“It was a war,
chiefly, between the Irish and the Italians. I’m Irish and I’d come into my
office in the morning after another shoot-out and I would say to my co-worker,
who was Italian, ‘Well that’s one to my side’ and the next day he would come
and say ‘well, it’s leveled Jim, we chalked one up on our side last night.’ It
was awful really, they were all such young men.” —James Doherty, crime reporter for the Chicago Tribune
By 1930, Roger Touhy and Matt Kolb were millionaires. Their
small, but profitable beer and gambling empire stretched from midtown Chicago
to as far north as St. Paul, Minnesota. They owned dozens of speakeasies,
roadside casinos, handbook parlors, three large breweries, and an enormous
fleet of trucks. Roger saw repeal approaching and invested his earnings in a
dry cleaning business with Kolb’s brother, commercial real estate, a well
digging company and a winter place for himself in Florida. Unlike Matt Kolb or
even his own broth-ers, Roger intended to be completely legitimate by
1933. Then he and
Clara and their boys would sell everything and move west to Colorado, although
Clara was holding out for Florida.
However, if Touhy was ready for prohibition to end, the mob
wasn’t. The depression hurt more and more of the mob’s traditional enterprises
like prosti-tution and gambling. A1 Capone decided to take over Chicago’s labor
racket business and gain control of the Teamsters International strike fund,
worth an estimated $150,000,000 with another $10,000,000 a year flowing into
its coffers from membership dues.
Leading Capone’s assault was George “Red” Barker, a west
side Irishman and former bookkeep-er. Working under Barker as his assistant was
the up and coming Murray Humpreys, a Welshman who had strong-armed his way into
at least twenty-six Teamster locals by then. When the decade of the 1930s
opened, George Red Barker was, as one Chicago cop put it, “riding on top of the
world.” Barker all but controlled the Chicago Teamsters and was reported to be
earning $200,000 a year as a result.
Before he took to a life of crime, Barker had been an honest
bookkeeper. He was literate, devouring every union newsletter and newspaper he
could find from anywhere in the country, and paid for informa-tion on locals as
well. Barker would get a copy of the financials and study them. If the union
had poten-tial, Barker recommended the takeover to Ralph Capone and Frank Nitti
who talked it over with A1 Capone. If Capone agreed—and he almost always
did—Barker and his boys would go after the union.
In early 1931, Capone urged Barker to go after the coal
teamsters.
Barker approached James “Lefty” Lynch, a semi- honest thug
who owned the Coal Teamsters Local 704, which delivered fuel to the entire
downtown district where every office building depended upon the local for fuel
to warm its buildings against the brutal Chicago winters. Barker told Lynch
that Capone expected him to turn over half of the control of his union as well
as his seat on the prestigious and important Joint Teamsters Council. In
exchange, Barker offered Lynch protection. On the up side, Barker told Lynch,
Capone intended to dou-ble the union’s membership and as a result Lynch’s
income would double as well.
Lynch sat through Barker’s speech and then threw him out of
his office. It was his union and he wasn’t going to give it up to Capone or
anyone else.
Capone waited.
Later in the month, Lynch went to his summer home on Brown
Lake outside Burlington, Wisconsin. His family was preparing a barbecue and the
members were seated around a long picnic table when Danny Stanton and Klondike
O’Donnell, two of the meanest Capone hoods in Chicago, drove into the yard.
They climbed out of the car slowly. They were in no hurry. There were no cops
or witnesses around for miles. They were armed with shotguns, pistols and
rifles. Stanton walked over to Lynch and said, ‘The Big Fellow back in Chicago
sends this message: you just retired from Local 704. From this moment on, you
stay away from the union hall. You stay away from the office. You stay away
from the Joint Council. You understand?”
Lynch nodded his head and Klondike added, ‘Well just so’s
you don’t forget what was said....” and pulled out his pistol and shot Lynch
through both of his legs while his wife and children looked on in horror. Lynch
fell to the ground, groaning in agony. Stanton bent over Lynch to make sure he
was alive and said ‘You got balls; I’ll give you that.” He stood up and turned
to Lynch’s daughter and said “get him to a doctor and he’ll be alright.”
At the next meeting of the Joint Council, Red Barker and
Murray Humpreys appeared at the door with a dozen heavily armed Capone men.
Barker, carrying a baseball bat, stood in the cen-ter of the
room and asked “Which one is Lefty Lynch’s chair?” Somebody pointed to a large
leather chair in the middle of the room and Barker sat there. He looked around
the room and announced that he was now running the Coal Teamsters Chauffeurs
and Helpers Union Local 704 and that everything would remain just the way Lynch
had left it. The only difference was that the entire trea-sury was turned over
to Capone except for $1,000 which was left to cover administrative payrolls.
After that, Barker went to the fuel dealers in the district
and informed them that they were only hir-ing union members and that they were
giving all of their drivers a massive pay raise or else Capone would see to it
that not a lump of coal was delivered downtown.
The dealers had no choice but to agree and passed the cost
along to the real estate developers who consequently raised the price of office
space in the area. Capone kept Lynch on the payroll to avoid a revolt in the
ranks. However, Lynch never appeared at another union function.
As a reward, Capone gave Barker control over the ushers’
union with orders to exploit it to its full potential. Barker sent word to
every theater owner in the city that they were to use his ushers for every
political and sporting event, indoor or outdoor. He
said they would have to pay for “crowd control,” a service
only his union could provide, at a rate of $10 per usher.
Movie theaters avoided the hike by paying off Barker in
cash. Five dollars per usher was less expensive for them. Within weeks Barker
was being paid off by every strip show, opera, ballet, sympho¬ny, prize fight
and ball game held in the city. He was collecting a fortune until one prize
fight promoter named Walter George decided to hold out.
Barker waited until the promoter had sold out the entire
Coliseum on South Wabash Avenue for a major prize fight. Then, just before the
fight was to begin, a half dozen cabs pulled up to the coliseum and let out
building inspectors, fire marshals, elec-trical inspectors, plumbing inspectors
and health inspectors, all led by Red Barker. Within minutes after entering the
building the inspectors declared that the water was unhealthy to drink and
ordered it turned off. The hot dog, beer and soda concessions were shut down by
the fire marshal and the electri-cal inspector said the wiring was faulty and
ordered the stadium lights shut off. During the delay, the crowd became
violent. George turned to Barker and said “All right, how much you bastard?”
Barker answered that his price was up to $20 per usher and
that the minimum number of ushers needed for the night was 120. Barker was paid
and the fight went on.
Roger Touhy and Matt Kolb had their own plans for Chicago’s
labor unions. Prohibition, gambling and the ability to avoid big political
payoffs and long drawn out beer wars had made them rich. By 1932, they had the
money, and the firepower to take over the entire Chicago Teamsters organization
without having to split any of it with Capone.
