Banghart, Basil

Banghart, Basil: AKA The Owl He was an underworld legend, a man's man, whose prison escapes made him a celebrity in every major prison from Atlanta to Soladad. He could drive a train, fly a plane, shoot a machine gun from a speeding car with deadly accuracy and pull off mail heists that produced a million dollars.

     Basil Hugh Banghart was born in Berville Michigan in 1900 and finished one year of college before he became a professional car thief, stealing over 100 cars in the Detroit area, still dubious but unbroken, before he was arrested in 1926 at age twenty-six.

     Prison sociologists rated him as "a professional criminal, recidivist with unfavorable prognosis. A sophisticated criminal who is astute, well poised, alert, but without social conscience or scruples. His I.Q 107."

     Banghart, dubbed "The Owl" because of his abnormally large eyes, had been associated with Gerald Chapman and George Dutch Anderson having met the both of them while he was doing time in Atlanta Federal pen.

     Chapman liked Banghart and took him under his wing and tutored him in the fine arts of mail robbery and prison escapes.

     Chapman had taught The Owl well. Assigned to a window washing detail, Banghart made his first, but unsuccessful, escape from Atlanta, by leaping 25 feet from a window he was washing into a marsh area on the other side of the prison's wall. He made his way to Montana, but was captured and sent back to Atlanta.

     His second escape was with George Chapman in 1927 but he was arrested in Pittsburgh a year later, in October of 1928, while trying to steal a car.

     Escorted by US Marshals back to prison, Banghart was taken to the federal building. Left alone in an office for several minutes, Banghart escaped by calling police and telling them he was an FBI agent who had been assaulted and overpowered by his prisoner, Basil Banghart, who had escaped after handcuffing him.

     The Owl gave the cops a description of the Marshal who was escorting him and said, "He's a dangerous, armed felon and a police imposter."

     Police, pistols drawn, flooded into the building and overpowered the FBI agent as he and Banghart walked through the building's lobby. The Owl disappeared in the confusion.

     He was arrested in Knoxville in February of 1930. Returned to Atlanta, he escaped again but was arrested in January 1932 in Detroit for armed robbery.

     Held in the South Bend Indiana jail, he escaped by throwing pepper in the guard's face, grabbing his machine gun and shooting his way to freedom.

     Banghart made his way to Chicago and went to work for Roger Touhy. While Banghart probably played a major role in the Touhy-Nitti union wars of 1932-33, there is only one incident on record where police suspected he was involved.

     In January of 1933, the Nitti organization trapped and killed one of Touhy's gunmen, a union extortionist named Jimmy O'Brien.

     Seven days later February 8, 1933, the Touhy's struck back.

     It was 15 degrees below zero and snowing. There was two feet of snow already on the ground. A dark colored sedan pulled up in front of the Garage Nightclub where Jimmy O'Brien had been killed.

     A tall man, identified as Banghart, and wearing a dark hat and overcoat, probably Basil Banghart, opened the front door to the club and said: "This is for Jimmy, you bastards!" and tossed a bomb into the bar room which blew the place to bits but remarkably didn't kill any of the occupants.

     In August of 1933, Banghart's occasional partner, Issac Costner, a Tennessee moonshiner working for the Touhy's as an enforcer, convinced Banghart to meet with an international con man named John Factor, AKA, Jake the Barber.

     Costner told Banghart that the Barber was wanted in England on a bonco conviction and needed to avoid extradition by kidnapping himself. Factor had promised Costner $50,000 if he would help make the kidnapping look real by picking up the ransom money.

     Remarkably, Banghart agreed.

     On August 17, 1933, Banghart drove to the forest preserves outside of Chicago where the ransom money was to be dropped.

     It was supposed to be an easy deal, a man in a cab would meet Banghart at the intersection of Wolf and Ogden roads and hand him a bag filled with 50k, in small unmarked bills.

     But, unknown to the Owl, two hundred and fifty policemen, cadets, Sheriff's deputies and FBI agents, two airplanes, sixty-two squad cars, ten machine guns and a dozen aerial bombs were waiting for him.

     Banghart and his partner, Ice Wagon Connor, were late picking up the money. They sped onto the roadway where the cab was waiting and pulled up to the cab's fender, screeching to a halt just barely avoiding an accident.

     Connors, in a gray summer suit, was on the passenger's side. He stepped out and walked over to the cab and looked at Officer McKenna in the back seat. "You got a package, a package for Smith?" he asked.

     The plainclothes policeman inside the cab nodded. "Yes. It's here."

     The cop handed Connors a package that contained nothing more than scraps of paper and then waved for the others to move in.

     Banghart and Connors saw the set up. Banghart floored the car while Connors threw himself into the back seat.

     Banghart raced the car down the road only to find it blocked by a dozen squad cars. Throwing the car in reverse, he raced down to the other end of the road and into another road block.

     The Owl threw the car in reverse again and dodged back and forth between the roadblocks, looking for an opening.

     At one point, McKenna and Meyers, the two cops in the taxi, drove up behind Banghart's car and fired the machine gun at the gangster, missing every shot. In frustration Meyers pulled the cab up alongside Banghart's car to give McKenna a better shot. McKenna let a burst go from the Tommy gun, but missed again.

     Banghart drove the car straight at the roadblock in front of him and the cops, not really sure if he would stop or not, moved out of his way and Banghart drove straight into the forest preserve to get out of the view of the airplanes above him.

     With the police only yards behind them, Banghart and Connor leaped out of the car and let it smash into a tree and ran away on foot and split up and escaped.

     With the Factor business behind him, or so he thought, in the winter of 1935, Banghart joined Roger Touhy and his gang in planning and executing what was then the largest string of mail robberies in history.

     Banghart's contribution was to steal $105,000 in federal reserve notes from a truck in Charlotte North Carolina in broad daylight.

     Unfortunately for Banghart, he used a stolen car for the heist, which brought the FBI into the case. The car was found outside of a Baltimore hotel a month after the robbery, and the FBI arrested Banghart shortly afterwards as he left the hotel.

     Banghart was returned to Chicago, where, to his surprise, he was indicted, along with Roger Touhy and four others, for kidnapping Jake the Barber Factor. The Owl had been set up.

     When Banghart was called to the stand during the Factor kidnap trial, the prosecuting attorney, Wilbert Crowley asked: "What is your occupation, Mr. Banghart?"

      "Thief."

      The jury laughed but Crowley was confused. "What?"

      "I'm a thief. I steal...that's how I make my living."

      "What was the last place of your residence?"

      "

601 McDonough Boulevard SE, Atlanta Georgia

, but it wasn't permanent."

     Later in the day Crowley found out that 601 McDonough was the address for Atlanta Federal prison and called Banghart back to the witness stand to explain himself.

     "Why didn't you tell us," Crowley demanded, "that you were in prison?"

     "Four walls and iron bars," Banghart replied, "do not a prison make."

     Flustered, Crowley said, "So you escaped from prison, isn't that correct?"

     Banghart was indignant. "No. The warden says I escaped from prison."

      "And," Crowley asked, "What do you say?"

      "I say," replied Banghart, "that I left without permission."

      "The point is, Mr. Banghart, is that you are a fugitive, are you not?"

      "Yes I am. I am a fugitive."

      "From where, sir?"

      "Well hell son, from justice."

     The jury had a good laugh at the Owl's testimony but they found him guilty anyway. He was sentenced to 99 years for his role in the Factor kidnapping, plus 31 years for his part in the mail robberies.

     In 1935, Banghart started off his new career at Menard State prison by driving a laundry truck through the main gates.

     The escape was short lived, he was recaptured and sent to the main prison with Roger Touhy at Statesville.

     In October of 1942, Banghart escaped prison again, this time with Roger Touhy and four others, going over Stateville's enormous 45-foot walls in a daring daylight breakout.

     They were recaptured several months later after one of the escapees, Matlick Nelson, who had been severely beaten by Banghart for drinking, turned himself into the FBI and told the agents everything he knew about the escape.

     By nightfall, a small army of agents was slowly and carefully moving in around the gang's apartments.

     J. Edgar Hoover arrived on the scene to personally supervise the raid.

     At zero hour, powerful searchlights were turned onto the windows of Touhy's apartment and then a loudspeaker cracked the silence of the night. "Roger Touhy and the other escaped convicts! The building is surrounded. We are about to throw tear gas in the building. Surrender now and you will not be killed."

     Banghart wanted to shoot it out, but Roger didn't. They debated over what to do for the next ten minutes before Banghart shouted out the window, "We're coming out."

     "Then come out backwards with your hands high in the air! Banghart you come out first!"

     Banghart, wearing only his pants, appeared at the front door, his back to the agents. Roger, clad in fire-engine-red pajamas, followed him.

