When Harry Met Tommy (O’Connor)
A Fond Farewell to the Great Persuader
It sounds like a line straight out of the first scenes in
Citizen Kane: "How many of his contemporaries would still be alive?"
muses Jim Grogan, chief counsel for the state's Attorney Registration and
Disciplinary Commission. In this instance, Grogan is alluding to Harry J.
Busch, doyen of the city's legal community, who died October 12 after a
Methuselah-like career that began at the outset of prohibition. Depending on
who's doing the arithmetic, he was either 97 or 101; his family opts for the
former age, while Illinois Supreme Court records indicate the latter.
During his nearly 70 years as a lawyer, Busch, a lifelong
Chicagoan, represented nearly every type of client. Politicians: Mayor Richard
J. Daley. Gangsters: John "Jackie the Lackey" Cerone. Cops: the
Chicago Police Department's "Red Squad," investigated by the state's
attorney for secretly spying on citizens in the early 70s. And his own
brethren: countless lawyers brought up on professional misconduct charges.
"The only thing he wouldn't do was represent somebody accused of dealing
in dope," notes Illinois appellate court judge Warren D. Wolfson, Busch's
friend and protege. "He just couldn't bring himself to do it."
Impeccably dressed and relentlessly courteous, Busch
simply loved to practice law. "Although he was an ordinary-looking guy
physically, he had a wonderful voice, and he had a very fluid way of moving his
body and hands," explains Wolfson, who before he joined the bench in 1975
sometimes served as cocounsel with Busch. "You just kind of watched him.
He was like a great conductor, like a Toscanini in the courtroom. He had a way
of moving and sounding that commanded attention. He wasn't a screamer and
shouter, he wasn't melodramatic, but people listened to what he had to say, and
within a very short time he was in control of the courtroom.
"He also had a great insight into human motivations
and desires, and he knew how to reach for them. He was a master of picking a
jury: by the time he was finished, the jurors were his friends."
Born December 14, 1898 (or was it 1902?), Busch grew up
on the city's west side. A 1922 graduate of Chicago-Kent College of Law, he
launched his career later that year as a Cook County assistant state's
attorney, then crossed over to become a top criminal defense lawyer, building a
reputation as one of the city's quintet of "B-boys," as Busch's
Sun-Times obit called them--successful defense attorneys whose surnames began
with the letter B.
"I remember as a young lawyer, before I knew
him," recalls Wolfson, "I was sitting in a court, and it was kind of
noisy and disorganized, and suddenly there was a hush, and everything was very
quiet when this man walked in. And I said to the person next to me, 'What's
going on?' And the guy says, almost with awe, 'That's Harry Busch.'"
Busch represented "hundreds and hundreds" of
clients, adds Wolfson, his final big-ticket case occurring in 1985, when he
took up the sentence-reduction cause of mobster Joseph Lombardo. In December
1982, Lombardo, ex-Teamsters boss Roy Williams, and three other men were found
guilty of conspiring to bribe then U.S. senator Howard Cannon of Nevada in an
effort to manipulate legislation affecting deregulation of the trucking
industry. Lombardo got 15 years. Busch's subsequent arguments failed to
persuade a judge that Lombardo deserved a break.
His enthusiasm, apparently, never waned. "When I
joined the ARDC in 1979, he was old then," says Grogan, "but it
appeared that all pistons were firing." Grogan's organization, which
fields grievances from the public against state lawyers, ran up against Busch
in court even as late as 1988, when he would have been either 85 or 89.
"And he was registered for the year 2000," points out Grogan,
"meaning that if he'd walked in here on October 1, he could have practiced
if he'd wanted."
Yet despite his longevity, despite his prominence,
despite his marquee clients, Busch is probably best remembered for a freaky,
fleeting encounter with legendary outlaw Tommy O'Connor that occurred 79 years
ago. In truth it was little more than an egregious case of wrong place, wrong
time. But during the intervening decades it has attained near-mythic status,
inextricably entwining the pair in the public mind even though they never set
eyes on one another again.
Late on the morning of Sunday, December 11, 1921, Busch,
still in law school, puttered through the city not far from the Cook County
Jail, located back then on West Hubbard. Seemingly out of nowhere, a man hopped
onto his car's running board. "I was driving north from the corner of
Clark and Illinois," Busch recounted in a 1993 interview with the
Sun-Times. "Suddenly the isinglass is ripped open, and in comes Tommy with
his cannon. He said, 'Drive like hell, you SOB, or I'll blow your brains out!
I'm Tommy O'Connor!' I drove!" O'Connor "proceeded to give me
directions," Busch continued, until he seized an opportunity to shake the
fugitive: "I had a chance to jam into a factory wall, and I did. The last
I saw of him, he was running toward an alley east of where I was."
Although present-day accounts invariably refer to him as
"Terrible" Tommy O'Connor, he was known as "Lucky" Tommy
O'Connor back in the 1920s, when his sensational exploits screamed from the
pages of the city's numerous newspapers. He embodied both nicknames:
"Terrible" because he likely killed four people, "Lucky"
because he did virtually no time for his crimes. By age 30 the Irish-born thug
had established a reputation as a fearless gangster who'd already beaten two
murder raps and was the leading suspect in a third killing. When five Chicago
policemen, including Sergeant Patrick (Paddy) O'Neill, sought to arrest
O'Connor in February 1921, gunfire ensued, and O'Neill was mortally wounded.
Convicted of murder, O'Connor was sentenced to die by hanging in the Cook
County Jail.
But at around 9:30 AM on December 11--between three and
five days before his scheduled execution, according to various
sources--O'Connor, brandishing a pistol rumored to have been smuggled into the
jail inside a sandwich, led a bold five-man breakout. First the prisoners
overpowered and tied up several guards, and then three of them, including
O'Connor, hightailed it to freedom. Moments later he was in Harry Busch's car,
loudly introducing himself.
Hundreds of cops armed with rifles immediately flooded
the streets. A $3,000 reward, big money for the time, was offered. And yet
O'Connor was never apprehended. While sightings abounded here, there, and
everywhere--one yarn placed him back in Ireland, where he supposedly died in
the Black and Tan nationalist uprising of the early 1920s--no one officially
saw Tommy O'Connor again. He leapt from Busch's running board straight into the
popular mythos, helped along immensely by Ben Hecht, who contributed to
O'Connor's notoriety by depicting the prison escape in a Chicago Daily News
column, in an original story for the silent 1927 film Underworld, and most
famously in the 1928 stage play The Front Page.
Over the years O'Connor remained very much a wanted man.
In fact the gallows intended for him--though packed away in the bowels of the
Criminal Courts Building after the introduction of the electric chair in
1929--were not dismantled until 1977, when a judge finally ordered the rotting
wooden structure destroyed. (Instead it was purchased privately; these days the
disintegrating platform is on display at Donley's Wild West Town in Union,
Illinois.)
Busch's brief dustup with O'Connor would dog the attorney
even after his death, as attested by obits in the Tribune and Sun-Times, which,
while acknowledging his distinguished and lengthy legal career, made it
abundantly clear that he will forever be known as the last man to see Terrible
Tommy O'Connor--that this ancient accidental encounter, much to Busch's
chagrin, had somehow come to define his life. The Tribune went so far as to
recall his reaction when, in 1996, on the 75th anniversary of O'Connor's
escape, one of its reporters asked Busch about his 1921 tete-a-tete with the
gun-toting cop killer. "My God," the ninety-something Busch bellowed.
"Will that piece of history never die?" Well, no. At least not before
he did.