ZANGARA, Joseph

(1900-1933): Assassin

Joseph Zangara is always listed as and was executed

as the would-be assassin of President-elect Franklin

D. Roosevelt and the killer-by-mistake of Chicago

mayor Anton Cermak. However, a strong minority

view is that Zangara never wanted to kill FDR — con-

trary to his own later confession — but was a hired

Mafia hit man assigned to shoot Mayor Cermak

while he was with the president-elect in Miami in

February 1933. Indeed, Judge John H. Lyle, gener-

ally held to be the most knowledgeable non-Mafia

man on Chicago crime, stated categorically that

"Zangara was a Mafia killer, sent from Sicily to do a

job, and sworn to silence."

Cermak, elected as a "reformer," was anything

but that. He waged war on the Capone Mob (at the

time Big Al was already in prison) but not so much

to clean up the city as to replace the Capones with

his own gangsters, headed up by Teddy Newberry.

He moved against Frank Nitti, Capone's at least titu-

lar successor, once Big Al was behind bars. In fact,

court testimony later indicated that the mayor had

dispatched some "tough cops" to erase Nitti, which

they attempted to do after handcuffing the unarmed

gangster. Nitti was shot three times in the back and

neck but miraculously survived, whereupon the

mayor of America's second city hurriedly left his

bailiwick for Florida.

The way the theory goes, Nitti had Newberry

killed and then sent a hit man — Zangara — to take

care of the mayor. Considering the fact that the

mayor had left Chicago on December 21, 1932, and

was still in Florida on February 15, 1933, it is con-

ceivable that he might not have been planning to

return at all, figuring Florida sun was preferable to

Windy City lead.

On February 15 Cermak was in an open car with

FDR in Miami when Zangara opened fire, fatally

shooting the "wrong man" Cermak. Yet Zangara

had won several pistol-shooting awards when he was

in the Italian Army. The fact that he of all people

failed to hit the president-elect led some crime

observers to believe that he might have hit his real

target after all. Lingering in his deathbed for three

weeks, Mayor Cermak declared he had no doubt

that he had been Zangara's real target.

Why had Zangara missed FDR? According to

press accounts, his failure was due to the alert reac-

tions of fearless spectators who grabbed his arm and

shoved it upward as he began to fire. Privately Zan-

gara contradicted this version to his lawyers, saying

his arm had not been seized until he had gotten off

all his shots. A policeman who helped bring him

down confirmed this version of the events. It made

the theory that he had hit his target all the more

plausible.

Zangara ranted and raved against capitalists, yet

there was nothing on the record to indicate he was

an anarchist, communist, socialist or even Fascist.

Despite all his ravings previously against "capitalist

presidents and kings," Zangara turned out to be a

registered Republican.

Joseph Zangara was almost stripped of all his clothing

after being seized in his unsuccessful attempt to

assassinate President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt. Some

have insisted Zangara was a Mafia hit man who did get

his actual target, Chicago mayor Anton Cermak.

For two years before the shooting Zangara had

lived in Florida, his main occupation seeming to be

betting on horses and dogs. One researcher on Zan-

gara, the Reverend Elmer Williams, wrote that Zan-

gara had worked in a syndicate "cutting plant" in

Florida "convenient to a canal where the whisky was

run in from the islands." Williams's thesis was that

Zangara got in trouble with his underworld employ-

ers and was given the choice of being tortured and

murdered himself or killing Cermak.

Of course Zangara went to the electric chair pro-

claiming his pride with his act, insisting he had

wanted to kill FDR. He said of Cermak, "I wasn't

shooting at him, but I'm not sorry I hit him."

Was that the real Zangara speaking or the Mafia

hit man sticking to his cover story? If it was the lat-

ter, it was hardly unbelievable. The mob always

could draw on such unlikely sources ready to lay

down their lives in some secret agreement. In The

Godfather Mario Puzo tells of the Bocchicchio fam-

ily, which permitted one of its members to confess to

a murder he hadn't committed and go to the chair for

it. That was fiction but it was hardly outside the

behavior patterns within certain Sicilian Mafia fami-

lies. The family was made an offer, a reward, it

couldn't refuse. Had Zangara got an offer he too

could not refuse? The majority view says no, that he

was a political assassin, period. There are those in

law enforcement and the underworld who laugh at

that.

