By Diane Summerville
When gangsters hit a mail truck on
the Queen City’s peaceful streets, they had no idea whose territory they had
invaded.
It didn’t take a genius to figure
out what had happened. Only days earlier, a tip came into the police department
that something big was about to go down in Charlotte.
As Frank Littlejohn surveyed the
scene and listened to eyewitnesses, the chief of detectives knew this was the
something big.
The mail truck was heading away from
the railroad depot on Third Street when a car darted out of an alley and
slammed on brakes in front of it. In swift, sure movements, four men, at least
one brandishing a machine gun, jumped out of the car and swarmed the truck.
The gunman shoved the tommy gun into
the truck’s cab and disarmed the driver. At the same time, two men walked to
the back, cleanly clipped the lock on the rear doors with a pair of wire
cutters, forced the mail clerk out of the truck, and grabbed several sacks.
In less than two minutes, the
thieves, loot in hand, retreated to their car, and, in a cloud of dust, they —
and more than $100,000 in cash and bank notes — were gone.
Mob
hit
Littlejohn had no doubt that this
crime, well executed and committed in broad daylight on a clear morning, was a
mob hit. He was right.
The year was 1933. The day, November
15. In Chicago, Illinois, Al Capone was battling Roger “The Terrible” Touhy for
control of illegal beer and liquor sales in that city’s northwest suburbs. Five
months earlier, Capone’s agents framed Touhy for the kidnapping of Jake Factor,
a known gangster (and brother of the famed makeup artist Max Factor). Touhy was
awaiting trial when four of his henchmen headed south to “raise” money for his
defense.
Charlotte in the 1930s had few if
any connections to organized crime. Cotton fields surrounded it, and textile
mills filled it. As in many towns at the height of Prohibition, staunching the
flow of bootleg liquor was one of law enforcement’s primary occupations. But
Charlotte, already with a population of roughly 80,000, was on its way to
becoming a financial center.
“There were multiple skyscrapers and
fancy department stores and the new offices of the Federal Reserve, which
opened in 1927,” says Dr. Tom Hanchett, staff historian at the Levine Museum of the New South. “Money flowed in
and out of Charlotte.”
Touhy’s men probably thought
targeting deposits on their way to the Federal Reserve in the so-called sleepy
South seemed like an easy mark. They were wrong.
‘Finest
detective in America’
What Touhy didn’t know was that he
had sent his men to commit a headline crime in a city patrolled by a man who J.
Edgar Hoover would describe as “the finest detective in America.” The ruthless
gangster soon learned why.
According to It Happened in North
Carolina, Scotti Kent’s 2000 book detailing several little-known episodes
in the state’s history, Littlejohn came to Charlotte from South Carolina in
1917 to run a shoe store. Sometime in the 1920s, he went to work as an
undercover federal agent investigating Ku Klux Klan activities. In 1927, the
Charlotte City Council hired him to rid uptown Charlotte of prostitution. That
position, originally temporary, was the start of a 30-year career with the
Charlotte Police Department.
By the time of the mail truck
robbery, Littlejohn had risen through the ranks to become chief of detectives.
He was a tall, lanky man. He smoked cigars, and even today, people who knew him
talk about his big nose. Some say his ego was bigger.
“He was not very humble,” says Ryan
Sumner, the historian who curated “Beneath the Badge,” the exhibit on policing
in Mecklenburg County at the Charlotte Museum of History. “He had a reputation
for being good, and he knew it.”
He was good.
“He was no fool,” says Johnnie
Helms, 79, a retired officer who went to work for the department in the 1950s
when Littlejohn was chief of police. “He was thinking next week while I was
thinking today.”
Helms remembers Littlejohn as a
tough but fair man who knew his city and who had strong ideas of how its police
department should be run. He didn’t like to be told what to do; he had more
than one clash with the City Council throughout the years and ultimately was
fired 15 days before his scheduled retirement for publicly criticizing a
council action.
And as a story in the book Charlotte
Police Department 1866-1991 shows, he wasn’t one to let convention get in
the way of closing a case. Evidence told Littlejohn that a murder in the Myers
Park neighborhood was likely the result of a homeowner walking in on a burglar.
Experience with Charlotte’s more unsavory characters told him who his likely
suspects were.
Rather than interrogating the
suspects, Littlejohn called their wives and girlfriends into his office. With
the lights down low, he peered into a crystal ball and began chanting a voodoo
spell he remembered from childhood. According to Charlotte Police Department,
“One of the women began swooning and screamed that the killer was her husband.”
Hot
on the trail
When Touhy’s men hit the mail truck,
all Littlejohn and his men needed was a single clue to get the investigation
rolling. They got it when the car used in the robbery was discovered within
hours of the crime just outside the city limits. It was a brand new black
Plymouth sedan that was stolen from a home on East Morehead Street two weeks
earlier. Maintenance records indicated that since its last service, the car had
been driven only nine miles — almost the exact distance between the robbery and
where the car was abandoned.
