Tuohy, Roger: AKA Terrible Touhy: "Roger Touhy," wrote the Chicago Tribune, "is one of those rare cases in which the man measured up to the legend...he was born in a lawless time in a lawless neighborhood."
That lawless neighborhood, the Valley it was called, is gone now, and, largely forgotten, except by a scant few descendants of the tens of thousands of Irish immigrants who huddled there, for a time, making that brutal slum the largest Irish ghetto west of New York.
It was located in the very heart of Chicago, a flat stretch of land, partial to flooding in the winter with water filled with human waste from the nearby canals. It was insufferably humid in the summer and always a dreary place of ancient wooden warehouses, overcrowded and stinking tenements, stores with near empty shelves and saloons packed with men who had long since given up their dreams of a better life.
Roger Touhy was born here, in 1898, the last of seven children in one of the thousands of working poor families jammed into the poverty of the Valley. While still an infant, Roger's mother was burned to death when the kitchen stove exploded, a remarkably common occurrence of the times, leaving his father, James, an Irish immigrant and lowly, but otherwise honest, beat cop, to raise the family. James Touhy eventually lost his four elder sons to a local thug named Paddy "the Bear," leader of the notorious Irish, Valley Gang.
There is a story, a story that became underworld legend, how one stormy night in 1909, Patrolman Touhy was walking his beat when he confronted his namesake, called Jimmy, leaving Paddy the Bear's saloon, a burglar's bag over his shoulder.
The normally quick tempered Touhy remained uncharacteristically calm. "Open the bag," the father said. When the young man did as he was told, out rolled burglary tools and a bottle of nitroglycerin, an explosive used on difficult safes around the turn of the century. The elder Touhy cuffed his son and then called a paddy wagon to have the boy taken to the station for arrest. "You book him," he told the cop behind the wheel, "it's bad enough to arrest my own son without going to court to testify against him."
Touhy gave up on his elder sons, and, in 1906, moved his two daughters, and his 10-year-old son Roger to what was then the tiny farming village of Downers Grove, just northwest of Chicago.
Roger attended St. Joseph's Roman Catholic church and school. In 1915, Roger graduated the eighth grade as class valedictorian and went job hunting in Chicago. Talkative, ambitious and charming when he had to be, he found work quickly, first as an office boy and stockroom clerk, and later, as a cookie taster in a biscuit bakery, before landing a position with Western Union for $12 a week.
A good student, Roger learned Morse code and was assigned to a midtown office as an operator, where he opened a bookmaking operation on the side.
"A really important thing happened to me--back then in 1915--was that a dark haired Irish girl went to work for Western Union in the company branch office in Chicago's finest hotel, the Blackstone. She was 16 and fresh out of telegraph school. From the main office I sent the Blackstone messages to her and received the ones she transmitted back. She sent better than she copied, but she wasn't good at either. I tried to help her."
The real important thing was 16-year-old Clara Morgan, and Roger fell hard for her. A romance blossomed, and, six years later, they would marry. Overall, life was good for the young man. He was learning an honest profession and being paid well for it, then, one day in late 1916, Roger was spotted reading one of the union's pamphlets during a break. Called into the supervisor's office for the standard accusation/denial interrogation, the manager asked, "So do you intend to take a union card?" "Maybe, maybe not," was Roger's defiant reply. He was fired on the spot. "I should have lied to that superintendent," he wrote. "Honesty was my downfall."
An organizer for the Commercial Telegrapher's Union came by his apartment later that day and explained that he was already blacklisted in the industry and talked him into working as an organizer. He soon tired of organizing, the hours were long, the pay was low and often the work was brutal and dangerous.
Except for a still blossoming romance with Clara Morgan, Roger had nothing to hold him in Chicago, and, like thousands of young men before him, headed west to the Great Plain States where he found work as a railroad brakeman and telegraph operator for $185 a month on the Denver & Rio and Grand Railroad in Eagle County, Colorado.
In 1918, he enlisted in the Navy and was eventually stationed at Harvard University where he worked as a wireless operator and taught officers the Morse code. Opting for an early out with the Navy Reserve, Roger was back in Chicago by 1919, but set off for the West again, landing in Drummund, Oklahoma where the oil business was in full boom and fortunes were being made overnight.