     The agents leaped on each of them as they came out of the building and knocked them to the freezing cold pavement and handcuffed them.

     A dozen agents rushed into the apartment and found five pistols, three sawn off shotguns, a .30/30 rifle and $13,523 in cash which they handed over to Tubbo Gilbert, who was still the Chief Investigator for the States Attorney's Office.

     When Gilbert returned the cash to the prisoners at Stateville prison, he said that he had only been given $800 by the FBI.

     After Touhy and Banghart were handcuffed, J. Edgar Hoover, surrounded by a dozen agents and a dozen more newspaper reports, strolled up to Banghart and said "Well, Banghart, you're a trapped rat."

     The Owl burst out into a huge smile, "You're J. Edgar Hoover, aren't you?" he asked.

      "Yes," Hoover beamed, "I am."

      Banghart nodded his head and said, "You're a lot fatter in person than you are on the radio."

      On January 2, 1943, The Owl was returned, by a massive and heavily armed convoy, to spend his 36th birthday in solitary confinement in Statesville.

     But State authorities had enough of Banghart and his death defying escapes. He was becoming a convict's legend. He had to be made an example of.

     Several days after his return, the Owl was dragged from his cell by eighteen federal marshals, chained at his wrists and ankles and sent by airplane to Alcatraz prison island.

     It was a stroke of bad luck for Banghart, for one thing, although he could fly a plane and drive cars better and faster than most mere mortals, Banghart had never learned to swim.

     The Owl was assigned to the prison kitchen where he and Alvin Karpis were assigned to the bakery although Banghart was later promoted to kitchen clerk, the same position Roger Touhy would hold at Statesville prison.

     "The Karpis Kitchen Crew", as it became known, was the stuff of convict legends. Banghart and Karpis learned to make wine out of cherry pie juices, spending all of their off time making and testing different types of wine and getting drunk. "The challenge was," Karpis wrote, "to avoid becoming an alcoholic."

     In 1959, after it had been proven that John Factor had arranged his own kidnapping, the Owl was transferred from Alcatraz back to Statesville prison.

     Eventually his conviction for kidnapping was overturned and his 30-year sentence for mail robbery was dropped for time served. In 1960, the Owl, now a graying man of sixty years, strolled out of prison for ever.

     There is, more or less, a happy ending to Banghart's story. When he left prison, his girlfriend of thirty years, Mae Blacock, was waiting for him as was a small but very respectable real estate fortune left to him by an aunt in 1945.

     The Owl lived out the remainder of his life in relative comfort on a small island in Puget Sound, watching the ships go by.

John Factor, the Kennedy's and the Star Dust Casino

If any one hoodlum can take claim for inventing Las Vegas, it was Tony Cornero. Tony not only built the Vegas that we know today, fittingly, he died there, dropped dead gambling at the Desert Inn, while Moe Dalitz, the Godfather of Sin City, stood in the middle of the casino floor, his fat, stubby little arm around the waist of his slim and much younger wife.

Cornero had gone to the Desert Inn for a last chance meeting with Godfather of the Strip, Moe Dalitz, to beg the mobs favorite front man for financing to help him complete construction on his own Casino, the cursed 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 and Dalitz and everybody else knew it. Tony was in the hole to the mob to the tune of $6,000,000 that he had already borrowed finance the Stardust, and he couldn't account for half of the cash. It was a mistake to give him the money in the first place, because Tony the Hat was no businessman, just dice jockey with high ambitions.

Cornero and Dalitz met for several long hours in a conference that went nowhere. Cornero wanted the mobs money and the mob wanted Cornero's casino, but had no intention of paying another penny for it. During a break in the meeting, Cornero went out to the floor and gambled at the crap tables 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's had. Cornero went ballistic. He was a guest of Moe Dalitz. The waitress didn't care and Dalitz stood by and watched Tony Cornero suffer through the ultimate Vegas insult to a big timer. Cornero screamed, ranted and raved and then he grabbed his chest and fell forward on the table, desperately clutching his heart through his shirt, the dice still wrapped in a his fat, hot 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 was poisoned, the answer went with him. An autopsy was never done. 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 Cannon Ball" and within eight hours after he hit the cold floor of the Desert Inn. Nobody checked the contents of the 7&7 he had been sipping before he dropped dead. No one cared enough to ask any serious questions anyway. 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.

They outfit had probably set Tony up from the very beginning anyway. He never would have gotten a license to run the place because he had a long criminal record and the even longer lists of powerful political enemies he had 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. Myer Lansky and Frank Costello were 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 casinos.

Cornero knew about the license problem of course, but it didn't concern him, maybe he could get a license anyway. A few million went a long way in Nevada in 1950s but the word was that Moe Dalitz had taken care of that already. There was 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 into talks with Dalitz about leasing the place to the Dalitz operation, and Dalitz was interested but the terms that Cornero wanted were steep, a half a million a month. So Dalitz bid his time because he knew Cornero was broke and would have to crawling back to him, and when he did, they'd handle him.

ile it lasted, Cornero has an amazing life. 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, driving them broke and forcing them to immigrate to San Francisco in the early 1900s. At age 16, Tony pleaded guilty to robbery and did ten months in reform school, he moved to southern California and racked up another ten arrest 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 before he decided to branch off into the rum running business. He started with a string of small boats and smuggled high priced whisky over the Canadian border and sold it to the wealthy and better clubs in Los Angles. At the same time, Cornero ran rum from Mexico to Los Angles, his freighters easily avoiding the understaffed coast guard. Next, Tony purchased the merchant ship, the SS Lily, which he stocked with 4,000 case's of the best booze money could buy and ran the booze into Los Angles under moonlight.


In 1931, Cornero decided to switch over to gambling and moved, with his brothers, to Las Vegas and opened one of the town’s first larger 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, Frank Costello sent around their representatives and demanded a cut in Cornero's action, but 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 Angles.


In 1938 Cornero bought several large ships and refurbished them into luxury casino's at a cost of over $300,000, and anchored them three miles off the coast of Santa Monica and had gamblers shuttled from shore by way of motor boats. Cornero's lead ship, The Rex, had a crew of 350, waiters’ waitresses, cooks, a full orchestra, and enforcers. The first class dining room served French cuisine only and on most nights, some 2,000 patrons flooded on to 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, they were still illegal. Back and forth it went, until at one point, after raiders had smashed almost a half a million worth of gambling equipment on one of his ships, Cornero decided to fight back. 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 and he closed up his off shore operations. Tony tried to open a few gambling joints inside Los Angles, but Micky Cohen, the ruling bookie and dope 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 to Las Vegas.


After several years in Vegas, Cornero undertook his dream, to build the largest gambling casino-hotel in the world, the Stardust. Then he went broke. Tony went out like the gambler he was. Of the estimated $25 million he had earned his career as a gambler, Tony Cornero had less than $800 in his pockets when he died. "I got the Stardust for Chicago," Johnny Roselli bragged and for once, he may have been near the truth.
After the Las Vegas Stardust casinos original owner Tony Cornero, either died of a heart attack or was poisoned, Tony Accardo called Johnny Roselli back to Chicago for a meeting at Moe's Restaurant with Murray Humphreys and Jake Guzak. Always the hustler, Roselli knew that the bosses back in Chicago were worried because they were losing what little presence they had in Vegas, and as the power west of New York, they felt, as a matter of mob pride, that they should have a major presence on the Strip. Roselli filled them in on the situation at the Stardust. It was, as Roselli called it, a "grind joint," a paradise for the low rollers located right in the heart of the Strip. It was agreed immediately that Chicago would take the Stardust for themselves. Eventually Kansas and Milwaukee had a piece of the Stardust, but all activity in the Stardust was overseen by the Chicago family, they got paid for babysitting the action in Las Vegas but they also took a bigger cut because of it.


Fronting the entire operation would be the mob's favorite and most successful con man, John Factor, brother to cosmetic king Max Factor. John Factor, AKA "Jake the Barber" went way back with the Chicago outfit, back to the days when Johnny Torrio was running things. Humphreys either put up Chicago's money for the purchase and used Factor as its front man, or had Factor put up the purchasing money he got from Humphreys. One way or the other two things were certain. From that point on, Jake the Barber was Chicago's front man in Vegas and Chicago had the Stardust, lock, stock and barrel. And it was a mob gold mine. The Stardust boasted 1,032 rooms, and, when it opened for business in 1955, with Lyndon Baines Johnson and Bobby Baker as the guests of honor, the Stardust had one of the biggest casinos in the world. There were some luxury suites but mainly the Stardust was for low rollers. To stress that, in the back parking lot there were the cheap one-room cabins and spaces for RV units.


