When Roger Touhy returned to
the Valley he invested most of his small fortune into aused car dealership not
far from the tiny house in the Valley where he was born.
"My automobile business," Touhy
said, "was bringing me in from $50,000 to $60,000 a year. But the big
money was in alcoholic beverages. Everybody in the racket was getting rich. How
could the bootleggers miss, with a short ounce of gagging moonshine selling for
$1.25, or an eight-ounce glass of nauseating beer going for 75 cents?"
The Touhy brothers, Johnny, Eddie, Tommy and
Joe had already gotten involved in the booming bootleg business via Terrible
Tommy O'Connor. They worked mostly as hired enforcers, but they occasionally
hijacked a syndicate beer truck. It was almost natural that Roger join them and
eventually he entered the bootlegging business. They entered the business
through the back door, leasing a small fleet of trucks with drivers, from syndicate
boss Johnny Torrio's enormous bootlegging operation. Using the money they
earned from those leases, Roger and his brothers bought a franchise from Torrio
for the beer delivery routes to rural northwestern Cook County, the area where
Roger grew up.
The beer delivery business could be
lucrative as long as expenses were kept to a minimum, so the notoriously
tight-fisted brothers opted not to pay for police protection. As a result,
Chicago and Cook County police, probably working in a 50/50 split with Johnny
Torrio, or at the least working under his orders, made a practice of stopping
and impounding the brothers' trucks, probably kicking back half the fines
collected to Torrio.
When the expenses started to mount it
occurred to Tommy Touhy that the police would never suspect a commercial
vehicle of delivering booze. They decided to test the theory. The boys bought
two used Esso Gasoline trucks-Esso being the forerunner to Exxon-and they made
several successful shipments that way. It was a practice they continued to use
even though most of the drivers the Touhys employed were off-duty cops.
Virtually every truck the Touhys owned was disguised as a meat delivery truck.
After that, their trucks were never stopped and the brothers shipped all their
beer in commercial vehicles, either marked as gasoline, meat or coal delivery
trucks.
Ambitious and flush with cash from the beer
routes, the brothers entered a bootlegging partnership with two north side
Chicago hoods, Willie Heeney and Rocco DeGrazio, both of whom were amateur
narcotics dealers who would eventually reach top spots in the syndicate under
Frank Nitti and Tony Accardo. The Touhys and their new partners pumped out
rot-gut beer from a rented garage and made enough money to open a short-lived
nightclub a few doors down from their brewery. Using their profits from the
brewery and speakeasy, Roger and Tommy opened a string of handbooks, and then
used the cash from that to buy Heeney and DeGrazio out of the business.
Now the prosperous owner of a beer delivery
service, a small brewery, several handbooks and a car dealership, Roger asked
Clara Morgan for her hand in marriage. She accepted and the couple married in a
simple church ceremony in Chicago on April 22, 1922.
For the next three years, the brothers
worked to develop their various enterprises, building up their suburban beer
routes and expanding into labor extortion and gambling, but like most other
Irish hoods, resisting the easy money of prostitution. Then, in late 1925, as
Johnny Torrio was just beginning to expand his criminal empire, the brothers
leaped out of the small time by entering a partnership with Matt Kolb, a
five-foot three-inch, 280 pound former ward politician, syndicate bagman and
pay-off expert, who ran a $3,000,000 rot-gut whisky and needle beer brewery not
far from Roger's car dealership.
Earlier in the year A1 Capone, who was then
still Johnny Torrio's chief of staff, told Kolb that he was out of business
unless he paid 50 percent of his gross to Rocco DeGrazio, Roger's former
business partner and Capone's new business agent on the north side. Although
Kolb acted as bagman for Johnny Torrio, he despised Capone. Rather than work
for him, Kolb called Roger and Tommy Touhy and by mid-year their partnership
was in place. It was a simple arrangement: Kolb was the money man, Roger was
business manager and Tommy was the muscle.
It was Kolb who encouraged Touhy to move his
operation out to the suburbs, largely because his brothers were already
operating in the area and because Kolb understood that peace would never reign
in Chicago as long as prohibition was in force. But Kolb also held considerable
clout with the new County Sheriff, Charles Graydon, who had owned an ice
packing business several years before. The brothers knew Kolb was right: peace
would never reign in Chicago's underworld with so many different-and
violent-street gangs vying for a limited amount of business. But that wasn't
the case out in the rural northern portion of the county. In fact, when the
brothers first started peddling the syndicate's beer they were stunned at the
amount of business, both existing and potential, that was out there. Better
yet, there was barely any competition for the market and there were scores of
people willing to operate speakeasies if Kolb, who was worth a million in cash,
put up the money to open them.
By 1926, the Touhy brothers and Matt Kolb
were operational in suburban Des Plains, a small but prosperous community where
they started a cooper shop, brewery and wort plant. They expanded that to ten
fermenting plants, working round the clock, each plant being a small brewery in
itself with its own refrigeration system and ice-making machine with a bottling
plant. The investment paid off. By the end of the year, the partners were
selling 1,000 barrels of beer a week at $55 a barrel with a production cost of
$4.50 a barrel.
They sold their beer to 200 roadhouses
outside of Chicago, mostly in far western Cook and Will County, north to the
Wisconsin Lake region. Richer then ever, they hired more muscle men and with
Tommy Touhy leading the assault, the brothers punched, shot and sold their way
into a considerable portion of the upper northwest region of the city,
"Our business"
Roger said, "was scattered over a lot of
mileage. A barrel here and a barrel there. Nobody realized that Matt and I were
grossing about $1,000,000 a year from beer alone....I didn't become a giant in
the racket, but you might say I was one of the biggest midgets who ever scoffed
at the Volstead law."
Since making wort-the main ingredient for
beer as well as bread-was legal, Roger and Kolb claimed their entire operation
was a bakery since "I was producing enough wort for all the bread baked in
a dozen states. It was a big enterprise and I paid fifteen cents tax on every
gallon I made."
To counter Chicago's off-beer season-the
winter months-they set up a slot machine business, placing 225 machines in gas
stations, dance halls and chicken dinner stands. 'The only way to make money
faster" he said, "is to have a license to counterfeit bills."
They kept the local politicians happy, aside
from bribing them outright, by doling out 18,000 free bottles of beer every
week through one of Kolb's underlings, Joe Goebel of Morton Grove. The County
President, Anton Cermak not only took the beer which he resold or gave away to
the party faithful, but had Touhy print his name and picture on the front
label.
To keep the cost of police protection low,
always a priority with the Touhys, they hired off-duty Cook County highway
patrolmen. "Our local law," Roger wrote, "was mostly Cook County
Highway Patrol. I figured out a way to keep the roads open for us, with top
priority for our beer trucks. Whenever we had a job open as a truck driver or
what not, I hired a cop right away from the highway patrol to fill it...we paid
no man less than $100 a week, which was more than triple what the patrol guys
got for longer hours."
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