He landed a job as the driver for the world famous geologist, Dick Raymond, who had been brought in to determine which wildcat wells was producing the most oil and from that, decide which land was worth leasing.
"There was nothing," he wrote, "against my buying leases that Raymond recommended." Learning everything he could about the oil business from Raymond, Roger took $1,000 out of his savings and purchased a 150-acre site that Drummond recommended. Within a month he resold the lease for a 200% profit.
He returned to Chicago with $25,000, a respectable fortune in 1920. "And," he said, "it had taken me less then a year to earn it." In 1923 he married Clara. Working with his brothers, Roger returned to the Valley and invested most of his cash into a used car dealership, not far from the house where he was born.
The brothers, Johnny, Eddie, Tommy, and Joe were already working around the edges of the booming bootleg business, but mostly as hired enforcers who occasionally hijacked a syndicate beer truck or two. It wasn't long before Roger entered the bootlegging business, but, through the back door, leasing a small fleet of trucks, and drivers, to syndicate boss Johnny Torrio's enormous bootlegging operation. Using the money he earned from those leases, Roger and his brothers bought a franchise from Torrio for the beer delivery routes to rural northwestern Cook County.
The brothers knew that peace would never reign in Chicago's underworld with so many different...and violent...street gangs vying for a limited amount of business. But, that wasn't the case out in the rural northern portion of the county. In fact, when the brothers first started peddling the syndicate's beer out there, they were stunned at the amount of business, both existing and potential, that was out there. Better yet, there was barely any competition for the market and there were scores of people willing to operate speakeasies for them.
By 1926, they were selling 1,000 barrels of beer a week at $55 a barrel, with a production cost of $4.50 a barrel, which they sold to two hundred roadhouses outside Chicago. The brothers punched, shot and sold their way into a considerable portion of the upper northwest region of the city, which, for a while anyway, was buffered against Capone's empire by the Moran gang.
The gang had its own Priest, Father Joseph Weber, whom Roger had met back in 1923 when Weber was an Indiana State Prison Chaplain while Tommy Touhy was serving time for his role in an Indianapolis department store burglary. Weber had always been politically active in Indianapolis, where he kept his parish, and argued that the Klu Klux Klan, which had its regional headquarters in Indianapolis, included some of the states and city's leading families and politicians.
As a result, Weber said, the Black citizens of Indianapolis were denied even the most basic of city services. One day, as a passing part of a conversation, Weber mentioned to Tommy Touhy that if he had the Klan's secret membership files, his could confirm his suspicions and break their power. A few days later, on April 1, 1923, a moonlit Easter Sunday, a burglar broke into the Klan's headquarters and stole the organization's state membership list, some 12,208 names.
The next day parts of the list were published in the Catholic newspaper Tolerance, under the headline: "Who's who in Indianapolis." The Klan offered me," Roger wrote "$25,000 for the records, which I turned down."
To the newspapers, the public, the police and the politicians, Roger's Des Plains operation looked exactly the way he wanted it to look...a hick, two-bit operation that grossed, maybe, a few hundred thousand dollars a year. But, while the public, the press and the police may have been fooled by Roger's small-time image, Al Capone knew exactly how much money Touhy and Kolb were earning out on the dusty back roads of Cook County and he wanted a piece of it, a large piece of it.
As he always did, Capone first tried to talk his way into a partnership explaining the benefits of working within his operation. When that failed, Capone tried a different tactic; he would push Touhy to see how far he could get before a shooting war broke out. Starting in the early summer of 1927, he tried to push his way into Touhy's territory by opening several whor*houses just inside Des Plains. That same day, Roger and Tommy Touhy, backed by several truckloads of their men and squads of Cook County police raided the bordellos, busted them up and chased the women back to Chicago.
All the while, Capone kept sending his beer salesmen into Touhy's territory where they achieved a fair amount of success by drastically undercutting Touhy's prices, but the ever-shrewd Touhy recognized Capone's ploy and refused to be prodded into a price war that they couldn't win. Instead, he responded by sending a simple message to any saloon keeper who sold Capone's beer inside their territory. If the bar owner sold Capone's brew, they busted the place up. If he continued, they would burn it to the ground, and that was the way Joe Touhy, Roger's older brother, died, in June of 1929.