It was Dalitz's idea to set up the Stardust as a place for "low rollers" and the Desert Inn for "high rollers." But first they would have to spruce up the Stardust in the fabled Las Vegas tradition of tacky splendor for the masses, and Murray Humphreys arranged for a million dollar loan from the Teamsters Welfare Fund by way of Red Dorfman via Jimmy Hoffa. At first, the outfit was excited at the prospect of having Jake the Barber as their front man. Jake was, if nothing else, trustworthy.

And the reason he was trustworthy was that he was smart enough to know the outfit would kill him in a heartbeat if he tried anything slick with them. The way the boys saw things running was that they would steal the place blind and if anything went wrong, Factor could take the fall for them. "But," wrote Hank Messeck, "he couldn't get a license either, 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 he would lease the Desert Inn Group." Factor said he wanted six and a half million a year for the rent but Dalitz was not about to pay that since he held all the aces in the deal including heavy clout with the Nevada state government. "It took," wrote Hank Messeck, "a western Apalachin to solve the matter."

Meeting in Sidney Korshak's Beverly Hills office were Meyer Lansky, Longy Zwillman, and Doc Stacher who represented their syndicate and Moe Dalitz and Morris Klienman who represented the Desert Inn. Representing Chicago was Johnny Roselli's replacement by order of Momo Giancana, Marshal Caifano and John Bats Battaglia. It was decided that the lease on the Stardust would be $100,000 a month, a low figure for the second largest moneymaker in Las Vegas. In the end, the true owners of the Stardust were Moe Dalitz and his partners, Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo, Sam Giancana and Murray Humphreys. Other smaller point holders included Wilbur Clark and Yale Cohen.


Large or small point holders, everybody was making money off the Stardust. Carl Thomas, the master of the Las Vegas Skim, estimated that the Chicago mob was skimming $400,000.00 a month from the Stardust in the early sixties, and that was only for the one arm bandits in the casino, the blackjack game, keno and roulette and poker yielded a different and higher skim. "Everybody," Thomas said, "played with cash. You couldn't get the paddle into the slot at the craps table, there were so many hundred dollar bills crammed into the drop boxes. That's why the front men who were the big shots in town, got laws passed that kept the wise guys who were the real owners, out of town."


As a rule, cash from the skims were paid out to each member of the Chicago operation in accordance with the number or percentage of points each person held in the casinos. Normally, only a few thousand dollars per point or percentage were paid out on a regular basis, with the bigger lump sum payments coming in March after the accountants were finished with their end-of-year figures. Then, hidden investors flew into Vegas with their girlfriends and wives to pick up their cash payments in person staying as "comped" guests all over town. Free women, free hotel suites, free gambling, and free money, free everything. For wise guys there was no place in the world like Vegas.


Ida Devine, the wife of Irving "Niggy" Devine who owned the New York Meat Company, which supplied the Las Vegas casinos, was the prime courier for the skim money out of Vegas to Chicago. She replaced Virginia Hill as Chicago deep cover operative in Vegas and chief exporter for the skimmed cash out of Vegas. Ida would take the train out of Vegas to Chicago's union station where she was normally met by one of Humphreys' people, Gus Alex or George Bieber, law partner to Mike Brodkin. From there, she was escorted to the Ambassador East Hotel on Goethe Street, not far from where Humphreys and Gus Alex lived. They would check into a room there for several hours, Chicago would receive its share of the skim money and then Ida was brought back to Union Station and placed safely on a train out of town.


By 1958, Accardo and Sam Giancana were taking $300,000.00 a month each out of Las Vegas. After a while, Giancana didn't trust anybody to bring in his share of the skim, so he went to Vegas and got it himself. Least of all, Giancana didn't trust Jake Factor and eventually assigned the Chicago outfit's "Outside man" in Vegas to follow Factor around Vegas and Beverly Hills and report his every move back to Chicago.


Murray Humphreys also stayed very close to Factor during his entire involvement in the Stardust and influenced Factor to follow through with his lease of the Stardust to Moe Dalitz's United Hotels Corporation. Sidney Korshak acted as the "go-between" for Factor and the Desert Inn Group, which was made up of Moe Dalitz and Allard Roen. The entire deal was so convoluted that the Nevada State Gaming Commission called a special meeting to look into the purchase and called Allen Roen, the Stardust representative, to answer a few questions.
Moe Dalitz closed the Stardust deal in Chicago on November 5 and 6, 1960. He met with Accardo, Humphreys and Giancana and worked a deal, which would give Chicago a greater interest in the Stardust as well as the Desert Inn, the Riviera, and the Freemont.

The remarkable sale of the Stardust Casino by Factor and his group to Moe Dalitz and his United Hotels happened in August of 1962 for $14,000,000.00, a relatively small amount for such a large enterprise. Eugene "Jimmy" James acted as his go between to the Teamsters fund.


James was the former secretary-treasurer of the Laundry Cleaning and Dye House Workers International Union as well as the President of Local 46 of the same union. However, he was caught stealing union funds on November 17, 1960 and he was going to jail as a result. So when Humphreys approached him to act as a go for one point in the Stardust, paid to his family directly while he was in jail, James readily agreed. Tony Accardo, Paul Ricca and Murray Humphreys took at least five points each, a point being valued at $125,000.00. Another mobster named Nick Civella, got $6,000.00 a month out of the deal, paid by the casino, as a broker's fee.


When news of the transaction hit the media, that John Factor had sold out what was then one of the largest and most profitable casinos in the world for the paltry sum of $15,000,000.00, Robert Kennedy, then the Attorney General of the States, thought it was a ridiculously small sales figure and ordered an investigation to find out who really owned the Stardust and why the sale price was so small. At the same time Kennedy's Justice Department and the Nevada state gaming commission began scrutinizing the stockholding in the Stardust, they opened this investigation in search of hidden assets by Momo and other hoods. Had those investigations not been halted on the President's orders, it would have revealed that Factor was a pawn in a much larger game as well as uncovering the Teamsters enormous funds buried in the casinos by mob accountants.


In September of 1962, the Federal Government decided that it wanted to talk to John Factor about his incredibly profitable deals at the Stardust Casino. They had lots of questions for Jake the Barber. Two months later, in November of 1962, Factor gave deposition in Chicago about his dealing in Las Vegas and explained that although he was the owner of record of the Stardust, and was still making money off the place, $110,000.00 a month in fact, he had leased the casino portion of the club to the Dalitz group and said that he was shocked when he found out that Moe Dalitz may have been involved with gangsters. Asked about the reported $500,000.00 finder's fee paid out by Moe Dalitz to Chicago's mob lawyer Sidney Korshak, Factor said he knew nothing about Korshak, a finder's fee or the workings of the Parvin-Dohrmann Company, the company Dalitz set up to purchase the casino from Factor. But before the Justice department/Nevada investigation could call Factor in to answer any questions the Immigration and Naturalization Service decided that Jake the Barber was an undesirable alien and made moves to deport him back to England where Jake was still wanted for his part in the stock swindles there.


At seventy years of age, John Factor, who had lived in America since at least 1919, was being booted out of the country. It was in this atmosphere that the Los Angeles office of the INS decided to deport the seventy-year old Factor to his native England based on the 1943 conviction because it involved "moral turpitude." George K. Rosenberg, the District Director of the INS was aware that Factor was seeking a pardon. "But because no action had been taken on Factor's pardon application, we figured that he was deportable and we moved to deport him."


On December 3, 1962, the Department of Justice requested that the Immigration and Naturalization begin proceedings to deport John Factor from the United States to England where he was a wanted felon. Unable to show due cause why he should not be deported, Factor was ordered to surrender to the Los Angeles office of the INS on December 21, 1962, at which point he would be arrested and deported out of the country. Adding to Factor's woes was the ongoing IRS investigation into his back taxes for the years 1935 through 1939. The government wanted Factor to explain where he received $479,093.27 in income, and Factor couldn't remember. If he were deported, the Government would impound his holdings until the matter was settled. But Factor was saved by a Presidential Pardon. Abusing the pardon privilege has a torrid and often astounding history, even on a state level. In the early 1920s, Illinois incredibly corrupt Governor, Len Small, sold an estimated 500 pardons before he was indicted and chased from office. Small's broker on the pardon deals was a union extortionist named "Umbrella Mike" Boyle, a bigwig in the Electrical Workers Union. Among Boyle's clients was Spike O'Donnell, who immediately started the great Chicago beer wars of 1926 upon his release, James "Fur" Sammons, a lunatic killer who scared even the Capone organization he worked for, and Johnny Touhy, the short-lived boss of the Terrible Touhy gang.


