The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.: The St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Real-Life and ...
The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.: The St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Real-Life and ...: Tony Sokol We have a history of the real St. Valentine's Day Massacre for you, as well as its impact on film and p...
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Terry Druggan of the Druggan and Lake Gang, Tuohy's occasional partners and friend from childhood
Druggan (With glasses) and his mother appear in court
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The Touhy's were tied in with the Shannon Ranch-Kelly gangs for several capers
Hymie Weiss killing began the mobs assault on the North side of Chicago
The Touhy's had working deals with St. Paul bosses to distribute beer in the areas
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St. Paul boss Tommy Banks (left) and lawyer John Gast
Touhy never allowed prostitution in his domain
Miller drove quickly to Touhy's sister's house.
Miller drove quickly to Touhy's sister's
house. He was worried about making the curfew so he didn't take the precaution
of driving around the block as he usually did. They were running late and it
was a bitter eight degrees outside with an ugly wind whipping across the
street.
He parked and the two men slowly walked up
the six steps of Ethel's porch, Miller's hulking frame towering over the
limping and bent Touhy. The only sound that could be heard was the occasional
passing traffic on Washington Boulevard a half a block away. Then Roger heard a
call from one of two men running toward him. "Wait, hold on, we're police
officers!"
Roger and Miller turned their heads as one.
Instinctively, Miller reached for his service revolver but it was too late. The
men were running toward them, leveling their shotguns as they sprinted across
the frozen street. With a policeman's eye, Miller noticed that one of the
killers stood at least six feet tall. He was wearing a topcoat. The other was
perhaps three inches shorter. Miller aimed at him and fired.
The killers fired back. Miller raised his
left arm to cover his face and nearly had it blown off at the elbow. Dozens of
pellets lodged into his back and legs. The transom over the door was shredded
by shot pellets and the vibration from the blasts had shattered the glass in
the front door.
Before the blasts knocked him to the ground,
Miller was able to get off a total of five shots. Two shots landed in the
windshield of a car parked on the opposite side of the street, two more
grounded themselves into the front lawn and one found its way into the leg of
one of the assassins.13
Almost at the exact moment that Miller was
blown backward, two huge blasts from the killers' shotguns knocked Roger across
the porch and then smashed him face first into the ground. Pellets tore a hole
in Touhy's inner left leg, the other pellets dug into his right upper rib cage.
His leg was barely attached to his body.14
In all, the killers fired at least seven
blasts with their shotguns and probably three more with an automatic pistol and
then they were gone.
The murder had taken less than forty-five
seconds.
Miller crawled over to Touhy and said,
"Say an act of contrition, Rog."
Ethel was in the kitchen drying the dinner
dishes when she heard the blasts. She had been half listening for her brother's
footsteps on the front porch, but when she heard the blasts, she knew he was
dead. She had been expecting it.
She ran out to the front steps and saw
Roger, twitching violently in a massive pool of his and Miller's blood.
She bent down over her brother and tried to
pick up his head.
Roger held her hand and moaned, "It was
two cops."
Patrolmen Robert Peters, Henry Sullivan and
Daniel Stillwagon were the first on the scene. They didn't try to stop the
blood because it didn't seem possible. Their only thought was to rush Touhy to
a hospital.
Two ambulances were called, but there wasn't
enough time to wait; Peters could see that Touhy was bleeding to death in front
of his eyes.
When a third squad car pulled up, Peters
placed Roger in the back seat and drove him to nearby Saint Anne's hospital.
Miller, who was conscious but in agony,
volunteered to wait for an ambulance and told the cops to get Roger to a
hospital.
Peters rode in the back seat with Touhy,
holding his hand and making a valiant but hopeless effort to stop the gush of
blood from the gaping holes in the dying old man's legs.
Roger kept nodding his head at the cop and
saying, "I'm all right, I'm okay."
But he wasn't. He was losing too much blood
from the shotgun pellets drilled into his leg, in the place where his knee had
been just a few minutes before. They arrived at the emergency room at 10:35 P.M.
where a shock trauma team headed by Dr.
Patrick Vitullo placed Roger
under an oxygen tent and wheeled him into an operating room.
Dr. Vitullo applied a tourniquet to the
upper portions of Touhy's legs in a fruitless effort to stop the bleeding just
as Chief of Detectives John Archer stepped into the room, slipping and almost
falling to the floor that was slippery with Touhy's blood.
Dr. Vitullo leaned over Roger's face to
check his breathing.
"Mr. Touhy, who shot you?"
"Two men."
"Do you know them?"
"No."
"Where is your identification?"
"I never carry any."
"Do you have any money on you?"
"About $200.00."
"Where is it?"
"Right front pocket."
Then he faded.
"Mr. Touhy, you must try to stay
awake."
