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

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