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

Americans everywhere, were preoccupied with the war in Europe and the Pacific. But things were changing.

In 1947, the Chicago Tribune reported that Daniel “Tubbo” Gilbert’s name was on a Department of Agriculture list of one hundred elected officials “gambling in the wheat market…when inside knowledge of administration market moves would have enabled a speculator in wheat to reap enormous profits.”195

And in 1950, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee brought his Senate committee to Chicago for hearings into organized crime. One of the witnesses was Gilbert. Amazingly, considering the public interest in the subject, he was allowed to give his testimony in private.

Or perhaps it wasn’t amazing. Just cynical. Kefauver was known to have presidential ambitions, and he surely didn’t want to alienate the Chicago Democratic organization.

But in an act of trickery that was a great public service, a Chicago Sun-Times reporter, Ray Brennan (who would later cowrite Roger Touhy’s book), obtained a copy of Gilbert’s testimony from the transcription service by posing as a Senate staff member. The revelation caused a sensation.

In 1950, Gilbert was making $9,000 a year in his investigative post. Remarkably, though, he was worth about $360,000, he told the senators. How to explain a net worth equal to forty years of his salary? Simple, Gilbert said. He was good at gambling and commodities trading. No one believed that Gilbert was that good at poker or bridge or picking horses. But Gilbert’s success in commodities trading was much more plausible, given what the Tribune had uncovered in 1947.

The Kefauver committee concluded that Gilbert’s time in office had been marked by neglect of his official duties and “shocking indifference to violations of the law.”196

In 1950, Gilbert gave up his post of Cook County chief investigator to run for sheriff. But the stink he had given off for his entire career had become too much, even for Chicago voters, after the findings of the Kefauver committee.

Meanwhile, Touhy’s family had hired a private detective who uncovered witnesses who said that John Factor had gone into hiding during the time he was supposedly a kidnapping victim. They recalled him playing cards, drinking liquor, and growing a beard.

Eventually, Touhy’s appeals and other legal maneuvers caught the attention of Federal Judge John P. Barnes of the Northern District of Illinois. He had been put on the bench by President Herbert Hoover, a Republican. Did that make him more receptive than other jurists to delve into mischief by Democratic politicians? Perhaps no one has a right to say. But there seems to be little doubt that he was thorough.

On August 9, 1954, in an opinion that ran to a remarkable 556 pages and 216 pages of notes, Judge Barnes concluded that there had been no kidnapping of Factor, that the whole thing was “a hoax, engineered by Factor to forestall his extradition to England to face prosecution for a confidence game.”197

He found that Touhy’s conviction had been obtained by perjured testimony, with the full knowledge and indeed the connivance of Gilbert and Thomas J. Courtney, then the Cook County prosecutor. The judge found that Gilbert knew that Factor had been hiding out during his supposed kidnapping ordeal and had “suppressed important evidence on this point.”

Prosecutors engaged in numerous shabby tricks “consistent only with a design to bring about the conviction of Touhy at any and all costs,” Barnes wrote. He found that the “sinister motives” of Gilbert “and the political-criminal syndicate” that he was part of lay behind the desire to exile Touhy so that what was left of Al Capone’s old mob could thrive.

Nor did federal investigators and prosecutors, who had claimed they had a strong case against Touhy in the kidnapping of William Hamm, escape criticism. “That Touhy was indicted at all on the Hamm matter is something for which the Department of Justice should answer. They knew it was a very weak case.”

Judge Barnes declared that Touhy should be released at once. He wasn’t, amid a debate over whether he had exhausted all his appeals in Illinois courts before turning to the federal system. The back-and-forth dragged on for five years before Touhy was freed in November 1959, having served twenty-six years for a “kidnapping” that probably never happened.

On the evening of Wednesday, December 16, 1959, three weeks after his release, Touhy and his coauthor, Ray Brennan, discussed their book at the Chicago Press Club. Then Touhy and a friend and bodyguard, a retired police sergeant, drove to see Touhy’s sister. As they were going up the front steps, two men emerged from the darkness. There were five shotgun blasts, and Touhy’s thighs were riddled by the pellets.

Roger Touhy died on an operating table a short time later. He was sixty-one. He had kept company with gangsters for most of his life. Gangsters hold grudges.

By the time he died of a heart attack on July 31, 1970, at the age of eighty, Daniel “Tubbo” Gilbert had richly earned the label of “the world’s richest cop,” as the headline writers had dubbed him.198 He had amassed a fortune that enabled him to live on Chicago’s fashionable Lake Shore Drive; he also spent time in Southern California, where he had “extensive property and contracting interests,” as the Tribune put it.

The funeral mass for Gilbert at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago was attended by Mayor Richard J. Daley, one of the last of the big city political bosses, along with various businessmen and union people and an assortment of political trough feeders and hacks from the good old days. It was as though Gilbert had devoted his life to public service instead of lying down with mobsters, misusing his investigative powers, and using his office to gorge himself financially.

One has to wonder if Gilbert ever felt guilty, ever confessed to a priest that he had committed one of the biggest sins of his life in pointing the finger at Roger Touhy. Did flights of angels take “Tubbo” to his eternal rest? Or did they drop him off in purgatory for some soul cleansing before