There was no reply. A nurse rifled through
Roger's bloody pants' pockets and found $240, a pack of non-filtered
cigarettes, a pair of reading glasses and two drawings from his sons, done
twenty-six years before.
The doctor worked frantically, but knew his
patient would never survive the massive loss of blood. Father Richard
Birmingham was brought into the room and gave Roger Touhy the last rites of the
Catholic Church which he completed at 11:23 P.M. Two minutes later, at 11:25,
Roger Touhy expired.
Ray Brennan came into the emergency room
just as the nurse pressed down Roger's eyelids for the final time and pulled
the sheet up over his head. "Rotten bastards,"he whispered over and
again. The killing shook Chicago and the question all
over town was
"Why?"...Why kill a rumpled, halfcrippled old man? Why, as Newsweek
put it, kill the "not so Terrible Touhy"?
Nobody in Chicago really wanted an answer,
but they had to make it look as though they did. By now, 701 mob murders later,
going through the motions of showing outrage, was standard practice.
Mayor Daly was awakened by his aides who
told him that Roger Touhy had been killed. Daly climbed out of bed and ordered
Police Commissioner O'Connor to personally investigate the killing.
O'Connor ordered his police to pick up
Marshal Ciafano and Sam Teets Battaglia. Ciafano and Battaglia were the mob's
favorite hit men, both were former 42 Gang members who had fought against Touhy
in 1932, and both had been arrested by Walter Miller a few years before on
armed robbery charges.
Marshal Ciafano was found at the Trade Winds
bar by detectives who dragged him screaming, off his bar stool and carried him
by his arms and legs to a waiting squad car, tossed him into the back seat and
drove him to police headquarters for questioning.
They found Battaglia in his expensive home in
Oak Park and hauled him in for questioning but then let him go.
Neither Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo, Murray
Humpreys15 nor Sam Giancana were ever questioned for their role in Touhy's
murder.
Several days after the murder, John Factor
testified at the coroner's inquest with an enormous diamond ring glittering
from his pinky finger. Police ushered him into a waiting room where Ethel sat
in a corner with Tommy Touhy Jr., her face buried in a Persian lamb coat, her
eyes hidden by dark glasses. The room was small. Factor, always amiable, turned
to the Touhys and nodded and smiled. They glared at him. Then he realized who
they were. He turned his face to the wall and waited for police officers to move
him to another room.
Before he left Chicago for Los Angeles,
Factor was allowed to take a lie detector test to prove his innocence. This was
the same type of test Touhy wasn't allowed to take to prove his own innocence
more than twenty-four years earlier. Chief of Detectives Archer watched the
test being administered and announced to the press mob waiting on the street,
"Factor had nothing to do with the shooting and no knowledge of the
participants or the reasons. We have no further reasons to question him."
Reporters tracked down Tubbo Gilbert who met them with his standard, "I
have no comment," but then, as always, he talked anyway; "I have no
idea who would want to do this either."
Perhaps not realizing the blatant stupidity
of the question, Tubbo asked "I'll say this, if Touhy was so innocent, why
did he need a bodyguard?"
Roger's body traveled from the Alexian
Brothers Hospital to the Cook County Morgue-the same route that John
Dillinger's and Frank Gusenberg's gunned down bodies had taken back in 1936.
While Touhy's dead body was waiting for
transport to the morgue, a scant two blocks from his childhood home on South
Robie Street, a photographer snapped a photo of the corpse, his face frozen in
terror and pain, the mouth pried open in one last frantic breath for life.
Roger's grief-stricken sister was left with
the awful task of identifying her brother's body a few hours later.
The next morning, at 8:30 A.M., a solitary
hearse bearing Touhy's body in its coffin, slowly pulled out of the back alley
of the funeral parlor. It was decided Touhy would be buried at the family grave
at Chicago's Boot Hill Cemetery, Mount Carmel. Not far from his gravesite were
the tombs of Dion O'Bannion, Frank Nitti, the Genna Brothers, Paul "Needle
Nose" La Briola, A1 Capone and by 1992, Tony Accardo. The tombstone would
bear the name TOWEY, the Anglo-Irish spelling of his family name, in the
northwest corner of the burial ground where his brothers Johnny, Joe, James and
Eddie were entombed.
Secrecy surrounded the funeral. Chief of
Detectives Archer, who had been planning an observation detail for the funeral
which he expected to take place the following week, was caught completely off
guard and was told about it by a Chicago Tribune reporter.
Arriving at the site only minutes after the
coffin, Archer watched from the warmth of his car as Clara and her sons, Roger
Jr. and Tommy, stood in the bitter winter cold while the funeral director
recited Roman Catholic prayers over the coffin. Nearby, six workmen stood by
with their shovels at ready. There were no other mourners, no flowers, no
pallbearers. The service ended in seven minutes and a weeping Clara was led
away to a car by Tommy. A freezing wind picked up and swept across the yard as
the workmen lowered Roger Touhy's coffin in its grave.
