The Stolen Years

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THE STOLEN YEARS

By

Roger Touhy

With

Ray Brennan

The Stolen Years was originally published in 1959 by Pennington Press, Inc., Cleveland, Ohio.

DEDICATION

* * *

To innocent men and women in prison,

or otherwise deprived of their liberties,

this book is dedicated. Roger Touhy

* * *

The court is of the opinion and finds and holds that the writ issued out of the Criminal Court of Cook County, Illinois, whereunder Relator Roger Touhy is held for the period of ninety-nine years for the crime of kidnapping for ransom is void because issued on a judgment of that court which is void because the proceedings in that court antecedent to said judgment and said judgment were violative of the Due Process of Law Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States in that said judgment was procured by means of the use of testimony known by the prosecuting officers to be perjured and because the Relator was deprived in a capital case of the effective assistance of counsel devoted exclusively to protection of Relator’s interests and compelled against his will and over his protests to accept the services of counsel who was compelled to serve adverse interests.

Judge John P. Barnes

United States District Court

Northern District of Illinois

August 9, 1954

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

DEDICATION 4

TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

CHAPTER I — The Sharpest Thief in Stateville 6

CHAPTER 2 — Over the Wall 14

CHAPTER 3 — 82 Days AWOL 21

CHAPTER 4 — My Father was a Cop 29

CHAPTER 5 — My Beer Was Bootleg—But Good 40

CHAPTER 6 — Al Capone Didn’t Like Me 45

CHAPTER 7 — The Labor Skates and I 52

CHAPTER 8 — Jake the Barber Was Kidnapped??? 60

CHAPTER 9 — Nobody Questioned Me 67

CHAPTER 10 — Gone Fishing 74

CHAPTER 11  Fiasco at St. Paul 80

CHAPTER 12  Washington Gets into the Act 87

CHAPTER 13 — What Jake The Barber Said 93

CHAPTER 14 — Alice in Factorland 100

CHAPTER 15 — A Hung Jury-and Hope for Me 105

CHAPTER 16 — The Witness Who Wasn’t There 110

CHAPTER 20 — My Vindication in Court 136

CHAPTER 21 — A Great Judge’s Opinion 143

John P. Barnes—a Profile 154

Acknowledgments 159

Illustrations 160

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 201

CHAPTER I — The Sharpest Thief in Stateville

The best thief I ever knew, in or out of prison, was Gene O’Connor. He was doing his stealing when I first knew him in Illinois’ biggest and toughest penitentiary, Stateville, near Joliet. A wheelbarrow was all the thievery equipment he had; that, and a lot of good will.

O’Connor was a little man—smaller than I am, which is five feet six inches. He had an engaging grin and a disarming manner, and he was thinking all the time. Escaping was what he thought about mostly.

He was on a prison yard detail, which gave him the run of the joint. He buzzed in and out of the storerooms, the shops, the kitchen and the cell houses like a fly through a window with the screen left out.

I was working in the kitchen as a steward and clerk, and he would come around to mooch a cup of coffee, an apple, a handful of raisins or whatever he could glom. He hinted about escaping, but I didn’t pay much heed. There were 3,000 cons in Stateville, and all of them had crazy ideas about going over the wall.

You’re too busy stealing in here to take time to escape, I told O’Connor. You’re doing better in stir than you could on the outside.

Two or three times a week I would see him pushing his wheelbarrow across the yard toward one or another of the guard towers. He would be trundling a quarter of beef, steaks, slabs of bacon, a 100-pound sack of sugar, or bags of coffee.

He stole the stuff out of the storehouses and peddled it to the guards in the towers. Those towers are perched on top of the prison wall, which is 33 feet high, of solid concrete and steel, and nine feet thick at the base. Each guard up there has a cubicle to sit in, with windows looking down on the yard and a catwalk for exercise along the top of the wall.

The only square way to reach a tower is by an enclosed stairway on the outside of the wall with a solid door kept locked at the bottom. When O’Connor reached the inside base of the wall at one of the towers, he would call up to the man on duty.

The screw would lower a rope and Gene would tie on the loot for the trip. Up would go beef, coffee, bacon or sugar. The tower screws dropped a dollar or two for Gene now and then, or mailed letters to his outside connections for him. But mostly he was making friends and building up good will.