TOUHY, Roger "Terrible"

(1898-1959): Bootleg kingpin

It has been said by some observers of the syndicate

crime scene in America that FBI chief J. Edgar

Hoover may have done the wise thing to pretend for

decades that organized crime and the Mafia did not

exist. The case of Roger "Terrible" Touhy demon-

strated that the FBI did not fully comprehend the

nature of such criminals and that the agency was

used and abused by organized crime in framing

Touhy.

The FBI may be said to have never understood

poor Roger the Terrible. When they went after him

in lieu of dozens of other more terrifying gangsters,

they picked on a man whom the Chicago Crime

Commission never had on its roster of public ene-

mies, and, as a federal judge would later note in a

major finding, had never even been associated in any

way with a capital offense.

Yet amazingly, just as Touhy proved a thorn to the

FBI, he was equally regarded as a true terror by Al

Capone, who regarded Touhy as one of the stum-

bling blocks to his plans to organize all crime in

Chicago.

Roger "Terrible" Touhy was pretty much a cre-

ation of sharp public relations, his own. As far as the

entire underworld had it figured, the Terrible

Touhys — Roger, the boss, and his five brothers — con-

trolled all booze operations in the Chicago suburban

area of Des Plaines and had their empire backed with

such firepower that they were impregnable.

Press coverage indicated the Touhy Gang to be

about the most vicious in the Midwest. Yet Touhy

was a middle-class bootlegger, one who employed no

more muscle than necessary to convince all the

speakeasies and saloons in his area to handle Touhy

beer and booze exclusively. Indeed, firepower was

less a reason for Touhy's success than his ability to

handle the fix as well as any figure in the under-

world. Not only was Touhy the master of the fix, but

he knew how to supplement cash payoffs with fringe

benefits that meant so much. He rewarded the local

politicians and police brass with bottled beer brewed

especially for them and often bearing their own per-

sonal labels.

Perhaps Touhy's reputation as a ferocious gangster

was sealed by his looks — kinky-haired, beady-eyed,

with a hawklike face, clearly a man to be feared. And

Touhy knew how to act the part, forcing even Al

Capone to back down to him. Touhy had once sold

the Capone boys 800 barrels of his superior beer for

$37.50 a barrel (his cost of production was $5.50 at

most), and Capone then tried to short Touhy with

$1,900 in the payoff, claiming that some of the bar-

rels had leaks. (Capone always pressured people that

way.) Touhy came back with his regular routine. He

assumed his famed hard stare, and said softly, "Don't

chisel me, Al." Capone paid the $1,900.

Roger and his five brothers had not started out as

criminals. They grew up in respectable circum-

stances, the sons of a policeman. In the early 1920s,

the Touhys went into the trucking business, "strictly

legit," at least by Touhys word. Business, however,

did not boom until they started filling the trucks with

beer. The Terrible Touhys raked in a fortune.

Roger Touhy took control of the Des Plaines area

in the northwest section of Cook County. In those

days a bootlegger was hardly an unpopular figure,

and Touhy found ways to increase the esteem in

which he was held. He kept out lowlife criminals and

especially clamped down on brothels. Whenever a

group of mobsters tried to open a roadside whore-

house, Touhy would relieve the local police of the

need to take action. He sent in his own enforcers to

wreck the joint. Even when Capone personally noted

that Des Plaines was, as he charmingly put it, "virgin

territory for whorehouses," Touhy's response was his

hard-eyed stare, which convinced Capone to drop his

plans.

