by David Stout
The terrified prisoners were dragged to a park in front of the Santa Clara County courthouse, facing the jail. They saw ropes being hurled over tree limbs, to the accompaniment of whoops and cheers. Knowing the fate that awaited them, did Thurmond and Holmes, who had been unmoved by the terror and suffering of their victim, finally feel empathy for Brooke Hart?
Thurmond was first. Almost in a faint, he did not resist. Thousands cheered as his body was hoisted. But Holmes was powerful, over six feet tall and weighing more than two hundred pounds. He fought fiercely as the noose was tightened around his neck. Finally, he, too, was pulled up, writhing in the beams of flashlights as the mob howled.
The next day, Governor Rolph expressed his delight at the pioneer justice, calling the lynchings “a fine lesson to the whole nation.”115
“With all the sorrows we have had, why should we add the sorrows of kidnapping?” he said. “It is about time the people should have comfort in their homes. This kidnapping business has become so bad that mothers and fathers are afraid to let their children out of their homes.
“Look at the Lindbergh case. Kidnappers have taken little children, killed them, and then jockeyed for huge sums of money. Now they have taken to kidnapping men and women for the purpose of extracting money from their distracted relatives.”
Making clear that he had given considerable thought to his statement and that he meant exactly what he said, Rolph said he had checked to see how many California prison inmates were behind bars for kidnapping. He suggested that kidnappers be turned over to “those fine, patriotic San Jose citizens.”
Rolph declared that no kidnapper would be released from prison while he was governor—and that he would pardon anyone arrested for lynching a kidnapper.
No doubt, many people felt as the governor did. Some said so publicly. “Congratulations on your attitude toward the Hart case,” a minister from Redlands, California, wired Rolph. A former judge in Kansas City, Missouri, praised Rolph and the people of California “for their noble example in dealing with criminals.”
But many people deplored the mob violence and Rolph’s praise of it. “The very spirit of government has been violated and the state has been disgraced in the eyes of the world by a brutal outburst of primitive lust for vengeance,” read a statement issued by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and signed by several prominent Californians, including former President Herbert Hoover, a Republican like Rolph. “A horrible crime had been committed which deeply moved every citizen, but lynching is unjustifiable and subversive of all government. It was mob violence, marked by the most degrading brutality.”116
Two nights after the San Jose lynching, a mob estimated at seven thousand to nine thousand people broke into the jail in St. Joseph, Missouri, where Lloyd Warner, a nineteen-year-old black youth, was held on charges of sexually assaulting and beating a young white woman. Warner had declared that he was ready to plead guilty; months earlier, he had escaped prosecution for attacking a black woman.
Police officers, jail guards, and several dozen National Guard troops tried to hold back the mob. Army tanks chugged to the jail. One tank driver was yanked out of his machine, putting it out of action. The mob dragged Warner to the courthouse lawn and hanged him from a giant elm tree. Then several people in the mob splashed gasoline on the corpse and set it afire.
Meanwhile, a lynching case in Maryland was playing out differently. In Salisbury, on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay, a mob gathered on November 28 with the collective purpose of freeing several white men who were suspected of taking part in the lynching of a black man several weeks earlier in Princess Anne, Maryland.
Local prosecutors had shown no urgency in investigating the lynching of George Armwood, twenty-four, who was suspected of attacking an elderly white woman on a country road. Nor had area residents pressed for prosecution. So Governor Albert Ritchie called up a contingent of three hundred Maryland national guardsmen to round up the suspects.
A mob estimated at three thousand people congregated outside the National Guard armory in Salisbury, railing against the governor and state Attorney General William Preston Lane Jr., who was in Salisbury that day. Some in the mob shouted their approval of California Governor Rolph’s glee at the San Jose lynching. Shouts of “Lynch him!” were directed toward Lane, who wisely left town.
