After the war with Capone started, the gang
leaped in size to about fifty men who worked for Touhy on a regular basis,
according to Jim Wagner, one of the first men to work with Touhy when he moved
out to Des Plains.
George Wilke, who was also known as George
Fogarty, had been one of Touhy's minor partners in the beer business for three
years but left it, 'because living in the country gave me enough sinus troubles
to have to move to Florida."
Walter Murray, forty-two, was a truck driver
and laborer in the organization. Murray wore false upper teeth, yet all of the
lower teeth were missing except for the two front ones. Like most of the men who
worked for Touhy, Murray was from the Valley and had a wife and four children
and no criminal record.
Jimmy Clarence Wagner, forty, worked as
Touhy's bookkeeper, although he and his brother John ran a small painting
business out of Elmwood Park. Married in 1918 and with a ten-year-old son,
James Jr., the family lived in Chicago until 1926 before finally moving out to
Des Plains. Wagner had enlisted in the army during the first war and served as
a sergeant in the artillery corps. After his discharge from the service he
worked for Edison Kees as a flooring salesman until 1920 when he became
involved with the city employees' annuity fund as a clerk for three years. He
then went to work for his brother-in-law Leonard Thompson who knew Matt Kolb.
Kolb introduced him to Touhy, who in 1930 hired him as a truck driver at $50.00
a week. Soon he was promoted to collector. He never used "muscle,"
never carried a gun and always had friendly dealings with his customers.
Willie Ford was a collector who lived in Des
Plains for four years, leaving in 1929 and then returning after the shooting
war with the DeGrazios had started. His brother, Jerry Ford, was a truck driver
living on 4th Street in Des Plains. Willie Ford later became Touhy's chief
enforcer and strong-arm man. Ford's roommate was Arthur Reese, a gang regular
and enforcer. Other enforcers included Jim Ryan who was, at least on paper, the
foreman in charge of the drivers and lived on Grand Avenue in River Forrest.
His brother, Clifford Ryan, lived across the street from the Des Plains
elementary school. Working under Ryan were enforcers John (Shaner) Crawford and
Joseph (Sonny) Kerwin. John
"Red" Ryan, one of Paddy the Bear's sons, had worked for the Shelton
gang for a while and was a member of the gang along with Martin O'Leary and Old
Harv Baily who were associated with the Touhy gang on a regular basis. Roy
Marshalk said Wagner "was not a collector or a driver. He always rode with
Touhy everywhere." Like everyone else, Ford was reluctant to discuss the
dangerous Marshalk who was actually, after Tommy Touhy, the gang's chief of
staff and high executioner.
Most of the bodyguards were former Cook
County Highway patrolmen like Buck Henrichsen who also worked as a laborer and
was known as a "muscle man." Henrichsen brought in his younger
brother called "Buck Jr." and a second highway patrolman, Mike
Miller, who acted as Tommy Touhy's personal bodyguard. Other bodyguards included
August John La Mar and Louis Finko, two very dangerous men, as well as Roger's
childhood friend Willie Sharkey and for a brief period, Gus Schafer who in 1930
was new to the area.
In 1933, Touhy's bodyguard Willie Sharkey
said, 'We always carried guns on beer runs to protect ourselves and friends
from the syndicate, after 1930 we seldom left the north side and the vicinity
of Des Plains and very seldom went into Chicago or else we would have been
placed on the spot. But we left town right after any of the newspapers pinned
us with a crime. Tommy (Touhy) took care of that."