Archer walked up to the gravesite and one of
the workmen paused from shoveling dirt and asked, "Is it true they only
gave him twenty-eight days of freedom?"
Archer nodded, that it was.
"That hardly seems enough,"the
workman said. "Just doesn't seem right."
13. The Chicago Police had been
telling reporters that they "were searching high and low" for
Giancana, to question him about the Touhy murder, but were unable to find him. Several
days later, reporter Sandy Smith went to the home of Sam Giancana and
interviewed the crime boss about the killing. Smith, who interviewed Giancana on his front
lawn, noted that the gangster's foot was wrapped in bandages and he limped.
It's possible that Giancana, a former 42 Gang member who was noted for his
fantastic driving skills, may have been the third gunman that Miller saw and
Touhy hadn't seen. Miller reported that he shot at least one of the gunmen and
heard him scream out "Son of bitch!"
14. Police officer Daniel
Stillwagon said later, "They blew that guy apart; you could see that the
leg was just hanging on by some veins and some skin."
15. A recently declassified FBI document reveals that on January
28, 1960, Humpreys discussed Touhy's killing with labor goon Joey Glimco. The
informant who reported the conversation said it was conducted mostly in
whispers. Suspecting that he would be arrested by the U.S. Treasury, which was
investigating Touhy's murder, for his role in the killing, Humpreys said,
"Dirty bastards, if I ever want to dispute them, I didn't keep it all to
myself, see?... I figure, if they're gonna get real hot on me, they want to
fuck with me like they did on that shit, they're not gonna give me shit. So, I
just keep still, 'cause I got the answers for them
He also added that, "He (Touhy?) was
dying a long time ago. He was on a stretcher, you know?"
After three years of exhausting legal maneuvering, in late 1957 Roger Touhy and Bob Johnstone stood before the State of Illinois Pardon and Parole Board and Roger told his story.
Freedom
After three years of exhausting legal maneuvering,
in late 1957 Roger Touhy and Bob Johnstone stood before the State of Illinois Pardon
and Parole Board and Roger told his story.
When he was finished speaking, Benjamin Adamowski,
the States Attorney for Cook County who had successfully tossed him back into
Stateville on the aiding and abetting technicality, strode into the room and
asked to be heard.
"My hopes sank," Touhy said,
"...his words could condemn me."
But what Adamowski said surprised everyone.
"My office has no objection to the release from prison of Mr. Touhy...in
fact, I would urge it."
Eventually, and again with Robert
Johnstone's help, Roger's 199-year term was reduced to three years on
institutional parole, reducing his kidnapping sentence to six months. After
that, he was to begin the commuted jail break sentence which was to expire
April 27, 1961.
On November 13, 1959, Roger Touhy, a greying
man of sixty-one, was paroled from prison after serving twenty-five years, nine
months and thirteen days for a crime of which he was innocent. His health was
gone and so was his money. He had been bled dry by the legal fees incurred from
his seventeen denied petitions for freedom, which included four denials by the
United States Supreme Court.
As he walked from the prison for the last
time, he was draped in a gray overcoat that had been purchased for him in 1958
for his court appearances and a blue suit made in the prison tailor shop. He
had the $600 which had remained on deposit in the prison before his 1942
escape.
Clara waited at the gates for him. They
hugged for several minutes and whispered to each other through tears, and then
walked, hand in hand, out of the prison. Bent and limping slightly, Touhy gave
his first and last press conference on television as well as talking to print
reporters at the Stateville guard house. He told the reporters that there was a
gag order imposed on him. He disagreed with the order "since they didn't
put one on Factor" but told reporters that he would have to be careful
which questions he answered nonetheless.
There was an awkward silence for a moment
which Roger broke. Referring to his first release several years before he said,
"Any you guys get the feeling we've been through this before?"
That loosened things up.
He looked up at the grey skies and held his
hand out to feel the mixture of light rain and snow falling around him.
"You know, it's funny. It was the same
kind of day when I entered this place way back then."
"What are you going to do now, Mr.
Touhy?" "Please call me Roger...I've invented a lure for fresh water
fishing; I'm going to manufacture it."
"Ever manufacture anything
before, Rog?" Touhy's eyes lit up. "Beer!"
"Do you hold any grudges, Mr.
Touhy?"
"No. They have to live with their
consciences." "Who are they? Who do you mean by they?" Johnstone
leaned forward and whispered for his client not to reply.
"Roger, are you looking for
Factor?"
"No. I'm not looking for anyone. I'm
just going to take it easy for a while and see my wife and my two sons."
"Why did you lead the prison
breakout?"
"I didn't plan it, I
didn't lead it, I just went along." "Did you learn anything in
prison?"
