up, I guess; like when one guy goes into the penitentiary
and another guy gets paroled to make room for him.
My wife and I moved from Oak Park to another sub-
urb, Des Plaines. I bought a place that some of the news-
papers later called a "mansion" or a "gang fortress." It
was a six-room bungalow and later I put a 60-foot
swimming pool in the back. The only gang I ever had
around there was a guard with a shotgun after the Capone
mob tried to kidnap my kids.
A bargain in trucks got me into the prohibition beer
business by chance. I bought eight of them, sold six, and
wound up with two sitting around my garage, using up
space and showing no profit.
It happened that I knew most of the bootleggers and
saloon owners in my area. Why not? They were the guys
who had money to buy fancy cars. If Chicago's best stores
catered to them and their wives, why shouldn't Roger
Touhy?
I called on a few saloonkeepers and then made a deal
with two young lads who would work hard to make a buck
or two. Also, I fixed it to buy beer from two breweries
which turned out legal one-half of one per cent prohibi-
tion beer—and sneaked good brew out the back door.
My trucks hauled the beer, the drivers made a profit of
twenty dollars a barrel, they paid me a percentage on the
purchase price of the trucks and everybody was happy.
The police generally expected a payoff of $5 a barrel
for beer being run into any given district. I didn't pay it and
neither did my drivers. Our operation was too small for the
law to bother much with us.
And then Tubbo Gilbert stepped into the picture. I had
known him for a long time, first as a labor skate and later
as a ward politician. We never got along well and, later on,
he swore that he couldn't remember having seen me until
July 19th, 1933, an important date in my life.
Anyway, Tubbo, a sergeant at the time, stopped one of
my beer trucks, carrying three barrels of beer, arrested the
driver and took the beer to his stationhouse.
The payoff was that the beer in the^ barrels was legal
stuff—a half of one per cent. It was no more illegal than
lollypops or baby Pablum, and it carried about the same
kick. He had to release the driver, the beer and the truck,
of course.
I circulated the story around Chicago and the back of
Tubbo's neck turned red as a gobbler turkey's wattles in
mating season.
Gilbert liked me even less after that. It took him a
long time to get even with me, but he finally did—99
years of even.
One of my friends at the time of Tubbo's near-beer
humiliation was Matt Kolb, a bootleg beer distributor with
a saloon on California Avenue, not far from my garage.
He was a fat, gentle old gent who weighed about 220
pounds, beer belly and all. Anybody who thought all
bootleggers were gangsters with machines guns and gun
molls had only to meet Matt. He would run away from a
ten-year-old kid armed with a flyswatter.
I sold Kolb a car, giving him a good deal and splitting
the commission with him, a thing all dealers did then to
promote sales. Matt came to me a few months later with
a proposition. He had a partner, but they weren't getting
along. I could buy out the partner for $10,000. Kolb once
had been tied up with the Capone mob, but violence had
scared him away.
My automobile business then was bringing me in from
$50,000 to $60,000 a year. But the big money was in
alcoholic beverages. Everybody in the racket was getting
rich. How could the bootleggers miss, with a short ounce
of gagging moonshine selling for $1.25, or an eight-ounce
glass of nauseating beer going at 75 cents?
I drew $10,000 from the bank, handed it to Kolb and
said: "You got a new partner."
My next on-the-job training in oil was as a telegrapher
for the Empire Pipe Line Company at Ardmore, Okla-
homa, and there I learned the big words about petroleum
—plus a few names to drop.
The Sinclair Oil people, in a moment of laxity, hired me
as a scout.
The experience I had had in that line was confined to
watching silent western movies in which Army scouts
killed Indians. But what the hell, I was an oil field en-
gineer, wasn't I? And I could talk as good a gusher as the
original Carbon Petroleum Dubbs.
Word came to me that a famous New York geologist,
Dick Raymond, needed a helper. He had located oil fields
all over the world. I went after the job and got it. It put me
in the big money.
Raymond and I drove all through southwest Oklahoma.
At each county seat town, we would get a plat, or dia-
gram, on oil leases, along with figures on production of
Otherwise, he would have had a hell of a lot less
trouble getting up the grocery and rent money. And I might
have managed to get farther in school than to squeak
through the eighth grade.
I was born in 1898, although the prison records say '97,
in a house at 822 South Robie Street, not far from one of
the places where I hid out while on the lam in 1942.
There were seven of us kids, two girls and five boys.
We lived in an area of working people, big families and
low incomes. My father's pay as a policeman wasn't enough
to keep the wolf off the front porch but, at least, he never
made it in to eat the potatoes and meat—when we had
meat, that is—off the table.
Some of Chicago's most notorious gangsters came out
of that part of the city. So did business leaders, college
professors, clergymen and a couple of mayors. I was doing
all right myself until the big Factor frameup came along.
My mother died when I was ten. She was fatally
burned when a kitchen stove exploded. After that, my
father, my two sisters and I moved to Downers Grove, a
suburb. The older boys stayed in Chicago, living with rela-
tives and friends. I graduated from the_£L._Joseph Roman
Catholic Parochial School i^TJowners Grove" when I was
thirteen. U"
It was a good enough boyhood. I played baseball and
raised the usual amount of the devil and got teased because
my hair was curly. If I had anything to gripe about, I
didn't realize it, because other boys didn't have any more
than I did, generally speaking.
I often thought in prison of the priest in charge of the
school, a Father Goodwin. My family couldn't afford to
pay tuition for me, so I was a sort of handyman around
the school and the church. I mowed the lawns, served mass
as an altar boy, tended the furnace, ran errands and did a
little janitor work. It was fun.
Once or twice a week, Father Goodwin rented a horse
and buggy from a livery and went calling on his parishion-
ers. I was his driver. At whatever house we stopped, there
would be refreshments—apple pies, lemonade, thick sand-
wiches, salads, pickles, ice cream. Father waved the food
away, but I ate fit to bust a gut.
In the church there was a big oil painting, a copy of The
Last Supper. Father Goodwin explained it to me, saying
that a man called Judas had betrayed Jesus Christ for
thirty pieces of silver. A thing like that can have a re-
markable influence on a kid.
I began thinking of Judas as a stool pigeon, a word I
knew, as did all youngsters. While sweeping up the church
and dusting the pews, I would stop and look for a long
time at the painting. I picked out the face of a man I
figured was Judas, and I would stand there hating him.
I thought of cutting the face of the man I concluded to
be Judas out of the picture, but that would have ruined
the painting and Father Goodwin would have been un-
happy. So I just went on despising Judas—something which
I never told the "bug doctors," which is what psychologists
and psychiatrists are called in prison.
My contempt for informers grew on me as the years
passed. When I later got into the labor union movement, I
despised the company finks. After a few years in prison, I
got to distrust everybody around me, except for a few
convicts. Too many inmates are stoolies; the bug doctors
can call my attitude antisocial if they want to.
My feeling about informers can be summed up by an
anecdote which seems very, very apt to me. Funny, too.
I once knew a confidence man called Yiddles Miller. He
spoke with a Weber and Fields Dutch accent, but he was
a shrewd operator. Con men are, I learned in prison, the
elite of all lawbreakers, in the opinion of other felons. They
never tattle on each other.
Well, Yiddles and another bunco expert, Gus London,
were sharing a twin-bed hotel room in Pittsburgh. Each
of them folded his pants across the back of the chair near
his single bed. E£ch fell asleep, but in the middle of the
night Yiddles, a light sleeper, was awakened by a prowler
in the room. London slept on, snoring a bit.
The thief took London's pants from a chair at the bed
nearest the door. He then moved toward the second chair.
Yiddles, feigning sleep, stirred and pretended to be awaken-
ing. The burglar left, taking only London's pants, with $3,-
000 in the pockets. Yiddles got out of bed, double-locked
the door, propped the back of a chair under the doorknob
for added security and went back to sleep.
In the morning London awakened, demanded to know
whether his pants had walked away with his $3,000, and
was told by Yiddles: "A burglar came in and stole your
trousers." London was indignant, demanding to know why
Yiddles hadn't awakened him, summoned the hotel house
officer, or called the police.
Yiddles propped himself up on an elbow, stared in as-
tonishment at his comrade in larceny and demanded:
"What do you think I am, a stool pigeon?"
London thought over the questionable ethics involved,
agreed that Yiddles was right, and apologized for having
suggested calling in the law.
Whatever the moral, or immoral, angles of the story
may be, I always have despised stoolies, and I always will.
The only thing worse is a perjurer. I have had more than
my share of troubles from both.
When I got out of the eighth grade, it was hunt-a-job
for me. Only rich kids went to high school back then, and
I didn't qualify. I had a little edge on other youngsters,
because my hobby was ham radio, or wireless as it was
called. I had built my own set at home, and I knew the
International code.
I tried for a job as a wireless operator, but there wasn't
a chance at my age. Too young for responsibility, I was
told. So I ran my feet down halfway to my ankles as an
office and stockroom boy for a few months and then hooked
on with Western Union. They made me manager of a little
residential section branch office. A real big dealer, I was.
Salary: $12 a week.
I lied about my age to get the job, but it was easy to get
by. My hair was gray at the sides of my head —maybe I
worried as an infant—before I got out of knee pants, and
every day I would have a five o'clock shadow by lunch time.
Western Union gave me a chance to learn the Morse code
which wasn't too difficult because I already knew the In-
ternational. They moved me to the main office downtown
and I was an operator.
My father went into retirement about that time, and he
liked to play the horses. He would bet fifty cents, or one
or two bucks on a race, and only one race a day, when he
had the cash to spare. And now I was in a position to be
his personal tout.
The stable owners, trainers and jockeys would send
messages on the chances of their horses over the wires. I
tipped off my father. He had nine winners, mostly long
shots, in a row. He would have broken half the bookies in
Chicago if he had started with ten bucks and parlayed it.
But no, he never risked more than two.
But the really important thing that happened to me—
back then in 1915—was that a dark-haired Irish girl
went to work for Western Union in the company's branch
office in Chicago's finest hotel, the Blackstone.
She was sixteen, and fresh out of telegraph school.
From the main office, I sent the Blackstone's messages to
her and received the ones she transmitted. She sent better
than she copied, but she wasn't so good at either. I tried
to help her.
Since she worked from four p.m. to midnight, I could
drop in and see her evenings after my day shift ended. The
first time I called only to help her with telegraphy. After
that I courted her by the Western Union's wires between
the main office and the Blackstone. And in person, too.
I'd take her home now and then when she finished work
at midnight, but she always had a chaperon. Another
pretty girl, Emily Ivins, was night telephone operator at the
hotel and she made certain that everything was proper on
those late-at-night-ride-home dates.
Miss Ivins, incidentally, was to be an important witness
in trying, many years later, to keep me out of prison on
the Jake the Barber hoax. She was to tell the truth, but it
wasn't good enough against the screen of lies behind
which Factor and his friends stood grinning.
I would have been a telegrapher for the rest of my life
but, odd as it sounds, I was too damn honest. The Com-
mercial Telegraphers Union of America was trying to or-
ganize Western Union and the Postal Telegraph Company.
I didn't know anything about unionization and I wasn't
interested, but I knew some of the operators in the office
had joined.
Every hour, the operators got a ten-minute "short," or
relief, and we would go into the men's lounge for a smoke.
One of the CTU boys scattered organization pamphlets
around the room. I picked up one and, like a dummy, read
it right out in the open. A company fink saw me and
within an hour I was on the pad in the superintendent's
office. He had a lot of questions to ask.
Did I belong to ther union? No. Did I know any men who
did belong? Yes, I did. Would I give him their names?
No, I would not. Did I have any plans for joining the
union? "Well," I said, "if I decide the union is a good
thing, 1 probably will take out a card."
Whammo! I was fired and out on the street. A company
guard escorted me to the door and told me never to come
back. Now, I'm not rapping Western Union after all these
years. Every employer fought the unions then, and the
National Labor Relations Act was nearly 20 years in the
future as the bosses' nightmare. I would have been fired
anywhere for giving the same answers about unionization.
I should have lied to the superintendent, of course.
Honesty was my downfall. A CTU organizer came to visit
me at home that evening. He brought along an armful of
union literature and a paid-up card in the union for six
months.
"You're all through as a telegrapher, Touhy," he said. "By
this time, your name is on the blackball list. No telegraph
company or brokerage office will hire you. But if you want
a job with us as a union organizer, we'll hire you."
I didn't believe him about the blackball, but he was
right. Nobody would accept an application from me, much
less give me a job. The hiring boss at the Associated Press
needed operators, but he turned pale and looked ready to
climb the wall when he heard my name. I could have been
a bearded bolshevik with a bomb under my coat.
