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

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