"Nope. Not a goddamn thing."
Johnstone broke in "Well you learned
patience, Roger. "
Always a proud man, Roger fought back tears
and said with a trembling chin, "You know, I never gave up hope that one
day I would be standing here a free man."
He said he planned to move to Florida with
his sons Roger Jr. and Tommy who were now in their mid-thirties with families
of their own.
For the time being, he would live with his
sister Ethel11, who had made more than two thousand visits to her brother over
the past quarter of a century and had appeared at seemingly endless hearings.
During his internment she had worked her way, alone for the most part, through
a maze of legal avenues in numerous attempts to free her brother from prison.
As he was driven back to Chicago in his
nephew's cramped sports car, he thumbed through his personal belongings. There
were two pictures drawn by his sons. He chuckled when he came across his 1942
draft card and a tiny black notebook with
entries going back to 1919 when he was in the Navy. "I kept my telephone
numbers and addresses of all my beer stops in code all through Prohibition.
Nobody knew the code but me."
His color was pale and his hands shook as he
thumbed through the book. Like his brothers, Roger suffered from the ravages of
Parkinson's Disease, a degenerative disease of the nervous system then called
"the shaking palsy."
As ordered, Roger went to the parole office
in Chicago where he was given the details of the gag order he was under.
Conversations with the media about the case were absolutely forbidden. An hour
later, the ex-prisoner was dining on brisket of beef and hash brown potatoes in
a west side restaurant with Ethel and Mike.11 "Delicious, delicious"
he muttered over and over again.
He would be dead within forty-nine hours.
The Birth of Vegas and the Death of Tony "The Hat"
Tony Accardo, Chicago's new underworld boss,
telephoned Johnny Rosselli, his man on the west coast, and told him he wanted
him back in Chicago for a meeting at Meo's Restaurant with Murray Humpreys and
Paul Ricca.
Always the hustler, Rosselli knew that the
bosses were worried because they were losing what little presence they had in
Las Vegas. As the self-declared power west of New York they felt, as a matter
of mob pride, that they should have a major presence on the strip.
Rosselli filled them in on the situation at
the Stardust. It was aimed at being, as he dubbed it, a "grind
joint," a paradise for the low rollers, located right at the heart of the
strip. If they wanted it, the bosses would have to pour a couple of hundred
thousand dollars into the place to get it completed, but otherwise it was
theirs. But first they had to deal with Tony Cornero, aka "Tony the
Hat."
Las Vegas wasn't built by gangsters alone,
and no matter how often it is written, Ben Siegel didn't build the first casino
there, either. If any one hoodlum could take credit for inventing Las Vegas, it
was Tony Cornero.
While it lasted, Cornero had an amazing
life. He was born Anthony Cornero Stralla in an Italian village near the Swiss
border in 1895. The Cornero family had owned a large farm there but his father
lost it in a card game. More bad luck came when young Tony Cornero accidentally
set fire to the family harvest, breaking them financially and forcing them to
immigrate to San Francisco in the early 1920s.
At age sixteen, Tony pleaded guilty to robbery
and did ten months in reform school. He moved to southern California and racked
up another ten arrests in ten years which included three for bootlegging and
three for attempted murder.
He was ambitious, but as late as 1922,
Cornero was still driving a cab. Eventually he decided to branch off into the
rum-running business. Starting with a string of small boats he smuggled
high-priced whisky over the Canadian border and sold it to the better clubs in
Los Angeles. At the same time, Cornero ran rum from Mexico to Los Angeles, his
freighters easily avoiding the understaffed Coast Guard. Next, Tony purchased a
merchant ship, the SS Lily, which he stocked with 4,000 cases of the best booze
money could buy and ran the illicit alcohol into Los Angeles under cover of
moonlight.
In 1931, Cornero decided to switch his
effort to gambling. He and his brothers moved to Las Vegas and opened one of
the town's first major casinos, the Green Meadows, which was known for its
staff of attractive and friendly waitresses.
The Meadows turned a small, but healthy
profit, and soon Cornero was investing his returns into other casinos in the
state, mostly in Las Vegas. The
money started to pour in and
before long New York's Luciano, Lansky, and Frank Costello sent their representatives
and demanded a cut of Cornero's action. Cornero who had always operated on the
fringe of the national syndicate, refused to pay. Instead he had built up his
own organization and was strong enough to turn the syndicate bosses down.
The syndicate, which had a small but
powerful presence on the West Coast, prepared for war and started by burning
Cornero's Green Meadows casino to the ground. Realizing he could never win the
fight, Cornero sold out his interest in Nevada and returned to Los Angeles.
