by David Stout
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“JAKE THE BARBER”
Chicago
Saturday, July 1, 1933
John “Jake the Barber” Factor was described in the New York Times as a “suave, curly haired speculator” and “a bizarre figure in the world of international finance.” He was also a man with “friends in all strata of society on both sides of the Atlantic,” the newspaper noted.78 He had plenty of enemies too.
Calling him “a bizarre figure” hardly did justice to Factor. He was a man who might have become wealthy by legitimate means, if only he had devoted his agile mind and considerable talents to honest endeavors.* But he preferred to separate gullible people from their money.
Born Iakov Faktorowicz in London on October 8, 1892, the son of a rabbi, he was raised in Poland. He moved to the United States with his parents in 1904. He had little schooling and perhaps little need for it. He knew what he wanted: to climb out of immigrant poverty any way he could.
In 1926, he persuaded Al Capone and Arnold Rothstein, the New York City gambler most infamous for rigging the 1919 World Series, to stake him in a swindling adventure in Britain, where Factor published a tip sheet that touted stocks of dubious value in Rhodesian gold mines among other offerings. The promised returns seemed too good to be true (which, of course, they were), but hordes of investors, reportedly including members of the royal family, entrusted their money to the fast-talking American.
Pursued by British regulators, Factor fled to France, where he made another bundle by forming a syndicate that rigged the gaming tables at Monte Carlo. Then he sailed back to the United States, where he counted on the Capone outfit to protect him.
But Al Capone’s influence did not extend to British diplomats and courts, which demanded that Factor be extradited to Britain to face trial on swindling charges. Factor fought extradition as long as he could, taking his case all the way to the Supreme Court, which seemed likely to find against him, given the strength of the evidence from London.
The Factor family seemed to be especially unlucky when it came to kidnapping. The previous April, John Factor’s nineteen-year-old son, Jerome, a student at Northwestern University, had apparently been abducted and held for eight days.
The elder Factor had taken a suite in Chicago’s Morrison Hotel, supposedly to negotiate for his son’s release, ignoring the police and reaching out to his well-connected friends on the nightclub circuit and to Murray Humphreys, a labor racketeer and friend of the Capone organization. A ransom of $50,000 had reportedly been demanded for Jerome’s freedom, but his father was supposedly telling close friends that he had tricked the kidnappers into freeing the young man for no ransom at all.
Later, there would be speculation that the “kidnapping” of Factor’s son was a phony drama, meant to scare off the British, who might appear to be heartless by trying to extradite the father of a kidnapping victim.
As Friday night melted into Saturday and June yielded to July, Factor was plucked from his car while returning from a party he had given at a roadhouse just west of the Chicago suburb of Evanston. Those traveling with him, including his second wife, Rella, told police the kidnappers meant business: there were nine of them altogether, traveling in two cars and armed with shotguns and machine guns.
This time, it was Jerome Factor who was ensconced in a suite at the Morrison Hotel, trying to orchestrate the release of his father. And Jerome seemed to be using the tactics his father had relied upon, as the New York Times observed, “There were noted around the corridors several mysterious characters, recognized as hoodlums who, presumably, were endeavoring to make contact with the kidnappers.”79
Perhaps not surprisingly, some lawmen in Chicago speculated right away that Verne Sankey, the family man, kidnapper and robber, and his bunch were responsible for grabbing Factor. Sankey was such a logical suspect. But he had nothing to do with the kidnapping of John Factor—if indeed there had even been a kidnapping.
Shortly before midnight on Wednesday, July 12, 1933, a street cop in La Grange, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, was walking his beat when an unshaven man in a rumpled white suit approached him. “I’m Jake Factor,” the man said. “Please notify my wife I’m safe.”80
Factor said he had just been tossed out of a car by his kidnappers, who had kept a hood over his head until the moment of his release. The cop took him to the La Grange police station, just a few blocks away, where Factor threw himself onto a cot.
No, he said, he didn’t know how much ransom had been paid for his freedom, didn’t know if any money at all had changed hands.