After holding back the mob with tear gas and bayonets, the guardsmen took the suspects to Baltimore to be jailed. But on November 29, just a day after the confrontation in Salisbury, a state judge in Princess Anne ordered the four suspects released, finding that the arrests had been improper. Outside the courthouse, a raucous celebration was punctuated by blaring car horns.
On the same day, Governor Rolph of California made it clear that he had not softened his vigilante attitude toward lynching. “No price is too high to pay if we can drive these fiendish kidnappers out of our state and nation,” he declared. “When we consider the agony to which Brooke Hart, a fine sample of American manhood, was subjected, and when we think of the innocent Lindbergh baby wrested from the security of his very bed and murdered, can we blame the people for becoming aroused?”117
The violent events in late November 1933 and the extraordinary spectacle of a California governor applauding vigilante justice were treated by print reporters like the big stories they were. Had television and the Internet existed back then, there might have been serious debate on whether the country was changing in fundamental and deeply frightening ways.
Verne Miller, who had found his duties as a South Dakota sheriff too confining and so had turned to crime, was found dead in a ditch outside Detroit on November 29, 1933. He had been beaten and strangled. The FBI said it had information that he was killed in retaliation for shooting a mobster from Newark, New Jersey.
It seemed that the sunny prediction of former New York governor Alfred E. Smith that Adolf Hitler and his crew were too stupid to remain in power had been mistaken. On the contrary, Hitler now seemed firmly in control of Germany. It seemed that the very foundations of German society were crumbling. For one thing, a movement was underway to unite all Christians, Catholic and Protestant, under a new religion. “Together with Chancellor Hitler, we will build a new German church,” Protestant bishop Ludwig Müller of Königsberg proclaimed in late November.118
Several other Protestant leaders, uneasy over Müller’s ties to the Nazi regime, declared that they would have nothing to do with the movement, which embraced anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, Müller’s statement illustrated how Nazism was affecting every aspect of German life.**
And while Americans shuddered at the thought of another war, there was a warning that, if one came, the U.S. Army would be ill prepared—unless drastic improvements were made. For the moment, the army was woefully below strength in numbers and equipment given “the obvious state of unrest now prevailing throughout the world,” warned General Douglas MacArthur, the army’s chief of staff.
But if Europe was in turmoil, there was at least some heartening news from the other side of the world. In a statement coinciding with the eve of Thanksgiving in America, the foreign ministry of Japan said it was hopeful that talks with the United States could head off any naval competition between the countries and thus preserve peace in the Pacific.
*It is not clear from news accounts at the time if investigators were misleading the kidnappers when they announced on November 13 that they would no longer intercept calls to the Hart home or if they knew from earlier intercepts that the latest call must be coming from the garage.
**The politically naïve Müller had been an obscure clergyman until his fervent Nazi beliefs caught the eye of Hitler, who had him installed as a bishop. Müller’s movement never succeeded, and he committed suicide in 1945 in despair over Germany’s defeat.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
TOUHY’S TORMENT CONTINUES
Chicago
Monday, December 4, 1933
“With repeal less than 48 hours away, federal officials worked through
out today to put in running order the government’s machinery for controlling the flow of legal liquor in wet states and protecting the dry.”119 So began a front page article in the Chicago Tribune trumpeting the end of the noble experiment, effective the next day, Tuesday, December 5. Utah had just become the necessary thirty-sixth state to ratify the Twenty-First Amendment, thus repealing the Eighteenth Amendment, which had established Prohibition. All across the country, people who liked an adult beverage or two (or four or five) now and then prepared to celebrate.
But it was a gloomy time for Roger Touhy, who had prospered by running illegal alcohol during Prohibition. Then there was Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert, the Cook County prosecutor, who was nothing if not persistent. With the acquittal of Touhy and his associates (“Touhyites,” the Chicago papers called them) in the kidnapping of William Hamm, Gilbert was determined not to let Touhy escape his clutches. This time, he would try to get them for the kidnapping of “Jake the Barber” Factor (if indeed Factor had really been kidnapped).
