“In a world where there are few roses, Roger Touhy never
pretended to be one but his finish emphasizes that even a man who was not so
good may be the vic¬tim of men who are worse.”—Chicago Sun Times
In the early evening of the night he died, Roger Touhy
prepared to drive to a meeting at the Chicago Press Club with Ray Brennan and
their book publisher to discuss Factor’s suit against them.
At the same time, across town, John Factor dined at the
Singapore Steak House on Rush street. The place was owned by two old saloon
keepers named Fritzel and Jacobson, whom Jake had known from Prohibition days.
Tommy Downs managed the restaurant which was popular with the mob in the 1950s.
Downs was once in charge of security at the Sportsman Park Race Track which was
previously owned by Bugs Moran and later by Frank Nitti. In 1959 the Singapore
Steak House was secretly owned by Chuckie English, a former member of the 42
Gang and right-hand man of Sam Giancana, and itremained one of Chicago’s
celebrity hangouts despite the mob connections.
Jake said he had flown in from Los Angeles to spend the
holidays with his son Jerome and to press his suit against Touhy and Brennan
over The Stolen Years.
Also seen in the Singapore that night was Murray Humpreys,
who had helped Factor rig his own kidnapping almost three decades before. As
always, Humpreys sat with a glass of whisky in front of him. The Hump put it
there to impress the others and nothing more, since he never drank.
During the rest of the evening, the normally low profile
Humpreys made sure of accounting for his whereabouts. He left the Singapore and
strolled down Clark Street where he was seen at Fritzels, a fashionable
restaurant and later at L’Escarot, anoth-er restaurant, returning home he said
at 3:00 A.M.
Tubbo Gilbert left his palatial homes in Los Angeles and
Palm Springs where he lived in semi- retirement, and was in town overseeing his
exten-sive real estate and contracting interests. He would later tell reporters
that he had flown into Chicago to spend the holidays with his grandchildren.
At 5:00 RM. sharp, Walter Miller pulled his car up to the
front of Roger’s sister’s home to take Touhy to his meeting with Brennan and
the publisher. At 5:55, they pulled into the Sheraton Towers Hotel garage and
took the elevator to the top floor to the wood-paneled press club. Brennan,
customary scotch in hand, greeted them at the door. They hung up their winter
coats and walked to a round table in the middle of the room where Richard H.
Brown, a New York lawyer representing the book’s publisher, Pennington Press,
was seated.
Brennan ordered appetizers and a German beer for Touhy. They
talked for three hours about the book. It was a grim conversation. Factor’s
suit had hurt the book’s sales because the big chain depart-ment stores fearing
a suit from Factor, refused to carry it. As if that wasn’t bad enough the
Teamsters had refused to load and carry copies on their trucks.
At 9:15 Miller said they had to leave because Roger was on
an 11:00 P.M. curfew. Brennan helped his two guests on with their topcoats.
Miller’s coat sagged from the heavy .38 caliber in his right pocket.
The last thing Touhy said to Brennan was, “Factor goes
around calling me every vile name in the book. I’m going to Springfield on
Friday to ask Governor Stratton for a full pardon. Goodnight, kid.”
Miller drove quickly to Touhy’s sister’s house. He was worried
about making the curfew so he didn’t take the precaution of driving around the
block as he usually did. They were running late and it was a bitter eight
degrees outside with an ugly wind whip-ping across the street.
He parked and the two men slowly walked up the six steps of
Ethel’s porch, Miller’s hulking frame tow¬ering over the limping and bent
Touhy. The only sound that could be heard was the occasional passing traffic on
Washington Boulevard a half a block away. Then Roger heard a call from one of
two men running toward him. “Wait, hold on, we’re police officers!”
Roger and Miller turned their heads as one. Instinctively,
Miller reached for his service revolver but it was too late. The men were
running toward them, leveling their shotguns as they sprinted across the frozen
street. With a policeman’s eye, Miller noticed that one of the killers stood at
least six feet tall. He was wearing a topcoat. The other was perhaps three
inches shorter. Miller aimed at him and fired.
The killers fired back. Miller raised his left arm to cover
his face and nearly had it blown off at the elbow. Dozens of pellets lodged
into his back and legs. The transom over the door was shredded by shot pellets
and the vibration from the blasts had shattered the glass in the front door.
Before the blasts knocked him to the ground, Miller was able
to get off a total of five shots. Two shots landed in the windshield of a car
parked on the opposite side of the street, two more grounded themselves into
the front lawn and one found its way into the leg of one of the assassins.13
(13. Several days later, reporter Sandy Smith went to the
home of Sam Giancana and interviewed the crime boss about the killing. The
Chicago Police had been telling reporters that they "were searching high
and low" for Giancana, to question him about the Touhy murder, but were
unable to find him. Smith, who interviewed Giancana on his front lawn, noted
that the gang¬ster’s foot was wrapped in bandages and he limped. It’s possible
that Giancana, a former 42 Gang member who was noted for his fantastic driving
skills, may have been the third gunman that Miller saw and Touhy hadn’t seen.