Eyewitnesses said that Joe and his crew were busting up a speakeasy that the Capone’s had opened in Schiller Park, when a waiter reached for something under the bar. Joe Touhy's own man, a hood named Paul Pagen, fired off a warning burst from his machine-gun, accidentally killing Touhy.
Johnny Touhy, the third eldest brother, didn't call it an accident. He killed Pagen for Joe's murder and was sent to prison for ten years to life but was out in four, his brothers having purchased his freedom with bribes. "And that's what money," wrote the Chicago Tribune of John's release, "well spent in Chicago will do."
A few months after his parole was granted, Johnny was arrested again for attempted murder of a Capone goon, was sent back to Stateville Prison where he died of consumption in a barren hospital room. The remaining brothers, Roger, Tommy and Eddie, declared war on Capone after Joe was killed and Johnny was jailed, and from 1928 until 1930, the dusty back roads of northern Cook County ran red with gangster blood from an otherwise quiet gang war that went largely unnoticed until 1931, when all hell broke loose.
Early that year, Capone started his push against Chicago's labor unions, and picked them off, one by one. Patty Burrell, the Teamsters International Vice President, called a meeting of all the locals threatened by the syndicate and gave them a choice; they could stand alone against Capone and lose their unions and probably their lives, or they could band together and move their operations into Touhy's camp.
Most of the bosses already knew Roger and decided he was the lesser of the two evils and pitched into a $75,000 protection fund that was handed over to Tommy Touhy. In exchange, the union bosses were allowed to keep their locals, and the treasuries that came with them, and live under the Touhy’s' protection. Roger Touhy was a cautious man, not prone to mistakes or leaps in judgment, especially when it came to defying a man as dangerous as Al Capone.
In fact, the only reason he would have entered a shooting war against Capone and his massive criminal organization, was based on his absolute certainty that he could win. That, and his little known agreement with Chicago's powerful Mayor Anton Cermak, made the bootlegger positive that he could pull Capone off his throne.
After Roger was murdered in 1959, the sociologist and writer Saul Alinsky, who was a member of the Joliet States Prison Parole Board, said that Touhy had told him that in 1932, Cermak and he entered an agreement, a partnership, to run Chicago's underworld. In the meeting in the mayor's office, Cermak urged Touhy to wage a war with the mob but Roger was reluctant. A defensive position against the mob was one thing, but an all-out war was something else again. The Syndicate could, Touhy pointed out, muster at least 500 gunmen in a few days, Cermak responded, "You can have the entire police department."
Eventually, Roger agreed to go along, and Cermak sent word down to his police commanders that the Touhy’s were to be cooperated with in the war against the syndicate. Over the next few months, the sporadic gun battles between the Touhy’s and the Capone’s that had been held on the empty back roads of Cook County were brought into the city streets of Chicago.
According to the Chicago Tribune, in 1932, nearly one hundred gangsters were killed. By the spring of 1933, the impossible was happening, the mouse was eating the lion, the Touhy’s were beating the syndicate. Then the mob killed Anton Cermak and gunned down the gang's field Marshal, Tommy Touhy, and one by one the union bosses surrendered to the syndicate.
Without Cermak's guns and the Teamsters' financial support, Roger knew that the war was lost. The best thing to do was to hold off the syndicate for as long as he could, make as much money as he could, fold up his operation and leave Chicago forever, perhaps living out his dream to retire to the wilds of Colorado.
Enter John Factor, aka, Jake the barber. John Jacob Factor is probably the most successful swindler of all time. He was born Iakow Factrowitz, the second son of Rabbi, the youngest of ten children. Jake, as he preferred to be called, was born in England and taken to Lodoz, Poland before his first birthday where he lived until he was 11 years old.
In or about 1900, the family moved to St. Louis Missouri and then to Chicago. Although not illiterate, Factor could barely read or write. "I have," he said, "a hazy recollection of several months of schooling in Poland." The family was desperately poor and it was Factor's mother who supported the family through various menial jobs, mostly as a street peddler. Jake's half brother, Max Factor, eventually made his way out to California and settled in West Los Angeles where he found work as a makeup artist with the major studios, and where he helped to invent pancake make-up and establish Max Factor International. Jake Factor took a different route to success. Sometime in late 1923, Factor convinced New York's master criminal, Arnold Rothstein, to put up an initial cash investment of $50,000 that Factor needed to pull off the largest stock swindle in European history, swindling an estimated £1,619,726, or about $8,000,000 dollars, an incredible sum of money in 1930.