Some newspapermen were more certain. Without saying where the information had come from, the New York Times reported on July 13 that the kidnappers had accepted “anywhere between $75,000 and $200,000.”
Wait, cancel that! On July 14, when Factor was “shaved and refreshed by alcohol rubdowns and a night’s rest,” as the Times put it, he changed his story.81 He said a down payment of $50,000 had been conveyed to the kidnappers, with the promise that another $150,000 would be forthcoming. In return for the full amount, the kidnappers had pledged not to harm Jerome or Factor’s seven-year-old son, Alvin.
Factor said he had been blindfolded for much of his captivity and that he had been kept in an upstairs bedroom of a house during the negotiations.
But the British authorities had never believed a bit of Factor’s story. Well before Factor turned up in La Grange, the British lawyer leading the extradition campaign, Franklin Overmyer, asserted that the entire “kidnapping” was a hoax, as the Times dutifully noted at the end of its July 13 article.82
The very next day, however, there was a new theory, as the Times reported at the bottom of its article on July 14. “Convinced that the Touhy gang kidnapped Factor, police began a round-up of as many members of the gang as possible.”83
To many Americans, the name Touhy was probably not as familiar as, say, Dillinger or Capone. But people in and around Chicago knew the name well.
*As did Jack’s half brother, Max Factor, who was a Hollywood makeup man and founded a cosmetics empire.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
ROGER “THE TERRIBLE”
Chicago
Summer 1933
No question about it: Roger “the Terrible” Touhy was an ideal suspect for just about any crime. He was a tough, shrewd Chicago bootlegger who was acquainted with loan sharks, gamblers, and various musclemen for hire. Remarkably, he had never been afraid to stand up to Al Capone, with whom he had a symbiotic relationship for a while.
Not quite thirty-five years old in the summer of 1933, Touhy had survived a childhood best described as short. He was the youngest of five sons of James Touhy, a Chicago policeman, and his wife, Mary, who died in a house fire when Roger was ten.
James struggled to raise his sons and two daughters, but he seems to have been overwhelmed. One son was shot dead by a Chicago policeman in 1917 while attempting a robbery. Another son was killed a decade later, reportedly by gunmen in Al Capone’s gang, and another son was shot dead two years after that, again presumably by Capone men.
After dropping out of school in the eighth grade, Roger Touhy had several unglamorous but honest jobs. He served in the navy during the Great War. After the war, he married. He and a brother started a trucking company. By this time, Prohibition was in effect. Much of the cargo in the Touhy trucks consisted of beer and liquor. By the late 1920s, Touhy had broadened his business interests to gambling and slot machines, which he installed in many Chicago-area saloons.
Capone was buying hundreds of barrels of beer each week from Touhy. It was high-quality beer, made in a brewery run by Touhy and his associates and shipped in wooden barrels also made by Touhy and his men.
The Touhy gang was rumored to number as many as eighty men. So it seemed reasonable when Daniel Gilbert, the chief investigator for the Cook County (Chicago) state’s attorney’s office, announced that the Touhy gang was most likely responsible for the kidnapping of both John Factor and Will
iam Hamm.
As it happened, Touhy and several associates were then in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, recuperating from injuries they’d suffered when their car hit a telephone pole.
Melvin Purvis, the head of the Chicago FBI office, took his cue from Gilbert, ordering several FBI agents to accompany Gilbert to Wisconsin to bring Touhy and his associates to Chicago for interrogation.
The car crash was doubly unfortunate for Touhy and friends. Not only had they been shaken up, but a small arsenal of weapons was found in the vehicle by police investigating the smashup. The car was also found to be equipped with a special, large-capacity fuel tank—ideal for kidnappers, who could drive as long as they could stay awake without having to gas up.
In Chicago, Purvis himself questioned Touhy, who laughingly dismissed the suggestion that he’d had anything to do with kidnapping Hamm. And when Hamm himself viewed Touhy and his several associates through a one-way mirror, he was far from sure they were the men who had grabbed him. After all, Hamm had initially thought one of his captors looked like Verne Sankey.*
But Purvis was persuaded by Gilbert’s assertion of Touhy’s guilt. Though the historical record is murky on this point, Purvis’s belief seems to have been reinforced by another witness, who said he was confident that Touhy had abducted Hamm.