In the 1970's, when federal prosecutors tried to deport southwestern Pennsylvania mob boss, John S. LaRocca, Governor John Fine pardoned the alleged Godfather of corruption along with his caporegime, Frank Rosa. Later, Governor George Earle pardoned mafia boss Joe Luciano, Luigi Quaranta and alleged Caporegime Nicholas Piccolo. He also pardoned Frankie Palermo, an alleged made member of the Mafia, Felix Bocchiccio, a fight fixer, Leo Kamminski and Louie Barish, suspected mob gamblers. One of the earliest and most outrageous pardons on records belongs to Harry Truman who pardoned "Ice pick" Danny Motto, a labor thug in the Gambino family. Motto had been convicted of war time racketeering and as a result, Danny the Ice Pick wasn't allowed to hold an "elective" office in New York's Bakers union, local 350, a 900-member local which he terrorized from 1939 until his death in the 1980s. Motto's 1947 federal racketeering charge, plus a previous conviction for murder, gave the Justice Department due cause to deport the hood. However, at the last moment, when deportation had been ordered, Truman granted a pardon and the deportation was canceled. The man who worked behind the scenes on Motto's behalf was his lawyer, Herb Itkin, a shadowy figure with unspecified connections to Naval Intelligence and later to the CIA.


It was Itkin who introduced New York's Lindsay administration to labor mobster, loan shark and Danny Motto's boss, Anthony "Tony Ducks' Corralo, a meeting that would eventually led to the James Marcus scandal of 1966. Truman also pardoned an enormous number of felons from the Boss Pendergast political machine. More than half of those pardoned were convicted of interfering with a citizen’s right to vote, or, in other words, were members of Owney Madden's goon squads.


Richard Nixon, who was pardoned by Jerry Ford, pardoned Angelo "Gyp" DeCarlo, a capo in the Gambino crime family and a major loan shark in Northern New Jersey. Officially, DeCarlo got the pardon because he was supposed to be dying of cancer. When released however, he reentered the loan sharking business and was suspected in ordering at least one murder within the first six months of his release. In 1970, DeCarlo told an FBI undercover agent that he paid singer Frank Sinatra $150,000 in cash to give to Vice President Spiro Agnew, to secure the pardon.


Nixon also pardoned the mobs personnel loan officer, Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa in 1974. Three years later, two federal informants reported that Allen Dorfman and gangster Tony Provenzano had each collected about $500,000 in cash, which was delivered to Nixon's counsel, Charles Colson. According to the informants, the money had been skimmed off of the Vegas casino's and was a payoff for both Hoffa's release and for the restrictions on that release which forbade Jimmy from returning to the Union business During his brief presidency, John F. Kennedy issued 472 pardons, more than any Chief Executive before or since. About half of which are appear to be questionable at best but the most outrageous is the Factor pardon.


In 1926, Factor, (AKA Jake the Barber) brother to Max Factor, conned thousands of British citizens out of $8 million dollars, (1928 value) Factor fled England for Chicago and successfully avoided extradition by paying to have himself kidnapped and accused six innocent men of the crime who served a total of 130 years for the fake abduction.

In 1942, Factor was convicted on federal charges and sentenced to ten years for a botched confidence scam. Released in 1948, Factor claimed he was broke, but, seven years later, opened the Stardust Casino in Vegas. In 1962, Factor sold his share of the casino, then the largest and most profitable in the world, for a paltry 14 million dollars. The buyer was the mobs other front man, Moe Dalitz. Chicago bosses Tony Accardo, Paul Ricca and Murray Humphreys took at least five points each from the sale, a point being valued at $125,000. Another hood, Nick Civella, got $6,000 a month out of the deal, paid by the casino, as a broker’s fee.


Attorney General Robert Kennedy thought it was a ridiculously small sales figure and ordered an investigation to find out who really owned the Stardust and why the sale price was so small. At the same time, Kennedy's Justice Department and the Nevada state gaming commission, began scrutinizing the stockholders in the Stardust and opened an investigation in search of hidden assets by the Mafia. t was in this atmosphere that the Los Angeles office of the INS decided to deport the seventy year old Factor to England based on the 1943 fraud conviction. On December 3 1962, the Department of Justice requested that the Immigration and Naturalization begin proceedings to deport Factor from the United States. Unable to show due cause why he should not be deported, Factor was ordered to surrender to the Los Angeles office of the INS on December 21 1962, at which point he would be arrested and tossed out of the country. Then the Kennedy's gave John Factor a full pardon. But at what cost?


The executive clemency had all the earmarks of a mob style shake down because just seven days before Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department ordered Factor deported, on November 26 1962, the Attorney General did something unusual, he changed the laws that govern Presidential pardons. It was only the second time the rules, which are actually a mere fourteen set of suggestions since they are advisory in nature, would be tampered with from 1946 until 1997.


Bobby Kennedy changed the rules by cutting out the middle man, all pardon requests went directly to the White House and then to the Justice Department, not the other way around which is how it was before Factors pardon was granted. It appears that Bobby's tampering was all about money because one day a very drunken Chuckie English, one of Chicago's mob boss Sam Giancana top men, strolled out of the Armory Lounge, the outfits meeting place, and leaned against the FBI observation car parked just across the street from the tavern and started a conversation with the agents who reported "English is bemoaning the fact that the federal government is closing in on the organization and nothing can be done about it. He made several bad remarks about the Kennedy administration and pointed out that the Attorney General raising money for the Cuba invaders make's Chicago's syndicate look like amateurs"


What English was talking about in front of a bar on a cold Chicago afternoon was the same thing business executive across the country were whispering about in their paneled board rooms. Many of the nation’s leading CEO's had taken phone calls and were amazed to find themselves on the other end of phone line with the Attorney General of the United States of America. They were even more amazed at what they heard. Kennedy wanted money to help rescue the Bay of Pigs survivors. The Attorney General reminded the executives that they had either pending contracts before the government or criminal cases pending, brought by the Justice department. Before they could respond, Kennedy interrupted, mentioned the fund to free the Cubans again, and hung up. Jake Factor was a rich man and nobody’s fool.


He threw $25,000 cash into the project and explained to a curious press that James Roosevelt, the problem child of the clan, had approached him about the donation, which he swore had nothing to do with his pardon. He was also one of Kennedy's single largest political contributors.


On December 24 1962, from his father’s estate in Palm Beach Florida, John F. Kennedy signed a Presidential Pardon for Jake the Barber. Pardons are normally granted on a master warrant and although several sentence reductions were given that day on a master pardon, Factors was the only single pardon granted. The deportation proceeding against Jake was dismissed on December 26 1962, and the investigation into the Stardust casino was quietly drawn to a close. A Presidential pardon was golden but just to be sure, on July 16, 1963, in Los Angeles John Factor, the poor kid from the ghettos of Chicago, raised a slightly shaking hand and along with other more recent arrivals, took the oath of citizenship of the United States of America. "I'm the luckiest man alive," he said and he was probably right.

Factor always denied that the mob used pressure with the White House to win him his pardon but in mid 1963, while Factor was trying to gain control of the National Life Insurance company of America and was buying up the company's shares at $125.00 each, he then sold 400 shares of his $125.00 a share stock to Murray Humphreys at $20.00 each. A loss of $105.00 per share to Factor.

Humphreys then sold the shares back to Factor for $125.00 a share making Humphreys $42,000.00 richer in one day. As far as the Hump's unusual and creative stock transaction with Jake the Barber was concerned, the government decided that it was a taxable exchange "for services rendered" and sent tax gain bills to both them.

Kolb Matt

Kolb Matt: Kolb was a 280 pound, potbellied, five foot three inch pioneer in the bootlegging business, having first entered into it in 1919 when he foresaw the coming prohibition.   Kolb was a ward heeler on the Northside, a political fixer, and big time gambler since 1902. It was Kolb who hired Leo Shaffer to work under him as his assistant. For many years he had been known as the czar of the northwest section of Cook County, being able to fix police problems for gamblers, vice operators and booze runners.

     But Kolb's power waned when Jake Lingle came around because Lingle took Kolb's spot when Russell became chief of police. After that all mention of "MK" in Jake Zuta's files ended and Lingle's initials appeared.

     By 1920 Kolb was in the bootleg beer business with Al Winge, a former Cook County cop, and Martin Guilfoyle. The Winge-Guilfoyle's were known for their toughness. They controlled the distribution of liqueur and beer production on the northwest side by running it through pipes that ran through the sewers into underground breweries.

     By 1923 Matt Kolb, Al Winge and Martin Guilfoyle had reached an understanding with Johnny Torrio. They would roll over a portion of their beer profits to Torrio, they would buy their beer when they needed to buy it, only from Torrio and they would stop trying to under price Torrio's rot-gut stuff with their own worse brew that was said to be made in massive vats in tunnels that ran under northern Chicago.