I read the union literature and got impressed with the
rights of the working man. I took the job as an organizer,
which was a lot of hard work and a smattering of prankish
fun. We would call up Western Union and Postal, dictate
long telegrams to fake addresses in distant cities and send
them collect. We kept the companies' messenger services
jumping with requests to pick up telegrams from vacant
lots.
One of the union men telephoned the non-union Asso-
ciated Press, posed as the AP's reporter at Rockford,
Illinois, and turned in a long, fake story about a hotel fire
that had killed twenty people. The story would have got
on the wires, too, but some smartie called Rockford to
check it.
It wasn't too difficult to sign up telegraphers in the un-
ion. The working hours were long, the pay was skinflint
and the bosses were nasty. The trouble was that as soon
as a key-pounder signed a secret union application card he
was fired. I figured we had a stool pigeon in the CTU of-
fices and I suspected one of our office secretaries.
So we forged the names of ten Western Union finks to
application blanks and gave them to the secretary. Sure
enough, all ten of the informers were fired, including the
one who had squealed on me. We got rid of the girl we
suspected and things went better.
Unions didn't have big enough treasuries to hire meeting
halls, so we usually met in saloons. I got to know the big,
tough, two-fisted pioneers of unionism. There were Pete
Shaunnessey of the bricklayers, Tom Reynolds and Tom
Malloy of the movie projection operators, Steve Sumner of
the milk wagon drivers, Umbrella Mike Boyle of the elec-
tricians, Big Tim Lynch, Con Shea and Paddy Burrell of
the teamsters, Bill Rooney of the flat janitors, and Art
Wallace of the painters.
Those men were to figure, innocently, in my being rail-
roaded to prison. Their names will crop up later in this
story. Some of them were honest enough to get murdered
and others were so crooked they could sleep comfortably
only on a circular stairway.
Their faces were scar-tissued from fighting hired strike-
breakers on picket lines. Their skulls were permanently
creased from bumping their heads on the tops of police
paddywagon doorways. Their knuckles, sometimes, were
driven halfway up to their wrists from past impacts. I
admired their courage and I made lifelong friendships with
them—short as some of their lives were.
Con Shea was an erudite character who delighted in us-
ing fancy words. I recall his saying to me one night at the
bar at the Ansonia Saloon: "Roger, a divided or deviated
septum is an occupational hazard of the profession of un-
ion organization." I nodded wisely, not wanting to appear
dumb. When I got to a dictionary, I learned that he was
talking about a busted nose.
Union organizing was fascinating, but there didn't seem
to be a secure future in it. Anyway, I liked telegraphy. I
joined the Order of Railroad Telegraphers, went west and
wangled a job from the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad.
The pay was magnificent—$185 a month.
Everywhere the Denver & Rio Grande went, it seemed
to parallel streams alive with big, fighting mountain trout.
I learned about game fishing there. Also, I became
acquainted with ranching, horseback riding and financial
security. I worked in small towns where living costs were
low, and I sent half my pay home to help out the family.
I wrote long letters and sent small gifts to Clara, the
girl telegrapher back in Chicago who was going to be my
wife. I was sure of that even then, although I never had
proposed to her.
I worked in the depots, with their round-bellied wood-
burning stoves in Buena Vista, Glenwood Springs and
Eagle, Colorado. In Eagle, I got my first warning of
western bad-man danger when a local merchant told me:
"You won't be here long, sonny. We got a rancher, Clyde
Nottingham, who runs depot agents out of town. He carries
a gun. Guess he don't like you depot agent dudes."
It was cold that first night in Eagle and I had the stove
red hot as I jiggled the telegraph key, handling freight car,
stock car and personal messages. The waiting room door
opened and in came a big man in cowboy clothes and a
sheepskin coat. He spat on the potbellied stove. Sizzle, siz-
zle, the stove went.
I walked to the ticket window, looked out and saw the
caller was carrying a .45. He didn't look pleasant, but
damned if he was going to run me out of town. "Mr.
Nottingham?" I asked. He nodded and I said: "Mr. Not-
tingham, any time you want to spit on the stove, go right
ahead. But come back next day after the stove cools, and
polish it. I ain't going to do it."
He stared at me for a long time. My proposition was
reasonable to him, I guess. He came to my window,
reached into an inner pocket and handed me a half dozen
letters. He asked me if I would put them in- the slot of the
mail car on the late train.
I made another proposition: "I put your letters on the
train and you stop spitting on the stove? Right?"
"That's the idea, young fellow," he said. "Only reason
I been running depot agents out of town is they don't want
to mail my letters for me."
A fine friendship started right away. He invited me out
to his ranch. He had a ten-year-old daughter called
"Toots," and I always get along well with kids. The three
of us went fishing and hunting and horseback riding to-
gether.
Meeting Nottingham taught me a lot, as a young fellow
away from home. I learned from the incident in the depot
that the town bad man—or later, the rioting con in prison
—pretty often isn't bad at all. His trouble is that he can't
make himself understood to the depot agent, or the yard
screw, or to his family—and he gets sore at people as a
result.
Being with Nottingham and his kid gave me a sense of
belonging, of being liked and being part of something.
Second to my own wife and sons, I thought a lot about the
Nottinghams at night in Stateville.
But nothing could be permanent back then. A war was
going on in Europe, and then the United States stepped in
and it was World War 1.
I got patriotic and headed back for Chicago to enlist in
the Navy. The Nottinghams saw me off at the station and I
tried to make Toots stop crying by promising to bring her
back half of Kaiser Bill's waxed mustache.
I didn't win the war, or have any active part in it, but the
war did something for me. It gave grounds for me, a boy
from the eighth grade, to say honestly to cops, bootleggers,
convicts, prison screws and interviewers: "I've been to Har-
vard." It was the truth, too. I taught telegraphy at Harvard
to classes of enlisted men and officers.
After my discharge from the Navy, I spent a couple of
weeks with my father, living in Franklin Park, a Chicago
suburb. I saw that cute little girl telegrapher a few times,
but I had a job of getting back on my financial feet be-
fore becoming serious about marriage.
I drifted out to a small Iowa town near Des Moines,
on a telegraphing job for the Rock Island Lines, then to
Kansas City, figuring I might go back to Colorado. But
I met one of my Morse code students from Harvard.
He was a bright young man, a lawyer, although I hadn't
been able to pound telegraphy into his head. He just didn't
have an ear for Morse signals. I'll call him Collins, for the
good reason that he had a different name.
Collins was heading for Cushing, Oklahoma, where his
brother had an interest in a hotel. The two brothers also
had a tire shop in Oklahoma, and I wound up as manager
of the store. There wasn't enough money in that job, but
it was a stopgap.
The oil business was boiling and busting and gushing
in Oklahoma. A guy could make a million overnight. That
was the line for me, particularly when I thought of my
little Irish telegrapher back in Chicago. Marriage was on
my mind.
I didn't know any more about the oil business than a
mink knows of sex hygiene, but I could learn. For a bottle
of bootleg corn, I got an oil field engineer to give me a
couple of hours of instruction in engineering. Now, all I
can remember of what he taught me is: "Don't bump your
skull against an overhead valve and smash your goddam
brains out."
I went to a field at Drummond, Oklahoma, told the
superintendent I was an engineer, and went to work. I
was short on technical skill, but long on bluff. And I
knew where to buy corn whiskey to give the mechanics
for doing my work when something went wrong with the
pumps or engines.
wildcat wells. Raymond would study those things, look over
the terrain and decide whether any of the land was worth
leasing from the owners, who were mostly Indians and cattle
ranchers.
I had about $1,000 saved, and there was nothing against
my buying leases that Raymond recommended. I took a
gamble on 150 acres at two dollars an acre in Jefferson
County. Three oil companies were bidding on my lease
within a month, and I made $2,000 on the deal. I bought
and sold about 20 leases, and never lost on any of them.
The money was good, but I was a guy who liked the
city. And my mind was on the girl at the telegraph key in
the Blackstone in Chicago. I went back home with $25,-
000 in cash, a fortune in 1920, and it had taken me less
than a year to earn it.
Clara and I were married on April 22nd, 1922. I had
figured on returning to the west, but Chicago looked too
good to me, and there was a lot of money around. Every-
body was buying cars and trucks and that was the busi-
ness for me.
A boyhood friend, John Powell, had an auto sales agen-
cy on Madison Street. He was a politician, and later he be-
came an Illinois state legislator and went blind. But at
that time he was a real rouser. Powell was a six-footer,
and he had a black bear that was just as tall when it stood
on its hind legs. When Powell went night clubbing, the
bear went along, and both of them would drink bourbon
with beer chasers. It was a race between them as to who got
drunk first.
I went to work for him (Powell, not the bear) as a car
and truck salesman, at no pay. My idea was to learn how
to buy and sell, and then go into business for myself.
My wife and I were living in an apartment in Oak Park,
a sedate suburb where every man was a municipal disgrace
if he wasn't a deacon, or at least a pillar of a church. To get
away from that mad social gaiety, and to keep my bank-
roll intact, I bought a taxicab and drove it nights in Chi-
cago. I learned things in the cab I never heard at Harvard.
In a few months, I opened my own garage and auto
sales place, with a capacity of 15 cars, and did pretty well.
I sold it and moved to a bigger place on North Avenue. I
was becoming a tycoon, in a minor league way, in the auto
business. I should have stayed in that league.
My brother, Tommy, and I bought our father a two-
flat building at California and Warren, where he could be
independent and make a small bet now and then. He died in
1926 on a trip to California, the same year Clara's and
my first son was born. That's nature's way of evening things
up, I guess; like when one guy goes into the penitentiary
and another guy gets paroled to make room for him.
My wife and I moved from Oak Park to another sub-
urb, Des Plaines. I bought a place that some of the news-
papers later called a "mansion" or a "gang fortress." It
was a six-room bungalow and later I put a 60-foot
swimming pool in the back. The only gang I ever had
around there was a guard with a shotgun after the Capone
mob tried to kidnap my kids.
A bargain in trucks got me into the prohibition beer
business by chance. I bought eight of them, sold six, and
wound up with two sitting around my garage, using up
space and showing no profit.
It happened that I knew most of the bootleggers and
saloon owners in my area. Why not? They were the guys
who had money to buy fancy cars. If Chicago's best stores
catered to them and their wives, why shouldn't Roger
Touhy?
I called on a few saloonkeepers and then made a deal
with two young lads who would work hard to make a buck
or two. Also, I fixed it to buy beer from two breweries
which turned out legal one-half of one per cent prohibi-
tion beer—and sneaked good brew out the back door.
My trucks hauled the beer, the drivers made a profit of
twenty dollars a barrel, they paid me a percentage on the
purchase price of the trucks and everybody was happy.
The police generally expected a payoff of $5 a barrel
for beer being run into any given district. I didn't pay it and
neither did my drivers. Our operation was too small for the
law to bother much with us.
And then Tubbo Gilbert stepped into the picture. I had
known him for a long time, first as a labor skate and later
as a ward politician. We never got along well and, later on,
he swore that he couldn't remember having seen me until
July 19th, 1933, an important date in my life.
Anyway, Tubbo, a sergeant at the time, stopped one of
my beer trucks, carrying three barrels of beer, arrested the
driver and took the beer to his stationhouse.
The payoff was that the beer in the^ barrels was legal
stuff—a half of one per cent. It was no more illegal than
lollypops or baby Pablum, and it carried about the same
kick. He had to release the driver, the beer and the truck,
of course.
I circulated the story around Chicago and the back of
Tubbo's neck turned red as a gobbler turkey's wattles in
mating season.
Gilbert liked me even less after that. It took him a
long time to get even with me, but he finally did—99
years of even.
One of my friends at the time of Tubbo's near-beer
humiliation was Matt Kolb, a bootleg beer distributor with
a saloon on California Avenue, not far from my garage.
He was a fat, gentle old gent who weighed about 220
pounds, beer belly and all. Anybody who thought all
bootleggers were gangsters with machines guns and gun
molls had only to meet Matt. He would run away from a
ten-year-old kid armed with a flyswatter.
I sold Kolb a car, giving him a good deal and splitting
the commission with him, a thing all dealers did then to
promote sales. Matt came to me a few months later with
a proposition. He had a partner, but they weren't getting
along. I could buy out the partner for $10,000. Kolb once
had been tied up with the Capone mob, but violence had
scared him away.
My automobile business then was bringing me in from
$50,000 to $60,000 a year. But the big money was in
alcoholic beverages. Everybody in the racket was getting
rich. How could the bootleggers miss, with a short ounce
of gagging moonshine selling for $1.25, or an eight-ounce
glass of nauseating beer going at 75 cents?