A native of South Carolina and a lawyer, Purvis was twenty-nine years old that summer of 1933 and still a bachelor. He was discreet, serious, loyal, not given to easy smiling. His taste in suits ran from dark to really dark. In other words, he personified Hoover’s idea of the ideal FBI agent.
Before he was assigned to Chicago, Purvis was an agent in Birmingham, Alabama; Oklahoma City; and Cincinnati. Yet however well-traveled he was and despite his schooling, he seems to have had all the street smarts of a cloistered monk. His willingness to rely on Gilbert was astounding, given the kind of man Gilbert was.
“Tubbo,” as the portly, thick-necked Gilbert was known, joined the Chicago police force in 1918, soon made sergeant, and was a captain by 1927. His meteoric rise came at a time when Al Capone controlled much of Chicago’s underworld, and city hall and the police department were corrupt. Perched happily atop the political dung heap for much of the era was Mayor William “Big Bill” Hale Thompson, a Republican who was in office from 1915 to 1923 and from 1927 to 1931 and who was friendly with Capone.
After Thompson was defeated by Democrat Anton Cermak in the mayoral election of April 7, 1931, the Chicago Daily Tribune declared that Thompson’s reign had brought “filth, corruption, obscenity, idiocy and bankruptcy” to Chicago and made it “a byword for the collapse of American civilization.”84 In the same editorial, the Tribune boasted of its condemnation of Thompson over the years: “It is unpleasant business to eject a skunk, but someone has to do it.”**
If Melvin Purvis had had an ounce of shrewdness, he would have wondered how Gilbert rocketed from patrolman to captain in nine years, after which he became head investigator for the Cook County prosecutor’s office.
Purvis might have wondered, too, if it was proper for Gilbert to be secretary-treasurer of a Teamsters union local while he was a young police officer. And Purvis ought to have wondered how Gilbert gained control of half a dozen Chicago Teamsters locals by the mid-1930s.
Purvis was remarkably careless and naïve in taking Gilbert’s word that Touhy was behind the kidnappings of Hamm and Factor. Nevertheless, he was sufficiently persuaded to announce that the FBI had no doubt about Touhy’s guilt, and would prove it in court.
And that was exactly what Hoover wanted to hear. He wrote Purvis to praise his diligence and that of the entire Chicago office of the FBI.
What Purvis and, of course, Hoover should have known was that Gilbert was working with Capone’s organization to eliminate competition from Touhy and his associates, a goal that could be neatly accomplished if Touhy were sent to prison.***
There is more, much more, to tell about the life of Daniel “Tubbo” Gilbert, for it was such an American story, such a Chicago story. For now, let us stay with the summer of 1933.
On July 24, Touhy and three associates, Willie Sharkey, Edward “Father Tom” McFadden, and Gustav “Gloomy Gus” Schaefer, were jailed in Milwaukee to await arraignment and a hearing on whether they would be sent to St. Paul to stand trial for kidnapping William Hamm.
The authorities were confident. “We will have from four to six witnesses to identify the Illinois gangsters as those who engineered the Hamm plot,” Thomas E. Dahill, the St. Paul police chief, promised.85
“We have a very good case against these men,” L. L. Drill, the U.S. attorney in St. Paul, said.
The defendants’ lawyer, William Scott Stewart of Chicago, said the charges against his clients were preposterous.
No one paid much attention to the defense lawyer at first. Languishing in jail to await trial, Touhy and his associates were all but forgotten for a while—and no wonder, given the smorgasbord of crime news that summer.
*It is not uncommon for crime victims to misidentify suspects. I know of a case in which two young men in New York City were mistakenly identified by women who had been sexually assaulted during burglaries. When the culprit was finally caught, his picture ran in the New York Times alongside those of the two innocent men. The three men resembled one another, to be sure, but they could hardly have been mistaken for triplets.
**Thompson was the last Republican to serve as mayor of Chicago. Cermak was shot in Miami on February 15, 1933, by a man trying to assassinate President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt and died on March 6.