     The same agreement was reached a few months before with the Saltis gang, which in that year included Johnny Hanrahan, Ralph Sheldon, and Willie Channel in its membership.

     Newspapers said that Kolb was "formerly" the head of the northwest side beer syndicate that also operated in the northwest portion of the county.

     Kolb, according to Touhy, had "once been tied up with the Capone mob, but the violence scared him away," which probably means that Kolb stayed on with the Guilfoyle gang until after they merged with the Capone organization in mid 1926.

     Newspaper reporters of the day said that when the Guilfoyle mob was taken over by the Capone's that Kolb was supposed to work under Jake Guzak but that the two of them quickly grew to despise each other. So when Charles Graydon became sheriff of Cook County in 1927, Kolb who had worked for Graydon in the ice business, moved out to Northern Cook County and then went through the county claiming a relationship with the sheriff. He became an important figure in gambling and beer dispensing privileges and collecting tribute.

     Later Kolb threw his considerable fortune behind Peter B. Hoffman who had been the Cook County coroner and then became county sheriff. Hoffman appointed Charles Graydon, a syndicate puppet, to be sheriff and in turn, Graydon made Michael Hughes, an exiled member of the Chicago police force, boss over the county highway patrol. Graydon permitted slot machines to flourish in the mostly unincorporated towns in the suburbs.

     As Kolb noted, "You can't operate slot machines and gambling unless you have the word to go from the state's attorneys and the sheriff's office. Otherwise you couldn't possibly keep the slot machines up for a day or two."

     Kolb was assigned by Touhy to the sheriff's office and Chief Hughes assigned Kolb to take care of payments to his uniformed patrol.

     When newspapers began snooping around at the large numbers of saloons and gambling joints in the outer county, Touhy would alert Kolb who would alert Hughes who would alert the highway patrol who would tell the saloons to close down for while.

     After Greydon retired, Sheriff William Meyering, a World War One hero came next and said, "I am no reformer nor do I intend to become one."

     By 1926 Kolb owned a third of the Capone-Guilfoyle's $3,000,000 bootleg beer business, but Kolb's primary business was that of a gambler and loan shark.

     Kolb's beer distribution place on

California Avenue

was a block from Touhy's garage. According to Touhy, he sold Kolb a car and split the commission with him, "a thing all dealers did then to promote sales."

     "Matt came to me a few months later with a proposition. He had a partner, but they weren't getting along. I could buy out the partner for $10,000. Kolb had a reputation of being a top man in beer running and slot machines in our part of the Cook County. He sort of liked the limelight and I didn't mind his having the notoriety. I enjoyed being a quiet family man...Even when the Chicago syndicate murdered Matt...my name wasn't mentioned prominently in the papers."

     Touhy claimed that when Kolb came to him with the partnership he was making $50,000 to $60,000 from his car business. "But the real money was in alcoholic beverages. Everybody in the racket was getting rich...I drew $10,000 from the bank, handed it to Kolb and said, 'You've got a new partner.' He was a fat gentle old gent who weighed 220 pounds beer belly and all. Anybody who thought all bootleggers were gangsters with machine guns and gun molls had only to meet Matt. He would run away from a ten-year-old kid with a fly swatter."

     In reality, Kolb was an enormously wealthy and ambitious man with deep political connections, both in the outer county and within the city of Chicago itself. He was a shrewd money hungry gambler who foresaw the end of Capone almost a decade before it happened.

     For ten percent of the gross, Kolb took care of political and police corruption for Touhy, Bugs Moran and Jake Zuta, with Zuta paying Kolb a thousand a week in protection money, most of it earmarked for beat cops.

     But after Kolb became Touhy's partner and the gang's business manager and political power house, Kolb dropped Moran as a client and the Capone's took out Zuta on their own.

     Kolb had been partners with Zuta and was once, briefly, with the old Moran-Aiello gang but after Capone had Zuta killed he sent his boys over to the Northside to tell Matt Kolb that he was "out", in other words Kolb's gambling territory now fell under the ownership of Jake Guzak and Kolb would either pay 50% of his gross to Guzak's agent on the far Northside, none other than Rocco De Grazio, Roger Touhy's old business partner.

     Kolb called Touhy and their partnership was on.

     On October 25, 1931, the unbelievable happened. Al Capone was convicted of income tax evasion and sentenced to ten years in prison.

     That same day Matt Kolb was killed at his speakeasy gambling club, the Club Morton on the corner of Dempster and

Ferris Road

.

     Two well dressed men, one was at least six feet tall, suspected to be George Red Barker, the other man, a few inches shorter, believed to be Paul Ricca, slipped out of their car and walked into the club through the back door. Kolb stood in the hallway, smiling, as the two killers walked up to him.

     The two men stopped in front of the club's gigantic roulette wheel that took up most of the hall. One of the men said, "Hello Matt" as Kolb reached out to shake hands. The taller man grabbed Kolb's hand and arm tightly as the shorter man reached inside of his overcoat, pulled out an automatic and poured the six shots into the little fat man. After the killers started to leave, the taller man said, "I better make sure," and returned and fired one more shot into Kolb's head, the round picking up the dead man's skull and bouncing it off the floor.

     The newspapers speculated that Kolb was killed for refusing to contribute to Capone's defense fund or for refusing to appear as a witness for Capone by testifying that Capone had lost large sums of money to him in gambling debts, thus relieving Capone of a tax burden.

     Others said that Capone tried to muscle in on Kolb's gambling concessions at the Morton Inn but Kolb had refused.

     It was more likely, said the Chicago police, that Ricca ordered the killing because Touhy-Kolb started to move in on Capone's gambling base as soon as Capone went on trial and Kolb was said to have sent in his own enforcers to try and regain some of the beer territory he had lost to Capone over the past several months.

     Word in the underworld was that Kolb was a dead man as far back as the winter of 1931 but the mob waited to kill Kolb until the end of the beer-selling season so as not to affect business and Touhy would be in Florida so retribution would be slow in coming, or maybe by the time Touhy returned to Chicago, sometime in April or May, the whole thing would have just blown over.

     But they were wrong. After Kolb was killed a fierce battle raged in the streets of Chicago and the dirt roads of northwestern Cook County.

     The Morton Grove substation for the Cook County Highway Patrol was only three and a half minutes away from Kolb's club. A call came into Lt. James Meyering at 1:50, the caller said that there had been a problem at the club. A few minutes later another call came in saying the place was being robbed. Lt. Meyering rushed to the road house to find Kolb's body still sprawled out on the floor.

     The waiters, Emanuel Gonzales, Jack Smalloy and Frank Francis, and Kolb's sister, said they hadn't see anything, they just heard the shots. Only William Mardorf would say that he got a full view of the killers but that he had never seen them before.

     The Cook County Highway Patrol told the press that they were "shocked to learn that there was gambling going on in Kolb's place." Lt. Meyering said: "About two weeks before they got him, Kolb called the station and said that four men in a car were circling his place. I went there and I watched but the men were gone. I questioned Kolb. He was nervous but he claimed he didn't know why anyone would try to harm him. He thought they were going to rob him he told me."

     The cops hauled in the usual suspects, James Belcastro, Dominick Brancato (

2757 North Pine Grove Ave

)  and Dominick Bello (

918 Wellington Street

) for questioning in the killing but to this day, there has never been any hint as to the identities of the killers.

     Three days after Matt Kolb was killed, Capone somehow got to a phone in the Cook County jail and called Tommy Touhy and told him that he was sorry to hear that Kolb was dead and that the way he heard the story, the whole thing happened over a drunken brawl. "I'm terribly sorry," Capone told Tommy. "There was a drunken caper and Matt got killed. I couldn't feel worse. I always liked Matt. I'm sending a hundred dollar wreath to the funeral."

     Capone did send the $100 horseshoe floral wreath to Kolb's funeral, which Roger Touhy tossed in the trash behind the funeral home.

     "All I could do," Touhy said, "was to give Matt a decent burial...The Chicago syndicate had erased Matt Kolb and I figured they would be out to eliminate me next."

     Kolb's demise was a major setback for Touhy since Kolb had no problems with taking the limelight, in fact, he adored the attention that being a gangster brought to him.

     Another problem was that with Kolb gone, vast amounts of Touhy's political protection went with him. Kolb knew who got what and how much of it they got. With Kolb dead and his blackmail records disappeared, the price for political protection went through the roof.

