The Mafia Encyclopedia (123 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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assistance from Jewish mobsters, had a relative breeze in New York.
Even after Luciano and Lansky succeeded in genuinely organizing crime, they frequently sought out the advice of the then-retired Torrio. (By that time Rothstein had been murdered.)
Born in Italy in 1882 and brought to New York at the age of two, Torrio grew up in the ghetto of the Lower East Side. He was still in his teens when he rose to the positions of subchief in Paul Kelly's huge Five Points Gang, one of the city's two most powerful (the other being the Eastmans), and of head of his own subgang, the James Streeters. Torrio managed in this period to avoid ever being arrested although his reputation as a tough young gangster grew. Known as Terrible Johnny, he took part in a number of gang battles and was adept with fists, boots and knives. As an opponent, he was regarded as cold, cruel and above all calculating. He was extremely short but his natural meanness qualified him as a bouncer at Nigger Mike's on Pell Street, regarded as one of the roughest and wildest joints in Manhattan, where, incidentally, Irving Berlin got his start as a singing waiter.
By 1912 the Bowery was no longer a big-money center, and Torrio shifted his personal interests to a bar and brothel for seamen in an even tougher section near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Now and then he offered strongarm employment to one of his James Street gang, a big, bullying teenage hoodlum named Al Capone.
Torrio felt the rewards of the whoring business were limited; he got into hijacking and narcotics. He expounded on how crime could be made into a big business. Those who listened to him, including Capone started calling him "the Brain."
As early as 1909 Torrio was trekking west to Chicago from time to time to do mob chores for his uncle by marriage, Big Jim Colosimo, the biggest whoremaster in that city. Around 1915, when Torrio was 33, Big Jim offered Torrio a full-time job with him. Torrio turned over most of his Brooklyn racket operations to his partner, Frankie Yale. In Chicago Torrio took over running most of Big Jim's whore joints, everything from such landmarks as the House of All Nations to the low-cost joints on what was known as Bedbug Row. Under Torrio all of these places upped their revenues handsomely.
Late in 1919 Torrio brought Capone out to Chicago, after he was informed Capone was having some troubles concerning a couple of murders. Technically, Capone was to help out in the whorehouses, but actually Torrio wanted Capone as his link for Prohibition and the bootlegging that would follow, knowing the racket would be worth a mint. The only trouble was that Torrio couldn't interest Big Jim in the booze business. He had made the mistake of making Colosimo so rich that he was lazy and couldn't see the need for more money. Torrio understood that Big Jim was a hindrance to his own ambitions and to the operation in general. He resolved that he had to go. By this time Capone was Torrio's number one aide, but he knew neither of them could assassinate Big Jim without coming under immediate suspicion. Frankie Yale came west to handle the job.
Like Arnold Rothstein and Meyer Lansky, Johnny Torrio
was also nicknamed "The Brain." As Al Capone's boss and mentor,
Torrio, like the other two, played a key role in organizing
crime in America.
Once Colosimo was erased, Torrio simply moved in and took over the entire organization. Anybody objecting had to deal with Capone. However, Torrio didn't see himself merely as the head of Big Jim's old empire. He wanted to build a new kind of empire in Chicago, one that brought all the gangs under a single confederation. Each gang would have its own area to milk without any competition. He called all the gangs togetherthe Italian gangs, many of whom were mafioso, the North Side Irish, the South Side Poles,
etc.
He promised them that they'd all make millions and, what was more important, actually live to enjoy their wealth. Torrio did not believe in the veiled threat; the alternative, he
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said softly, was war and he would win that. It was join the new syndicate setup or, sooner or later, die.
The various gang leaders were tough men who'd made it to the top because they could shove better than others, but most of them were persuaded, by Torrio's logic and perhaps as well by his threats. Some of the others, especially among the Irish gangs, said they would join up but didn't. War soon raged, with the tough North Siders headed by the murderous and erratic Dion O'Banion. The Italian Genna gang joined but never stopped double-dealing, continuing to invade other territories with its lower-priced rotgut. The wars that raged often were multisided and marked by double crosses, with henchmen bribed to kill their own leaders.