Unlike Capone, they didn’t need to terrorize their way into
each local union before reaching the Teamsters International office. They had a
direct and trusted contact in the International office with Edward Chicken
McFadden, an old time labor ter-rorist with deep contacts into the Teamsters
International leadership.
McFadden picked up the name Chicken when he organized a
shakedown operation known as the Kosher Chicken Pluckers Union. He had an
arrest record dating back to 1901 that included intent to rob, police
impersonation and labor slugging. He had been a business partner with a labor
mobster named “Big Tim” Lynch, controlling the Chauffeurs and Teamsters Union
together, until Capone had Lynch killed. Capone took over the union and chased
McFadden and his contacts into the waiting arms of Roger and Tommy Touhy. In early
1932, when Capone started his major push against the unions, it was McFadden
who set up a meeting between the Touhys and Patty Burrell, the Teamsters
International Vice President. Burrell called a meeting of all the locals
threatened by the syndicate and gave them a choice; they could stand alone
against Capone and lose their unions and probably their lives, or they could
band together and move their operations into Touhy’s camp.
Most of the bosses already knew Roger and decided he was the
lesser of the two evils. They pitched into a $75,000 protection fund that was
handed over to Tommy Touhy. In exchange, the union bosses were allowed to keep
their locals, and the treasuries that came with them, and live under the
Touhys’ protection.
************************
“Tony Cermak was an
example of the lowest type of machine politics that the corrupt political life
of Chicago had yet produced. He was uncouth, gruff, insolent and inarticulate
... he could engage in no more intelligent discussion of the larger political
issues of the day than he could of the Einstein theo-ry of relativity. He
appeared to take pride in his lack of polish.” —Judge Lyle
Like Matt Kolb, Roger Touhy was a cautious man. He was not
prone to mistakes or leaps in judgement, especially when it came to defying a
man as dangerous as A1 Capone. In fact, the only reason he would have entered a
shooting war against Capone and his massive criminal organization was based on
his absolute certainty that he would win. That, and his little known agreement with
Chicago’s powerful mayor, Anton Cermak, made the bootlegger positive that he
could pull Capone from his throne.
“Ten Percent” Tony Cermak, the mayor of Chicago, would lead
the Touhys into a war with the Capone syndicate. Tony Cermak was, as Judge Lyle
noted, “not a nice man.” Instead he was an intim- idator and a bully with a
violent temper, who would never walk away from a confrontation. He liked very
few people and trusted no one. As his power grew, so did his paranoia. In the
state house, as president of Cook County and later as mayor, Cermak used
wiretaps, stolen mail, secret surveil¬lance and informants to get intelligence
on the weaknesses of his enemies.
Cermak was born on May 7, 1873 in a Bohemian village about
fifty miles from Prague. The family immigrated to America in 1884, settling in
a Chicago slum. In 1900, the Cermak family moved to Braidwood, in southern
Illinois, where the elder Cermak worked as a coal miner. At age sixteen Tony
returned to Chicago alone and saw his opportunity in the rough and tumble world
of ethnic politics. He organized the Bohemian community into a powerful voting
machine and before he was old enough to vote himself, Tony Cermak was a
political power in the Windy City.
In addition to his unquenchable thirst for power, Cermak was
also a greedy man who used his power and position to grow wealthy. While still
a ward politician, he formed the United Societies, a high- sounding name for
what was nothing more then a shakedown operation to collect money from the
hun¬dreds of pimps and saloon owners who worked along the notoriously wicked
22nd Street (which was later, oddly enough, renamed Cermak Road).
In 1902, at age twenty-six, Cermak went to the State Capitol
as a member of the House of Representatives. He eventually worked his way up to
Speaker of the House. This position allowed him,
if he wished, to block every piece of banking reform
legislation before the House. It was a position for which the state’s bankers
paid him richly. After three terms in the capitol, Cermak’s net worth was more
than one million dollars. By the time he became mayor of Chicago at age
fifty-six, Tony Cermak, the nearly illiterate immigrant, boasted a net worth of
seven million dollars, although he never had a job that paid him more then
$12,000 a year.
In 1931, Cermak was the undisputed boss of the most powerful
political machine in the country, and declared himself a candidate for Mayor of
Chicago. The syndicate, sensing the federal government might step in to restore
order to the streets of Chicago if the hopelessly corrupt “Big Bill” Thompson
was re-elected, stood solidly behind Cermak’s candidacy. Ten Percent Tony
Cermak the syndicate figured, was one of them. They could live and prosper with
Cermak at the helm. On election day, April 7, 1931, Cermak trounced Thompson by
the largest margin ever recorded in a Chicago may- oral election. He promised
the people of Chicago that he would rid their city of gangsters before the
Century of Progress Exhibition opened at the World’s Fair in the summer of
1933. But Cermak wouldn’t rid Chicago of organized crime. Instead he would try
to corral it, dominate it, and grow rich from it. All he had to do was give it
another face, a plot the federal government had unknowingly aided by putting
Capone in prison on a shaky tax charge. Capone’s imprisonment left a void in
Chicago’s crime syndicate. Cermak intended to fill that void with Roger Touhy.
Touhy had told Saul Alinsky, a sociologist, writer and
former member of the Joliet State Prison parole board, that in 1932 he entered
a partnership with Cermak to run Chicago’s underworld. The middle man in the
deal was Teddy Newberry, a thug who at one time or another had been associated
with every major gang in the city and acted as Cermak’s bag man on the street.
In a meeting at the mayor’s office, Cermak and Newberry
urged Touhy to wage a war with Capone’s mob. Roger was reluctant. A defensive
position against the mob was one thing, but an all out war was entirely
different. The syndicate could, Touhy pointed out, muster at least 500 gunmen in
a few days. Cermak responded, ‘You can have the entire police department.”
Eventually, Roger agreed to go along, and Cermak sent word
to his police commanders that the Touhys were to be cooperated with in the war
against the syndicate.
Wars cost money. Before the shooting started Roger had to be
positive that the cash he needed to support a street war was in place. Anton
Cermak could help with that.
At 6:56 A.M., on December 6, 1932, Tommy Touhy led a gang of
five masked men into the United States Post Office in the heart of Chicago’s
Loop. They overpowered the guard and stole $500,000 in securities and cash. The
getaway was easy. Two hours earlier, Cermak called the police shift com¬mander
and ordered him to pull all of his men out of the area. A month later the
Touhys, armed with machine guns, robbed a Minneapolis postal truck of $78,417
in bonds, cash, certificates and jewelry. Several days later they struck again,
robbing a Colorado mail truck of $520,000 in cash.