In 1938 Cornero bought several large ships
and refurbished them into luxury casinos at a cost of more than $300,000. He
anchored the ships three miles off the coast of Santa Monica and had gamblers
shuttled from shore by way of motorboats. Cornero's lead ship, the Rex, had a
crew of 350 waiters, waitresses, cooks, a full orchestra, and an entourage of
enforcers. The first class dining room served superb French cuisine and on most
nights some 2,000 patrons flooded onto the ship to gamble, dance and drink the
night away. Tony was hauling in an estimated $300,000 a night after expenses,
and the money would have continued to pour in had he not become the center of a
reform movement in Los Angeles County.
State Attorney General Earl Warren ordered a
raid on the Rex and several other of Cornero's off- coast ships. Cornero and
the California government fought a series of battles, with Tony's lawyers
arguing that his ships were operating in international waters, and the
California government taking the indefensible stance that it didn't care where
they were, they were still illegal.
Back and forth it went, until Cornero
decided to fight back after raiders had smashed almost half a million dollars
worth of gambling equipment on one of his ships,. When the law men came to raid
his ships, Cornero ordered his men to repel the attackers with water hoses. A
sea battle went on for nine hours and the lawmen finally gave up. But Cornero
was beaten and he knew it; he closed his offshore operations.
Tony tried to open a few gambling houses
inside Los Angeles, but Micky Cohen, the ruling bookie and drug dealer in the
town, shut him down. When Cornero refused to back down, Cohen had his boys bomb
Cornero's Beverly Hills estate. Fearing for his life, Cornero took his fortune
and moved back to Las Vegas.
After several years in Vegas, Cornero
undertook his dream to build the largest gambling casino-hotel in the world,
the Stardust. To finance the construction of the Stardust Tony had borrowed
$6,000,000 from the mob. As the casino neared completion Cornero couldn't
account for half of the borrowed cash. The word on the street was that the
bosses back east were whining that it had been a mistake to give him the money
in the first place, because Tony the Hat was no businessman, just a dice jockey
with high ambitions.
The truth is that the syndicate had probably
set Tony up to fail from the very beginning. He never would have gotten a
license to run the place because he had a long criminal record and an even
longer list of powerful political enemies made across the state. And he had his
enemies in the underworld as well. His endless arguments with the New York
syndicates over the size of the Stardust-five hundred rooms-were legendary.
Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello were both
positive that Las Vegas would never be able to attract enough gamblers to fill
all of those rooms and the Stardust would cause a glut on the market, reducing
prices for all the other casino rooms.
Cornero knew about the license problem, of
course, but it didn't concern him. He believed he could get a license anyway. A
few hundred grand went a long way in Nevada in the 1950s. But the word was that
Moe Dalitz had already taken care of that and there was absolutely no way that
Tony Cornero was going to get a gaming license in Nevada or anywhere else.
So, as the opening day drew closer, Cornero
entered talks with Dalitz about leasing the place to the Dalitz operation.
Dalitz was interested, but the terms that Cornero wanted were steep: a half a million
a month. So Dalitz bided his time because he knew Cornero was broke and would
have to come crawling back to him, and when he did they'd handle him.
As fate would have it, Tony not only helped
build the Vegas that we know today but fittingly he died there, too. He dropped
dead while gambling at the Desert Inn, with Moe Dalitz, the Godfather of Sin
City, looking on with his fat arm draped around the waist of his slim and much
younger wife.
Cornero had gone to the Desert Inn for a
last chance meeting with Dalitz to beg the mob's favorite front man for
financing to help him complete construction on his casino-the forever troubled
Stardust. The place was scheduled to open in just two weeks, on July 13, 1955,
and Cornero didn't have the cash to pay the staff or supply the house tables.
He was in over his head-Dalitz and everybody else knew it
Cornero and Dalitz met for several long
hours in a conference that went nowhere. Cornero wanted the mob's money and the
mob wanted Cornero's casino. Neither party had any intention of giving anything
to the other. During a break in the meeting, Cornero went out to the floor of
the Desert Inn and gambled at the craps table and quickly fell into the hole
for $10,000. Then a waitress came and handed him a tab for twenty-five dollars
for the food and drinks he had. Cornero went ballistic. He was a guest of Moe
Dalitz. The waitress didn't care; she wanted the money. Dalitz stood by and
watched as Tony Cornero suffered through the ultimate insult to a big timer in
Vegas.
Cornero screamed, ranted and raved and then
grabbed his chest and fell forward on the table, desperately clutching his
heart through his shirt, the dice still wrapped in his hands.
For decades the story circulated in the
underworld that Cornero didn't die of a heart attack, that his drink had been
poisoned. If he had been poisoned, the truth went with him to the grave. An
autopsy was never performed. His body was shipped off to Los Angeles for a
quick funeral where an organist from the Desert Inn knocked out a rendition of
his favorite song, "The Wabash Cannonball Express" and eight hours
after he hit the cold floor of the Desert Inn, Tony the Hat was eight feet
under the ground.