Miller reported that he shot at least one of the gun¬men and heard him scream
out "Son of bitch!"
Almost at the exact moment that Miller was blown backward,
two huge blasts from the killers’ shotguns knocked Roger across the porch and
then smashed him face first into the ground. Pellets tore a hole in Touhy’s
inner left leg, the other pellets dug into his right upper rib cage. His leg
was barely attached to his body.14
(14. Police officer Daniel Stillwagon said later, "They
blew that guy apart; you could see that the leg was just hanging on by some
veins and some skin.")
In all, the killers fired at least seven blasts with their
shotguns and probably three more with an automatic pistol and then they were
gone.
The murder had taken less than forty-five seconds.
Miller crawled over to Touhy and said, “Say an act of
contrition, Rog.”
Ethel was in the kitchen drying the dinner dish¬es when she
heard the blasts. She had been half lis-tening for her brother’s footsteps on
the front porch, but when she heard the blasts, she knew he was dead. She had
been expecting it.
She ran out to the front steps and saw Roger, twitching
violently in a massive pool of his and Miller’s blood.
She bent down over her brother and tried to pick up his
head.
Roger held her hand and moaned, “It was two cops.”
Patrolmen Robert Peters, Henry Sullivan and Daniel
Stillwagon were the first on the scene. They didn’t try to stop the blood
because it didn’t seem possible. Their only thought was to rush Touhy to a
hospital.
Two ambulances were called, but there wasn’t enough time to
wait; Peters could see that Touhy was bleeding to death in front of his eyes.
When a third squad car pulled up, Peters placed Roger in the
back seat and drove him to nearby Saint Anne’s hospital.
Miller, who was conscious but in agony, volun-teered to wait
for an ambulance and told the cops to get Roger to a hospital.
Peters rode in the back seat with Touhy, holding his hand
and making a valiant but hopeless effort to stop the gush of blood from the
gaping holes in the dying old man’s legs.
Roger kept nodding his head at the cop and say-ing, “I’m all
right, I’m okay.”
But he wasn’t. He was losing too much blood from the shotgun
pellets drilled into his leg, in the place where his knee had been just a few
minutes before. They arrived at the emergency room at 10:35 P.M. where a shock
trauma team headed by Dr.Patrick Vitullo placed Roger under an oxygen tent and
wheeled him into an operating room.
Dr. Vitullo applied a tourniquet to the upper por-tions of
Touhy’s legs in a fruitless effort to stop the bleeding just as Chief of
Detectives John Archer stepped into the room, slipping and almost falling to
the floor that was slippery with Touhy’s blood.
Dr. Vitullo leaned over Roger’s face to check his breathing.
“Mr. Touhy, who shot you?”
“Two men.”
“Do you know them?”
“No.”
“Where is your identification?”
“I never carry any.”
“Do you have any money on you?”
“About $200.00.”
“Where is it?”
“Right front pocket.”
Then he faded.
“Mr. Touhy, you must try to stay awake.”
There was no reply. A nurse rifled through Roger’s bloody
pants’ pockets and found $240, a pack of non-filtered cigarettes, a pair of
reading glasses and two drawings from his sons, done twenty-six years before.
The doctor worked frantically, but knew his patient would
never survive the massive loss of blood. Father Richard Birmingham was brought
into the room and gave Roger Touhy the last rites of the Catholic Church which
he completed at 11:23 P.M. Two minutes later, at 11:25, Roger Touhy expired.
Ray Brennan came into the emergency room just as the nurse
pressed down Roger’s eyelids for the final time and pulled the sheet up over
his head. “Rotten bastards,”he whispered over and again. The killing shook
Chicago and the question all over town was “Why?”...Why kill a rumpled, half-crippled old
man? Why, as Newsweek put it, kill the “not so Terrible Touhy”?
Nobody in Chicago really wanted an answer, but they had to
make it look as though they did. By now, 701 mob murders later, going through
the motions of showing outrage, was standard practice.
Mayor Daly was awakened by his aides who told him that Roger
Touhy had been killed. Daly climbed out of bed and ordered Police Commissioner
O’Connor to personally investigate the killing.
O’Connor ordered his police to pick up Marshal Ciafano and
Sam Teets Battaglia. Ciafano and Battaglia were the mob’s favorite hit men,
both were former 42 Gang members who had fought against Touhy in 1932, and both
ha
d been arrested by Walter Miller a few years before on armed robbery charges.