Zangara, Giuseppe:

Zangara, Giuseppe: Born 1900 Died 1933 Almost 70 years ago, an enigmatic Italian immigrant bricklayer named Giuseppe Zangara momentary leaped onto history’s stage and took a misguided shot at President-elect Franklin Roosevelt and, accidentally, killed Chicago’s reform mayor, Anton Cermak. Or so the story goes. But over the next six-and-a-half decades, the shooting only created more questions than it answered. Who was Zangara, and who was his intended victim Anton Cermak, and did the Chicago Mob order the killing? The recent discovery of lost government records can now answer those questions and forever seal the case of the Guns of Zangara. Like most Mob murders, it started over money, greed and the lust for power. In 1931, the labor rackets business in Chicago was worth $145,000,000.00 or about a half billion dollars in today’s value. In fact, unions were such easy prey for gangsters that before prohibition, the Mob saw control of labor unions, not bootleg beer, as the quickest route to riches. Now, in 1931, with repeal closing in, and the national depression curbing the Outfit’s gambling business, Al Capone pulled out all stops in his drive to control the labor unions in Chicago. Capone’s gangsters invaded so many union locals that Frank Loesch, President of the Chicago Crime Commission, estimated that Capone ran two out of every three unions in Chicago. As Capone terrorized his way into more teamster locals, the union bosses fled out to suburban Des Plains to live under mobster Roger Touhy’s protection.

The Touhy brothers, Roger, Tommy and Eddie were the last serious threat to Capone’s might. The brothers, safely tucked away in the still mostly undeveloped portion of northern Cook County, had grown rich from Prohibition and gambling and the ability to avoid big political payoffs and long-drawn-out beer wars. By 1932, they had the money, the manpower and the firepower to take over the entire Chicago Teamsters’ organization without having to split any of the proceeds with Capone.

Patty Burrell, the Teamsters Vice President, called a meeting of all the locals threatened by Capone and gave them a choice. They could stand-alone against Capone, and lose their unions and probably their lives, or they could move their operations under the Touhy’s’ protection. They would still lose a large portion of their treasury to the Touhy’s, but at least they’d be alive. Most of the union bosses knew Roger Touhy from their childhood. He had a solid reputation as a union organizer in his youth and compared to Capone at least, he was still evil, but at the least, he was the lesser of the two evils. The bosses would go with Touhy. After the meeting, Burrell sent union boss Jerry Horan to Roger’s house with $75,000 in cash for a defense fund. Touhy used that money, plus an additional $75,000 from his own pocket, to hire an army of thugs to fend off Capone’s pending assault. Touhy’s defiance didn’t come without a price. The Capone’s killed one of the brothers, and attempted to kidnap his children. Then, on October 25, 1931, the unbelievable happened. Al Capone was convicted of income tax evasion and sentenced to ten years in prison. That same day, Capone gunmen gunned down Matt Kolb, Touhy’s business partner and financier,[1] as well as the source of Touhy’s enormous political clout, inside his speakeasy, the Club Morton. With Kolb dead, the price for political protection went through the roof. Touhy would have to find a Kolb replacement soon and Anton Cermak was just off on the horizon. Once Cermak had smashed the gamblers into submission he would need someone dependable to act as his collector and street boss, the mayor’s personal bagman. Enter Teddy Newberry, a lifelong gangster, who had been with Bugs Moran and then the Aillo, and finally with Capone until his career ended.

After several months of acting as Cermak’s street supervisor, Teddy Newberry sat down with Anton Cermak in the summer of 1931 and worked out a deal. As Newberry and Cermak saw it, with Capone and most of his top men behind bars, or on the run from the law, what was left of the syndicate would easily fall apart. The fact that Roger Touhy was winning his shooting war against the Mob was another plus for them. All that was left, according to Newberry, to topple the Chicago syndicate, was to kill the head and then watch the body die. Enter Roger Touhy. Anton Cermak, who had known Touhy for Roger Touhy for decades, wanted Touhy to join forces with him and Teddy Newberry to help them jointly run the underworld in Chicago and the Midwest. In 1959, Touhy told the Illinois parole board that in early 1933, Newberry and Cermak called him down to city hall for a discussion. In a meeting in the mayor’s office, Cermak and Newberry urged Touhy to wage a larger war with the Mob, but Touhy laughed it off saying he didn’t have the strength to fight the Nitti organization, which could muster at least 500 gunmen within a week’s time. Cermak said, “You can have the entire police department.”

Touhy eventually agreed, and Cermak lived up to his end of the bargain. He sent word down to his police commanders that Roger Touhy was to be cooperated with in his war against the syndicate for control of the Chicago Teamsters .The number of Capone men killed after Cermak took office tripled in two years. Someone hundred gangsters were killed in ambushes and street fights. For a while, the hoods fell at a rate of one gangland murder a day with most of the dead coming from the syndicate’s ranks.

James Doherty, a crime reporter for the Chicago Tribune recalled: “It was a war, chiefly, between the Irish and the Italians. I’m Irish and I’d come into my office in the morning after another shoot-out and I would say to my co-worker, who was Italian, “Well that’s one to my side” and the next day he would come and say “Well, it’s leveled Jim,” we chalked one up on our side last night.” For a while, it was going well for the upstarts. Almost too well. The Touhy’s gunned down the syndicate’s lead labor plunderer, Red Barker, the government jailed the equally deadly Murray Humphreys, and Cermak’s hoods shot down Frank Nitti. They were so close. They had chased the syndicate out of the Teamsters and had ready access to the pension funds. They owned city hall and the police. Then the tide started to turn. First, Teddy Newberry’s dead body showed up on the bitter cold evening of January 7, 1933. He was found lying face down in a ditch in Porter county, Indiana.      After Newberry was killed, Tony Cermak lost his nerve. Tony was absolutely certain that the Outfit had pegged Louis “Short Pants” Campagna; (

2927 Maple Street

) Al Capone’s former bodyguard was going to kill him. He may have been right. According to newsman Jack Lait, in late 1933, the syndicate’s hit men tried to blow up Cermak’s car early one morning in the middle of Chicago’s loop. After that, Cermak beefed up his security forces and moved from the Congress hotel to the Morrison hotel where he paid for a private elevator that went non-stop to his penthouse suite. He increased his city police guard from two to five officers and had detectives sent to protect his daughters and hired on private bodyguards to augment his city police detail and then took a midnight train to Miami where he owned a home. The job to end the union war with the Touhy’s and take out Anton Cermak fell to Paul Ricca, acting boss since Nitti had been shot. Ricca determined that the only way to deal with Cermak was to kill him. But, knocking off the mayor of the nation’s second largest city would bring down more heat on the Mob then Cermak ever could have gathered. Unless, of course, the murder could be thumbed off on a “nut case.” The “Nutcase” they found was Giuseppe Zangara, a hapless Italian immigrant with a gambling problem, who was into the Outfit for his eyeteeth. Zangara was born September 7, 1900, in Ferruzzano, a small and very poor village in Calabria, Italy. His mother died while he was still a small boy. His father remarried, to a women with six daughters, and Zangara, small, fragile, seldom smiling and deathly quiet, was lost in the hoard that was his new family. By all accounts Zangara’s father was an odd man, angry at the world. He had constant problems with authority and he beat his children. It was no surprise to anyone when, at age six, after Zangara’s step mother entered him into public schools, that his father withdrew him two months later. “When my father come he say me like this, he says me, ‘you don’t need school, you need work.’” Zangara, the child, went to work beside his father building roads. Later he learned the work of bricklayer, which was, in Italy of that time, still almost an art form and required years of apprenticeship. Apparently Zangara had an aptitude for the trade and at age 17 was already a mason, no small feat. Zangara the somber and unhappy child grew into Zangara the somber and unhappy man, enraged at the world because he was poor and because he was taken from school as a child. He talked about his unhappiness openly and often during his trial. Perhaps, if for no other reason, he finally had someone to listen to him.      In 1917 Zangara, then 17, was drafted into the Italian infantry and stayed in the Army for five years. While in the service, he was arrested, on October 24, 1921, for carrying a knife. He was tried and convicted but the sentence was suspended.

Discharged from the military in 1923, Zangara sailed to the United States from Naples, arriving in Philadelphia aboard the liner Martha Washington, on August 18 1923, five days before his 23rd birthday.