Tony went out like the gambler he was. Of
the estimated $25 million he had earned in his career as a gambler, Tony
Cornero had less than $800 in his pockets when he died.
Nobody checked the contents of the drink he
had been sipping before he dropped dead. No one cared enough to ask any serious
questions. The important
thing was that Tony Cornero was
dead. Jake the Barber Factor, a Chicago favorite, was moved into position as
the Stardust's new owner of record, and everybody in mobdom was happy.
Well, everybody except Tony
Cornero.
A few weeks after Tony's death,
Jake the Barber announced that he had just purchased the Stardust.
Factor was released from Sandstone Prison in February of 1948.
Factor was released from Sandstone Prison in
February of 1948. He was sentenced to parole for the remaining four years of
his ten-year sentence. In 1954, at the end of his parole sentence, he told the
parole board he was broke. In 1955, one year after his final meeting with the
parole board, and six years since he last held a job, convicted felon John
Factor announced that he had purchased the Stardust Casino in Las Vegas. Jake
the Barber was now the owner and operator of one of the largest casinos in the
world.
It was Murray Humpreys who decided that Jake
the Barber would buy the Stardust with the only explanation out of the mob
being that "Jake owes Chicago a big one."
Humpreys must have put up the money to buy
the casino. From that point on, Jake the Barber was Chicago's front man in the
Stardust, and it was a mob gold mine.
At first the outfit was excited at the
prospect of having John Factor as its head man. He was, at least by mob
standards, trustworthy. He was smart enough to know the outfit would kill him
in a heartbeat if he tried anything creative.
The problem with Factor was that he, like
Cornero, couldn't get a liquor license. As Hank Messick wrote, "...much to
the disgust of the Chicago boys. The Barber tried everything he could to get a
license but there was no way it was going to happen. He finally bowed to
reality and announced that he would lease to the Desert Inn Group....It took a
western Appalachian to solve the matter."
In a meeting held in mob lawyer Sidney
Korshak's Beverly Hills office, Meyer Lansky, Longy Zwillman, Doc Stacher
(representing New York and New Jersey), Moe Dalitz and Morris Kleinman decided
that Dalitz would lease the casino operation. Dalitz represented the Desert
Inn. All involved agreed that Dalitz's Desert Inn would pay $100,000 a month-a
low figure for the second largest money maker in Las Vegas-to operate the
casino part of the Stardust. Factor would, at least on paper, still own the
building, the grounds and the hotel operation.
Dalitz, who was one of the founding members
of the national crime syndicate, would run the day-to- day operation and Johnny
Rosselli-Brian Foy's old pal-would be off in the shadows, representing the true
owners of the Stardust: Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo, Sam Giancana and Murray
Humpreys.
Everybody was making money off the Stardust.
Carl Thomas, the master of the Las Vegas skim, estimated that the Chicago mob
was skimming $400,000 a month from the Stardust in the early sixties, and that
was only for the one arm bandits. Blackjack, craps, keno, roulette and poker
yielded a different skim.
It was more money then they had ever dreamed
of and nothing, absolutely nothing, was going to prevent them from taking it.
And then Roger Touhy was released from
prison.
A few days before Roger was released from prison, retired Rabbi Harry Zinn walked the few blocks from his home to the rental apartment building he owned, directly across the street from Roger's sister's house.
A few days before Roger was released from
prison, retired Rabbi Harry Zinn walked the few blocks from his home to the
rental apartment building he owned, directly across the street from Roger's
sister's house.
Zinn was there because one of his tenants
said that she had seen a rough-looking man loitering in the building over the
past several days and the Rabbi should come over and investigate. He walked
around the property and then went down into the building's basement to check
the boilers. As he rounded a corner in the dark cellar, he spotted a
rough-looking man, with a dark complexion, staring out of a basement window at
Touhy's sister's house. Zinn noted the expensive fur-lined tan-colored winter waist
coat and knew it wasn't a street bum who had come in out of the cold.
Sensing Zinn's presence the man spun around,
glared at the old rabbi and said, "What are you doing here?"
Zinn asked, "Who are you?"
The stranger was flushed. "I'm just
checking on my kid, my son, he's running around with some broad in this
neighborhood."
Even as he spoke, the stranger was walking
toward Zinn and then suddenly brushed past him, almost knocking the old man
over as he ran up the stairs to the front door of the building with Zinn in
pursuit. By the time Zinn made it to the street, the stranger had disappeared.
If the hit men had learned anything from watching Ethel's house, it was that
killing Roger Touhy wouldn't be easy. The old bootlegger had taken precautions.
He refused to leave home unless he had one of his two "watchdogs," as
he called them, with him, and both of those watchdogs were cops.
Ethel's son, Mike, was a
twenty-three-year-old policeman and part-time law student who traveled around
town with his uncle when time allowed.