Whenever rivals made noise about wanting to

move in, Touhy would invite them to his headquar-

ters for a visit, where they were greeted by what

appeared to be an armed camp, the walls lined with

submachine guns. What the visiting hoods didn't

know was that the weapons had been made available

by cooperative local cops just for a good show. While

the gangsters were conferring with Touhy, underlings

would come rushing in for weapons, mumbling

something about having a great chance to rub out

some party. Touhy would nod his head slightly in

assent and return to the dialogue as though the mat-

ter was of minor importance. When Touhy's visitors

left, they were fully convinced they would be the

loser in any war with the Terrible Touhys. At various

times such Capone gunners as Murray "the Camel"

Humphreys and Frank Nitti were so shaken that they

reported back that Capone would be facing a terrible

bloodletting if he tried to move in.

Still the Capone gang tried to get Touhy — even

after Big Al went to prison. Deciding violence was

out, they resolved to use another method, helping the

law get something on him. Suddenly Touhy found

himself in big trouble with the FBI. It is unclear if the

Chicago Outfit had anything to do with the first inci-

dent, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility.

Touhy and several of his henchmen were arrested for

the kidnapping of William Hamm Jr. The FBI

announced it had a strong case against Touhy, but a

jury thought differently, finding him not guilty. Later,

the FBI switched the charge to the real culprits, the

Barker-Karpis gang. By coincidence Alvin "Creepy"

Karpis had long been close to the Capone Gang.

Next the FBI arrested Touhy for the alleged 1933

kidnapping of Jake "the Barber" Factor, an interna-

tional confidence man with ties to the Capones. This

was despite underworld grapevine information that

indicated the abduction was a fake masterminded by

Factor and the Capones. Special agent Melvin Purvis

announced that his arrest of Touhy in the Factor

snatch was a landmark in the art of detection. "This

case," he said, "holds a particular interest for me

because it represents a triumph of deductive detective

work. We assumed from the start, with no material

evidence, that the Touhy gang was responsible for

the crime."

Touhy's first trial ended in a hung jury. He was

convicted the second time around and was sentenced

to 99 years. Touhy went to prison screaming frame-

up while the Capones swarmed into Des Plaines.

In 1942, Touhy escaped from prison but was

recaptured soon and saddled with an additional

sentence of 199 years. Still, there were many per-

sons, including several journalists, who considered

him innocent of the Factor kidnapping, and took up

the fight to clear him. In the 1950s Touhy at last

won a rehearing on his original conviction. After a

searching inquiry lasting 36 days, Federal Judge

John H. Barnes ruled that Factor had not been kid-

napped at all but had disappeared "of his own con-

nivance." Judge Barnes had plenty of criticism to

hand out to several quarters, especially to the FBI,

the Chicago police, the state's attorney and the

Capone Gang. It took a few more years of legal

jockeying before Touhy was released. He collabo-

rated on a book, The Stolen Years, about his ordeal.

Just 23 days after Touhy won his freedom, he was

gunned down as he was entering his sister's house in

Chicago. As he lay dying, the former gangster mut-

tered: "I've been expecting it. The bastards never

forget."

The underworld had no doubts about who had

knocked off Touhy — the word was the price on his

head was $40,000 — that it was the handiwork of

longtime Capone mobster Murray "the Camel"

Humphreys. Six months after the Touhy rubout,

Humphreys bought 400 shares of First National Life

Insurance Co. stock at $20 a share from John Factor,

Touhy's old nemesis, and a man at the time eager to

have an unsullied slate as he was attempting to oper-

ate in Las Vegas. Eight months later, Humphreys sold

the shares back to Factor for $125 a share, turning a

profit of $42,000 in capital gains. The IRS looked at

the transaction and related details and declared that

the $42,000 was clearly payment for services ren-

dered and that it was subject to full income taxes.

The Humphreys-Factor financial dealings were

not the only noteworthy matter occurring after

"Terrible" Touhy lies dying after being shot. Released

From prison after doing 25 years on a mob frame-up, he

said, "I've been expecting it. The bastards never forget."

Touhy's death. Early in 1960, a few months after the

murder, retired FBI man Purvis committed suicide.