During that time Cermak increased his raids on syndicate
gambling dens. In one afternoon alone, Chicago police acting on Cermak’s orders
impound-ed 200 syndicate slot machines plus another 300 machines stored at
Gottleib and Company ware-houses. This was the same Gottleib that would later
provide slots to mob-owned Las Vegas casinos. As soon as the police took the
syndicate’s machines, Touhy’s men replaced them with their own one armed
bandits. The moment a Mob handbook was closed Touhy’s operators were moved in
to fill the gap. As always, Cermak had an ulterior motive. The raids were a
calculated move to cut the syndicate’s cash flow in half so that they wouldn’t
have the funding to carry on a drawn out street war.
It didn’t take the mob’s leadership a long time to figure out
they had been double-crossed by Cermak, who, along with Touhy, was now putting
on the dou¬ble squeeze. The quick solution for the syndicate was to kill Roger
and Tommy Touhy. However killing them wouldn’t prove easy, especially now that
they were surrounded by a small army of enforcers including George “Baby Face”
Nelson, a proven tough guy.
Still, the syndicate’s bosses were determined to stop the
flow of union treasuries to Touhy. To do that, they would have to send out a
message; they had to throw a scare into the union bosses. It had to be loud and
violent and it had to be someone close to Touhy.
Bill Rooney was just the right person.
William James Rooney was a labor goon who had done his first
prison time back in 1907. In the years that followed Rooney would face dozens
of arrests including one in 1910 for the suspected murder of Joseph Patrick
Shea. Shea had been the business agent for the Chicago sheet metal workers’
union, a local which Rooney was trying to muscle his way into. He was acquitted
of the murder, even though he had shot Shea dead in the middle of the union
hall in front of at least 150 witnesses. No one testi-fied against him and
Rooney was released to contin-ue his takeover of the union. By 1928, he not
only controlled the sheet metal workers’, but the flat jan¬itors’ and the meat
cutters’ unions as well. Capone sent word that he wanted half of Rooney’s labor
empire. Rooney refused and Capone threatened his life. Unfazed, Rooney made his
own threats and then started to move his operation and his family out to Des
Plains to live under Touhy’s protection.
On the night they killed him, Rooney was still moving his
belongings from his home in Chicago to a rented house in Des Plains. His wife
and two chil-dren had already driven to the country.
Rooney waited outside his home while his chauf-feur sprinted
down the street to retrieve his car from a rented garage about five minutes
away. Draped in a heavy grey top coat and dress hat, Rooney paced back and
forth on the lawn as a blue sedan pulled up to the curb. One of the men in the
back seat, believed to be Paul Ricca, rolled down a window and said, “Hi Billy.
”
When Rooney stepped up to the car and bent down to look
inside, a shotgun appeared in the win-dow and three blasts ripped into Rooney’s
head, chest and stomach. Remarkably, the blast didn’t knock him down. Instead,
Rooney grabbed the car as it sped away, but then slid slowly to his knees. He
was dragged twenty-five feet before releasing his grip.
With Rooney dead, Red Barker and Murray Humpreys took over
the sheet metal and the build-ing service employees’ union and looted its
treasury.
Rooney’s murder was one of the last bright moments for the
syndicate. For the next two years, the Touhy-Cermak-Newberry combination
pounded the mob mercilessly. In fact, within three days of Rooney’s murder, the
Touhys responded by killing Johnny Genaro, Capone’s new acting chief of staff,
and his driver, Joey Vince, by pulling up along the side of Genaro’s car and
drilling a dozen rounds of machine gun fire into both of them.
Genero died immediately but Vince managed to live until the
cops arrived. A patrolman lifted the hood’s head out of a pool of blood and
whispered “Who shot you? Who did this?”
For a man full of bullet holes on the threshold of death,
Vince was remarkably lucid. He sat upright for a second and said ‘1 can’t
describe the men. I was too confused at the moment it happened...and I would
never tell you anyway, you piece of shit. ”
Then he fell back into the gutter and died.
A few days later, Roger Touhy, armed with a machine gun,
walked into a meeting at the Teamsters Headquarters in Chicago. With him was
his top enforcer, Willie Sharkey, and two other men. Each of them carried a
machine gun and a pistol as they herded the union officials and lined them up
against the wall. As more members entered the building for a special emergency
meeting, they too were lined up against the wall until there were over one
hundred members held hostage.
After two hours, Roger stood before the crowd and spoke.
“Listen up you mugs, we’ve come here today to clean the dago
syndicate out of the Teamsters Union.”
A cheer went up across the room from the mem-bership. Roger
looked over the faces in the hall and spotted a half dozen of Murray Humpreys’
enforcers including Artie Barrett whom Touhy had known from the Valley. “We
thought you were a right guy” he said to Barrett. ‘What are you doing hanging
around these rats for?”
‘Well, hell, I gotta eat Rog, ” Barrett said.
He let Barrett leave but pulled two of the syndi-cate’s
union leaders named Goldberg and Sass into an office and told them to call
Murray Humpreys and tell him to come to the building as soon as he could. When
they said they couldn’t remember the number, Roger said, ‘Well, get together
and think it up or we’ll give it to you right outside the door. None of you
other mugs have to be afraid, we’re after Klondike O’Donnell, Camel Humpreys
and Jack White and we won’t hurt anybody else.”
Out of ignorance or fear Goldberg and Sass did¬n’t place the
call.
Roger rounded up his men and left the building at 11:30 in
the morning, three full hours after they had arrived, taking Goldberg and Sass
with him. His last words to the membership were, ‘These two are going to get
theirs. ” Once again the membership exploded in cheers.
Sass and Goldberg were released two days later. They were
not harmed or abused. “Actually,” said Goldberg, “they treated us well. The
food was excel-lent. The conversation was good.”
Touhy’s brazen daylight raid on the heart of the syndicate’s
union operation was a slap in the face for Red Barker and Murray Humpreys. The
syndicate, less than several hundred in number, had ruled over Chicago’s
massive unions by fear and the threat of violence. Touhy’s raid had temporarily
taken away that edge and they needed to get it back.
Barker and Humpreys retaliated with a daylight drive-by
shooting at Wall’s Bar-B-Que and Rib.
Wall’s was a restaurant frequented by the Touhys because
Roger had developed a friendship with a waitress, Peggy Carey. In the middle of
a sun-filled Saturday afternoon, four carloads of syndicate gun-men sped by the
restaurant while Roger and sever¬al of his men lounged around in the parking
lot. They sprayed the lot and the restaurant with machine gun fire. The Touhys
returned fire but remarkably, no one was injured in the melee.
In retaliation for the shooting the Touhys struck The Dells,
a large syndicate speakeasy and casino operating just inside Touhy’s territory.
