Despite his conviction, Touhy was not giving up his fight.
From prison, in 1938, Roger retained Thomas Marshall as counsel with his last
$50,000. Marshall was one of the nation's leading criminal lawyers. After
sifting through the evidence, Marshall was convinced of Roger's innocence, but
decided that what was needed was a complete reinvestigation of the case. With
Touhy's approval, Marshal brought in a private detective named Morrie Green, a
disbarred lawyer who had once represented most of the Chicago underworld,
including the Moran Gang's leader, Schemer Drucci.
Green had also been the lawyer for super pimp
and political pay-off expert Jake Zuta. In fact in that case, Green may have
overstepped the fine line between lawyer and partner when Green's signature was
found on several checks written from Jake Zuta to himself, and then signed over
to a judge Joseph Schulman of the municipal bench. The judge said that he had
business dealings with Morrie Green and that was why Zuta had the checks.
Disbarred, Green spent the last part of his career as a private detective.
An interesting note on Green-in 1959, long after
the Touhy case, he would make the newspapers again when the underworld murdered
Fred Evans. Evans and Murray Humpreys had started their criminal careers
together back in the Roaring Twenties and by 1959 both of them were powerful
men. Evans' loan-sharking operation eventually put him in touch with Lou
Greenberg, a lowlife character who ran Capone's Manhattan brewery and the
Roosevelt Finance Company at 3159 Roosevelt Road. Greenberg had his life
snuffed out after he cheated Frank Nitti's adopted son out of his inheritance
which Greenberg had been entrusted to hold until the boy came of age.
Eventually Evans and Greenberg's widow, Esther, would become partners in a
luxury hotel in Beverly Hills. Coincidentally, it was at that hotel in 1951
that wise guys from Chicago and St. Paul planned the execution of a Los Angeles
reform mayor. Eventually the two made enough money to reinvest their profits
into another hotel just inside Beverly Hills.
By 1959 Evans was a rich man. His fortune was at
least eleven million dollars in cash. Most of that was made in the early 1940s
when Evans worked the inroads that Humpreys and Teddy Newberry had made in
their brokerage firm shakedown schemes in the late 1930s. With Humpreys' muscle
behind him, Evans ended up with part ownership of a discount brokerage
corporation at 100 North La Salle Street in Chicago. By now Evans was
considered to be the brains behind Humpreys' financial success and was widely
thought to be the fiscal genius behind Frank Nitti's ability to wash the
extortion money from Hollywood's Bioff scandal.
The FBI made a customary stop at Evans' office
and briefly interviewed him. He consented to answer questions, but was guarded
in his conversation. While speaking with Evans, the agents weeded through a
pile of useless information to find out that Morrie Green was a front for
Humpreys in the Superior Laundry and Linen Supply Company which he owned lock,
stock and barrel.
It seemed, to Evans anyway, to be a fairly
worthless piece of information-most law enforcement people and wise guys in
Chicago already understood the relationship between Humpreys and Greenberg.
However the FBI didn't know it. In fact in 1959 the FBI knew very little about
organized crime.
The agents took what they learned from Evans and
confronted Morrie Green with the information and its source. Word got back to
Ricca and Accardo and Giancana that Evans had talked to the federal government.
The bosses sat in judgement with the evidence
before them and decided that Evans had to be eliminated. It didn't matter what
he had said; the fact was that he had communicated with the FBI. As a courtesy
to Humpreys, since he and Evans went back so far, the boys asked if the Hump
could come up with a reason not to kill Evans. Humpreys shrugged and said he
had nothing to say on the subject. That sealed Evans' fate.
Twenty-one days later, on August 22, 1959, Fred
Evans finished up work at his desk. He had been going over his assets. Closing
his books he scribbled "total resources eleven million dollars" on a
paper which he left in the middle of his desk. He turned off his desk lights
and left the office, walked to 5409 West Lake Drive, where his Cadillac was
parked at a lot. As Evans walked across the lot, Mrs. Alice Griesemer of 328
North Lotus Avenue, saw a young man wearing a heavy winter coat, buttoned to
the
neck, who had been sitting on a step for over an hour on an
extremely muggy Chicago evening. As Evans strolled in front of Mrs. Griesemer's
line of vision the young man in the winter coat leaped to his feet and ran
across the street into the parking lot towards Evans. At the same time, another
man holding a handkerchief across the lower part of his face ran out of an
alley toward Evans. It took Evans and Mrs. Griesemer only a few seconds to see
that both of the men had pistols in their hands. Evans stopped in his tracks
and covered his face and yelled "No, don't!"
The two men slammed Evans against a wall,
searched him quickly and snatched an envelope from his back trouser pocket.
Leaping backward they shot him twice in the head and twice in the throat. The
shots in the throat were to let the underworld know that they suspected Evans
of being a stool pigeon.
The assailants leaped into a blue Chevrolet and
vanished.
Evans staggered a few feet back to his car and
collapsed across the front seat. The witness, Mrs. Griesemer, on North Lotus
Avenue, said "It was like watching a movie or a television show."
When the police arrived they found Evans' body
lying on an envelope that held a $5000 government bond. Further investigation
of the contents on Evans' desk showed that he held about $500,000 in cash,
jewelry, stocks and bonds and part ownership of two apartment buildings. In the
end he paid the ultimate price for committing the underworld's one mortal
sin-talking to the feds. It didn't matter that the information he divulged
about Morrie Green's relationship with Murray Humpreys was old news to most;
Evans sealed his fate by talking at all.
In the last months of 1938, before becoming
embroiled in the Evans shooting, Morrie Green was working as a private
investigator for Roger Touhy. There's no doubt that the two men had known each
other on the outside. Chicago's underworld was too small for them not to have
known each other. "Morris," Roger said, "seemed a bit cynical
when he first came to see me. He sat across the visitor's table in the long,
narrow room where fifty or more convicts can talk with their lawyers or with
their relatives on approved visiting days. I could see that Green wasn't happy
with his mission." However, "Green surprised me," Roger said.
"He was a jewel, a really rich prize....Morrie turned out not to be really
a cynic. He was a kind, considerate, conscientious man...who had bitter
disappointments in his life, and he had an understanding for informants like
me. People expect to be bled white by private detectives. Although my legal
expenses had been enormous, I still had about $50,000 which my family had
salvaged from my ruined beer business. But Green charged only reasonable fees
and he didn't pad his expense account."
The first thing Green did was visit Buck
Henrichsen, Touhy's former bodyguard. With Touhy in prison, Henrichsen found
full time work for himself with Chicago's gambling czar, Billy Skidmore, at the
mob's Bon Aire Country Club. The Bon Aire wasn't actually a country club at
all. It was a posh casino owned by the underworld-mostly by Tony Accardo-and
run by Skidmore, the syndicate's favorite front man. Each weekend buses owned
by the mob delivered hundreds of gamblers to the club. Somehow, despite the
casino's high profile, it was never raided.
The fact that Henrichsen was working for Billy
Skidmore was no small thing either. Roger had known Skidmore from his childhood
when Skidmore ran a notorious saloon on West Lake and North Robey streets4 only
a few doors down from the house where Roger had been born. Confidence men and
petty criminals gathered at the saloon to divide their spoils, and gamblers and
pimps arrived to pay their protection money. The place also served as
headquarters for Valley pickpockets, sneak thieves and shoplifters of all
sorts. Skidmore sold bail bonds to them all. But what Skidmore did best was to
act as a go-between-firming up deals between gangsters and
politicians-ultimately serving as the bag man when a deal was worked out.