     He went to Patterson, New Jersey, moved in with an uncle, Vincent Cafaro, a bricklayer who landed Zangara on a job with the construction company he was working for.     As a skilled laborer and a member of the Bricklayers union #2 in Patterson, Zangara earned as much as $12.00 an hour, an extremely high hourly rate when the average national income was less then $5,600 a year.     He filed a declaration to become a citizen of the United States, doing so only because it was required by his union that all members be United States citizens or at least have filed to become citizens. The names of the witnesses on the declaration, two men, disappeared with most of the official information that surrounded Zangara’s background, but on September 11, 1929, Zangara became a United States citizen, and registered as a Republican.     Later that month, on September 28, someone named Giuseppe Zangara of Patterson, New Jersey, was arrested for running a massive, 1,000-gallon still in rural New Jersey.     When arrested Zangara used the name Sam Livari, but later changed that to Luigi DiBernardo. Arrested with him was Tony Adgostino, a known racketeer in Northern, New Jersey.     On May 26, 1930 Zangara/DiBernardo pleaded guilty to owning the still and was sentenced to one year and one day at Atlanta Federal Prison. During sentencing, United States Attorney Philip Forman, later a federal judge, asked, “Your real name is Zangara, isn’t it?” and Zangara answered that it was.     The fact that the prosecutor knew Zangara by sight implies that Zangara wasn’t a stranger around the federal courthouse. DiBernardo/Zangara entered Atlanta Federal prison, on May 26, 1930, and was paroled seven months later on December 20, 1930.    Later, when the Secret Service investigated the Cermak shooting, they accepted Zangara’s explanation for the missing seven months as his having been in Central America. Even more remarkably, when Phillips Forman, the U.S. Attorney, informed the Secret Service about Zangara’s time in prison, the agents pulled Zangara’s prison photo and compared it to a picture taken in Florida when he was arrested and determined that “They seem to match, however, our Zangara has a lower forehead but, otherwise, they match.” However, the investigating agent never followed up on the lead.

     When 1931 rolled around, Zangara started to change. He lost interest in his job and avoided people even more then he did in the past, and then, without any apparent reason, he left New Jersey for Florida. When he departed from New Jersey, he left hurriedly, leaving all of his possessions in the boarding house.     In Florida, Zangara became a gambler, a degenerate gambler, betting mostly on the horses. When he gave up on the horses, Zangara turned to the dogs, and in one incident lost $200 in one night, a huge amount of money for anyone in the depression-racked America of 1933, but a small fortune to an out-of-work bricklayer.     On February 12, 1933 Chicago city hall announced that his Honor, Anton J. Cermak of Chicago, would make an appearance in a Miami park, at night, to greet the arrival of president-elect Roosevelt. Thousands were expected to turn out for the event.     It was a godsend for the Mob. Ricca sent word down to Dave Yaras, a transplanted Chicago hood, that they were going to whack Cermak, and Yaras had to line somebody up to take the fall for the murder, a patsy. Yara reported back that he had just the man they needed.      Dead broke, Zangara took a slot in Dave Yaras’s highly secretive heroin- smuggling operation, in or about, early 1932, when he was spotted regularly around the municipal docks. According to Reverend Elmer Williams, a Chicago minister who exposed political corruption in the Windy City during the Capone and Nitti reigns, Zangara worked in Ricca’s narcotics processing plant in extreme south Florida, as a mule, transporting narcotics up to New York, a city he knew well.

In New York, Zangara turned the dope over to distribution specialists like Bugsy Siegel in Brooklyn, Longy Zwillman (1899-1959) in Jersey and others. He would collect the money for delivery and then return to Florida to run the entire cycle all over again.

According to both Williams and Jack Lait, while Zangara was on one of his runs to New York he got spotted in a Mob casino in Manhattan by a group of the New Jersey hoods that he had cheated back in 1930.    Now the hoods from New Jersey had a make on him and they brought their complaint to Ricca since, technically, Zangara was under Chicago’s protection. The New Jersey hoods wanted him so they could kill him. Even if New Jersey didn’t want him, Zangara had now been uncovered as an unreliable worker, a detriment in a racket as volatile as narcotics. So Yaras would have to deal with him.   The gangsters sat Zangara down and explained his two choices. The Mob could kill him, right then, right they’re...or Zangara could take his chances and shoot Cermak for them.

Shooting Cermak, they explained had its up side. Maybe the police would kill him. Maybe the crowd would rip him to pieces...or maybe he’d get lucky. Maybe he’d get caught after he killed Cermak. He could pretend he was insane, and, at the most, he might get, ten...maybe fifteen years on a farm for the mentally insane and then he could walk. All debts forgiven. Someone had checked. Florida, second only to Texas, as Jack Ruby later pointed out, had the most lenient laws on the books in dealing with mentally unstable criminals. Zangara may have actually believed that he was going to get away with it. When the Secret Service went into Zangara’s room after the shooting they found only a few personal items in his travel bag, which was left on his bed, neatly packed. It included clothes and three books, The Wehman Brothers Easy Method for Learning Spanish Quickly, Italian Self Taught and an English-Italian grammar book and several newspaper clippings about Roosevelt’s trip to Florida and one about the Lincoln assassination conspiracy. But, of course, the Mob had no intention of letting Zangara walk away. According to Roger Touhy, the second after Zangara fired into Cermak; a Mob assassin would plug Zangara and disappear back into the crowd.

The Miami police, Secret Service or Cermak’s private guards would get the recognition. Whoever it was, the American public would hail them as a hero.

Jack Lait, a top Chicago reporter noted: “Had Cermak escaped Zangara’s bullets another triggerman would have gotten him.” Lait was right of course, except there weren’t going to be any mistakes because Paul Ricca, the Mob’s acting boss, wouldn’t leave room for one to happen. Ricca was sending his best killers down to Florida to make sure the hit went off correctly: Three Fingers Jake White and Frankie Rio. Two days before Anton Cermak was shot, a Chicago beat cop spotted White sitting inside the main terminal of the Chicago railroad. Within minutes, several carloads of detectives were inside the station and had White and his companions, Frankie Rio and ward politician Harry Hockstien, up against the wall for a body search. The officers found nothing on the three smirking hoods except a bag of donuts and were forced to release them. White and Rio explained that they were on their way to Miami, Florida for a short vacation.

On February 14, 1933, the day before the shooting, Zangara went to Davis Pawn shop in downtown Miami, and spent eight dollars on a .32 revolver and ten bullets.

Gordon Davis, the Miami pawn broker who sold Zangara his gun along with ten bullets, admitted that he had a criminal record in Chicago and that he had known Zangara “for a long time.” Gordon said he didn’t ask Zangara why he felt he needed to purchase the revolver, “I ain’t a wet nurse, Pal,” he told a Secret Service investigator.

While still in the store he placed five bullets in the chamber and kept five in his pocket.  Then Zangara started stalking Cermak. On the day of the shooting, at about 11:30 in the morning, Zangara went to the Bostick Hotel at

217 South Miami Avenue

near the park and rented a room. He paid a dollar for the night, and was assigned to room 4. Before he entered the room, Zangara asked to see all of the exits and entrances to the hotel, then he went to his room, left the door open, sat on the edge of the bed and stared down the hallway towards the front door of the hotel. By 6:30 that evening, Zangara was gone.

What Zangara knew, although it has never been established how he knew, was that the hotel was owned by Horace and May Bostick, close friends to Anton Cermak and that they expected the Mayor to drop by that evening before going to greet the President.

“Zangara’s object in coming here,” May Bostick later told the Secret Service, “was to kill Cermak.” From the hotel, Zangara walked several blocks to cigar manufacturing plant owned by Andrea Valenti, an immigrant from Sicily who had once lived in Chicago.    Zangara and Valenti left the plant at about 7:30 P.M., walking to Bayfront Park. With them were Steve Valenti and Lorenzo Grandi, all Sicilian immigrants. The Valentis and Grandi were arrested after the Cermak shooting, questioned, and released.

With forty acres of Palm Trees and open lawns edged on to Biscayne Bay, Bayfront Park was a perfect place for a political rally and an assassination. At its south end, the park held an amphitheater, with some eight thousand seats. At the very end of the amphitheater was a flat bandstand and in back of that a stage where dignitaries, including Cermak, waited for the President-elect’s arrival. By the time Zangara arrived, the park was jammed to a standing-room-only crowd of about 15,000 people. They had miscalculated badly. No one figured, not even the police, on such a large turnout. Desperate, Zangara, the Valentis and Grandi began to push, shove and kick their way through the crowd, so they could reach the bandstand. Anton Cermak wasn’t feeling well that night. While in Chicago, some bad water from a nearby canal had seeped into his hotel’s water reserves, and Cermak had drunk it, giving him a stomach infection. A lesser man would have canceled the night’s engagement, but Tony Cermak had always been an extraordinary man. Yet, when a bodyguard handed him his bulky, black bulletproof vest, Cermak said he didn’t want it. It was too humid outside and he was too weak to carry its weight. At 9:25 that evening, Roosevelt’s car entered the park, and stopped next to the bandstand area, where Cermak and the other dignitaries were seated. It was warm that night. The humidity that hung in the air was almost stifling. The coconut trees and royal palms that covered the park were bathed in red, white and blue lights, giving the entire scene and eerie feel to it. At that same moment, Zangara and his party had pushed their way up to the second isle from the bandstand and were less then 35 feet away from Roosevelt’s car, where Zangara had a clear view of FDR, whose back was to Zangara.