On December 4, 1933, at Gilbert’s request, Governor Henry Horner of Illinois signed warrants for the extradition from Minnesota to Chicago of Touhy and his associates Edward McFadden and Gus Schaefer. They had remained in jail in St. Paul on the authorities’ assumption that Gilbert would want them sent to Chicago.
Another “Touhyite,” Albert Kator, who had not been accused in the Hamm kidnapping, was also named a suspect in the Factor case. Yet another Touhy ally, Willie Sharkey, who had been a defendant in the Hamm case, had found the ordeal too much to bear. Emotionally undone despite being acquitted, he hanged himself in his jail cell in St. Paul.
In a coincidence that seemed remarkable but that Chicago journalists seemed not to have underlined, on the very day that Governor Horner signed the extradition order, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Factor should be extradited to Britain to stand trial in a stock-swindling scheme he had been accused of engineering, causing the loss of millions of dollars among people of means, including members of the royal family.
By the time of the Supreme Court ruling, the suspicions of British authorities—that Factor had faked his “kidnapping” to avoid extradition—had been well publicized, raising serious questions about whether Factor was a man who could be trusted to tell the truth about anything.
But Thomas J. Courtney, the Cook County prosecutor who worked closely with Gilbert, insisted that Factor should be allowed to stay and help bring Touhy and friends to justice.
Washington officials found Courtney’s arguments persuasive, so Factor was allowed to remain stateside and to testify against Touhy and his codefendants. The first trial didn’t go well for the prosecution—one juror admitted to lying under questioning during the jury-selection process, and another juror tried to get himself excused halfway through the trial—so a mistrial was declared.
Gilbert and Courtney weren’t giving up. The defendants were soon put on trial again, and this time, all were found guilty. Immediately, each man was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison—a compromise decided upon by the jurors, six of whom wanted to send the defendants to the electric chair.
“The jury had written ‘finis’ to the so-called terrible Touhys,” a Tribune reporter declared.120 The scribe indulged in some cruel sport, noting that Touhy appeared to become ill when the verdict was read, “gagging and coughing, his handkerchief held to his face.” Schaefer was “white-faced.” And Kator, “known as a cold-blooded gunman and killer, managed a last scornful grimace” as he was led from the courtroom.
But there was still more fun to be had. A few weeks later, Basil “the Owl” Banghart, a “machine gunner of the Touhy gang,” as the Tribune put it, was tried separately for the Factor kidnapping.121 Convicted on March 13, 1934, “the Owl,” who it will be recalled was known for his big, slow-moving eyes and his wisdom, was immediately packed off to the penitentiary for ninety-nine years.
The Tribune writer had rich material indeed. Hours before Banghart was found guilty, “forces outside the law had disposed of Charles ‘Ice Wagon’ Connors, another Touhyite who had been identified as one of those involved in the Factor abduction…”
“His body, bullet-riddled, with his false teeth missing and a penny clutched in one rigid hand, was found beside 107th Street and a half-mile east of Archer Avenue,” the reporter wrote. “It was the theory of the police that the copper coin had been left by the killers as a sardonic message to indicate that the notoriously stingy Connors had refused to contribute to the defense fund for his erstwhile companions,” the writer explained.
There was such good sport to be had in the ordeal of Touhy and his fellow gangsters! And they were gangsters, if bootleggers and their henchmen qualified as such, though Touhy seems not to have been cut from the same cloth as some of the psychopathic killers of his era.
But from the vantage point of eight decades on, one cannot escape the feeling that something wasn’t right about the verdict. Did none of the journalists know of Gilbert’s ties to Touhy’s rivals, the Capone organization? Did it occur to them to spotlight the fact that Factor was untrustworthy? Should they have dug a bit deeper?
The impression persists that Touhy and his gang were convicted, in effect, of being gangsters, that Gilbert and the jurors thought they belonged behind bars, if not for the “kidnapping” of Factor, then for…something. Maybe for being Touhy’s rivals.