I drew $10,000 from the bank, handed it to Kolb and
said: "You got a new partner."
My next on-the-job training in oil was as a telegrapher
for the Empire Pipe Line Company at Ardmore, Okla-
homa, and there I learned the big words about petroleum
—plus a few names to drop.
The Sinclair Oil people, in a moment of laxity, hired me
as a scout.
The experience I had had in that line was confined to
watching silent western movies in which Army scouts
killed Indians. But what the hell, I was an oil field en-
gineer, wasn't I? And I could talk as good a gusher as the
original Carbon Petroleum Dubbs.
Word came to me that a famous New York geologist,
Dick Raymond, needed a helper. He had located oil fields
all over the world. I went after the job and got it. It put me
in the big money.
Raymond and I drove all through southwest Oklahoma.
At each county seat town, we would get a plat, or dia-
gram, on oil leases, along with figures on production of
Chapter 3 82 Days AWOL
A convict on the lam absolutely must have a set of iden-
tification papers. A Social Security card. A driver's
license. And—back in 1942, when I was loose—a draft
card.
With such papers, a man usually can talk himself out
of a routine arrest. Without them, he is up against a trip
to a police station—with identification by fingerprinting—
for any trifling thing the cops may ask about.
I was living in a semi-Skid Row section of Chicago, los-
ing myself among thousands of men trying to be forgotten
for reasons of wife-trouble, personal disgrace, a permanent
knockout by booze, or just plain shiftlessness.
This jungle of men gave me a fine protective coloring,
but there were drawbacks. The cops might collar a man
—me, for instance—at any time for a few questions. The
FBI was looking for draft dodgers and the military au-
thorities for wartime deserters.
Also, I needed a car to get around, and passing a traffic
sign could mean a return ticket to Stateville unless I had a
driver's license.
I hit on the deal that a pickpocket could fix me up, and
37I knew where to find one. He was a skinny little guy, and
I had seen him get run out of a Monroe Street joint by a
saloonkeeper who hollered at him: "Get out of here, Slim,
and stay out. You've lifted your last wallet off my cus-
tomers."
I watched for this character and saw him about a week
later as he waited for a streetcar. When I asked for a word
with him, he held his arms out from his sides and said:
"Okay, officer, give me the frisk. I'm clean. Haven't made
a touch in months."
It took a little talking to persuade him that I wasn't a
detective, and then we went into a little restaurant for
coffee. I told him a tale—one he obviously didn't swallow
—that I had walked out on my wife and that I needed
driver's license, Social Security and draft registration cards.
He wanted to know how much, and I offered $100, if
the cards fit me on age and general description. He wanted
$500 and we settled at $200. "Okay, meet me here
Friday at the same time," he said, and skittered out to
the street.
I met him that Friday and he had a set of cards that
came close to me on description. But I wasn't quite satis-
fied, and he aimed to please. Before we finished dickering
I had examined 18 sets—and finally I had myself a tailor-
made fit.
My name was Jackson. I was five feet six inches tall,
weighed 160, had gray eyes and wavy hair. I was 4-F in
the draft for physical reasons and I had a job in a war
plant. My new papers said so, and who was I to argue?
As more camouflage, I bought a round tin badge in a
novelty store. It said "Inspector" and looked like the iden-
tity discs issued to some war workers. I wore this thing
pinned to my shirt.
Cons in Stateville, the screws and some of my visitors
often asked me later how I dodged the law on the outside.
The truth is that I didn't dodge. I lived like hundreds of
other men, only they were working stiffs and I was a
fugitive.
I wore good enough clothes, but nothing gaudy. My
hat came down well on my forehead. I wore glasses, issued
38to roe in prison, and the old photographs of me in the paper
showed me without them. If that adds up to a disguise,
I'm Mary Margaret McBride in a cell.
My new papers made it easy for me to buy a cheap used
car. I drove around Chicago and out into the country
through the Forest Preserves. I saw movies, dozens of
them. I drank nothing more than a beer or two now and
then, but a few bartenders became friendly.
Coming out of the Tivoli Theater late one afternoon, I
had one of my biggest starts. Under the bright lights of
the marquee, I met two ex-cons from Stateville. They
whooped at me, shook my hand, clapped me on the back
and wanted me to go on a celebration.
I got away from there fast. They were good guys, but
one of them might take a pinch some day or get picked up
up for parole violating. It might be too much of a tempta-
tion for him to talk himself out of trouble by telling where
Roger Touhy was.
About six weeks passed and I never saw any of the guys
who went over the wall with me. The Owl was the only
one who knew where I lived. One evening he came calling.
With him were Stewart and Nelson, and that didn't sit well
with me. I didn't want those trouble makers to know where
I was.
"Thanksgiving is coming up, Rog, and we all ought to
be together," Banghart said. "We got two nice apartments
out near Broadway and Wilson. Come out and stay with
us, at least for the holiday."
It didn't sound too bad. Living like a hermit was getting
dreary. There wasn't much point in it any longer, now that
Stewart and Nelson knew my address. I packed up, went
with them and moved into one of the apartments with
Banghart and O'Conner.
No dice. On the second night, all seven of us were
drinking beer and playing cards when a rumble started.
Darlak wanted to move into the apartment where I was.
I said no; that it was crowded enough with three of us. I
insisted on a room by myself.
Nelson was a little drunk and got mean. I tried pacify-
ing him and Stewart, who was pretty soggy, jumped in. I
39gave him a slap in the mouth and left. I had the telephone
number of the flat, and I told Gene and The Owl: "I'll
keep in touch with you, but if you ever again tell those
other three bastards where I am, I'm through with all of
you."
My next stop was a room with an old lady on Wood off
Madison, back near the Skid Row belt again. I had a line
on her because she had a son who did time in Stateville
and now was in the can in another state up north. She
didn't know me from the name on my Social Security card,
but she took me in when I mentioned the son.
"Terrible" Touhy still made headlines in the papers. An
armored car carrying a $20,000 candy company payroll
got robbed out in the suburbs, and they blamed me and
my gang of "escaped terrorists" for that one. In the next
edition there was a story saying I had bribed my way to
South America ten days earlier. I was reported seen all
over Chicago—at times, in two places simultaneously.
The FBI was making things tighter for me all the time.
I learned that when I went out to suburban Des Plaines one
evening to look at the house with swimming pool, where
I had lived with my wife and sons so many years ago.
I was feeling sloppy sentimental and I remembered that
I had an old friend, a square, in the village of Cumberland
nearby. I drove over there and rang his bell. He opened the
door, looked at me, winked and did an acting job that
would have won laurels on Broadway. "Yes, sir?" he said,
in the tone people have for door-to-door salesmen. "What
can I do for you?"
I looked past him into the living room. Two young
guys in bankers' gray suits and Arrow collars were sitting
there with briefcases beside their chairs. FBI agents, sure
as J. Edgar Hoover has jowls.
It was my cue, and I blabbered something about hear-
ing he was in the market for a good used car. My friend
said, "No, thank you," and shut the door in my face. I
got out to the street and around the corner to where my
car was parked.
The federals took a couple of minutes to get the polite
looks off their faces, and then took out after me. I was
40long gone, threading my car through alleys and side-
streets, but I had learned something. The FBI was every-
where.
Another time I pulled into a filling station at North and
Damen Avenues for gas. A car was at the next pump and
the driver—a city cop in uniform and wearing a gun—
was standing beside it.
He came walking toward me, and I was sort of mes-
merized. He didn't reach for his gun, but I was willing to
give up. He leaned in the open window of my car. He
grinned and I flinched. Then came the goddamnedest one-
way conversation I ever heard:
"Hello, Mr. Touhy. I was wondering if I'd run into you.
I'd like to repay a big favor. When you were running beer,
back in '29, I was in an accident and laid up in the hos-
pital. Things were tough for my wife and kids, until you
put me on your payroll.
"Can I help you now? Need any money?"
I couldn't speak, but I managed to shake my head. He
reached out a big paw and shook my hand. The station
attendant finished filling my tank, and the policeman paid
him for me—which made the attendant almost as dum-
founded as I was. Quite a few Chicago cops collect easy;
but they usually pay under protest, I had learned years
before.
It was all I could do to squeak out a "thanks" to my
benefactor. He told me to phone him any time I needed
anything, and gave me the number of his district station.
I drove away.
I sat in my room that night and wondered. If that
copper had arrested me, I wouldn't have given him a bit
of trouble. I didn't have a gun and I wouldn't have resisted.
Pinching me would have gotten him a promotion and the
award of hero cop of the year, probably. But he had
remembered a favor. And I hadn't even remembered the
guy, say nothing of the favor!
The time was getting close for capture. The friendly cop
and those FBI men in my friend's home in Cumberland
village proved that. I was covered too tight to stay on the
41streets for long. But what was the difference? Capture had
to be sometime.
I had made my big protest against false imprisonment.
My escape should get a lot of people wondering whether I
really might be innocent. No longer would I be a man
buried alive. After my capture, the newspapers would
print my side of the story. That was the silliest hope I ever
had!
When the law moved in on me, I would come out with
my hands up. I would go back to prison, but I wouldn't
betray the people who had helped me and I wouldn't
squeal on the other six who went over the wall with me.
I had telephoned Banghart a few times in their hideaway,
but that didn't seem smart. Some day the FBI might be
there, waiting for the phone to ring after catching or kill-
ing the others. They would trace my call and I would be
next.
So I set up a meet with Banghart—a strange meet for
two of the most wanted men in America. It was St. Charles
Roman Catholic Church at 12th and Cypress, where I had
received my first communion.
Every Tuesday evening at six o'clock, the bell tolled in
the steeple at St. Charles. It was a call to confession for
people of the parish, an unusual custom for that day of the
week, I guess. I would be walking up the steps as the
bell started clanging.
In the church would be women with shawls over their
heads. People were too poor in that neighborhood for the
womenfolk to buy hats. They would be praying and going
to confession in order to take communion next day for
their dead or for sons, sweethearts or husbands in the war.
I had strayed away from religion a long, long time ago,
but the holiness of the place still got me.
I would sit in a vacant pew. Banghart would slip in be-
side me and we would whisper, exchanging word on wheth-
er any of us needed help. Then we would leave, separately.
If The Owl was more than five minutes late, I would
leave.
Banghart, O'Connor, Darlak, Mclnerney, Nelson and
42Stewart were getting along okay. They hadn't committed
any crimes, The Owl said. All of them were getting help
from relatives or friends. They were being discreet about
women and liquor. Sometimes they worked at odd jobs
for walking-around money.
"I don't think they'll ever catch us," The Owl said. But I
didn't agree. Pitch a needle into the biggest haystack in
the world, and it'll be found if enough people look for it
long enough, I told him.
The Christmas season came along and I spent hours
walking on State Street, looking in the windows. Christ-
mas is always a lonely business in prison, but it was worse
for me that year on the outside. I did manage to get a
message through to my wife and kids in Florida, with a
few gifts. I thought of visiting them, but that would be
nuts. Even if I got away with it, which was unlikely, the
tear of parting would be too much.
My old landlady had me in her living room on Christ-
mas Eve to look at her tree. It was scrawny, with the lights
flickering on and off, and she was sniffling about her son
in prison. I got out of there.
Almost everybody knows the gag about "lonely as a
whorehouse on Christmas Eve." Well, I lived it—in a
sidestreet saloon, that is, listening to the Christmas carols
on the radio and drinking beer for beer with a white-
haired bartender.
The next day I went to the Empire Room in the Palmer
House, got a table in a corner and ate a big dinner. I was
halfway through the meal before I began to realize that
the turkey didn't taste much better than it had at Stateville.
Freedom was beginning to pall on me, I guess.
When I got home that evening, there was a holiday-
wrapped package on my bureau. It was a necktie, a gift
from the landlady. I had put a box of candy under her
scrawny tree, and now she was paying off.
Every day I left my room early in the morning and took
my car out of a garage on Adams Street. I would drive
around or go to a movie or take long walks in the Forest
Preserves. In the late afternoon, I would be back, like a
43working man finishing his day. The tin "inspector" badge
on my shirt helped that fakery along.
And then I felt the roof creaking, as a hunted man gets
to sense. It was going to fall in on me unless I moved fast.
I came home on a Tuesday afternoon and started for
my room. The old lady heard me and called to me from
the living room. She had three or four guests in there,
having coffee and cake. I went in and she introduced me
by my phony name. "This man is a friend of my son," she
said. "I want him to have refreshments with us. He gave
me such a nice box of chocolates for Christmas."
The lights were bright. Across the room I saw a dried-
up looking guy peering at me. I knew he had me made.