The other problem was the other cop-Walter
J. Miller-then sixty-two years old. Back in 1932, Tubbo Gilbert assigned Miller
to guard Factor for three months after Jake appeared on the streets of LaSalle.
So if they were going to kill Touhy, they
would probably have to kill one of the two cops with him, the old one would be
easier, but if they had to kill the young one, well so be it. But still, even
for the Chicago outfit, cop killing was more or less a forbidden act. Touhy's
suit threatened the whole casino operation and his death warranted bringing
down the risk of killing a cop.
Roger never feared for his life; that wasn't
why he had the two men travel with him. "If I have Mike and Walter with
me," he told Ray Brennan, "they won't be able to pin a phoney parole
violation on me. They'll never hit me.
They'll try to frame me for a parole violation probably, but they'll never hit
me."
• • •
Anatomy of a Hit
"In a world where there are few roses, Roger Touhy never
pretended to be one but his finish emphasizes that even a man who was not so
good may be the victim of men who are worse." -Chicago Sun Times
In the early evening of the night he died, Roger Touhy prepared to
drive to a meeting at the Chicago Press Club with Ray Brennan and their book
publisher to discuss Factor's suit against them.
At the same time, across town, John Factor dined
at the Singapore Steak House on Rush street. The place was owned by two old
saloon keepers named Fritzel and Jacobson, whom Jake had known from Prohibition
days. Tommy Downs managed the restaurant which was popular with the mob in the
1950s. Downs was once in charge of security at the Sportsman Park Race Track
which was previously owned by Bugs Moran and later by Frank Nitti. In 1959 the
Singapore Steak House was secretly owned by Chuckie English, a former member of
the 42 Gang and right-hand man of Sam Giancana, and it
remained one of Chicago's celebrity hangouts despite the mob
connections.
Jake said he had flown in from Los Angeles to
spend the holidays with his son Jerome and to press his suit against Touhy and
Brennan over The Stolen Years.
Also seen in the Singapore that night was Murray
Humpreys, who had helped Factor rig his own kidnapping almost three decades
before. As always, Humpreys sat with a glass of whisky in front of him. The
Hump put it there to impress the others and nothing more, since he never drank.
During the rest of the evening, the normally low
profile Humpreys made sure of accounting for his whereabouts. He left the
Singapore and strolled down Clark Street where he was seen at Fritzels, a
fashionable restaurant and later at L'Escarot, another restaurant, returning
home he said at 3:00 A.M.
Tubbo Gilbert left his palatial homes in Los
Angeles and Palm Springs where he lived in semi- retirement, and was in town
overseeing his extensive real estate and contracting interests. He would later
tell reporters that he had flown into Chicago to spend the holidays with his
grandchildren.
At 5:00 RM. sharp, Walter Miller pulled his car
up to the front of Roger's sister's home to take Touhy to his meeting with
Brennan and the publisher. At 5:55, they pulled into the Sheraton Towers Hotel
garage and took the elevator to the top floor to the wood-paneled press club.
Brennan, customary scotch in hand, greeted them at the door. They hung up their
winter coats and walked to a round table in the middle of the room where
Richard H. Brown, a New York lawyer representing the book's publisher,
Pennington Press, was seated.
Brennan ordered appetizers and a German beer for
Touhy. They talked for three hours about the book. It was a grim conversation.
Factor's suit had hurt the book's sales because the big chain department stores
fearing a suit from Factor, refused to carry it. As if that wasn't bad enough
the Teamsters had refused to load and carry copies on their trucks.
At 9:15 Miller said they had to leave because
Roger was on an 11:00 P.M. curfew. Brennan helped his two guests on with their
topcoats. Miller's coat sagged from the heavy .38 caliber in his right pocket.
The last thing Touhy said to Brennan was,
"Factor goes around calling me every vile name in the book. I'm going to
Springfield on Friday to ask Governor Stratton for a full pardon. Goodnight,
kid."
Roger Touhy Must Die
The ringleaders of those who were making money
hand-over-fist at the Stardust in the early sixties had all grown out of the
old-time Chicago syndicate. Virtually all of them had been players in Capone's
mob and its war against the Touhy organization.
When Roger entered prison in 1934, there was some
question as to whether the Chicago syndicate, then under Frank Nitti's control,
would make it into the next decade. The end of prohibition had taken away its
beer money. Additionally, the Great Depression, which hit Chicago extremely
hard, had hurt its traditional rackets like white slavery and prostitution. To
top it off, the war with Touhy for control over labor unions had cost them
dearly.
But when Touhy was defeated, Nitti did take control
over most of Chicago's labor unions and even joined the New York and New Jersey
mob in an ill- fated move on the Hollywood entertainment locals. That collapsed
in 1942, when federal indictments locked up virtually all of the leaders of the
Chicago mob. The indictments even caused Frank Nitti to fire a bullet through
his own brain. But by 1959 the mob was under the firm leadership of Paul Ricca-
the man who had murdered Matt Kolb-and Tony Accardo, who was just a small-time
hood when Touhy had been locked away.
