The Kidnap Years: by David Stout (popular books of all time TXT) 📗

I did my work as long as I had a job assignment. But the thought nagged me constantly that I was innocent, that I had been framed.”191

Yes, he had once profited mightily as a bootlegger, and he was friendly with all kinds of men on the wrong side of the law. He had been a Prohibition-era gangster. But he insisted that what he was not, for all his sins, was a kidnapper.

Touhy’s claim that there had been no kidnapping, that Factor had faked the whole thing and been aided and abetted by Daniel “Tubbo” Gilbert, the mob-friendly investigator for the Cook County (Chicago) prosecutor’s office, would in fact be validated one day, though Touhy had no way of knowing that. Having just turned forty-four, Touhy longed to be reunited with his wife, Clara, and their two sons. He had even urged her to move far away, to cut ties with him and start a new life. But she had stood by him.

In the fall of 1942, Touhy picked up prison scuttlebutt that several long-term convicts were plotting an escape. One of them was Basil “the Owl” Banghart, Touhy’s old associate who had also been found guilty and sentenced to ninety-nine years in the Factor case. Not surprisingly, Touhy wanted to be part of the breakout. After all, with his appeals going nowhere, what did he have to lose?

“This is going to be a high-class break, with no dummies allowed in the group,” one of the plotters assured Touhy.192

A date was settled upon: Friday, October 9, 1942. Though Joliet Prison was thought of as a hard place to do time and a hard place to break out of, Touhy believed the chances of escape were fair to good. He had observed that with able-bodied men away at war or working in defense plants, a lot of the prison guards seemed middle-aged and soft. And some guards were so friendly with the prisoners that they would pay them a few dollars in return for extra food (beef, coffee, bacon, sugar) smuggled out of the prison kitchen and destined for the guards’ homes.

Early in the afternoon of October 9, Touhy rushed out of the prison bakery where he worked and surprised and overpowered the driver of a garbage truck. He was a little rusty behind the wheel, not having driven in eight years or so, but he managed to steer the truck across the prison yard to the mechanical shop, where Banghart worked.

Banghart was armed with one of several handguns that the breakout plotters had managed to have smuggled into the supposedly high-security prison (apparently with the aid of the plotter’s brother). A guard in the mechanical shop was quickly overpowered, and Touhy and Banghart seized two ladder sections. Then they took the guard hostage, along with a lieutenant who supervised the shop and had the bad luck to show up just as the escape was unfolding. Five other prisoners who were in on the plot climbed aboard.

Touhy drove to a watchtower near the main gate. The would-be escapees had trouble fitting the ladder sections together, yet somehow the guards missed the commotion or were afraid to react to it. According to Touhy, the guards did not carry firearms, though there were weapons in the tower.

But as Touhy recalled it, the guards were in no mood to resist once they realized what was happening. “Please don’t take me with you,” one guard pleaded. “I’m an old man.”

In no time, the escapees were on the other side of the wall where Touhy knew a car belonging to one of the guards was parked nearby, ready to be loaded with home-bound food from the prison.*

The escapees crammed into the car and sped off toward Chicago, where they planned to hide out, probably not in a high-rent neighborhood. On the way, they abandoned the guard’s car and procured another with the aid of an outside friend of one convict.

Once in Chicago, Touhy and Banghart found a cheap flat with rats and roaches for company. Two other escapees were cornered by police and killed in a gun battle. Another turned himself in. Perhaps hoping for leniency, he told everything he knew about the fugitives’ plans.

A friend of an escapee had obtained some civilian clothes for Touhy and Banghart, but Touhy still wondered if they looked like the fugitives they were. During the day, he might take in a movie or even go for a walk—anything to pass the time.

Touhy found the taste of freedom bittersweet. He couldn’t contact his wife and sons. No doubt, the police were watching them. And with a war on, there was a larger than usual number of lawmen on the streets, with FBI agents helping the police look for draft dodgers and deserters. Touhy half expected his stay outside to be a short one.

Touhy and Banghart were asleep in the predawn blackness of Tuesday, December 29, 1942, when their apartment was suddenly filled with light from the outside. A voice boomed over a loudspeaker: “This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You are surrounded. You cannot escape. Come out with your hands up—immediately. If you resist, you will be killed.”193

Touhy and Banghart surrendered peacefully. Their short vacations would add 199 years to their original ninety-nine-year terms. The other three remaining fugitives were captured around the same time. In an attempt to insinuate himself into events, Hoover had traveled to Chicago so he could be close to the arrests.

“Nights are the worst time in prison,” Touhy wrote in his book. “Cons yell in their sleep. Some of them weep and call out for their mothers. The sense of shame for the present and remorse for the past rides them constantly.”194

The years crawled by, and Touhy kept insisting he’d been framed in the Factor case. Hardly anyone listened, and no wonder. He had never been a sympathetic figure in the first place—he had been a gangster in the Prohibition years—and he had broken out of prison. And the people in Chicago, like