He was almost drooling at the chops over his fat reward in
the near future. I went around the room, deadpan as
Buster Keaton, shaking hands. The character I suspected
had a moist, hot hand. Excitement? Anticipation? Greed
for reward? Anxiety to become a hero by stooling on
"Terrible" Touhy?
I got the hell out of there fast, after mumbling excuses.
In my room, I packed up and used a towel to wipe every
surface that might hold a fingerprint. The old lady—she
was probably 75—didn't deserve a harboring rap. Then
I back-doored the joint.
My hunch was right, too. A Chicago copper, John No-
lan, told me after my capture that a telephone stoolie had
called the police, left his name, and squealed that Roger
Touhy was hanging around Wood and Madison, where I
had been living. He wanted a reward, the stoolie said. But
I foxed him.
Leaving the old lady's house, I ran to my garage on
Adams, tossed my suitcase into my car and headed for St.
Charles Church. I dashed up the steps—almost falling on
the ice—and got inside. The bell stopped tolling just as I
pulled open the heavy doors.
Banghart was sitting in a pew. The candlelight flicker-
ing on his widow's peak, his big eyes and his beakish
nose, made him look more like an owl than usual. I got
next to him and whispered: "Basil, they got me made. I'm
in bad trouble. No place to go."
44"Never mind," Banghart said. "I got things all fixed
up. Come on."
We left the church and sat in my car. The Owl explained.
He and Darlak had a big apartment out on Kenmore
Avenue, near Lawrence Avenue. Everything was as quiet
and well behaved as an 82-year-old spinster with a dis-
placed cervical vertebra.
"Move in with us," he invited. "We don't have any
guns, liquor or women around the place. Any playing we
do, we get away from the neighborhood. O'Connor and
Mclnerney have an apartment a few blocks from us."
Nelson and Stewart, he went on, had broken away from
them. Probably left town, he said, and that news didn't
exactly make a weeping ruin out of me. Those two guys
were no assets to any of us.
We went out to the Kenmore flat and up the back stair-
way after I had parked about a block away. Darlak, always
a good enough mope, was there. But the joint felt creepy to
me, and I prowled around, uneasy as an alley tomcat at
midnight mating time, and peered out the windows.
I saw a man stop briefly and talk with another man. He
walked a half block and stopped to chat with a second
fellow. That was it! Men don't hold sidewalk conversations
with other men at night—with girls, yes, but not with
men. These men must be cops. I told Banghart and Dar-
lak that we ought to clear out of there.
The Owl laughed at me. "It's that kind of a neighbor-
hood," he said. "Dope addicts and peddlers. They meet on
the streets to make deals." I accepted that explanation and
decided to stay. It was the lousiest goddam decision I ever
made—aside from joining the break in the first place. This
is what happened . . .
I was sleeping like dead when a hoarse, bellowing voice
awakened me. I thought at first that Banghart or Darlak
had turned on the radio. It was that kind of voice.
Then the room lit up, brighter than the sunniest day
you ever saw, with a pure white light. It stung my eyes,
and I started to yell for somebody to turn it off. But the
light wasn't in the apartment. It was blasting through the
windows.
45The voice came on again. And now I knew what it was.
Somebody was talking over a loudspeaker from the street
outside. It was the voice of doom—the reveille bugle call-
ing us back to Stateville.
"Touhy! Banghart! Darlak!" the voice said, with an
ungodly tone that must have been heard a half mile away.
"Touhy! Banghart! Darlak!
"This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You are
surrounded. You cannot escape. Come out with your hands
up—immediately. If you resist, you will be killed."
There was a minute or so of silence, while the spotlights
played against our windows. Then the voice resumed:
"You, Banghart, come out first. Hold your hands over
your head and walk backwards down the stairs."
The game was up. We all knew it. Banghart looked at
me, with those big owl eyes blinking. Then he opened the
door and, without a word, backed out through it. Darlak
followed him, and then I did. Half way down the stairs
there was a gun in my back, and then the handcuffs were
on. Just like old times, it was.
Our next stop was the FBI headquarters on the 19th
floor of the Bankers Building in downtown Chicago. They
questioned us separately, in pairs, and all three together.
We didn't chirp about anyone who had harbored us, of
course. And we soon got the pitch on how the law had
caught up with us.
Nelson had turned himself in to the FBI in St. Paul,
Minnesota, and Stewart had been picked up in a fleabag
hotel on State Street in Chicago. They had squealed on us.
During all the questioning in those early hours, nobody
asked about O'Connor and Mclnerney, I noticed. There was
an astounding lack of curiosity about them. I began to
scent, in a vague sort of way, the attar of embalming fluid.
An FBI man confirmed it for me.
"We killed O'Connor and Mclnerney," he said. "They
opened fire and we had to shoot them."
The news of the death of O'Connor, particularly, shook
me up. Mclnerney never had meant much to me, except
for wondering why his parents hung the first name of St.
Clair on him.
46All I said was that I hoped Gene would have that
wheelbarrow and rope with him, wherever he was. The
FBI kids looked at me blankly—a habit of theirs.
That was it. The big escape was all done. The date was
December 29th. We had been free for 82 days. Two of us
were dead and, although we weren't aware of it yet, the
other five were in a hell of a fix.
The FBI and the Chicago police yammered at us for
most of two days. They tried to get us to rat on people who
had helped us, but we dummied up. As for blaming the
$20,000 candy-company payroll job on me, that was
strictly police guff. I had had nothing to do with any rob-
beries or other crimes, and there was no evidence of any
kind against any of us.
The time had come to go home; home to prison. I
glanced toward a doorway in the FBI suite and there stood
a man I knew well. He was Joseph E. Ragen, one of the
most widely known prison wardens in America. He was
my boss, and a stern disciplinarian. There was an ironical
story behind my association, as a convict, with Ragen, the
warden.
Back in 1941, Ragen had resigned as warden of State-
ville because of a political upheaval in Illinois. My escape,
with Banghart and our five companions, had created the
most whopping prison scandal of its kind in Illinois pen-
itentiary history. The politicans had gone whining to
Ragen, begging him to return and take charge.
He had agreed, but only after being guaranteed abso-
lute freedom from politics. My escape had made him, in
effect, the most independent state prison warden in the
United States. I looked at him as we met again and said:
"Well, Warden, I see I got your job back for you."
The warden looked a bit startled, then chuckled and
said: "Yes, Touhy, you did." They tell me Warden Ragen
told that story hundreds of times in the years that followed.
We rode back to Stateville in style, with a bigger police
escort than they give to the St. Patrick's Day parade. I
spent New Year's Eve getting dressed back into prison,
but I didn't feel too unhappy about it. I had made my big
47protest as an innocent man. What had it cost me personal-
ly? Not too much, I thought.
Illinois law, strangely enough, provided no prosecution
or penalty at that time for inmates who broke out of
prison. That sounds cockeyed, I know, but it wasn't a
crime then to escape from custody, provided you didn't
kill or hurt somebody in doing so. It wasn't until 1949
that the Illinois General Assembly passed a law making it
a felony to bust dut of a jail or a penitentiary.
All I could lose, personally, I thought at the time I went
over the wall, was time off earned for good behavior. And
that was a damnably insignificant item against 99 years.
It was much more important, I had convinced myself, to
make a big public protest against false imprisonment.
A Chicago lawyer, Joseph Harrington, came to see me a
few days after I was back in Stateville. My family had re-
tained him. I asked him if I was correct in believing they
couldn't prosecute me for escaping. Oh, yes, he said, I was
right. Absolutely right. But hiding away in the pubic bushes
of the law was a little angle that I had overlooked.
There was a clause saying that a person who aids or
abets another in escaping can be prosecuted and, if found
guilty, be sentenced to the same number of years which
the escapee had been serving. It is an archaic law, and
judges time and again had called it unfair and barbaric.
"In your case," Harrington said, "I have a hunch they're
going to try to pin Darlak's 199 years on you."
I recalled, as Harrington spoke, that Captain Daniel A.
"Tubbo" Gilbert—often called "the world's richest cop"—
had been lurking around after the FBI had picked me up
in Chicago. Gilbert had been a central figure in my being
sent to prison.
It would be a terrible injustice to hook me with Darlak's
time, of course. I hadn't aided or abetted anybody to es-
cape. Darlak's brother had smuggled the guns and the
whole caper had been planned for months before I talked
myself—with Gene O'Connor's persuasion—into going
along.
But I strongly suspected that Gilbert would be delighted
if the law saddled me with Darlak's 199 years. Tubbo had
48helped send me to prison for the Factor sham in the
first place, as Judge Barnes later ruled. To bury me in
prison forever might be Gilbert's idea of personal triumph.
To understand the case of Dan Gilbert vs Roger Touhy,
it is necessary to go back a lot of years. I had known him
for a long time, back to the days when my truck drivers
were running beer through his Chicago district.
49
Chapter 4
My Father was a Cop
My father was a Chicago policeman. An honest one.
Otherwise, he would have had a hell of a lot less
trouble getting up the grocery and rent money. And I might
have managed to get farther in school than to squeak
through the eighth grade.
I was born in 1898, although the prison records say '97,
in a house at 822 South Robie Street, not far from one of
the places where I hid out while on the lam in 1942.
There were seven of us kids, two girls and five boys.
We lived in an area of working people, big families and
low incomes. My father's pay as a policeman wasn't enough
to keep the wolf off the front porch but, at least, he never
made it in to eat the potatoes and meat—when we had
meat, that is—off the table.
Some of Chicago's most notorious gangsters came out
of that part of the city. So did business leaders, college
professors, clergymen and a couple of mayors. I was doing
all right myself until the big Factor frameup came along.
My mother died when I was ten. She was fatally
burned when a kitchen stove exploded. After that, my
50 father, my two sisters and I moved to Downers Grove, a
suburb. The older boys stayed in Chicago, living with rela-
tives and friends. I graduated from the_£L._Joseph Roman
Catholic Parochial School i^TJowners Grove" when I was
thirteen. U"
It was a good enough boyhood. I played baseball and
raised the usual amount of the devil and got teased because
my hair was curly. If I had anything to gripe about, I
didn't realize it, because other boys didn't have any more
than I did, generally speaking.
I often thought in prison of the priest in charge of the
school, a Father Goodwin. My family couldn't afford to
pay tuition for me, so I was a sort of handyman around
the school and the church. I mowed the lawns, served mass
as an altar boy, tended the furnace, ran errands and did a
little janitor work. It was fun.
Once or twice a week, Father Goodwin rented a horse
and buggy from a livery and went calling on his parishion-
ers. I was his driver. At whatever house we stopped, there
would be refreshments—apple pies, lemonade, thick sand-
wiches, salads, pickles, ice cream. Father waved the food
away, but I ate fit to bust a gut.
In the church there was a big oil painting, a copy of The
Last Supper. Father Goodwin explained it to me, saying
that a man called Judas had betrayed Jesus Christ for
thirty pieces of silver. A thing like that can have a re-
markable influence on a kid.
I began thinking of Judas as a stool pigeon, a word I
knew, as did all youngsters. While sweeping up the church
and dusting the pews, I would stop and look for a long
time at the painting. I picked out the face of a man I
figured was Judas, and I would stand there hating him.
I thought of cutting the face of the man I concluded to
be Judas out of the picture, but that would have ruined
the painting and Father Goodwin would have been un-
happy. So I just went on despising Judas—something which
I never told the "bug doctors," which is what psychologists
and psychiatrists are called in prison.
My contempt for informers grew on me as the years
passed. When I later got into the labor union movement, I
51 despised the company finks. After a few years in prison, I
got to distrust everybody around me, except for a few
convicts. Too many inmates are stoolies; the bug doctors
can call my attitude antisocial if they want to.
My feeling about informers can be summed up by an
anecdote which seems very, very apt to me. Funny, too.
I once knew a confidence man called Yiddles Miller. He
spoke with a Weber and Fields Dutch accent, but he was
a shrewd operator. Con men are, I learned in prison, the
elite of all lawbreakers, in the opinion of other felons. They
never tattle on each other.
Well, Yiddles and another bunco expert, Gus London,
were sharing a twin-bed hotel room in Pittsburgh. Each
of them folded his pants across the back of the chair near
his single bed. E£ch fell asleep, but in the middle of the
night Yiddles, a light sleeper, was awakened by a prowler
in the room. London slept on, snoring a bit.
The thief took London's pants from a chair at the bed
nearest the door. He then moved toward the second chair.
Yiddles, feigning sleep, stirred and pretended to be awaken-
ing. The burglar left, taking only London's pants, with $3,-
000 in the pockets. Yiddles got out of bed, double-locked
the door, propped the back of a chair under the doorknob
for added security and went back to sleep.