For appearances anyway, the outfit's official leader
was Sam "Momo" Giancana, a merciless thug who had fought the Touhys
as part of the 42 Gang under Rocco DeGrazio's command back in 1932.
But Giancana was nothing more then a lightning rod to
keep the government away from Accardo and Ricca. The fact was that Accardo was
the boss. In fact, he remains to this day the most powerful, successful and
respected boss known by the Chicago syndicate, or probably any other criminal
syndicate for that matter. He also had the distinction of being the mob leader
with the longest-lived career. During his tenure, Accardo's power was
long-reaching and frightfully vast.
He was so respected and feared in the national mafia
that in 1948 when he declared himself the arbitrator for any mob problems west
of Chicago- in effect proclaiming all of that territory as his-no one in the
syndicate argued.
He was the boss pure and simple. Unlike Torrio, Nitti
or Ricca, Tony Accardo looked exactly like what he was-a mob thug who could and
did dispatch men and women to their death over money or disrespect. He was a
self-professed peasant. But he was a reserved man and a thinker, unlike
Colosimo, Capone, Giancana and all those who came after Giancana.
Unlike the other bosses, Accardo knew his
limitations. He consulted often with Ricca, Murray the Camel Humpreys and Short
Pants Campagna because he recognized their intelligence and wisdom and liked to
use it.
He admitted lacking the crafty thinking ability of
Ricca, Nitti or Torrio and the flair and self deprecating wit of Capone or
Giancana. Despite his shortcomings, it was Accardo who expanded the outfit's
activities into new rackets after the end of the prohibition era. It was
Accardo who, recognizing the dangers of the white slave trade, streamlined the
old prostitution racket during the war years into the new call girl service
which was copied by New York families even though they laughed at the idea at
first.
Two decades after prohibition was repealed Accardo
introduced bootlegging to the dry states of Kansas and Oklahoma, flooding them
with illegal whisky. He moved the outfit into slot and vending machines,
counterfeiting cigarette and liquor tax stamps and expanding narcotics
smuggling on a worldwide basis.
Watching someone as clever as Paul Ricca and as smart
as Frank Nitti go to jail over the Bioff scandal, Accardo pulled the
organization away from labor racketeering and extortion. Under Accardo's reign
the Chicago mob exploded in growth and became increasingly wealthy.
The outfit grew because aside from the Kefauver
committee, there wasn't a focused attempt on the part of any law enforcement
agency to break it up. The FBI was busy catching Cold War spies and denied that
the Mafia or even organized crime existed at all.
Under Accardo's leadership, the gang set its flag in
Des Moines, Iowa; downstate Illinois; Southern California; Kentucky; Las Vegas;
Indiana; Arizona; St. Louis, Missouri; Mexico; Central and South America.
Accardo's long reign highlighted a golden era for the Chicago syndicate. But it
also ushered in the near collapse of the outfit as well. In 1947, as Tony
Accardo took the reigns of power from Paul Ricca, the outfit produced an
estimated $300 million in business per year, with Accardo, Humpreys, Ricca and
Giancana taking in an estimated forty to fifty million each per year.
Accardo pensioned off the older members of the mob
and gave more authority to its younger soldiers, mostly former 42 Gang members
like Sam Giancana, the Battaglias and Marshal Ciafano.
The money poured in. Hundreds of thousands of dollars
rolled in everyday from all points where Chicago ruled. The hoods who had
survived the shootouts, gang wars, purges, cop shootings, national exposes and
the federal and state investigations now saw rewards for what they had so
dilligently hustled for.
By 1959, the Chicago outfit was stealing millions of
dollars from the Teamsters' pension fund, which they had more or less turned
into their own piggy bank. The outfit was pouring much of that money into Las
Vegas casinos, including The Stardust which Jake the Barber fronted.
It was all so easy, and then Roger Touhy announced
that he intended to pursue a $300,000,000 lawsuit against John Factor and all
the others-Ricca, Humpreys, Accardo-who had helped railroad him to prison for
twenty-five years.
The bosses, Ricca and Accardo,
watched and worried. They thought they had buried Touhy alive in Statesville
but Johnstone got him out. This proved to the syndicate that Touhy's lawyer was
no hack. When he sued, he meant business.
Worse yet, the word on the street was that Touhy was
working with Ray Brennan, an investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune.
Brennan was
somebody to worry about. He knew what he was doing and he was
honest. Brennan kept turning up asking the wrong questions about Teamster loans
to the Stardust.
The way Ricca and Accardo saw it, there was only one
answer. Roger Touhy had to die.