Roosevelt was lifted out of his seat and slid on the top of the trunk. Dressed in a white suit, with a sole floodlight beaming down on him, he was the perfect target.

He spoke to the crowd for about eight minutes, and when the speech ended, looked up, on to the reviewing stand and saw Cermak sitting in the front row, and waved for him, “Tony! Come on down here.” Smiling broadly, Cermak stood from his chair, and walked down to FDR. As he did, his bodyguards rose with him and stepped up to join him, but Cermak told them to stay on the stage. It was, he said later, unseemly for the mayor of Chicago to have more bodyguards then the President of the United States.

Cermak walked up to Roosevelt’s side of the car, the side facing Zangara and the two politicians shook hands and chatted for about three minutes. They shook hands, and agreed to talk later. It was now about 9:35. Cermak stepped away from the car and turned to his right and briefly embraced Secret Service agent Clark with his left arm. Cermak and Clark had known each other when Clark was assigned to the Chicago Office of the Secret Service. There was a brief exchange, a quick joke between them, and then, for some unknown reason, Cermak walked towards the crowd to his left, away from the stage. Perhaps, as Judge Lyle suggested, Cermak spotted Harry Hockstien, the politician who was questioned in the Chicago train station with Nitti’s shooters the night before.

Harry Hockstien had grown rich enough off of city politics to afford a mini mansion in the upscale neighborhood of Riverdale, next to Frank Nitti’s place. In fact, it was at Hochstien’s home that the Outfit meet in 1934, and decided to go through with the Brown and Bioff Hollywood extortion scandal and, a year later, in December, met there again and decided to kill union boss Tommy Maloy. Frankie Rio, it was widely known, ran Hockstien. Whatever the reason, Cermak clearly took over a dozen steps away from the stage where he was sitting and walked toward the position where Zangara was standing.

The very second Cermak stepped away from the car, a group of local businessmen, carrying with them an immense, imitation telegram welcoming FDR to Florida, surrounded the car, unknowingly forming a human shield around the President elect.

At that moment, tall blonde women, who had been sitting in the first isle, got up and left her seat empty.  Zangara leaped up onto the empty seat, drew his revolver from his pant pocket and fired rapidly, letting off five rounds, pointing the gun to his left, at Cermak, and not to his right, at Roosevelt. The first bullet hit Cermak in the right armpit, causing Cermak to grab his chest with both arms, and slowly sink to his knees. Bullets struck several other bystanders as well. Zangara said, over and over again, and the Miami Police agreed, that he never got off more than three rounds from his pistol; furthermore, Zangara’s pistol was manufactured to fire five rounds. Yet police recovered seven bullets from the scene of the shooting. The direction of Zangara’s gun when he fired was almost the only point that eyewitnesses agreed on, Zangara was shooting Cermak, not Roosevelt. As United States Representative-elect from Florida, Mark Wilcox and Chicagoan Robert Gore, whom were both standing only a few feet from Zangara, told a radio interviewer minutes after the shooting, “He was shooting at Cermak. There is no doubt about that. The killer waited until Mr. Roosevelt sat down and then fired.” Reports went out of the wires at once that Cermak had been shot by Chicago gangsters. But after the first day, there were no other mentions of gangsters being involved in the shooting. Later, while Roosevelt waited in the halls of the Jackson Memorial Hospital where Cermak was being treated, he pointed out to his Secret Service detail, that not one of the six persons shot was near him when they were hit. In fact, he pointed out, they were at least thirty feet away from him, but only two or three feet away from Cermak, and, added Roosevelt, Zangara had not fired off a single shot at him while he had a full eight-minute window during his speech. Roosevelt concluded that Zangara was “a Chicago gangster” sent to kill Cermak and said as much for the rest of his life. In 1957, Roger Touhy told the Illinois Parole Board that what really happened in Miami that night was that when Zangara started shooting, there was mass confusion. People were screaming and running, ducking and falling. Everything was happening just the way it was supposed to happen.

Two Syndicate killers, Three Fingers Jack White and Frankie Rio, both wearing badges from the Cicero Police Department, waited until Cermak fell wounded, and then stepped out from the crowd, with their .45s at ready. In a few more seconds, uniformed police, Secret Service, plain-clothes detectives and Cermak’s hired private detectives would all have their weapons drawn, so White and Rio didn’t stand out in the Mob.

They fired their .45 caliber guns towards Zangara, in an attempt to silence him, but the shots missed and nicked several bystanders instead. Then they slipped into the crowd of 10,000 confused and frightened onlookers and disappeared. All eyes were on Zangara anyway, as the angry crowd leaped on him and before police could pull him to safety. The rabble had torn off most of the little man’s clothes and beaten him badly on the face and chest. Yet Zangara never released his grip on the pistol despite the beating. When police were finally able to reach him, they disarmed him, handcuffed him and tossed into the trunk of a nearby truck, while three enormous Miami policemen sat on him all the way to the jail. The Chicago police department was certain that the shooting was a Mob hit, and requested the Miami police round up eighteen Chicagoans, all known to be in Miami, twelve of whom were known syndicate associates, and hold them for questioning. However, the arrests were never made. When Chicago reporters followed the lead, it turned out that the request had been canceled by the syndicate’s favorite State’s Attorney, Thomas Courtney, who defended his actions with the confusing statement, “My only interests were to learn if there were any Chicago gangsters involved...apparently there were not.” From his jail cell, Zangara told a Miami police detective that he “had to kill,” but he wasn’t specific on who he had to kill, because if he didn’t keep quiet, he said, “my friends will kill me tomorrow.” In sharp contrast to his lifelong behavior, after his arrest Zangara was voluble and excitable, shooting defiant looks into press cameras. At times, he was almost giddy with joy. The local jailers suspected he was having a mental breakdown, yet doctors who examined him that night declared that he was normal in every respect, even sane. Just hours into their investigation, the Secret Service was already convinced that Zangara was a communist and followed that lead, extensively and solely, even though when asked for his views on socialism, anarchism, fascism and communism, Zangara replied that they were all “foolish.” Yet, despite the lack of evidence for it, the Government’s investigators concluded that Zangara was motivated in the shooting by his political beliefs. From his hospital bed in Miami, Anton Cermak insisted that he was Zangara’s target. When his secretary arrived from Chicago, Cermak said, “So you’re alive! I figured maybe they’d shot up the office (in Chicago) too.”

He rallied again when his family arrived and arose long enough to sign a 4.2 million teachers’ payroll, but on February 27, Cermak caught pneumonia of the lungs, which caused the area around the right lung to almost double in size. Up until he lapsed into a coma, Cermak believed that he would recuperate, but at 6:57 A.M., he died. In all, Cermak held out for 19 days in a heroic struggle against colitis, pneumonia and finally gangrene. Cermak didn’t die from his bullet wounds, but it was close enough for Zangara to be placed on trial for murder. Represented by three court appointed lawyers who, although experts in their field of civil law, not one of them had ever tried a criminal case before a jury. The lawyers allowed their client to plead guilty to murder. When he did, the court sentenced him to death. Just sixty days after he was tried, Zangara strutted to the electric chair, which, when he sat in it, kept his feet from touching the floor.

The guards placed a hood over his head, while Zangara gazed out at the room of reporters and state officials to ask, “No pictures? Well, Goodbye! Adios to the world! Go ahead push the button! Viva Italia!” Just seconds before the switch was pulled Zangara turned to the prison’s warden, Leo Chapman, and smiled. Chapman had been of one of Zangara’s very few visitors in jail, and had become convinced that the tiny man wasn’t insane at all, and that he was a member of “some sort of secret criminal syndicate.” As Chapman had walked from the cell to the death chamber with Zangara, he and the Miami Police Commissioner asked Zangara if he was part of an organized group that plotted to kill Cermak. “No. I have no friends,” he replied. “It was my own idea.” But now, Zangara grinned slyly at Chapman and said, “Viva Comorra!” one of many Italian terms word for the Mafia. Then he leaned back in the chair and 2,300 volts snuffed out Zangara’s strange life. When told Zangara was dead, William Sinnot, the New York policeman who was injured in the shooting said, “I still believe he was a member of some secret society. He was no more shooting at Mr. Roosevelt that night than I was...and should be investigated further.” Ed Kelly was Chicago’s next mayor. When reporters found Kelly to tell him he was Chicago’s new Mayor, Kelly was gambling at a Mob owned racetrack in Havana.    When asked if he thought that the syndicate had anything to do with Cermak’s killing, Kelly put down his racing form and said, “Boys, let’s stop that. From now on, there’s no such thing as organized crime in the city of Chicago.”

 

 

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[1] Roger Touhy claimed that Al Capone himself gunned down Kolb