In the morning London awakened, demanded to know
whether his pants had walked away with his $3,000, and
was told by Yiddles: "A burglar came in and stole your
trousers." London was indignant, demanding to know why
Yiddles hadn't awakened him, summoned the hotel house
officer, or called the police.
Yiddles propped himself up on an elbow, stared in as-
tonishment at his comrade in larceny and demanded:
"What do you think I am, a stool pigeon?"
London thought over the questionable ethics involved,
agreed that Yiddles was right, and apologized for having
suggested calling in the law.
Whatever the moral, or immoral, angles of the story
may be, I always have despised stoolies, and I always will.
The only thing worse is a perjurer. I have had more than
my share of troubles from both.
52 When I got out of the eighth grade, it was hunt-a-job
for me. Only rich kids went to high school back then, and
I didn't qualify. I had a little edge on other youngsters,
because my hobby was ham radio, or wireless as it was
called. I had built my own set at home, and I knew the
International code.
I tried for a job as a wireless operator, but there wasn't
a chance at my age. Too young for responsibility, I was
told. So I ran my feet down halfway to my ankles as an
office and stockroom boy for a few months and then hooked
on with Western Union. They made me manager of a little
residential section branch office. A real big dealer, I was.
Salary: $12 a week.
I lied about my age to get the job, but it was easy to get
by. My hair was gray at the sides of my head —maybe I
worried as an infant—before I got out of knee pants, and
every day I would have a five o'clock shadow by lunch time.
Western Union gave me a chance to learn the Morse code
which wasn't too difficult because I already knew the In-
ternational. They moved me to the main office downtown
and I was an operator.
My father went into retirement about that time, and he
liked to play the horses. He would bet fifty cents, or one
or two bucks on a race, and only one race a day, when he
had the cash to spare. And now I was in a position to be
his personal tout.
The stable owners, trainers and jockeys would send
messages on the chances of their horses over the wires. I
tipped off my father. He had nine winners, mostly long
shots, in a row. He would have broken half the bookies in
Chicago if he had started with ten bucks and parlayed it.
But no, he never risked more than two.
But the really important thing that happened to me—
back then in 1915—was that a dark-haired Irish girl
went to work for Western Union in the company's branch
office in Chicago's finest hotel, the Blackstone.
She was sixteen, and fresh out of telegraph school.
From the main office, I sent the Blackstone's messages to
her and received the ones she transmitted. She sent better
53 than she copied, but she wasn't so good at either. I tried
to help her.
Since she worked from four p.m. to midnight, I could
drop in and see her evenings after my day shift ended. The
first time I called only to help her with telegraphy. After
that I courted her by the Western Union's wires between
the main office and the Blackstone. And in person, too.
I'd take her home now and then when she finished work
at midnight, but she always had a chaperon. Another
pretty girl, Emily Ivins, was night telephone operator at the
hotel and she made certain that everything was proper on
those late-at-night-ride-home dates.
Miss Ivins, incidentally, was to be an important witness
in trying, many years later, to keep me out of prison on
the Jake the Barber hoax. She was to tell the truth, but it
wasn't good enough against the screen of lies behind
which Factor and his friends stood grinning.
I would have been a telegrapher for the rest of my life
but, odd as it sounds, I was too damn honest. The Com-
mercial Telegraphers Union of America was trying to or-
ganize Western Union and the Postal Telegraph Company.
I didn't know anything about unionization and I wasn't
interested, but I knew some of the operators in the office
had joined.
Every hour, the operators got a ten-minute "short," or
relief, and we would go into the men's lounge for a smoke.
One of the CTU boys scattered organization pamphlets
around the room. I picked up one and, like a dummy, read
it right out in the open. A company fink saw me and
within an hour I was on the pad in the superintendent's
office. He had a lot of questions to ask.
Did I belong to ther union? No. Did I know any men who
did belong? Yes, I did. Would I give him their names?
No, I would not. Did I have any plans for joining the
union? "Well," I said, "if I decide the union is a good
thing, 1 probably will take out a card."
Whammo! I was fired and out on the street. A company
guard escorted me to the door and told me never to come
back. Now, I'm not rapping Western Union after all these
years. Every employer fought the unions then, and the
54
tification papers. A Social Security card. A driver's
license. And—back in 1942, when I was loose—a draft
card.
With such papers, a man usually can talk himself out
of a routine arrest. Without them, he is up against a trip
to a police station—with identification by fingerprinting—
for any trifling thing the cops may ask about.
I was living in a semi-Skid Row section of Chicago, los-
ing myself among thousands of men trying to be forgotten
for reasons of wife-trouble, personal disgrace, a permanent
knockout by booze, or just plain shiftlessness.
This jungle of men gave me a fine protective coloring,
but there were drawbacks. The cops might collar a man
—me, for instance—at any time for a few questions. The
FBI was looking for draft dodgers and the military au-
thorities for wartime deserters.
Also, I needed a car to get around, and passing a traffic
sign could mean a return ticket to Stateville unless I had a
driver's license.
I hit on the deal that a pickpocket could fix me up, and
37I knew where to find one. He was a skinny little guy, and
I had seen him get run out of a Monroe Street joint by a
saloonkeeper who hollered at him: "Get out of here, Slim,
and stay out. You've lifted your last wallet off my cus-
tomers."
I watched for this character and saw him about a week
later as he waited for a streetcar. When I asked for a word
with him, he held his arms out from his sides and said:
"Okay, officer, give me the frisk. I'm clean. Haven't made
a touch in months."
It took a little talking to persuade him that I wasn't a
detective, and then we went into a little restaurant for
coffee. I told him a tale—one he obviously didn't swallow
—that I had walked out on my wife and that I needed
driver's license, Social Security and draft registration cards.
He wanted to know how much, and I offered $100, if
the cards fit me on age and general description. He wanted
$500 and we settled at $200. "Okay, meet me here
Friday at the same time," he said, and skittered out to
the street.
I met him that Friday and he had a set of cards that
came close to me on description. But I wasn't quite satis-
fied, and he aimed to please. Before we finished dickering
I had examined 18 sets—and finally I had myself a tailor-
made fit.
My name was Jackson. I was five feet six inches tall,
weighed 160, had gray eyes and wavy hair. I was 4-F in
the draft for physical reasons and I had a job in a war
plant. My new papers said so, and who was I to argue?
As more camouflage, I bought a round tin badge in a
novelty store. It said "Inspector" and looked like the iden-
tity discs issued to some war workers. I wore this thing
pinned to my shirt.
Cons in Stateville, the screws and some of my visitors
often asked me later how I dodged the law on the outside.
The truth is that I didn't dodge. I lived like hundreds of
other men, only they were working stiffs and I was a
fugitive.
I wore good enough clothes, but nothing gaudy. My
hat came down well on my forehead. I wore glasses, issued
38to roe in prison, and the old photographs of me in the paper
showed me without them. If that adds up to a disguise,
I'm Mary Margaret McBride in a cell.
My new papers made it easy for me to buy a cheap used
car. I drove around Chicago and out into the country
through the Forest Preserves. I saw movies, dozens of
them. I drank nothing more than a beer or two now and
then, but a few bartenders became friendly.
Coming out of the Tivoli Theater late one afternoon, I
had one of my biggest starts. Under the bright lights of
the marquee, I met two ex-cons from Stateville. They
whooped at me, shook my hand, clapped me on the back
and wanted me to go on a celebration.
I got away from there fast. They were good guys, but
one of them might take a pinch some day or get picked up
up for parole violating. It might be too much of a tempta-
tion for him to talk himself out of trouble by telling where
Roger Touhy was.
About six weeks passed and I never saw any of the guys
who went over the wall with me. The Owl was the only
one who knew where I lived. One evening he came calling.
With him were Stewart and Nelson, and that didn't sit well
with me. I didn't want those trouble makers to know where
I was.
"Thanksgiving is coming up, Rog, and we all ought to
be together," Banghart said. "We got two nice apartments
out near Broadway and Wilson. Come out and stay with
us, at least for the holiday."
It didn't sound too bad. Living like a hermit was getting
dreary. There wasn't much point in it any longer, now that
Stewart and Nelson knew my address. I packed up, went
with them and moved into one of the apartments with
Banghart and O'Conner.
No dice. On the second night, all seven of us were
drinking beer and playing cards when a rumble started.
Darlak wanted to move into the apartment where I was.
I said no; that it was crowded enough with three of us. I
insisted on a room by myself.
Nelson was a little drunk and got mean. I tried pacify-
ing him and Stewart, who was pretty soggy, jumped in. I
39gave him a slap in the mouth and left. I had the telephone
number of the flat, and I told Gene and The Owl: "I'll
keep in touch with you, but if you ever again tell those
other three bastards where I am, I'm through with all of
you."
My next stop was a room with an old lady on Wood off
Madison, back near the Skid Row belt again. I had a line
on her because she had a son who did time in Stateville
and now was in the can in another state up north. She
didn't know me from the name on my Social Security card,
but she took me in when I mentioned the son.
"Terrible" Touhy still made headlines in the papers. An
armored car carrying a $20,000 candy company payroll
got robbed out in the suburbs, and they blamed me and
my gang of "escaped terrorists" for that one. In the next
edition there was a story saying I had bribed my way to
South America ten days earlier. I was reported seen all
over Chicago—at times, in two places simultaneously.
The FBI was making things tighter for me all the time.
I learned that when I went out to suburban Des Plaines one
evening to look at the house with swimming pool, where
I had lived with my wife and sons so many years ago.
I was feeling sloppy sentimental and I remembered that
I had an old friend, a square, in the village of Cumberland
nearby. I drove over there and rang his bell. He opened the
door, looked at me, winked and did an acting job that
would have won laurels on Broadway. "Yes, sir?" he said,
in the tone people have for door-to-door salesmen. "What
can I do for you?"
I looked past him into the living room. Two young
guys in bankers' gray suits and Arrow collars were sitting
there with briefcases beside their chairs. FBI agents, sure
as J. Edgar Hoover has jowls.
It was my cue, and I blabbered something about hear-
ing he was in the market for a good used car. My friend
said, "No, thank you," and shut the door in my face. I
got out to the street and around the corner to where my
car was parked.
The federals took a couple of minutes to get the polite
looks off their faces, and then took out after me. I was
40long gone, threading my car through alleys and side-
streets, but I had learned something. The FBI was every-
where.
Another time I pulled into a filling station at North and
Damen Avenues for gas. A car was at the next pump and
the driver—a city cop in uniform and wearing a gun—
was standing beside it.
He came walking toward me, and I was sort of mes-
merized. He didn't reach for his gun, but I was willing to
give up. He leaned in the open window of my car. He
grinned and I flinched. Then came the goddamnedest one-
way conversation I ever heard:
"Hello, Mr. Touhy. I was wondering if I'd run into you.
I'd like to repay a big favor. When you were running beer,
back in '29, I was in an accident and laid up in the hos-
pital. Things were tough for my wife and kids, until you
put me on your payroll.
"Can I help you now? Need any money?"
I couldn't speak, but I managed to shake my head. He
reached out a big paw and shook my hand. The station
attendant finished filling my tank, and the policeman paid
him for me—which made the attendant almost as dum-
founded as I was. Quite a few Chicago cops collect easy;
but they usually pay under protest, I had learned years
before.
It was all I could do to squeak out a "thanks" to my
benefactor. He told me to phone him any time I needed
anything, and gave me the number of his district station.
I drove away.
I sat in my room that night and wondered. If that
copper had arrested me, I wouldn't have given him a bit
of trouble. I didn't have a gun and I wouldn't have resisted.
Pinching me would have gotten him a promotion and the
award of hero cop of the year, probably. But he had
remembered a favor. And I hadn't even remembered the
guy, say nothing of the favor!
The time was getting close for capture. The friendly cop
and those FBI men in my friend's home in Cumberland
village proved that. I was covered too tight to stay on the
41streets for long. But what was the difference? Capture had
to be sometime.
I had made my big protest against false imprisonment.
My escape should get a lot of people wondering whether I
really might be innocent. No longer would I be a man
buried alive. After my capture, the newspapers would
print my side of the story. That was the silliest hope I ever
had!
When the law moved in on me, I would come out with
my hands up. I would go back to prison, but I wouldn't
betray the people who had helped me and I wouldn't
squeal on the other six who went over the wall with me.
I had telephoned Banghart a few times in their hideaway,
but that didn't seem smart. Some day the FBI might be
there, waiting for the phone to ring after catching or kill-
ing the others. They would trace my call and I would be
next.
So I set up a meet with Banghart—a strange meet for
two of the most wanted men in America. It was St. Charles
Roman Catholic Church at 12th and Cypress, where I had
received my first communion.
