Traveling with Roger Touhy, probably in the capacity
of a bodyguard, was thirty-six year old Gustave Schactel, aka Gus Schafer. Jim
Ryan, Touhy's top enforcer, had hired Schafer as a guard for his beer
collectors in May of 1933 and before long Schafer was planning additional mail
robberies for the gang. Schafer's brother, Joseph Schactel, was a Catholic
priest and a Ph.D. candidate at the Catholic University of America in
Washington D.C. For years, Gus had managed to keep his criminal life away from
his brother.
And what a criminal life it was. Schafer was
arrested in San Francisco on December 15, 1913 for burglary, and was sentenced
to five years' probation. He was arrested again that same year and sent to
prison for attempted larceny and released in 1916. He was arrested again on
March 9, 1922, in Oakland for highway robbery and sent to Stillwater Prison in
Minnesota on June 16, 1922. After his release he was arrested again on March
16, 1931, in Los Angeles on suspicion of robbery, grand theft auto and was sent
to prison in Pontiac, Michigan.
Schafer did more time in the Stillwater,
Minnesota prison for a jewelry store robbery. After that, Schafer had been
working in San Francisco on gambling boats as "atmosphere" as he put
it, from March of 1931 until March 1932 when he and his wife packed their Chevy
and relocated to Chicago.
The marriage had problems since its inception in
Oakland, California in 1920. When Gus went to prison in Minnesota his wife
filed for divorce, but when he was released she dropped the proceedings.
Schafer said he went to Chicago to make money on the World's Fair liquor
business and felt that "if I didn't make some money my marriage would be
on the rocks."
They settled in Oak Park and then Des Plains
where they were put up by a German family who had known Schafer's parents in
Europe. The family gave them a small apartment. Then in May of 1933 he was
brought into the Touhy organization as a hired gun. Roger and Tommy Touhy liked
Schafer's style. When they learned that he had been the prison movie
projectionist they promoted him to a minor official status in Tommy Maloy's
movie projectionists' union so he could explain his income.
The red-headed Schafer was a serious man by
nature, seldom smiling. As Touhy said "a big guffaw or belly laugh for him
was a slight twitch at the corners of the lips." But Schafer did have a
dry, hangman's wit that Tommy and Roger enjoyed.
After Schafer moved to Illinois he brought in
Patrick McDonald, a San Francisco gambler whom he had done time with. The two
of them, with Touhy's permission, opened a handbook in the Montrose Apartments
in Chicago.