Then, Jake the Barber, as he was known, fled to the States but was arrested in Chicago on demand of the English government for receiving property knowing it to be fraudulently obtained, but was freed on a $50,000 bond. Factor's lawyer managed to bring the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court, but it was generally agreed in legal circles that Factor had a weak case and would be extradited before the spring. Factor was an exceptionally smart and practical man, he knew no matter how many shrewd lawyers he could buy with his stolen money that he was going to lose his case before the court and be deported.
In August of 1933, Factor paid off several members of Roger Touhy's gang to assist him, and then, in effect kidnapped himself, even going so far as to collect a $70,000 tax-free ransom for his own return. When Factor reappeared several weeks later, he accused Roger Touhy of the crime. Touhy's trial for kidnapping Jake the Barber was scheduled to start in November of 1933.
There were two trials, held by a politically corrupt judge. At the end of the second trial, the jury took less then four hours to decide his guilt and six hours to decide the penalty. Half of the jurors wanted to impose the death penalty, and half wanted life in prison. As a compromise, Roger was sentenced to 99 years in Joliet State Prison.
On October 9, 1942, Touhy and four others went over the 30-foot walls of Stateville prison in a daring daylight escape. However, the transition back to living with the others didn't go well. There was drinking, which led to a fist fight, and Matlick Nelson, one of the escapees left the group to visit his mother in Minneapolis. She promptly turned him into the FBI just hours after he arrived and collected a $5,000 reward for it as well. Within minutes after his arrest, Nelson told the agents everything he knew about the escapees.
By nightfall, a small army of agents was slowly and carefully moving in around the gang's apartments. When two of the escapees, O'Connor and McIneray came home early, six agents, guns drawn, leaped out from behind a hallway door. "Put your hands up! We're federal officers." O'Connor turned, and according to the agents' reports, fired his .45 automatic twice, the bullets landing into the stair rail. McIneray never got to reach for his .38, the agents returned fire and pumped at least 35 shells into the two convicts.
Roger and Banghart arrived back at the apartment about an hour later. At zero hour, powerful searchlights were turned onto the windows of Touhy's apartment and then a loudspeaker cracked the silence of the night to announce: "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."
Roger was brought before a judge who told him, to his amazement, that his sentence was now 199 years because under a little known Illinois law, anyone who aids the escape of a state prisoner will receive the same sentence as the prisoner they helped to escape. The state of Illinois had decided that Touhy should take on Eddie Darlak's sentence of 100 years. Roger was the first person to be given this sentence under that law.
Several months after Roger's return to prison, Twentieth Century Fox began production of the film "Roger Touhy, Last of the Gangsters." The film previewed at the Stateville prison on July 12, 1943, where over a thousand state officials watched the film in the main yard. Roger refused to attend, and sat in his darkened cell he could hear the echo from the film's dialog that ridiculed him. Touhy sued Fox Studios and its distributors on the grounds that the film defamed him. He managed to get a temporary restriction on showing the film, which he argued portrayed him as "a vicious violator and gangster."
In 1948, Roger won an out of court settlement with Fox and its distributors for $10,000 for defamation of character and an agreement by Fox to destroy the film. Within a week, Touhy's lawyers had the $10,000 "for services rendered" and Fox started to redistribute the film overseas.
After his return to prison, Roger's faith in ever seeing freedom again was badly shaken, or at least it was until 1948, when his lawyer, Howard Bryant, brought another attorney into the case named Robert B. Johnstone, a 43-year-old, tough, seldom smiling, giant of a man who rarely spoke unless spoken to. Johnson was a brilliant lawyer and investigator who pushed Touhy's case before Federal Judge John Barnes. On August 9, 1954, a cool summer day, Barnes ordered Roger brought before the court to hear a summary of his 1,556-page decision with 216 pages of notes.