Every Tuesday evening at six o'clock, the bell tolled in
the steeple at St. Charles. It was a call to confession for
people of the parish, an unusual custom for that day of the
week, I guess. I would be walking up the steps as the
bell started clanging.
In the church would be women with shawls over their
heads. People were too poor in that neighborhood for the
womenfolk to buy hats. They would be praying and going
to confession in order to take communion next day for
their dead or for sons, sweethearts or husbands in the war.
I had strayed away from religion a long, long time ago,
but the holiness of the place still got me.
I would sit in a vacant pew. Banghart would slip in be-
side me and we would whisper, exchanging word on wheth-
er any of us needed help. Then we would leave, separately.
If The Owl was more than five minutes late, I would
leave.
Banghart, O'Connor, Darlak, Mclnerney, Nelson and
42Stewart were getting along okay. They hadn't committed
any crimes, The Owl said. All of them were getting help
from relatives or friends. They were being discreet about
women and liquor. Sometimes they worked at odd jobs
for walking-around money.
"I don't think they'll ever catch us," The Owl said. But I
didn't agree. Pitch a needle into the biggest haystack in
the world, and it'll be found if enough people look for it
long enough, I told him.
The Christmas season came along and I spent hours
walking on State Street, looking in the windows. Christ-
mas is always a lonely business in prison, but it was worse
for me that year on the outside. I did manage to get a
message through to my wife and kids in Florida, with a
few gifts. I thought of visiting them, but that would be
nuts. Even if I got away with it, which was unlikely, the
tear of parting would be too much.
My old landlady had me in her living room on Christ-
mas Eve to look at her tree. It was scrawny, with the lights
flickering on and off, and she was sniffling about her son
in prison. I got out of there.
Almost everybody knows the gag about "lonely as a
whorehouse on Christmas Eve." Well, I lived it—in a
sidestreet saloon, that is, listening to the Christmas carols
on the radio and drinking beer for beer with a white-
haired bartender.
The next day I went to the Empire Room in the Palmer
House, got a table in a corner and ate a big dinner. I was
halfway through the meal before I began to realize that
the turkey didn't taste much better than it had at Stateville.
Freedom was beginning to pall on me, I guess.
When I got home that evening, there was a holiday-
wrapped package on my bureau. It was a necktie, a gift
from the landlady. I had put a box of candy under her
scrawny tree, and now she was paying off.
Every day I left my room early in the morning and took
my car out of a garage on Adams Street. I would drive
around or go to a movie or take long walks in the Forest
Preserves. In the late afternoon, I would be back, like a
43working man finishing his day. The tin "inspector" badge
on my shirt helped that fakery along.
And then I felt the roof creaking, as a hunted man gets
to sense. It was going to fall in on me unless I moved fast.
I came home on a Tuesday afternoon and started for
my room. The old lady heard me and called to me from
the living room. She had three or four guests in there,
having coffee and cake. I went in and she introduced me
by my phony name. "This man is a friend of my son," she
said. "I want him to have refreshments with us. He gave
me such a nice box of chocolates for Christmas."
The lights were bright. Across the room I saw a dried-
up looking guy peering at me. I knew he had me made.
He was almost drooling at the chops over his fat reward in
the near future. I went around the room, deadpan as
Buster Keaton, shaking hands. The character I suspected
had a moist, hot hand. Excitement? Anticipation? Greed
for reward? Anxiety to become a hero by stooling on
"Terrible" Touhy?
I got the hell out of there fast, after mumbling excuses.
In my room, I packed up and used a towel to wipe every
surface that might hold a fingerprint. The old lady—she
was probably 75—didn't deserve a harboring rap. Then
I back-doored the joint.
My hunch was right, too. A Chicago copper, John No-
lan, told me after my capture that a telephone stoolie had
called the police, left his name, and squealed that Roger
Touhy was hanging around Wood and Madison, where I
had been living. He wanted a reward, the stoolie said. But
I foxed him.
Leaving the old lady's house, I ran to my garage on
Adams, tossed my suitcase into my car and headed for St.
Charles Church. I dashed up the steps—almost falling on
the ice—and got inside. The bell stopped tolling just as I
pulled open the heavy doors.
Banghart was sitting in a pew. The candlelight flicker-
ing on his widow's peak, his big eyes and his beakish
nose, made him look more like an owl than usual. I got
next to him and whispered: "Basil, they got me made. I'm
in bad trouble. No place to go."
44"Never mind," Banghart said. "I got things all fixed
up. Come on."
We left the church and sat in my car. The Owl explained.
He and Darlak had a big apartment out on Kenmore
Avenue, near Lawrence Avenue. Everything was as quiet
and well behaved as an 82-year-old spinster with a dis-
placed cervical vertebra.
"Move in with us," he invited. "We don't have any
guns, liquor or women around the place. Any playing we
do, we get away from the neighborhood. O'Connor and
Mclnerney have an apartment a few blocks from us."
Nelson and Stewart, he went on, had broken away from
them. Probably left town, he said, and that news didn't
exactly make a weeping ruin out of me. Those two guys
were no assets to any of us.
We went out to the Kenmore flat and up the back stair-
way after I had parked about a block away. Darlak, always
a good enough mope, was there. But the joint felt creepy to
me, and I prowled around, uneasy as an alley tomcat at
midnight mating time, and peered out the windows.
I saw a man stop briefly and talk with another man. He
walked a half block and stopped to chat with a second
fellow. That was it! Men don't hold sidewalk conversations
with other men at night—with girls, yes, but not with
men. These men must be cops. I told Banghart and Dar-
lak that we ought to clear out of there.
The Owl laughed at me. "It's that kind of a neighbor-
hood," he said. "Dope addicts and peddlers. They meet on
the streets to make deals." I accepted that explanation and
decided to stay. It was the lousiest goddam decision I ever
made—aside from joining the break in the first place. This
is what happened . . .
I was sleeping like dead when a hoarse, bellowing voice
awakened me. I thought at first that Banghart or Darlak
had turned on the radio. It was that kind of voice.
Then the room lit up, brighter than the sunniest day
you ever saw, with a pure white light. It stung my eyes,
and I started to yell for somebody to turn it off. But the
light wasn't in the apartment. It was blasting through the
windows.
45The voice came on again. And now I knew what it was.
Somebody was talking over a loudspeaker from the street
outside. It was the voice of doom—the reveille bugle call-
ing us back to Stateville.
"Touhy! Banghart! Darlak!" the voice said, with an
ungodly tone that must have been heard a half mile away.
"Touhy! Banghart! Darlak!
"This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You are
surrounded. You cannot escape. Come out with your hands
up—immediately. If you resist, you will be killed."
There was a minute or so of silence, while the spotlights
played against our windows. Then the voice resumed:
"You, Banghart, come out first. Hold your hands over
your head and walk backwards down the stairs."
The game was up. We all knew it. Banghart looked at
me, with those big owl eyes blinking. Then he opened the
door and, without a word, backed out through it. Darlak
followed him, and then I did. Half way down the stairs
there was a gun in my back, and then the handcuffs were
on. Just like old times, it was.
Our next stop was the FBI headquarters on the 19th
floor of the Bankers Building in downtown Chicago. They
questioned us separately, in pairs, and all three together.
We didn't chirp about anyone who had harbored us, of
course. And we soon got the pitch on how the law had
caught up with us.
Nelson had turned himself in to the FBI in St. Paul,
Minnesota, and Stewart had been picked up in a fleabag
hotel on State Street in Chicago. They had squealed on us.
During all the questioning in those early hours, nobody
asked about O'Connor and Mclnerney, I noticed. There was
an astounding lack of curiosity about them. I began to
scent, in a vague sort of way, the attar of embalming fluid.
An FBI man confirmed it for me.
"We killed O'Connor and Mclnerney," he said. "They
opened fire and we had to shoot them."
The news of the death of O'Connor, particularly, shook
me up. Mclnerney never had meant much to me, except
for wondering why his parents hung the first name of St.
Clair on him.
46All I said was that I hoped Gene would have that
wheelbarrow and rope with him, wherever he was. The
FBI kids looked at me blankly—a habit of theirs.
That was it. The big escape was all done. The date was
December 29th. We had been free for 82 days. Two of us
were dead and, although we weren't aware of it yet, the
other five were in a hell of a fix.
The FBI and the Chicago police yammered at us for
most of two days. They tried to get us to rat on people who
had helped us, but we dummied up. As for blaming the
$20,000 candy-company payroll job on me, that was
strictly police guff. I had had nothing to do with any rob-
beries or other crimes, and there was no evidence of any
kind against any of us.
The time had come to go home; home to prison. I
glanced toward a doorway in the FBI suite and there stood
a man I knew well. He was Joseph E. Ragen, one of the
most widely known prison wardens in America. He was
my boss, and a stern disciplinarian. There was an ironical
story behind my association, as a convict, with Ragen, the
warden.
Back in 1941, Ragen had resigned as warden of State-
ville because of a political upheaval in Illinois. My escape,
with Banghart and our five companions, had created the
most whopping prison scandal of its kind in Illinois pen-
itentiary history. The politicans had gone whining to
Ragen, begging him to return and take charge.
He had agreed, but only after being guaranteed abso-
lute freedom from politics. My escape had made him, in
effect, the most independent state prison warden in the
United States. I looked at him as we met again and said:
"Well, Warden, I see I got your job back for you."
The warden looked a bit startled, then chuckled and
said: "Yes, Touhy, you did." They tell me Warden Ragen
told that story hundreds of times in the years that followed.
We rode back to Stateville in style, with a bigger police
escort than they give to the St. Patrick's Day parade. I
spent New Year's Eve getting dressed back into prison,
but I didn't feel too unhappy about it. I had made my big
47protest as an innocent man. What had it cost me personal-
ly? Not too much, I thought.
Illinois law, strangely enough, provided no prosecution
or penalty at that time for inmates who broke out of
prison. That sounds cockeyed, I know, but it wasn't a
crime then to escape from custody, provided you didn't
kill or hurt somebody in doing so. It wasn't until 1949
that the Illinois General Assembly passed a law making it
a felony to bust dut of a jail or a penitentiary.
All I could lose, personally, I thought at the time I went
over the wall, was time off earned for good behavior. And
that was a damnably insignificant item against 99 years.
It was much more important, I had convinced myself, to
make a big public protest against false imprisonment.
A Chicago lawyer, Joseph Harrington, came to see me a
few days after I was back in Stateville. My family had re-
tained him. I asked him if I was correct in believing they
couldn't prosecute me for escaping. Oh, yes, he said, I was
right. Absolutely right. But hiding away in the pubic bushes
of the law was a little angle that I had overlooked.
There was a clause saying that a person who aids or
abets another in escaping can be prosecuted and, if found
guilty, be sentenced to the same number of years which
the escapee had been serving. It is an archaic law, and
judges time and again had called it unfair and barbaric.
"In your case," Harrington said, "I have a hunch they're
going to try to pin Darlak's 199 years on you."
I recalled, as Harrington spoke, that Captain Daniel A.
"Tubbo" Gilbert—often called "the world's richest cop"—
had been lurking around after the FBI had picked me up
in Chicago. Gilbert had been a central figure in my being
sent to prison.
It would be a terrible injustice to hook me with Darlak's
time, of course. I hadn't aided or abetted anybody to es-
cape. Darlak's brother had smuggled the guns and the
whole caper had been planned for months before I talked
myself—with Gene O'Connor's persuasion—into going
along.
But I strongly suspected that Gilbert would be delighted
if the law saddled me with Darlak's 199 years. Tubbo had
48helped send me to prison for the Factor sham in the
first place, as Judge Barnes later ruled. To bury me in
prison forever might be Gilbert's idea of personal triumph.
To understand the case of Dan Gilbert vs Roger Touhy,
it is necessary to go back a lot of years. I had known him
for a long time, back to the days when my truck drivers
were running beer through his Chicago district.
49
Chapter 4
My Father was a Cop
My father was a Chicago policeman. An honest one.
Otherwise, he would have had a hell of a lot less
trouble getting up the grocery and rent money. And I might
have managed to get farther in school than to squeak
through the eighth grade.
I was born in 1898, although the prison records say '97,
in a house at 822 South Robie Street, not far from one of
the places where I hid out while on the lam in 1942.
There were seven of us kids, two girls and five boys.
We lived in an area of working people, big families and
low incomes. My father's pay as a policeman wasn't enough
to keep the wolf off the front porch but, at least, he never
made it in to eat the potatoes and meat—when we had
meat, that is—off the table.
Some of Chicago's most notorious gangsters came out
of that part of the city. So did business leaders, college
professors, clergymen and a couple of mayors. I was doing
all right myself until the big Factor frameup came along.