It was under the protection of a hood named Fred Pacelli, younger brother of
future United States Congressman Bill Pacelli. Three of Roger’s best men,
Willie Sharkey, Roy Marshalk and George Wilke arrived at The Dells driving
Roger Touhy’s new Chrysler sedan. They walked into the casino, surrounded
Pacelli and fired one round into his face and one into the small of his back.
After the hood’s girlfriend, Maryanne Bruce, tried to wrestle the pis-tol out
of Marshalk’s hand they fired a round into her head as well.
A few days later, the Touhys gunned down Red Barker. It was
a damaging blow to the syndicate. Willie Sharkey, Roger’s most reliable killer,
had rented an apartment overlooking Barker’s office and waited there patiently,
perched in a window, with a water-cooled, tripod set machine gun. Sharkey
killed Barker by firing thirty-six bullets into him in a matter of seconds as
he walked down the street.
At almost exactly the same time across town, Touhy’s
gunners, dressed as Chicago police and rid-ing in a borrowed police cruiser,
killed a syndicate enforcer named “Fat Tony” Jerfitar, and his partner, Nicky
Provenzano. The drive by shooting occurred as the two hoods sat in front of a
store with their eyes closed, sun bathing their faces. They never knew what hit
them.
Next, Touhy’s gang killed a beer peddler named James J.
Kenny. He was found in an alley dead, hav-ing had the back of his head blown
off. A few weeks before the murder the Touhys had taken the unusu-al step of
warning Kenny not to push the syndicate’s booze inside their kingdom. He did it
anyway, so they killed him.
Four days later an unknown hood, believed to be a
professional killer imported from New York by Frank Nitti, was found dead on a
Chicago sidewalk. His face was blown off by shotgun pellets. His frozen body
was planted, literally, in a snow bank on a dead end street.
A week later, Joe Provenzo, a syndicate soldier, was killed
when two men wearing police uniforms asked him his name. When he answered, they
thanked him, shot him through the head and calm¬ly walked away. Five minutes
later and several blocks away, John Liberto, another Nitti hood, was shot in
the head at close range by the same two men.
After that the syndicate took two more hard hits. At the
crack of dawn Cermak was in his office, sur-rounded by his special squad and
the Chicago chief of police, planning the day’s raids against the mob’s most
lucrative casinos. Over the remainder of the morning, working on information
provided by Roger Touhy and Teddy Newberry, twelve mob casinos were closed
down. Sixteen Chicago detectives were demoted, reassigned or fired for allowing
a rising syndicate hood named “Tough Tony” Capezio to operate in their
districts. The loss of sixteen cops, all bought and paid for, hurt the
syndicate badly, leav-ing them with very few officers on the take.
Cermak’s pressure on the police department had scared most
officers off the syndicate’s pad, while the others waited on the sidelines to
see who would come out on top in this war.
The next blow came when two of the syndicate’s best gunners,
Nicholas Maggio, and his partner in crime, Anthony Persico, were targeted in a
retalia-tion killing for the murder of Bill Rooney. John Rooney, the business
agent for the billposters’ union and brother to Bill Rooney, ambushed and
killed the two men on a back stretch of road deep inside Touhy’s territory.
The syndicate was taking a pounding. Their ranks were
already thinned from assaults by the federal government, not to mention the
beating they were taking at the hands of the Touhy organization. To bolster
their numbers the outfit’s leaders recruit¬ed members of the 42s, a gang of
crazy kids from an Italian neighborhood called the Patch. This same gang would
produce the syndicate’s next ruling body in the form of Sam Giancana, Marshal
Ciafano, Teets Battaglia and others.
Reinforced with the 42s, the syndicate tracked down a top
Touhy enforcer named Frank Schaeffler, once a contender for the world’s light
heavy-weight crown. They shot him as he entered an all-night speakeasy called
The Advance.
The Touhy forces struck back by killing a major syndicate
pimp named Nicky Renelli and in a sepa-rate incident gunning down Elmer Russel,
a bounc¬er at a syndicate bar called the Alaskan Forum Road House.
The next mob hood to die was Maurice Barrett. He was shot
through the head and arm, then dropped at the front door of a neighborhood
hospital where he bled to death.
Three days later the Touhys lined up three of Nitti’s men
and shot them through the knees with machine guns after they tried to muscle
into a meet¬ing at the Chicago house painters’ union.
The Touhys scored another big hit when they killed Danny
Cain, the thirty-two-year-old president of the Chicago Coal Teamsters and
brother-in-law of George Red Barker. Several men in a car followed Cain home as
he left a nightclub. They pulled up alongside his car and drowned it in machine
gun fire.
On a freezing Wednesday night, Willie O’Brien, a slugger
employed by the Touhys, walked into a pop-ular speakeasy called the Garage.
There he was jumped by three men who tried to force him outside to the rear
alley where a car was waiting. O’Brien managed to fight them all off until one
of the men pulled a pistol and fired a shot into O’Brien’s back. Unarmed,
O’Brien was running toward the front door when another shot caught him in the
leg and a third shot went into the palm of his right hand as he used it to
cover his spine. A half an hour later O’Brien staggered into the waiting room
of the Augustana hospital.
Officer Martin O’Malley, who grew up with Touhy and O’Brien
in the Valley, arrived and inter-viewed the hood on his death bed.
‘Who shot you Billy?”
“I known them. Known them for ten years, but I won’t tell
you who they are. ”
“You’re going to die Billy. Who killed you? I’ll have your
revenge.”
O’Brien just shook his head and died.
Seven days later, the Touhys struck back. It was fifteen
degrees below zero and snowing when a car pulled up to the curb. Several men in
long coats climbed out, walked into a pool room and poured five shots into a
syndicate hood named Fred Petilli who was leaning against a pool table, his
back to the door. A few moments later the same car pulled up in front of The
Garage nightclub where Jimmy O’Brien had been killed. A tall man, probably
Basil Banghart, opened the front door to the club, tossed in a bomb and said
“This is for Jimmy, you bas-tards!”
The bomb blew the place to bits but remarkably, no one was
killed.
After that, Charlie O’Neill, a very young Touhy gunman, was
kidnapped off the street, shot twice in the head and dumped in the middle of
traffic on a busy intersection.
The Touhys responded by killing a labor goon named Nichols
Razes. They shot him five times dur-ing a running gun battle in the Green Hut
restau-rant owned by Razes’ brother. Charles McKenna, a Touhy labor enforcer
and president of the truck painters’ union, was shot in the arm during the gun
battle. He was arrested for murder as he straggled down the street, murder
weapon still in hand. He was held, booked and then released for “lack of
evi-dence.”