In summation, Barnes declared that Roger Touhy had not kidnapped John Factor but rather that "John Factor was not kidnapped for ransom or otherwise on the night of June 30 - July 1, 1933, but was taken as a result of his own convenience, that John Factor's disappearance was a hoax meant only to forestall his extradition to Europe to avoid prosecution there." Barnes also said that the Illinois statue under which Roger was sentenced an additional 199 years for aiding Eddie Darlak's escape back in 1942 was unconstitutional and that Touhy's sentence under that statue was void as a result.
When Roger heard Barnes read the words "The relator, Roger Touhy should be forthwith be discharged from custody," he stood bolt upright, trembling and then started to weep. They, the Chicago mob, probably working in agreement with the national syndicate, were going to kill Roger Touhy and it was all about money.
They had to kill him, because in order to make the Stardust deal work it would have to be done quietly, secretly, without a lot of attention. In 1955, John Factor, fresh out of prison after a ten-year stint for mail fraud, was running the Stardust hotel casino in Vegas for the Outfit. By 1959, the Chicago mob was already stealing millions of dollars from the Teamsters' pension fund, which they had more or less turned into their own piggy bank. The outfit used cash from the pensions to not only build more Vegas casinos but to rebuild and expand the Stardust and eventually to buy Jake the Barber out of the deal.
Touhy announced that he intended to enter a $300,000,000 lawsuit against John Factor and all the others who had helped to railroad him to prison for 25 years. The mob bosses, Ricca and Accardo, watched and worried. The way they saw it, there was only one answer. Roger Touhy had to die.
In the early evening of the night he died, Roger Touhy prepared to drive to a meeting with Ray Brennan, Touhy's ghostwriter of his biography, "The Stolen Years," and their book's publisher at the Chicago Press Club to discuss Factor's suit against them. At 5:00 P.M. sharp, Walter Miller, a retired Chicago cop who had once guarded John Factor and who was now acting as Touhy's bodyguard, pulled his car up to the front of Roger's sister's home and waited for Touhy. They pulled into the Sheraton Towers Hotel garage at 5:55 and took the elevator to the top floor to the wood paneled press club. There was much to discuss. Factor's suit had hurt the book's sales because the big chain department stores were refusing to carry it, fearing a suit from Factor and the teamsters had refused to load and carry copies on their trucks.
After several hours, Miller said it was 9:15 and 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 in his right pocket. Miller drove quickly to Roger's sister's home on Chicago North side. He was worried about making the curfew so he didn't take the precaution of driving around the block once like he usually did. They were running late and it was a bitter 8 degrees outside with an ugly wind whipping across the street.
He parked and the two old men slowly walked up the six steps of Maureen's porch, Miller's hulking frame towering over the limping and bent bootlegger. 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 the 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. Miller aimed and fired at the men who fired back with shotguns. Miller raised his left arm to cover his face and nearly had it blown off at the elbow. Hundreds of pellets lodged into his back and legs. Almost at the exact moment that Miller was blown backwards, two huge blasts from the killers' shotguns knocked Roger across the porch and then smashed him face first into the ground. Hundreds of pellets tore a hole in Touhy's left inner leg, the other pellets dug into his right upper rib cage.
The leg was barely attached to the body.
The killers disappeared into the night. Miller crawled over to Touhy and said, "Say an act of contrition, Rog." At the hospital, doctors worked frantically, but knew he would never survive such a massive loss of life. Father Richard Birmingham was brought into the room and gave Roger Touhy the last rights of the church, which he completed at 11:23. Two minutes later, at 11:25, Roger Touhy expired.
The next morning, at 8:30 A.M., a solitary hearse bearing Touhy's body in its mid- priced coffin, slowly pulled out of the back alley of the funeral parlor. It was decided Touhy would be buried at the family's resting place at Chicago's Boot Hill cemetery, Mount Carmel. Not far from his grave site, were the tombs of Dion O'Banion, Frank Nitti, the Genna Brothers, Paul "Needle Nose" La Briola, Al Capone and by 1992, Tony Accardo.
The tombstone would bear the name TOWEY, in the Northwest corner of the burial ground where his brothers Johnny, Joe, James, and Eddie already lay.
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. Chief Detective Dan Ascher walked up to the grave site and one of the workmen paused from shoveling dirt and asked, "Is it true they only gave him 28 days of freedom?"
Ascher nodded that it was. "That hardly seems enough," the workman said. "Just doesn't seem right."