Marshal Ciafano was found at the Trade Winds bar by
detectives who dragged him screaming, off his bar stool and carried him by his
arms and legs to a waiting squad car, tossed him into the back seat and drove
him to police headquarters for questioning.
They found Battaglia in his expensive home in Oak Park and
hauled him in for questioning but then let him go.
Neither Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo, Murray Humpreys nor Sam
Giancana were ever quesntioned for their role in Touhy’s murder.
(15. A recently declassified FBI document reveals that on
January 28, 1960, Humpreys discussed Touhy’s killing with labor goon Joey
Glimco. The informant who reported the conversation said it was conducted
mostly in whispers. Suspecting that he would be arrested by the U.S. Treasury,
which was investi-gating Touhy’s murder, for his role in the killing, Humpreys
said, "Dirty bastards, if I ever want to dispute them, I didn’t keep it
all to myself, see?... I figure, if they’re gonna get real hot on me, they want
to fuck with me like they did on that shit, they’re not gonna give me shit. So,
I just keep still, ’cause I got the answers for them. He also added that, "He (Touhy?) was
dying a long time ago. He was on a stretcher, you know?")
Several days after the murder, John Factor testi-fied at the
coroner’s inquest with an enormous dia-mond ring glittering from his pinky
finger. Police ushered him into a waiting room where Ethel sat in a corner with
Tommy Touhy Jr., her face buried in a Persian lamb coat, her eyes hidden by
dark glasses. The room was small. Factor, always amiable, turned to the Touhys
and nodded and smiled. They glared at him. Then he realized who they were. He
turned his face to the wall and waited for police officers to move him to
another room.
Before he left Chicago for Los Angeles, Factor was allowed
to take a lie detector test to prove his innocence. This was the same type of
test Touhy wasn’t allowed to take to prove his own innocence more than
twenty-four years earlier. Chief of Detectives Archer watched the test being
administered and announced to the press mob waiting on the street, “Factor had
nothing to do with the shooting and no knowledge of the participants or the
reasons. We have no further reasons to question him.” Reporters tracked down
Tubbo Gilbert who met them with his standard, “I have no comment,” but then, as
always, he talked anyway; “I have no idea who would want to do this either.”
Perhaps not realizing the blatant stupidity of the question,
Tubbo asked “I’ll say this, if Touhy was so innocent, why did he need a
bodyguard?”
Roger’s body traveled from the Alexian Brothers Hospital to
the Cook County Morgue—the same route that John Dillinger’s and Frank
Gusenberg’s gunned down bodies had taken back in 1936.
While Touhy’s dead body was waiting for trans-port to the
morgue, a scant two blocks from his childhood home on South Robie Street, a
photogra-pher snapped a photo of the corpse, his face frozen in terror and
pain, the mouth pried open in one last frantic breath for life.
Roger’s grief-stricken sister was left with the awful task
of identifying her brother’s body a few hours later.
The next morning, at 8:30 A.M., a solitary hearse bearing
Touhy’s body in its coffin, slowly pulled out of the back alley of the funeral
parlor. It was decid¬ed Touhy would be buried at the family grave at Chicago’s
Boot Hill Cemetery, Mount Carmel. Not far from his gravesite were the tombs of
Dion O’Bannion, Frank Nitti, the Genna Brothers, Paul “Needle Nose” La Briola,
A1 Capone and by 1992, Tony Accardo.
The tombstone, it would bear the name TOWEY,
the Anglo-Irish spelling of his family name, in the northwest corner of the
burial ground where his brothers Johnny, Joe, James and Eddie were buried.
(Towey is not an native Irish name, it is French -Norman)
Secrecy surrounded the funeral. Chief of Detectives Archer,
who had been planning an obser-vation detail for the funeral which he expected
to take place the following week, was caught complete¬ly off guard and was told
about it by a Chicago Tribune reporter.
Arriving at the site only minutes after the coffin, Archer
watched from the warmth of his car as Clara and her sons, Roger Jr. and Tommy,
stood in the bit¬ter winter cold while the funeral director recited Roman
Catholic prayers over the coffin. Nearby, six workmen stood by with their
shovels at ready. There were no other mourners, no flowers, no pallbearers.
The
service ended in seven minutes and a weeping Clara was led away to a car by
Tommy. A freezing wind picked up and swept across the yard as the workmen
lowered Roger Touhy’s coffin in its grave.
Archer walked up to the gravesite and one of the workmen
paused from shoveling dirt and asked, “Is it true they only gave him
twenty-eight days of free-dom?”
Archer nodded, that it was.
“That hardly seems enough,"the workman said. “Just
doesn’t seem right.”