That same month, the syndicate tried to kidnap Roger Touhy’s
two sons as they waited for their mother to pick them up from school in Des
Plains. Somebody had to pay for that and Roger chose Eddie Gambino, a dope
peddler and union goon. They caught Gambino as he was about to step out of his
car. Two gunmen, stepped up to the driver’s window and opened fire. Before he
bled to death, Gambino was able to pull his own pistol but dropped it before he
could fire at his killers. One of the two killers, enraged at Gambino’s
defiance, stepped back over to the hood’s blood-smeared face and fired at his
tem-ple.
By the spring of 1933 the impossible was hap-pening: the
mouse was eating the lion. The Touhys were beating the syndicate.
********************
Tony Cermak and Teddy Newberry, probably acting on Touhy’s
advice, decided that the quickest way to end the gang war was to kill the
Capone outfit’s new leader, Frank Nitti. After that they figured all the other
hoods would fall into line and the two-year-old war would be ended.
Nitti became boss of the Chicago mob through attrition. In
the winter of 1931 the federal govern-ment started its crackdown on Capone and
his oper-ation. On the freezing morning of February 28, 1931, seventy-five
heavily armed United States Marshals rounded up and deported more than 125
Capone hoods who had entered the country illegally. There were no long and
costly trials, appeals or delays. The gangsters were handcuffed, shoved into an
airplane, flown to New York and then shipped back to Europe.
The federal government’s lethal use of deporta-tion as a
weapon against organized crime had begun. A few days later, on March 13, 1931 a
grand jury indicted Capone for tax evasion. Over the next twenty-four months
the Treasury Department would effectively close down Capone’s syndicate by
locking away the organization’s top leadership. On November 7, 1931, Al’s brother
Ralph Capone would go to prison because of a tax conviction. Jake Guzak, Mops
Volpe, Murray Humpreys and even Capone’s financier, Louis Lipschultz, were
eventually indict¬ed and convicted on tax charges along with their boss.
The next in line was Frank Nitti.
Francisco Raffele Nitto, or Frank Nitti as he pre-ferred,
was a frail, pensive little man with ulcers and a nervous twitch. He was born
outside Palermo, but avoided discussing his Sicilian background, pre-ferring to
have himself called “Italian.”
Unlike Capone, Nitti was fairly well educated, having
trained as a chemist before arriving in Chicago by way of New York. He worked
as a barber for a while in the immense Italian community but quickly turned to
fencing stolen gems brought to him by his life long friend Louis Greenberg. It
was Greenberg who had introduced Nitti to Capone.
The newspaper called Nitti ‘The Enforcer, ” but for those
who knew the real story, the name was comical. As far as anyone knows, Nitti
never killed anyone. Instead, he made his way up through the mob’s ranks
because he was smart, pushy and cun-ning. While it was true that he would
easily order a beating or an execution by the goon squads he con-trolled,
syndicate leaders rightly considered Nitti a nervous, high-strung individual,
better suited, as Paul Ricca once said, “to be the barber-fence he had been.”
At mid-morning on the day Cermak decided to have Frank Nitti
killed, His Honor summoned two members of his special squad to his office,
Harry Miller and Henry Lang. Miller, who had once been dismissed from the
police force for trafficking nar-cotics, was the youngest of the notorious
Miller brothers who headed the Valley Gang. Lang had been a bag man for former
Mayor Big Bill Thompson and taught Miller the little bit he needed to know
about being a crook when he came on the force by “special political
appointment” back in 1927. Now, both men were detective sergeants on Cermak’s
‘Special Squad,” a group of tough cops with ques¬tionable backgrounds, brought
together to carry out Cermak’s every whim.
At 10:00 in the morning on December 20, 1932, Cermak called
Miller and Lang to his office. When they arrived, Teddy Newberry was already
there sit-ting on the mayor’s desk smoking one of his small cigars. Newberry
handed them a slip of paper with Frank Nitti’s name and office address on it
and told them that it was time for Nitti to die. Miller and Lang were
commissioned for the task. He said that once Nitti was dead he would pay them
$15,000 each. That was good money for a pair of cops who were supposed to be
making less than one hundred dollars a week.
Lang and Miller drove to Nitti’s office at the La
Salle-Wacker building and flagged down a passing squad car. “We might need some
help inside,” they told the driver, a rookie cop named Chris Callahan. Then the
three men entered the massive office building and took the elevator to the
fifth floor, room 554, where Nitti kept a cramped, three-room office. When they
entered the room they found Nitti, his bodyguard and several others gathered
around a desk. Lang ordered them to turn and face the wall with their hands
raised over their heads. Lang then grabbed Nitti by the wrists and ordered
Callahan to search him.
“When I bent down to grab Nitti’s ankles/’ Callahan said,
‘Lang fired five shots into Nitti. I leaped back. Nitti staggered toward the
door and then he stopped and looked at Lang, and he said ‘What’s this for?’ and
Lang shot him again. Then Lang walked to an anteroom, alone, and fired a
sin-gle shot. When he came back out, he was shot through the hand.”
Nitti had been shot in the neck, leg and groin. He was taken
to Bridewell Hospital, where his father- in-law, Dr. Gaetano Ronga, was called
to care for him. After several hours Dr. Ronga emerged from the operating room
to announce that Frank Nitti would probably die before the night was over.
Nitti lived and, while it was true that the shoot-ing had
panicked what was left of Capone’s leader-ship, it was now only a matter of
days before they reorganized and struck back. The good news for Touhy was that
Murray Humpreys, Red Barker’s assistant, did not fight being jailed on federal
income tax charges, no doubt to avoid sure death at the hands of the Touhys. The
bad news was that the shooting put a far more competent and dangerous man in
charge of the outfit in the form of Paul “the Waiter” Ricca. Ricca’s first move
was to bring in ‘Three Fingers” Jack White to replace the murdered Red Barker.
White was a Valley Gang graduate who said he got his
nickname when a brick fell on his hand on a construction site when he was a
boy, crushing sev-eral fingers. It was a deformity he tried to hide with a
glove, stuffing the empty fingers with cotton. In fact it’s more likely that
White lost the fingers in a bungled burglary attempt where he mishandled
nitroglycerin, a common mishap that probably cost Roger Touhy his right thumb
as well. White recruited James “Fur” Sammons, a certified psychopath and
probably the most dangerous man in Chicago, if not in the United States.
Like White, Sammons’ record was long and var-ied. In 1900 he
and four others kidnaped an eleven- year-old, eighty-five-pound school girl,
raped her, broke her nose, punched out one of her eyes and stabbed her in the
vaginal area with a pencil. Sammons, who showed no remorse over the attack,
smirked at the girl’s parents in court. He was given five years for his part in
the crime and was paroled two years later. Two months after his release, Sammons
was arrested for the murder of Patrick Barret, a saloon keeper. He was
convicted and sen-tenced to be hanged. He was put into solitary con-finement
where it was said he was driven insane by the solitude. He remained on death
row until 1917 when he managed to escape and commit a series of robberies
before being recaptured.