My mother died when I was ten. She was fatally
burned when a kitchen stove exploded. After that, my
50 father, my two sisters and I moved to Downers Grove, a
suburb. The older boys stayed in Chicago, living with rela-
tives and friends. I graduated from the_£L._Joseph Roman
Catholic Parochial School i^TJowners Grove" when I was
thirteen. U"
It was a good enough boyhood. I played baseball and
raised the usual amount of the devil and got teased because
my hair was curly. If I had anything to gripe about, I
didn't realize it, because other boys didn't have any more
than I did, generally speaking.
I often thought in prison of the priest in charge of the
school, a Father Goodwin. My family couldn't afford to
pay tuition for me, so I was a sort of handyman around
the school and the church. I mowed the lawns, served mass
as an altar boy, tended the furnace, ran errands and did a
little janitor work. It was fun.
Once or twice a week, Father Goodwin rented a horse
and buggy from a livery and went calling on his parishion-
ers. I was his driver. At whatever house we stopped, there
would be refreshments—apple pies, lemonade, thick sand-
wiches, salads, pickles, ice cream. Father waved the food
away, but I ate fit to bust a gut.
In the church there was a big oil painting, a copy of The
Last Supper. Father Goodwin explained it to me, saying
that a man called Judas had betrayed Jesus Christ for
thirty pieces of silver. A thing like that can have a re-
markable influence on a kid.
I began thinking of Judas as a stool pigeon, a word I
knew, as did all youngsters. While sweeping up the church
and dusting the pews, I would stop and look for a long
time at the painting. I picked out the face of a man I
figured was Judas, and I would stand there hating him.
I thought of cutting the face of the man I concluded to
be Judas out of the picture, but that would have ruined
the painting and Father Goodwin would have been un-
happy. So I just went on despising Judas—something which
I never told the "bug doctors," which is what psychologists
and psychiatrists are called in prison.
My contempt for informers grew on me as the years
passed. When I later got into the labor union movement, I
51 despised the company finks. After a few years in prison, I
got to distrust everybody around me, except for a few
convicts. Too many inmates are stoolies; the bug doctors
can call my attitude antisocial if they want to.
My feeling about informers can be summed up by an
anecdote which seems very, very apt to me. Funny, too.
I once knew a confidence man called Yiddles Miller. He
spoke with a Weber and Fields Dutch accent, but he was
a shrewd operator. Con men are, I learned in prison, the
elite of all lawbreakers, in the opinion of other felons. They
never tattle on each other.
Well, Yiddles and another bunco expert, Gus London,
were sharing a twin-bed hotel room in Pittsburgh. Each
of them folded his pants across the back of the chair near
his single bed. E£ch fell asleep, but in the middle of the
night Yiddles, a light sleeper, was awakened by a prowler
in the room. London slept on, snoring a bit.
The thief took London's pants from a chair at the bed
nearest the door. He then moved toward the second chair.
Yiddles, feigning sleep, stirred and pretended to be awaken-
ing. The burglar left, taking only London's pants, with $3,-
000 in the pockets. Yiddles got out of bed, double-locked
the door, propped the back of a chair under the doorknob
for added security and went back to sleep.
In the morning London awakened, demanded to know
whether his pants had walked away with his $3,000, and
was told by Yiddles: "A burglar came in and stole your
trousers." London was indignant, demanding to know why
Yiddles hadn't awakened him, summoned the hotel house
officer, or called the police.
Yiddles propped himself up on an elbow, stared in as-
tonishment at his comrade in larceny and demanded:
"What do you think I am, a stool pigeon?"
London thought over the questionable ethics involved,
agreed that Yiddles was right, and apologized for having
suggested calling in the law.
Whatever the moral, or immoral, angles of the story
may be, I always have despised stoolies, and I always will.
The only thing worse is a perjurer. I have had more than
my share of troubles from both.
52 When I got out of the eighth grade, it was hunt-a-job
for me. Only rich kids went to high school back then, and
I didn't qualify. I had a little edge on other youngsters,
because my hobby was ham radio, or wireless as it was
called. I had built my own set at home, and I knew the
International code.
I tried for a job as a wireless operator, but there wasn't
a chance at my age. Too young for responsibility, I was
told. So I ran my feet down halfway to my ankles as an
office and stockroom boy for a few months and then hooked
on with Western Union. They made me manager of a little
residential section branch office. A real big dealer, I was.
Salary: $12 a week.
I lied about my age to get the job, but it was easy to get
by. My hair was gray at the sides of my head —maybe I
worried as an infant—before I got out of knee pants, and
every day I would have a five o'clock shadow by lunch time.
Western Union gave me a chance to learn the Morse code
which wasn't too difficult because I already knew the In-
ternational. They moved me to the main office downtown
and I was an operator.
My father went into retirement about that time, and he
liked to play the horses. He would bet fifty cents, or one
or two bucks on a race, and only one race a day, when he
had the cash to spare. And now I was in a position to be
his personal tout.
The stable owners, trainers and jockeys would send
messages on the chances of their horses over the wires. I
tipped off my father. He had nine winners, mostly long
shots, in a row. He would have broken half the bookies in
Chicago if he had started with ten bucks and parlayed it.
But no, he never risked more than two.
But the really important thing that happened to me—
back then in 1915—was that a dark-haired Irish girl
went to work for Western Union in the company's branch
office in Chicago's finest hotel, the Blackstone.
She was sixteen, and fresh out of telegraph school.
From the main office, I sent the Blackstone's messages to
her and received the ones she transmitted. She sent better
53 than she copied, but she wasn't so good at either. I tried
to help her.
Since she worked from four p.m. to midnight, I could
drop in and see her evenings after my day shift ended. The
first time I called only to help her with telegraphy. After
that I courted her by the Western Union's wires between
the main office and the Blackstone. And in person, too.
I'd take her home now and then when she finished work
at midnight, but she always had a chaperon. Another
pretty girl, Emily Ivins, was night telephone operator at the
hotel and she made certain that everything was proper on
those late-at-night-ride-home dates.
Miss Ivins, incidentally, was to be an important witness
in trying, many years later, to keep me out of prison on
the Jake the Barber hoax. She was to tell the truth, but it
wasn't good enough against the screen of lies behind
which Factor and his friends stood grinning.
I would have been a telegrapher for the rest of my life
but, odd as it sounds, I was too damn honest. The Com-
mercial Telegraphers Union of America was trying to or-
ganize Western Union and the Postal Telegraph Company.
I didn't know anything about unionization and I wasn't
interested, but I knew some of the operators in the office
had joined.
Every hour, the operators got a ten-minute "short," or
relief, and we would go into the men's lounge for a smoke.
One of the CTU boys scattered organization pamphlets
around the room. I picked up one and, like a dummy, read
it right out in the open. A company fink saw me and
within an hour I was on the pad in the superintendent's
office. He had a lot of questions to ask.
Did I belong to ther union? No. Did I know any men who
did belong? Yes, I did. Would I give him their names?
No, I would not. Did I have any plans for joining the
union? "Well," I said, "if I decide the union is a good
thing, 1 probably will take out a card."
Whammo! I was fired and out on the street. A company
guard escorted me to the door and told me never to come
back. Now, I'm not rapping Western Union after all these
years. Every employer fought the unions then, and the
54
Chapter 2 Over the Wall
I skidded the truck to a stop near the wall tower. We
unloaded the ladder, and then things went comical. No-
body knew how to fit the two extension lengths together.
Each guy tried to do it in a different way at the same time,
with everybody swearing at each other.
Another guard lieutenant came ambling up. He seemed
upset, but not much. "You sonsabitches," he said, "don't
you know them tower windows ain't supposed to be washed
from the inside?" I started laughing so hard I could hardly
hold the .45 on him.
He finally saw the gun. His mouth fell open and he went
over and stood with the other lieutenant and guard. One
of the screws kept saying, over and over: "Let 'em go.
Don't interfere. They'll kill us for sure."
The three of them were helpless against us. Guards and
officers went unarmed, except for blackjacks and clubs,
inside Stateville. They used to have weapons, but the state
lost too many guns that way, with the cons taking them
away from the screws.
But the old lad up in the tower had plenty of firepower,
26and I got to thinking about him. The way we were flub-
bing around with the ladder might give him brave ideas.
He might get hurt and so might we, which I didn't want.
He was standing over to one side of the tower at the
end of the walkway, doing nothing. He wasn't holding
a gun, but he didn't have far to reach for one.
I decided a little noise might make things safer for
everybody, including him. So I fired two shots and knocked
out the glass of a window at the opposite end of the tower.
He raised his hands and hollered that he was going to
behave.
We got the ladder in place, at last, and I scrambled up
with the .45. The other six men in the escape party fol-
lowed, with the two lieutenants and the guard spaced in
between us. With the screws along, we had less danger of
drawing fire, although maybe that precaution wasn't needed.
Not a shot came from any other tower. Either the screws
weren't looking, or else they were remembering all those
meats and groceries from O'Connor's wheelbarrows.
It was pretty crowded when all of us got to the tower
house, which was only a cubicle. The guard handed over
his keys to his sonny boy, Gene, and croaked at him:
"Please don't take me with you. I'm an old man." A couple
of other guys got his weapons—a 30.30 rifle and an au-
tomatic handgun.
On the floor of the tower were packages of meat and
other stolen stuff that O'Connor had delivered a few hours
before. The tower man's Ford sedan was standing on the
roadway outside the wall waiting to haul the loot home—
but now the script was changed. It was going to carry us
far, far away, if our luck held.
The grandpappy guard had a scratch on his face, from
flying glass, I guess. He sure as hell wasn't shot, as some
people tried to claim later.
The next thing that happened all but panicked me.
Gene gave the ladder a kick and it clattered down to the
ground inside the wall. I started to yell that now we were
trapped in the tower. Without the ladder, we could break
our legs or necks dropping that 33 feet to the outside.
Sure, there was a stairway leading down, but the door
27at the bottom would be locked, and there was a keyhole
only on the outside. But O'Connor had covered that angle,
too. "Thorough" was his middle name that day.
He dropped his grocery delivery rope over the side and
somebody—Nelson, as I remember—shinnied down it.
Then O'Connor dropped him a key, taken from the old
guard, to the door below.
Some one of the guys tore the tower telephone out by
the roots. That would delay the alarm getting to the war-
den's office and from there to the Illinois Highway Patrol.
Then we tumbled down the stairs, locked the door behind
us and piled into the guard's Ford.
I looked at my watch. It had been just 17 minutes since
I took the garbage truck away from the driver—but it
seemed like it'd been some time back in my childhood.
Banghart gunned our getaway car, and I looked back.
The two lieutenants and two guards were gazing after us
from the wall. They couldn't do a thing except yell for
help. We had the tower arsenal, plus the two pistols that
Darlak's brother had delivered to the flagpole.
We were on Highway 66 for a while, but mostly we hit
the country side roads. After a while we pulled into a patch
of woods to talk things over.
"Where do we go from here?" I asked. "Where's the
hideout?"
There was a long silence. I began feeling silly, then
alarmed and finally, downright mad. The situation was ob-
vious—and awful.
We didn't have any place to go. There wasn't any hide-
out. O'Connor, the master mind, hadn't set up even one
single goddam contact to help us. We were in a mess.
We had just pulled off one of the slickest prison breaks
in history. And now we were as unprotected as a stranger
turned loose at noon without clothes in downtown Chicago.
Seven of us were jammed into a small car. All of us
were wearing prison uniforms. We had guns, but what
good would they be against the army of cops who soon
would be looking for us? What a fugitive needs is a place
to hide, not firepower.
I had taken it for granted that O'Connor had made
28arrangements, at least for a few days, on the outside. He
hadn't. Well, there was no sense in bellyaching. We took
stock. Together we had $120, mostly money that Gene
had picked up from his meat-and-grocery route.
What we needed was darkness, and it was hours away.
In the meantime, we had to keep moving. The news would
be on the radio soon, and every farmer or small town rube
in Illinois would be phoning the cops upon seeing a
parked car with a lot of guys in it.
So we drove. We kept to the dirt and gravel roads, driv-
ing carefully and slowly. When we met a car, some of us
crouched down so we wouldn't seem to be so overcrowded.
The car had no radio so we couldn't hear the news about
ourselves. But one thing was good. The Ford had a full
gas tank, so we didn't need a filling station stop. Nature's
demands we handled in the trees and bushes. Everything
was aimless. I remember noticing that we passed through
one village four times. The name of the place was Barkley,
and I got mighty weary of it.
When darkness hit, we pulled into a Forest Preserve
grove near Lombard, a suburb to the west of Chicago. We
had driven more than 150 miles and we still weren't any-
place.