The year was 1942 and the guards were old parties brought in to replace younger men who left for the armed services or for big-paying jobs in war plants. They probably never understood what a hell of a chance they were taking with O’Connor. The damnedest prison break that ever happened at Stateville was in the making.

Gene kept giving me reports about the jolly, larcenous friends he was making in the towers, and the influence he was building up. Wartime rationing was on and the guards were getting big money—considering the starvation wages paid in all prisons—by selling O’Connor’s meats and groceries in the Joliet and Chicago black markets.

First and foremost, I was under a sentence of 99 years. I would have to serve a third of it, or 33 years, before even being allowed to apply for parole. I had a minimum of 25 years left to go before parole, and I didn’t want to stay alive that long in prison—even if I could. So what did I have to lose by going over the wall—or getting killed trying?

Also, One old character up there is treating me like a son,‘ O’Connor told me. I said to him this morning that I was coming up to visit him some day. He told me to come right ahead and bring my friends. He said he never shot anybody in his life and he wasn’t aiming to start now.

I didn’t want to know about such things and I told O’Connor so. Convicts have a saying that goes: If three guys know a secret, that makes four, counting the warden. I didn’t relish getting a rap as one of the three guys who got word to the fourth.

Anyway, O’Connor kept on stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down, and some things that were. He got away with it because we had a dull warden and a lot of new guards. And he kept needling me to throw in with him on the escape. I was a good candidate for a break, by his standards.

First and foremost, I was under a sentence of 99 years. I would have to serve a third of it, or 33 years, before even being allowed to apply for parole. I had a minimum of 25 years left to go before parole, and I didn’t want to stay alive that long in prison—even if I could. So, what did I have to lose by going over the wall—or getting killed trying?

I had been railroaded to prison. I was innocent. I had been convicted of a fake kidnapping that never happened. I had been sworn into prison on false testimony. I was a fall guy for the Chicago Capone mob. I was rotting in prison on the falsified testimony of a swindler and ex-convict, John Jake the Barber Factor.

A distinguished former Federal judge, the late John P. Barnes, subsequently ruled that the kidnapping was a hoax. I had been railroaded to prison under an unjust conviction. Even so, I should have continued to be deaf when Gene O’Connor talked to me. Instead, I was dumb—stupid dumb.

He came to me one day in early summer, and he was grinning with good news. I was in the kitchen and he was pushing that silly wheelbarrow. It was half full of sand. They were drilling a well in the yard and some of the sand from the hole was going into the bottoms of decorative tanks of goldfish in the big dining hall. O’Connor sidled up to me and whispered: We got two guns into the joint last night, Rog. Old Percy Campbell carried ‘em in wrapped up in the flag.

I was shocked and scared. Guns in a prison are like a firebug in a high octane gasoline refinery. I backed off from Gene and told him to keep the hell away from me. There was no reason for me to be thinking seriously about a break at that time. I had something going for me, and I wasn’t hopeless. Not even desperate. I figured I had some percentage on my side.

John P. Lally, a Chicago Daily News writer, had made up his mind that I was innocent. He was one of the first of many to realize the truth. He worked day and night on my case, digging up evidence. He had visited me a few months before with this message: Rog, you never will spend another Christmas in this place.

One of Lally’s Daily News co-workers, William Gorman, had written a long magazine story on my case. I had read the story. It was a good one, and it showed my innocence. When it was published, Gorman and I figured, public opinion wouldn’t allow me to remain in prison any longer. I had the greatest possible confidence in the article.

After O’Connor dropped the word about the guns and left me, I stood in the kitchen doorway for quite a while. It was the first really fine day of early summer. Acres and acres of flowers were blooming in the prison yard, where Warden Joseph E. Ragen had had them planted before the politicians got rid of him, temporarily—and I, Roger Touhy, got him back. In Joliet, down the road a piece, the pretty girls would be out in their sleeveless, summer dresses. It was the kind of day when convicts, all 3,000 of us in Stateville, began to get restless. Nature makes guys that way in the spring, I guess.