Both Three Fingers Jack White and Sammons had been paroled
in 1923 by Illinois Governor Len Small after paying a small fortune in bribe
money to “Porky” Dillon, a Touhy gunman who had been one of Small’s bagmen.
Porky Dillon had an interesting background. He had once been sentenced to serve
ten years in the state prison but managed to rig a pardon for himself from the
same corrupt governor, Small.
White was a competent battle tactician. Now backed by
Sammons’ psychotic brutality, he was able to take back the upper hand in the
battle against the Touhys in four quick and deadly blows. The first to die
under the White-Sammons regime was Teddy Newberry, the mayor’s bag man who
plotted the Nitti shooting. Newberry was found lying face down in a ditch of
frozen water in Porter County, Indiana. The killers were on their way to a mob
burial ground, the gruesome real estate that belonged to “Machine Gun” Jack
McGurn and was later passed down to Mickey “the Ant” Spilotro in the 1970s.
Next they got Touhy’s strongest ally, Paddy Barrell. Barrell
was the international vice president of the Teamsters. He was killed while he
and his bodyguard, Willie Marks, were vacationing in Wisconsin. Marks, a former
Moran gunner, had sur-vived the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre by being late for
work. This time he wasn’t so lucky. The killer, believed to be Fur Sammons,
caught Barrell and Marks off guard while the two were fishing knee deep in a
lake. The blast from the shotgun, fired only inches from the victims, nearly
took off Barrell’s head.
A second and awesome setback for the Touhys came when White
and Sammons caught Matt Kolb at his saloon, the Club Morton. Kolb was standing
in the hallway next to a roulette wheel. Walking up from behind him, Sammons
said, “Hello Matt. ” As Kolb reached out to shake hands, Sammons grabbed his
hand and arm tightly as White pulled out an automatic and poured the six shots
into the little fat man. After the killers started to leave, Sammons said, “I
better make sure.” He returned and fired another shot into Kolb’s head. The
final round picked up the dead man’s skull and bounced it off the floor. With
Kolb dead and his blackmail records gone, the price for political and police
protection went through the roof, even with Cermak on their side.
The next blow came when Tommy Touhy was gunned down by Fur
Sammons. It happened when Tommy and two cars of his men combed the streets of
Chicago looking for Fur Sammons. As it turns out Sammons was out in an
armor-plated car, looking for Tommy. The two groups spent several hours
stalking each other until Tommy decided that he had had enough of the cat and
mouse game and ordered his caravan to pull over at the intersection and wait
for Sammons.
Several minutes later Sammons brazenly pulled up alongside
them, Tommy leaned out his window, machine gun in hand and opened fire on
Sammons, hitting his tires and radiator. Then, without taking his finger off
the trigger, Tommy climbed out of his car and stood on the bumper and fired into
Sammons’ windows. Sammons leaned out of his window and released a clip into
Tommy’s legs while driving with one hand and firing with the other. A squad car
from the town of River Forrest pulled onto the scene and demanded that the
gunmen pull over. The Touhys answered by firing a clip off at the cops who
returned fire, but by then Touhy and Sammons had disappeared into the city.
Tommy Touhy was cut up badly. This was a major setback for
the Cermak-Touhy operation since Tommy was the organization’s field general.
Unlike the pensive and remote Roger, Tommy was earthy and gregarious, gifted
with a natural charisma that his group trusted. He was their motivator. Without
him, the gang was in trouble.
Despite the recent small victories that White had scored for
the syndicate it was undeniable that the mouse was still eating the lion.
Against all odds, the Touhy-Cermak combination was winning the street war. The
42 Gang, the syndicate’s front-line troops, were tough and fearless, but they
were wild and undisciplined and the Touhys were picking them off with ease.
Other, more seasoned syndicate hoods were turning up dead at the rate of one
every other day The Chicago Tribune put the number of casual-ties as high as
seventy dead in one six-month peri¬od. At the same time, the federal government
was closing in on the syndicate, deporting hundreds of reliable operatives and
throwing most of the remaining syndicate power players in jail.
Although the Touhys had taken their share of a beating, they
could hold out in the fight for a couple years more. They were smaller, tighter
and more organized than the remains of Capone’s mob and they had the resources
to hire the best gunmen money could buy.
Chasing the syndicate out of the Teamsters had assured them
ready access to the union’s enormous pension fund, and the Teamsters’ top
leadership was backing Touhy’s war against the syndicate.
Then there was Tony Cermak, who remained Touhy’s strongest
ally. As long as they had Cermak on their side, they controlled the police and
City Hall.
It was clear to Paul Ricca that the key to ending the war
was to kill Anton Cermak. For its inability to take back the streets from
Touhy, Chicago looked ridiculous in the eyes of the new national crime syn-dicate.
Worse yet, the New York mobs were taking advantage of the disorder in Chicago
by planting their flags in Los Angeles, Florida, Arkansas, Nevada and Texas.
They had to kill Cermak. The war had to end.
“Touhy had the syndicate on the ropes and they were ready to
throw in the sponge but then they killed Anton Cermak.”—Saul Alinsky
Anton Cermak had an animal’s instinct for survival, and
after the failed attempt on Frank Nitti’s life, he knew his own days were
numbered. In fact, a few weeks after the botched murder attempt, Louis “Short
Pants” Campagna, Capone’s former bodyguard who had risen to syndicate chief,
had personally planned Cermak’s murder, almost succeeding in gunning him down
in an early morning ambush inside the Loop.
Cermak tried to postpone the inevitable by beef-ing up his
bodyguard detail from two to five men and augmenting them with private security
forces. He also took the added precaution of moving from the accessible
Congress Hotel to the more secluded Morrison, where he paid for a private
elevator that went nonstop to his penthouse suite.
It didn’t matter how careful he was. They were going to kill
him. They had to kill him. They planned to kill Touhy, too but that could wait
because they knew that wouldn’t end the war. Cermak would just replace him with
another ambi¬tious hood. Murdering Cermak was the key. Kill the head and the
body dies.
While it was true that there was a huge risk in killing the
mayor of the second largest city in the United States, it was the key to their
survival and maybe, just maybe, they would get away with it. A Chicago mayor
had been gunned down in the past. Chicago’s mayor Henry Harrison was killed in
October, 1893. The shooter was one Eugene Pendergast, who claimed that the
mayor had reneged on a political appointment.