“If it hadn’t any more than nine
miles on it, it had to have been hidden somewhere all that time,” Littlejohn
explained in a Charlotte Observer article published toward the end of
his career. So he put a detective in a car and told him to drive along every
route leading to the holdup scene. At the same time, he had postal carriers
asking residents on those same routes if anyone had rented a garage. “This was
a mail robbery, you see, and the postal inspectors were on it. … We rang every
doorbell,” he said.
They found a woman on 10th Street
who had rented a room to two men. At first, they didn’t want to take it, she
said, because it didn’t come with a garage. She arranged for them to use her
neighbor’s. But, she added, every time the two men left the house, they headed
west, on foot.
That information, combined with the
fact that there were still two robbers unaccounted for, sparked a search for a
second hideout.
Case
closed
A tip about an unfamiliar Packard
spotted near where the Plymouth was stolen sent Littlejohn to the second
location. “I went tearing out,” he said. “I came up to the door and heard my
own police calls blaring out.”
Whoever had been in the room left in
a hurry. They didn’t bother turning off the radio they had tuned to the police
channel. Detectives found a suitcase full of clothes, three steaks in the
refrigerator, and, on the table, a newspaper with the story of how Littlejohn
found the car used in the robbery. Littlejohn ordered his men to take every
item, including the garbage, to headquarters. There, he sorted out 27 bits of
torn-up paper that, when pieced together, formed a Chicago rent receipt.
“For 60 hours there, I didn’t have
my shoes off,” Littlejohn said. “I left here at 6 p.m. that evening and was in
Chicago the next morning.”
The landlady at the rental property
gave Littlejohn descriptions that matched eyewitness accounts in Charlotte.
“The landlady said one of the men
carried a violin all the time,” Littlejohn said in the 1957 interview. “That
was no violin. That was a machine gun case!”
Between the descriptions and
fingerprints lifted from beer bottles found in the second hideout, investigators
nailed the robbers’ identities. The ringleader was Basil “The Owl” Banghart, a
notorious thief in the Chicago area and Touhy’s right-hand man. His suspected
partners in the heist were Ludwig “Dutch” Schmidt, Isaac A. Costner, and
Charles “Ice” Connors. All four had long histories on the wrong side of the
law.
Within two weeks of the robbery,
three of the suspects were behind bars; one was dead. Investigators tracked
down Banghart in Baltimore. He was arrested and, six months after the holdup,
stood trial in federal court in Asheville. He was sentenced to 36 years for his
role in the robbery. Costner testified against his cronies but still got 30
years. And Schmidt pulled almost 30 years.
Ice Connors never made it to trial.
According to The Charlotte Observer article, he “was found dead in a
Chicago suburb, his body riddled with machine gun bullets and trussed with
barbed wire, his dead fist clenched around a penny.”
Littlejohn explained in the 1957
article: “That’s the underworld sign for betrayal. Maybe Ice was just dumb, but
he put the police on the mob’s trail and that was enough to kill him.”
No-nonsense
character
For his role in solving the crime
and helping to put Touhy’s top associates behind bars, Littlejohn received a
letter from J. Edgar Hoover in which the legendary FBI director praised him “as
the finest detective in America.” The framed letter adorned Littlejohn’s office
throughout his career with the Charlotte Police Department, which included 12
years as chief of police.
Say the name Littlejohn to anyone
who knew him or is familiar with his history, and you get the same reaction: He
was a no-nonsense character, a poster boy for hard-line law enforcement. Helms,
who walked an uptown beat in his early days on the force, remembers the chief
as a man who spent little time at his desk and who knew everything about his
city.
As the voodoo story demonstrates,
Littlejohn wasn’t above using questionable measures to solve a crime. Yet, Charlotte
Police Department 1866-1991 credits him with setting the police department
on a course toward more professional law enforcement. He established
Charlotte’s first police academy; before that, new recruits were handed a gun
and a badge and put on the streets. He sent commanding officers to the FBI
National Academy and the Southern Police Institute. He set up the first youth
bureau in the state to address juvenile delinquency, and the police department
established its first firing range under his reign.
Littlejohn had high expectations for
his officers, Helms says, but he had the respect of his men and of the
townspeople.
Persistence
and perception
Even with those accomplishments,
Charlotte’s “crime of the century” and his role in solving it remained a
highlight of Littlejohn’s career. It shows up in most references to the chief.
Littlejohn enjoyed the recognition
and recounting the drama, no doubt. But apparently, the way he saw it, putting
together the pieces of the puzzle was just a part of the job.
“People have an exaggerated idea of
the acumen and brains a case like this takes,” he said in 1957. “Mostly, it’s
persistence … persistence and perception, which is different from observation.”