***Capone himself had been sent to prison in May 1932 after being convicted of income tax evasion.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
A PRINCE OF ALBANY
Albany, New York
Friday, July 7, 1933
Ah, the Great Empire State! Some of the men who lived in the governor’s mansion in New York State’s capital, Albany, became figures on the world stage: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Averell Harriman, Nelson A. Rockefeller. Two other New York governors, Alfred E. Smith and Thomas E. Dewey, captured their party’s presidential nominations but missed the big prize. Nonetheless, their places in history are secure because of their fine public service.
But there has always been a shabbier Albany, one in which tawdry scandals bubble up occasionally like cesspool gas. Bribes for liquor licenses, do-nothing jobs, bloated contracts for public projects, backslapping, and backstabbing—all have been part of the political circus of Albany. One kidnapping in particular offered a glimpse of some of these goings-on.
The car was found in front of his father’s house, the driver’s side door open and the engine still warm, early in the morning. The vehicle belonged to John J. O’Connell Jr., a prince of a powerful political clan. Twenty-four years old, “Butch” O’Connell, as he was known, was mature, sensible. He wouldn’t have left his car with the door open. Other young men might be stupid enough to get drunk and just stumble off, but not Butch.
So where the hell was he?
His uncles, the brothers Daniel P., known as “Big Dan,” and Edward J. O’Connell, were bosses of the Albany County Democratic machine. Big Dan was the big boss of the family. He was born in 1885 in Albany, son of a tavern owner, and dropped out of high school. As a brash thirtysomething, he ran for city assessor and won. His victory surprised everyone in city politics, as the Republican city organization had been considered invincible. But Dan and his brothers worked tirelessly, and within three years, they were in command of a Democratic organization that controlled both city and county government.
Butch O’Connell’s father was widely known as “Solly” O’Connell, and he was also active in politics. Solly’s brother Edward was chairman of the Albany County Democratic Party.
Butch was expected to maintain the family’s power in the capital of the Empire State. Sadly, a death in the clan, that of another uncle, Patrick O’Connell, just a few weeks before had created a possible stepping stone for Butch. Patrick had been clerk of the state sen
ate, and there was speculation that Butch might succeed him.
Nor need Butch have worried about his future outside politics. His uncles were stockholders in the Hedrick Brewery, and Butch was learning all about the beer business. He would prosper, no doubt about that. Then as now, Albany politicians knew how to use their connections to succeed in business.
Though not particularly handsome, Butch was impressive looking in a square-jawed Irish way, and he looked good in a uniform, which he often wore as a lieutenant in the National Guard. He was still single, but his status was expected to change soon. He had a steady girlfriend, Mary Fahey.
Relatives and a few trusted friends gathered in Butch’s home on Putnam Street in a quiet residential section of Albany. On Friday afternoon, the phone rang. It was picked up by George Myers, a family friend. “Tell Ed we have his nephew, and if he wants to see him alive again, tell him not to call the police.”86 Samuel Aronowitz, Edward O’Connell’s law partner, got a similar call on Friday.
On Saturday morning, there was a third phone call, this one for Daniel O’Connell: “Look in your mailbox at the post office.”
The mailbox contained a letter, hand-printed and with Butch O’Connell’s signature, demanding $250,000 for Butch’s safe return. Soon, there was another letter, this one instructing the family to insert an ad in the Knickerbocker Press on Sunday, listing men who would be trustworthy intermediaries.* The list was to be in code, using numbers for letters: 1 for A, 2 for B, and so on.
When the list was compiled, it was inserted in the newspaper by Walter V. Johnson, a friend of the O’Connells and the Democratic leader of neighboring Rensselaer County. This list showed a preponderance of Irish names whose bearers were familiar figures around Albany sporting venues.
The kidnappers found the list unsatisfactory and demanded a fresh list of possible intermediaries. This second list was also printed in code, although in the Albany Times Union. How the O’Connells came up with the new names or whether the kidnappers offered hints isn’t known. In any event, as the New York Times put it, several men on the list “were members of or in direct contact with the Albany underworld.”87