The syndicate knew the shooter they found would have to be a
“nutcase” as they put it, but they could find a patsy to take the fall. That
was the easy part. It was all a matter of timing and opportunity, both of which
came together when Anton Cermak announced that he would greet President-elect
Roosevelt in a public park in Florida.
Finding the patsy to take the blame for the mur-der fell to
Paul the Waiter Ricca. Ricca earned his nickname while working in a restaurant
owned by his mentor “Diamond Joe” Esposito, a colorful underworld character
whose deep political contacts enabled him to finagle a federal license to
import sugar from Cuba into the states. Sugar, and lots of it, was the primary
ingredient needed to make boot¬leg whisky.
Esposito was a major player in the underworld. With the
money he made by importing sugar, Esposito was able to expand his criminal
holdings into the control of several vital teamster unions which he flatly
refused to share with Capone. So they killed him. He was shot on the street
while his wife and two small children watched.
As a reward for setting up his boss for the kill, Capone
allowed Ricca to take over most of Esposito’s operations including the legal
and profitable sugar importing business which Ricca handed over to a young hood
named Dave Yaras from Chicago’s west side. Ricca invested in Yaras’ move to
Florida and in exchange got a handsome cut of all of Yaras’ illegal ventures,
including a piece of his narcotics smug-gling ring based out of Havana. Within
a year after his arrival, Yaras’ rackets in south Florida and Cuba were second
only to Meyer Lansky’s in size and prof-itability.
According to mob boss Sam Giancana, it was Yaras who decided
that Cermak’s killer would be Giuseppe Zangara, a thirty-two-year-old
bricklayer who preferred to be known by his Americanized name of Joey Zangara.
Giuseppe Zangara was a mean, near-illiterate, sullen little
hood from Southern Italy. He arrived in America in 1923 and took up residence
with an uncle in Paterson, New Jersey.
In September of 1929, Zangara and a syndicate hood, Tony
Adgostino, were arrested for violating the prohibition law by running a
1,000-gallon still in Mount Vail, New Jersey. At the station house, Zangara
claimed his name was Luigi DiBernardo and pleaded guilty, telling the police he
owned the still, thus allowing the higher-ranking Adgostino to walk away from
prosecution. For his troubles, Zangara was sentenced to one year and a day at
Atlanta Federal Prison. During sentencing, United States Attorney Philip
Forman, later a federal judge, asked ‘Your real name is Zangara, isn’t it?”leaving
the implication that Zangara was no stranger to the courtroom. Off the record,
the boot-legger admitted that he was Giuseppe Zangara but that he would enter
prison under the assumed name of Luigi DiBernardo. Several years later, when
the United States Secret Service investigated the Cermak shooting, agents
compared photographs of DiBernardo the bootlegger with Zangara the assas-sin
and determined that they matched. Remarkably, the agent never followed up the
lead.
Paroled from prison in 1931, Zangara moved to south Florida
where he kept to himself. One of his few known contacts was his roommate, an
Italian immigrant named Joseph Patane who worked at Valentino’s restaurant in
Miami, a mob hangout. Patane was introduced to Zangara by their landla¬dy,
Constantina Vatrone, a Sicilian immigrant whose husband Petro Vatrone had been
active in the mob in Florida until he was stabbed to death in 1924, in what she
later told the Secret Service was “an underworld incident. ”
Zangara spent most of his time gambling and losing heavily.
In need of cash, he took a position as a mule, or courier, in Dave Yaras’
heroin smuggling operation, working out of a narcotics processing plant in
south Florida. Zangara’s job was to trans-port the drugs up to New York where
he turned them over to distribution specialists like Ben “Bugsy” Siegel in
Brooklyn, Abner “Longy” Zwillman in New Jersey and others who would pay for the
delivery. In turn, Zangara was supposed to hand the cash over to Yaras.
But, according to several published reports, while Zangara
was on one of his runs he made off with the mob’s money and lost it at the
track. Yaras decided to kill him. Then news came from Chicago City Hall that
his Honor, Anton J. Cermak, would make an appearance in Miami’s Bayfront Park
to greet President-elect Roosevelt.
Anton Cermak would make a public appearance in a crowded,
open area. It was a godsend for the mob. Ricca sent word down to Yaras that
they were going to kill Cermak at the park and that Yaras was to line somebody
up to take the fall for the murder. It was too big a hit to not leave a gunman
to take the blame. The shotgun killing of Cook County’s Assistant States
Attorney Billy McSwiggin a few years before had taught them a valuable lesson:
always leave a fall guy.
Yaras called Zangara into his office, and gave him his two
dismal choices. The mob could kill him, or Zangara could take his chances and
shoot Cermak for them. Maybe the cops would kill him, or maybe the crowd would
rip him to pieces, or maybe he’d get lucky. Maybe he’d get caught after he
killed Cermak. He could claim he was insane and if the judge and jury bought
it, at the most he might get ten maybe fifteen years in an insane asylum and
then he could walk, all debts forgiven. Yaras knew what he was talking about.
Florida, second only to Texas, had the most lenient laws on the books in
dealing with mentally ill criminals.
Zangara chose to kill Cermak and take his chances with an
insanity plea or the possibility that he could slip into the crowd and
disappear.
As implausible as it might seem, Zangara may have actually
believed that he was going to get away with it. After the shooting, when Secret
Service agents searched Zangara’s room, they found his neatly packed travel bag
sitting in the middle of his bed. Inside were his clothes, a book, The Wehman
Brothers’ Easy Method for Learning Spanish
Quickly, several newspaper clippings about Roosevelt’s trip
to Florida and another on the Lincoln assassination conspiracy.
Despite Zangara’s fantasies of escape, the mob had no
intentions of letting him slip away and dis-appear. They needed a patsy to take
the fall. They had already started painting a picture of Zangara, the
conservative registered Republican, as Zangara, a radical communist who wanted
to overthrow the American government. But better than a patsy, they wanted a
dead patsy. According to Roger Touhy, the second after Zangara shot Cermak, a
mob assassin would shoot Zangara and disappear into the crowd, leaving the
Miami police, Secret Service or Cermak’s private guards with the credit for
killing the Mayor’s murderer. The gunman was also there to make sure that
Zangara followed through on his assignment. As Chicago newsman Jack Lait wrote,
‘had Cermak escaped Zangara’s bullets, another trigger man would have gotten
him.”
The two back-up gunmen were Three Fingers Jack White and A1
Capone’s former bodyguard Frankie Rio, both of whom were picked up at the
Chicago train station two days before Anton Cermak was shot. But the police had
no reason to hold the two smirking hoods who explained that they were on their
way to Florida for a short vacation. ‘You mugs slay me,"White said. “First
you ride me to get out of town and then when I try to leave, you want me to
stay.”