I was thinking of my wife, Clara, the little brunette I had courted by telegraph when we were both youngsters working opposite ends of a Morse wire for Western Union in Chicago. Our two sons now were high-school age. They weren’t having it easy, I knew. This was my eighth year away from them; a hell of a long eternity when you measure it on a penitentiary calendar.

As I stood there in the doorway, birds were singing from every direction, from the flower beds, the shrubbery, and from trees in the yard. There were thousands of birds in Stateville, and more every year because the cons fed and protected them. We envied them, too, and sometimes our feelings got pretty close to hatred. A bird can go over those 33-foot walls faster than a tower screw’s rifle can follow and be miles away in minutes. The cons protected the birds, and any hungry cat caught sneaking up on a robin or a bluejay could expect a kick in the tail in Stateville. Still—with the temptations of birds, family, spring time and all—I had no thought of joining Gene O’Connor. I had faith in Gorman and his magazine story. I remembered the promise that I’d be out by Christmas.

All through the hot summer and into the fall, O’Connor needled me. The two guns were hidden somewhere in the prison, he kept saying. The break couldn’t miss. Basil Banghart was going along. The old tower screw wouldn’t shoot.

Gene’s news bulletin about Banghart impressed me. Basil was a shrewd, fast-thinking con. Everybody called him The Owl for two reasons. He had big, slow-blinking eyes, and he was wise. He wouldn’t go on a break unless the gamble was a good one. I had met him for the first time in Stateville.

The Owl had been sentenced to 99 years for the Factor kidnap fake, as I had. He was a resourceful and courageous man. He could run a locomotive or fly an airplane, and he was better than a green hand at opening up an armored mail truck or persuading a bank guard not to step on the robbery alarm button.

O’Connor was no slouch, either. He had beat Stateville twice on breaks. Once he got into the powerhouse at night, pulled a switch that doused every light in the prison, got a ladder from the carpenters’ shop, and whisked over the wall in darkness. Another time he had himself nailed inside a furniture crate being shipped to Joliet, and rode through the gates in a truck.

This is going to be a high-class break, with no dummies allowed in the group, O’Connor assured me. Sometimes he talked like those Ivy League Madison Avenue boys who started getting into Stateville after they lowered the entrance requirements to include Phi Beta Kappa men. He also explained the exact way in which the two guns had been smuggled in.

Percy Campbell was an old trusty who pottered around outside the main gate, tending the flower beds, watering the grass, sweeping the walks and tidying up the visitors’ parking area. He also had the job of carrying in the American flag at sundown every day.

The guns were left at the base of the flagpole one night and Percy carried them in next evening, wrapped up in Old Glory. He got a grand total of thirty bucks for this errand. Whatever his other talents might have been, Campbell was an amateur at collective bargaining. I guess Percy did it mainly for meanness. He had put in 17 years on a one-to-life term, and he should have been paroled long before.

I was an unwilling listener while Gene talked, but that was all. O’Connor wanted me along so bad that his urging got to be a nuisance. I had friends and political connections on the outside. I could raise money and arrange for hideouts, he figured. I just shook my head no and grinned.

And then the bad news began hitting me.

First it was Lally, of the Chicago Daily News. He died of cancer of the throat. Not only had I lost a good friend, but one of my last two legal chances to get out of Stateville was gone. I had some outside people send flowers to John’s funeral. That was all I could do.

John died without ever telling anybody what evidence he had found: why he was so certain I never would spend another Christmas in prison. He wanted his story to be exclusive and, like any good newspaperman, he kept buttoned up.

Chance No. 2 blew up when Gorman came to see me. I knew at once that something had gone wrong. He was carrying a large brown envelope, and his face was long. I’d rather be kicked all the way back to Chicago than tell you this, Rog, he said. He dumped the contents of the envelope in front of me. Magazine rejection slips, dozens of them.

No magazine will take the story, Gorman said. I read a few of the slips. Some of the editors wrote that they were interested only in articles with a war angle. Others said that the story of my doublecross was too fantastic, that readers wouldn’t believe it. One editor commented coldly that all prison inmates claimed to be innocent and that most of them were trying to get their alibis into print.