We did some scrounging and one of the guys got into a
garage at the rear of a house. He came back with a tattered
suit jacket and an old raincoat. The clothes fit Banghart
pretty well, so he wore them into a grocery store to shop.
We ate bread, cheese and cold meat, washed down with
milk. It felt fine to eat without a gun pointed at you from
a dining-hall tower. "You should have brought a side of
prison beef along," Darlak told O'Connor, "and we could
have had a barbecue."
We had to have help, but where to try for it was a
terrible problem.
The prison had complete lists, with addresses, of our
relatives, of visitors we had had at Stateville, of people
we had corresponded with. They would be watched, with
taps on their telephones. Former cell mates and friends on
parole would be covered like a floor with wall-to-wall
29carpeting. Anybody who did help us could be prosecuted
for harboring criminal fugitives.
There was one possibility among all the hundreds of
people I knew in Chicago. He was a legitimate business-
man and he had been my friend since we were boys. He
never had been in trouble with the law, and there was
nothing kinky in his background. But, most important,
we never had communicated when I was in Stateville, so
the prison had no line on him. I felt sure he would help
us if we could get to him.
The Owl, wearing the tattered jacket and old raincoat,
rode a bus into Chicago. I gave him instructions on how to
telephone the man I had in mind. I couldn't make the trip
because the clothes from the garage were acres too big
for me.
The rest of us waited through the night. It was bitter
cold, even for October in the Chicago area. We couldn't
take a chance on lighting a fire. "If Banghart doesn't score,"
Mclnerney said, "we might as well go back to the main
gate at Stateville and apply for readmittance."
But The Owl didn't fail us, and neither did my friend.
Soon after dawn Banghart was back. He was driving a
car and carrying $500, both loaned to him for me by the
Chicago businessman. And in the car were pants, jackets,
shirts and neckties—nobody ever expects to see a necktie
on a con—enough so we all got a good enough fit.
We dressed and were ready to take off for Chicago in
the borrowed car. But Gene got to feeling sorry for the old
tower guard and his Ford sedan. If we left the Ford in
the grove, O'Connor said, it might not be found for a long
time. What would the screw do for transportation?
"I'll drive the car up on the main drag of Lombard
and park it there," our master-mind said. "That way it
will be spotted in a couple of days. You follow me and
pick me up."
In a couple of days, it would be spotted, he said! Less
than a couple of minutes! The license numbers of that
Ford had been going out over the police radio every ten
minutes all night long. Every cop in the Midwest was
looking for it, slavering frothily for a reward and dreaming
30of becoming a hero. That car was hotter than a jet plane's
after-burner.
We had no more than turned the corner after O'Connor
parked the guard's heap and rejoined us when there came
the big "w-o-o-o—woooo" of a police car siren. A suburban
squad had spotted the license. But by that time we were
out of sight.
I turned on the radio in the new car and got the police
wavelength. The broadcasts made us feel real good. We
had been reported seen in St. Louis, Indianapolis, Kansas
City, Peoria, and 14 different places in Chicago. The cops
had us pinpointed just about everyplace in the Midwest
except where we really were.
All the way into Chicago we didn't see so much as one
police car. If the police had us blocked off, as the radio
kept on saying, then somebody had left a great big hole
in the roadblock.
"I got more good news for you," Banghart said, as we
turned in on Ogden Avenue, the diagonal street leading
from Joliet and the Chicago Midway Airport into the Loop.
"Rog's friend has lined us up for an apartment. We can
move in right away."
We went there, and what a miserable dump it was. A
basement flat near 13th and Damen. I knew the neighbor-
hood like a penitentiary screw knows his stool pigeons. I
had played stickball in the streets out there as a kid, pes-
tered the hurdy-gurdy man, and opened the fire hydrants
for cooling off on those 100-degree August days.
We went into the apartment. Warden Ragen wouldn't
allow a pig from the Stateville farm to set one cloven hoof
in the place. The walls were sweating with dampness. The
kitchen crackled everywhere we stepped. Roaches were a
carpet on the floor.
And the rats! They were as big as tiger cubs and twice
as nasty. Banghart claimed that one of them—a stallion
rat, he said—stood up on his hind legs, doubled up one
fist, pulled a switchblade knife in the other and told him,
with the authority of a Stateville guard captain: "Get
outa here, you bastard, and take your friends with you.
31I've been boss of this cellar for 20 years and you ain't
going to muscle in on me."
I believed The Owl. And the rat, too. But we had no-
where else to go. We stayed, after Banghart said: "We'll
plug up the holes in the floors and the walls with steel
wool, and let the goddam rats tear out their claws and
teeth trying to burrow through." A great strategist, Bang-
hart was—except when it came to staying out of prison.
The landlord of the building was an elderly man who
lived in a cottage at the rear. We told him we were from
downstate Illinois, in Chicago to go to work in a war plant.
He took $65 for a month's rent and told us where we
could buy cheap furniture in a second-hand store some-
where on Madison Street.
We got in some groceries and, for the first time, we saw
the newspapers, all editions of them since the previous
afternoon. Our escape was the biggest news anywhere in
the world, so far as Chicago was concerned. We had
pushed the war off page one. The big, screaming headlines
would make you think we had murdered half the guards
in Stateville.
The Owl and I got the biggest play, because we had been
in the headlines for our conviction in the fake Jake the
Barber Factor kidnaping. Our pictures were plastered all
over the papers, but they were eight years old or more and
we had aged a lot in prison. O'Connor killed my optimism
along that line by saying:
"Sure, you guys are older, but you're just as homely, if
not more so. Any cop could recognize you from the photos,
and don't forget there'll be rewards out for all of us soon."
In its very first story of the break, one of the papers had
dug up the tag of "Terrible" Touhy for me. That fitted me
like calling Calvin Coolidge an anarchist.
The only conviction I ever had in my life, up to the
time of the Factor frameup, was for parking my car too
close to a fireplug. And now the papers were speculating
on how soon I would lead my "mob of terrorists" into
robbing a bank or kidnaping somebody.
Out in California, on a fancy estate built out of swindling people, Jake the Barber was bleating like a lost lamb
32and trying to look twice as innocent. He was scared as hell
that Banghart and I would kill him, he said, and the FBI
was guarding him. Huh! I wouldn't spit in his direction,
much less touch him.
Factor then was under indictment, but on bond, for
swindling Catholic priests in another of his fancy con
games. He later served a prison term in the case, too.
My silly idea of bringing my case before the public for
justice was rebounding in the newspapers like a screw's
club off a convict's head. Instead of getting fair treatment,
I was being crucified. There wasn't one mention in any of
the papers that day that I might be innocent—although
there were plenty of working reporters, even then, who
believed in me.
Later there was a story by Bill Gorman in the Daily
News, saying there probably had been no kidnaping, but
nobody seemed to pay much heed.
I gave up reading and went for a walk. It was my first
jaunt around Chicago since getting free. I looked at the
show window displays, dropped in at a couple of joints
for a beer and saw a movie. The thing I enjoyed most
was looking at the people, free people.
Heading back toward the apartment, I went into a Pix-
ley & Ehler's Restaurant, one of a cafeteria chain special-
izing in baked beans. I got a crock of beans, Boston brown
bread and coffee at the counter, went to a table, and started
to eat. But I didn't relish the beans for long.
In the door came three of the biggest, toughest-looking
coppers I ever saw. I froze. There wasn't any back door. I
was like a mouse in the wainscoting with a cat plonked at
the only exit.
The cops picked out their food and brought it to the
table next to mine. One of them sat sipping coffee and
looking at the Chicago Times, a tabloid. My picture cov-
ered practically all the front page. He squinted at the
photo for a while.
"This guy Touhy would be a fine pinch," he said, and
lit into his grub. He could have reached out and grabbed
me almost as easily as he picked up his coffee cup.
I finished my food, paid my check and left. A fine sense
33of well-being hit me. I wasn't scared any more, and I
wouldn't be again. The experience had shaken the hell out
of me, but, at the same time, it had given me back my
courage.
Now, I knew, I really was free. Nobody knows freedom,
of course, if he has fear, but I had never thought of that
before.
Back at the apartment, things weren't good. Mclnerney,
Nelson and Stewart had brought in whiskey and they were
getting drunk and noisy. They were talking about going
out to look for women. I told them to quiet down and act
careful.
Mclnerney got mean and sneering. "Big shot, eh?'1 he
said. "Think you're going to run everything, do you?"
I put it on the line for them. Noise, whiskey and women
would bring trouble. Not only for them, but for me, too,
if I was living with them.
It was my money, part of the $500 I had borrowed,
that they were drinking up. I wasn't being tough, but un-
less they stopped behaving like reform-school sophomores
I was moving out.
* I went to bed after that, but the next day I gave our
situation a lot of thought. I wasn't going to gamble on
going back to Stateville on a drunk-and-disorderly pickup.
Anyway, living with six other convicts in a small apart-
ment was too much like prison for me. I wanted solitude:
a life of my own without unnecessary danger.
For another thing, the men who escaped with me still
had the guns we brought from the penitentiary. Suppose
a cop came nosing around the apartment and one of the
guys let loose with a pistol. A lot of people could get
killed, and I might be one of them.
So I set up a life for myself. I was going to stay outside
the wall just as long as I could. I would enjoy my freedom
in my own way. I wouldn't carry a gun, and, when the
time came, as it must for every fugitive, I would give up.
[ wasn't going to have anything to do with any shooting.
I found a furnished flat behind a bank building at Mad-
ison and Ogden on the West Side. It was small, and the
toilet-bath was a share-it proposition down the hall. But the
34joint had two exits, which was essential to sound sleep
for me. And the location gave me a boot. My, how those
bankers would have shook if they knew "Terrible" Touhy
was living only a few feet from their building!
When I got back to the basement apartment that evening,
a drunken argument was going on. Mclnerney wanted to
fight. I jollied him along and then said, in a nice way, that
I was leaving for a place of my own. It was only fair to them
that I move out, I told them.
The newspapers were running pictures of me every day.
I was hot as a depot stove. If I got caught, so would the
rest of them if they were living with me.
I didn't really believe that guff, but it got me out of the
basement without a fight. I made a deal with Banghart for
contacts. To hell with the rest of them.
For a couple of days, I just sat around my new place,
admiring the loneliness. It was terrific not to have- some
con snoring or whimpering or yelling in his sleep in the
same cell, or the next one. And no guard peering through
the door with a stool pigeon pencil in his hand. The great-
est pleasure in life is to be unregimented, your own boss.
Prison teaches you that—though it isn't the easiest way to
learn it.
I needed a substantial bankroll, just in case I had to
pay off a bribe or get out of Chicago. My best source was
my brother, Eddie. He owned a roadhouse, Eddie's Won-
der Bar, near the State Fair Grounds outside of Madison,
Wisconsin.
I had put up the money for the place, and Eddie would
come up with any reasonable amount I needed.
But making a meet with him was almost as tricky as
getting out of Stateville. The FBI would be sticking as
close to him as hogs to a swill barrel. His phones would be
tapped. If he got caught with me, it would be a harboring
rap for him.
So I called my friend, the businessman who had loaned
me the car and the $500. We met in mid-afternoon at the
Morrison Hotel bar and had a drink at a quiet table. I ex-
plained what I wanted and he set me up with a guy. I'll
call him Simpson, but that wasn't his name.
35Simpson was an ex-convict, and eager to pick up a quick
buck. I explained what I wanted and even drew a map for
him.
He drove up across the state line to Wisconsin, parked
his car in downtown Madison so his license wouldn't get
spotted and took a bus out to my brother Eddie's place. I
figured I needed $1,500, but Eddie said to make it $2,500.
He would get it from the bank next day and send it by
messenger to Chicago.
Simpson came back to Chicago and he was itchy about
the set-up in Wisconsin.
"There are a lot of guys acting like surveyors around
your brother's club," he said. "They got spyglasses set up
on tripods so as to get a fix if you try sneaking up to the
joint across the fields or through the fairgrounds.
"They're FBI men. They hang around Eddie's bar and
peek through the windows of his living quarters at night.
I told him to have your messenger make damn sure he
isn't tailed when he comes to Chicago."
I got the $2,500 next day. An ex-convict working at
the Wisconsin Fair Grounds brought it to me at my apart-
ment, and he wouldn't take a dime for his trouble. Eddie
was paying him, he said.
He also brought word that Eddie wanted to fix me up
with a hideout in Arizona. To hell with that, I said. I
wasn't going to bury myself in some hole in the desert. I
was staying in Chicago.
I had plenty of money now and things should go better.
But a lot of problems and troubles were ahead.
36
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