The next day, down in Florida, Giuseppe Zangara went to the
Davis pawn shop in downtown Miami and spent eight dollars on a .32 calibre
revolver and ten bullets. While still in the shop, Zangara placed five bullets
in the chamber and kept five in his pock-et and then began stalking Anton
Cermak. Zangara walked to the Bostick Hotel because he had read in the papers
that the hotel’s owners, Horace and May Bostick, were close friends of Cermak
and expected him to drop by that evening before he went to Bayfront Park.
Zangara went to the hotel, which was actually more of a rooming house than
anything else. He paid his dollar for the night and asked to see all of the
exits and entrances. Then he went to his room where he proceeded to sit on the
edge of the bed, with the door open, and stare down the hallway toward the
front door of the hotel, waiting for Anton Cermak to arrive so he could kill
him.
At 5:30, after six hours of waiting, Zangara prob-ably
realized that Cermak wasn’t coming and left the hotel by a back door. He
quickly walked several blocks to a cigar manufacturing plant owned by Andrea
Valenti, a Sicilian immigrant. Zangara, Valenti and two other men, Steve
Valenti and Lorenzo Grandi, left the factory at about 7:30 and made their way
to Bayfront Park. But they miscal-culated how many people would turn out for
the event. By the time they arrived at the park, at about eight o’clock, 10,000
spectators filled it to standing room only. Slowly, and sweating profusely,
Zangara and the others obnoxiously pushed and shoved through the crowd trying
desperately to make their way to the bandstand.
At about that same time, Anton Cermak was preparing to leave
his hotel room for the park. He was dismally sick with peritonitis causing him
to double over in pain. A lesser man would have can-celed the night’s
engagement but Tony Cermak had always been extraordinary. As he prepared to put
on his light blue and white jacket, a bodyguard handed him a bulky black
bullet-proof vest but Cermak did-n’t want it. It was too humid and he was weak.
It was a mistake that would cost him his life.
Cermak arrived at the park about a half-hour before Franklin
Roosevelt’s car pulled up to the bandstand. At about the same time, Zangara
pushed and shoved his way up to the second row of chairs.
F.D.R. placed himself on the car’s rear seat. He took a
small black microphone and made a short speech as a flood light beamed down on
him in his white suit. He was the perfect target, but Zangara, less than
thirty-five feet away, never fired.
When Roosevelt’s speech ended, he turned and looked up at
the stage and saw Cermak sitting in the front row and waved ‘Tony! Come on down
here. ”
Smiling broadly, Cermak rose from his chair and walked
toward F.D.R., his bodyguards stepping up to join him, but Cermak told them to
stay where they were. It was unseemly, he said, for the Mayor of Chicago to be
photographed with more body¬guards than the President-elect.
The two men shook hands and chatted for less than three
minutes, then Cermak stepped away from the car and turned to his right and
then, for some unknown reason, walked a dozen steps away from the stage and
toward the place where Zangara was waiting.
At that moment, Zangara leaped out of the crowd and sprang
onto an open seat, drew his revolver from his trouser pocket, fired five rounds
directly at Cermak. One bullet hit Cermak in the right armpit and pushed its
way to just above his heart and then drove itself into his right lung, causing
the mayor to grab his chest with both arms and slowly sink to his knees.
Several other bystanders were struck by bullets, yet Zangara
maintained, repeatedly, that he never got off more than three rounds from his
five-round pistol. Remarkably, police recovered seven bullets from the scene.
Just minutes after the shooting, United States
Representative-elect Mark Wilcox and Chicagoan Robert Gore, told a radio
newsman they were stand-ing a few feet from Zangara. Gore said, “He was
shooting at Cermak. There is no doubt about that. The killer waited until Mr.
Roosevelt sat and then fired. ”
Based on Gore and Wilcox’s statement, reports that Cermak
had been shot by Chicago gangsters went out over the wires at once. But after
the first day, there was no other mention of gangsters being involved in the
shooting. Later, when Roosevelt waited in the halls of the Jackson Memorial
Hospital where Cermak was being treated, he point¬ed out that not one of the
six persons hit by bullets were near him when they were shot. In fact they were
at least thirty feet away and only two or three feet away from Cermak and,
added Roosevelt, Zangara had not fired off a single shot at him while he had a
full eight minute window during his speech. Roosevelt concluded that Zangara
was “a Chicago gangster” sent to kill Cermak.
In 1959, at his last parole hearing, Roger Touhy said that
when Zangara started shooting, Jack White and Frankie Rio, both wearing Cook
County Deputy Sheriff’s badges, waited until Cermak fell to his knees and then
stepped out from the crowd and fired a .45 caliber pistol at Zangara but the
shot missed and nicked several bystanders instead. Before they could get off a
second shot, the crowd had leaped onto Zangara, in effect saving his life.
From his hospital bed Anton Cermak insisted that he was
Zangara’s target. When his secretary arrived from Chicago, Cermak said to him,
“So you’re alive! I figured maybe they’d shot up the office too.”
Cermak was in relatively good condition on the first few
nights in the hospital and issued his own news bulletins on his condition. By
the third day, however, colitis complicated Cermak’s wounds and caused him
great pain. At one point Cermak’s intestinal trouble made his temperature rise
to 101.6. On February 27, Cermak contracted pneumo-nia and died. Giuseppe
Zangara went on trial for murder.
Zangara’s three lawyers appointed by the state didn’t speak
Italian, had never tried a criminal case and none of them had ever argued
before a jury. It was their recommendation that Zangara plead guilty. When he
did, the court sentenced him to death less than two months after he fired the
fatal shots that killed Anton Cermak.
His last few days were dismal. The only people to visit him
in jail were the prison chaplains, whom he cursed and threw out regularly. Just
before he was walked out to the death chamber, the prison warden asked Zangara
if he was part of an organized group that plotted to kill Cermak “No. I have no
friends. It was my own idea. ”
Then the little murderer strutted down the hall and sat
himself in the electric chair, but he was so short his feet didn’t touch the
ground. Just before the guards placed a hood over his head Zangara turned to
the warden, smirked and yelled “Viva Italia! Viva comorra!”
The word comorra was one of many Italian terms for the
Mafia. Then he leaned back and waited. The room was filled with an
uncomfortable silence as 2,300 volts snuffed out Zangara’s strange life.
Ed Kelly, Chicago’s next mayor, was the kind of city
official that Frank Nitti could live with. When reporters were looking to tell
Kelly that he was Chicago’s new mayor, they found him gambling at a mob owned
race track in Havana. When asked if he thought that the syndicate had anything
to do with Cermak’s killing, Kelly replied “Boys, from now on, there is no such
thing as organized crime in the city of Chicago.”