I mumbled my thanks to Gorman for all of his wasted work. I stumbled back to my cell. I was seeing through a sort of haze. My last hope was gone. The United States Supreme Court earlier had turned me down for a hearing. I wasn’t a man any more. I was a dead thing. I stayed awake until dawn in my cell, thinking. I was without hope. I was buried alive in prison and I would die there. I couldn’t see a light ahead anywhere. Nothing but darkness and loneliness and desperation. The world had forgotten me, after eight years. I was a nothing.

Well, there was one way I could focus public attention on my misery. I could escape. I would be caught, of course, but the break would show my terrible situation.

What cockeyed thinking that was. The only thing I could do by going over the wall would be to destroy almost every chance I might have for decent justice at some future time. But a man in my spot isn’t reasonable, of course.

My mental attitude was a mess, I later came to realize. I hadn’t seen my wife, Clara, for four years, but I couldn’t forget her last visit. It had been an ordeal rather than the usual delight. She had worn a white hat and gloves and a dark tailored suit, I remembered. It might be a long time before I saw her again, and maybe never.

At that time, in 1938, I had been disconsolate. I had figured that I couldn’t be a drag on Clara and our two sons for all of their lives. So I had given her a direct order for the first time in our 18 years of marriage: Take all the money you can raise and go to Florida. Change your name. Take the kids with you, of course. Start them out in a new school down there under new names. This is something you must do. I’ll be in prison for a long time. I want you to make a fresh start for all of us in Florida."

I gave her the names of a couple of people she could trust completely in Chicago and in Miami. They would help her get started in this new life. I would send word to her and the boys through the contacts, and get messages from her.

Her eyes filled with tears, but she didn’t cry and she didn’t ask a lot of questions, either. Giving her that order was the most difficult thing I ever did. But it had to be done, I thought. She had only one question to ask as she sat across the long table in the visiting room, forbidden by the rules to so much as reach across and touch my hand for a goodbye.

When should the boys and I leave for Florida? she wanted to know. I told her right away, the next day, if it was possible. The visit was over, and when I looked back from the door, she was staring at me. I think she was crying, but somehow she put on a smile.

Anyway, after my last hope collapsed in 1942, I decided to throw in on the escape. I was thankful then that Clara and the boys were out of the way, living in obscurity under the name of Turner in the Florida town of Deland.

Once I was over the wall, or killed trying to get there, the publicity would be monstrous, with newspaper headlines the size of boxcars. I didn’t want my wife and kids hounded by the police or the FBI; I wouldn’t be able to see my family, anyway. They would be watched, if the law could, find them. Their mail and telephone would be checked. I would have to avoid them like yellow fever wherever they were—Chicago or Florida or the other side of the world.

After making up my mind to go AWOL, I passed Gene O’Connor in the yard and told him: I’m going with you.

He didn’t seem a bit surprised then, or later, in the kitchen, when he gave me a rundown on the program. He pointed to one of the guard towers and said that was where we would go over the wall. He set the time for one p.m. on October sixth.

The screw up there is the old guy who says he won’t shoot anybody, Gene said. I’ll promise him the day before the break to bring him some meat and groceries. That way he’ll be sure to have his car beside the wall outside, to take home the stuff. We’re using his car.

O’Connor explained exactly what I had to do, and it didn’t sound too tough. But not easy, either. October sixth was three days away, the longest three days I ever lived. I ate and pretended to sleep and acted like I was interested in the radio broadcasts. And all the time the only thing on my mind was how a rifle bullet from one of the guard towers would feel drilling into my back.

Then, with only ten minutes’ notice, O’Connor called everything off for another three days. The new date, October ninth, was the one he had in mind all along. I had jittered for three days for nothing.

I asked him the reason for the fake date and time, and he explained. It had been a pretty clever idea, at that—he had been testing the security of the plan. Suppose somebody had stooled to the warden that the break was coming off on the sixth, he said. The warden would have canceled all days off for the screws, and I would know he was wise. Then I could have nosed around, found out who talked too much, dealt him out of the break and made a scheme to use the guns later in some other way.

Gene could have been a great commanding general or an international spy, if he hadn’t preferred being a thief.

I asked him then for the first time who was going on the break and he told me—Banghart, Eddie Darlak, Martlick Nelson, Ed Stewart and St. Clair McInerney, plus the two of us. Ours were names that were to hit the headlines for nearly three months.

Eddie Darlak was a Chicago man doing 199 years for murder in