Anyhow, by early 1934, it seemed that Touhy was confined to obscurity forever. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
BREWER, BANKER, VICTIM
St. Paul, Minnesota
Wednesday, January 17, 1934
As summer morphed into autumn in the Upper Midwest, turning the leaves on the trees into a watercolorist’s delight, there seemed to be no progress in the investigation of the kidnapping of William Hamm or at least none that the public was being told about. And suddenly, too suddenly for those who didn’t ski or ice-skate or build snowmen, the trees were bare. It was winter again.
Edward G. Bremer had heard a rumor, which had been circulating among St. Paul’s organized crime figures for months. The rumor was that he was the next likely kidnapping target.
Bremer was a prominent banker in a mob-infested city and an heir to a beer fortune. Inevitably, then, he occasionally did business with mob members or with people who knew mob figures. So it was no surprise Bremer was a target and that a kidnapping that hadn’t even happened yet was grist for gossip.
Perhaps it said something about Bremer, or “Eddie,” as he was known to relatives and friends, that he finally tired of having a bodyguard. So in November, out of arrogance or courage or both, he had told the bodyguard his services were no longer needed.
He wanted to live a normal life, or as normal a life as a wealthy man like him could live. Bremer was the president and owner of the Commercial State Bank. His father, Adolph, was majority stockholder in the Joseph Schmidt beer company. Adolph Bremer was also a personal friend of President Roosevelt and Minnesota Governor Floyd Olson.
On this cold Wednesday morning, Bremer, thirty-seven, left his eight-year-old daughter, Betty, at the Summit School. Then he started driving to his bank.
A short time later, a milk truck driver saw Bremer’s car stop at an intersection and another car suddenly pull in front of it. The milk truck driver stopped to let some children cross the street. He turned to wave to the schoolchildren. When he turned his eyes to the traffic again, he saw Bremer’s car driving away behind the car that had pulled in front of it.
When Bremer’s car was found abandoned a short time later at the edge of the city, there were bloodstains on the front and rear seat cushions, so much blood that police immediately feared that Bremer was dead or dying.
Soon, a friend of Bremer, a wealthy contractor named Walter Magee, received a ransom note to forward to the family. It demanded $200,000 in used small bills and threatened death to Bremer if the demand was not met. Bremer himself had been forced to sign the note. His sig
nature was shaky, nothing like his usual graceful penmanship, leading relatives to conclude that he must have been in great distress or in great pain when he signed his name.
Adolph Bremer had contacted the police right after his son was taken. A federal agent who had worked on the Urschel kidnapping immediately flew from Dallas to St. Paul. Other federal agents joined him. Phones at the Bremer home were tapped.
“Please don’t make any move that will endanger Eddie’s safety,” the elder Bremer begged the police publicly.122 The old man made it clear he wanted federal, state, and city lawmen to do virtually nothing while he and family representatives tried to recover Edward.
Hamstrung by the father’s pleas, the police and federal agents agreed to stand down to await further word from the kidnappers. The kidnappers assumed that phone lines to the Bremer home were tapped, so they communicated via written messages. The kidnappers were not fools, after all. More importantly, given the nature of the St. Paul police department, it was likely that information about the investigation was being leaked to the kidnappers or to people in contact with them.
As the kidnappers had instructed, the Bremer family placed an ad in the Minneapolis Tribune, indicating a willingness to cooperate. “We are ready. Alice,” the ad read.
Then, three days after the kidnapping, there was devastating news. The postmaster of Minneapolis, W. C. Robertson, announced the receipt of an anonymous letter addressed to him but meant to be read by “a Federal officer,” according to the writer.
“Very sorry, but Edward Bremer is now resting in peace,” the letter declared. “Was by accident bumped off. Body near Anoka, Minn. Will not be found until after the snow thaws. Contact all off. Please forgive us. All a mistake by one of our gang being drunk.”123