Several Genna men fell, but O'Banion remained a thorn. Then suddenly O'Banion sent word to Torrio that he wanted to quit the rackets and get out. If he could sell his Seiben Brewery for a half-million dollars, he would be through. Torrio jumped at the offer. It was a cheap price to pay to have O'Banion go away. A week after the deal was finalized and O'Banion got his money, federal agents raided the brewery and confiscated everything. Torrio realized O'Banion had suckered him. He discovered O'Banion had been tipped off that the federal action was in the works and had cunningly let Torrio take the loss.
Torrio stormed about his office, brandishing a gun and screaming he'd have vengeance on the Irish mobster. It was an uncommon reaction from Torrio who seldom let his emotions show. Torrio made good on his threats. Frankie Yale, Colosimo's assassin, was sent for again. Yale and two hoods, Albert Anselmi and John Scalise, murdered O'Banion in the flower shop he ran.
Capone was overjoyed by O'Banion's murder, but Torrio knew it would only produce more gang conflict. O'Banion's gang, now bossed by Hymie Weiss, would fight and the longer it took Torrio to subdue them, the greater the chances other gangs would start revolting. As expected, Weiss and some of his boys tried to ambush Torrio as he was riding in his limousine. The chauffeur and Torrio's dog were shot to death, but Johnny escaped with just two bullet holes in his gray fedora. Torrio had Capone and his gunners out looking for Weiss but Hymie stayed undercover. Then on January 24, 1925, Torrio was ambushed in front of his apartment building. He was cut down with a shotgun blast and then a second gunman pumped four slugs into him. Hit in the chest, arm and stomach, Torrio hovered near death for a week and a half while Capone kept a troop of 30 hoods stationed around the hospital to ward off any further tries at him.
After Torrio recovered, he did a lot of thinking. His dream for a syndicate setup in Chicago was far from realized and any hope for a national syndicate was still far in the future. And there was an excellent chance he'd be killed. He'd survived five years at the top in Chicago gangland, no easy task. He was 43 years old and had $30 million. Torrio's pioneering was done. He told Capone: "It's all yours, Al. I've retired."
Torrio walked away from what was up until then the greatest setup ever established. It was he rather than Capone who had first said, "I own the police force." Now he was going to retire in Brooklyn after lazing around for a year or two in the Mediterranean sun.
The law and the press often expressed doubts that he really retired, but basically he did except for occasionally playing elder statesman. Luciano and the emerging national crime syndicate often sought his advice, as did Capone. Torrio attended the underworld's landmark 1929 Atlantic City Conference, and it is known that his counsel was sought before the decision was voted to hit Dutch Schultz because of his dangerous plan to assassinate prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey. It was said that several Murder, Inc., hits also required his approval. Torrio said it wasn't so at all, that he was a has-been who just wanted to die in bed.
In April 1957 Johnny Torrio sat down in a Brooklyn barbershop chair and suffered a heart attack. He lingered long enough to die in bed. He was 75.
Ironically, a few months later, Albert Anastasia was assassinated in a barber chair in Manhattan. Anastasia had been relaxing with his eyes closed when the assassins struck. Torrio, on the other hand, had not been an assassination victim and hadn't expected to be. But in the barber chair, he had been sitting Chicago-stylewith his eyes wide open and the chair facing the door so that he could see who was coming. Johnny Torrio was the cautious one right to the very end.
Touhy, Roger "Terrible" (18981959): Bootleg kingpin
It has been said by some observers of the syndicate crime scene in America that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover may have done the wise thing to pretend for decades that organized crime and the Mafia did not exist. The case of Roger "Terrible" Touhy demonstrated that the FBI did not fully comprehend the nature of such criminals and that the agency was used and abused by organized crime in framing Touhy.
The FBI may be said to have never understood poor Roger the Terrible. When they went after him in lieu of dozens of other more terrifying gangsters, they picked on a man whom the Chicago Crime Commission never had on its roster of public enemies, and, as a federal judge would later note in a major finding, had never even been associated in any way with a capital offense.
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Yet amazingly, just as Touhy proved a thorn to the FBI, he was equally regarded as a true terror by Al Capone, who regarded Touhy as one of the stumbling blocks to his plans to organize all crime in Chicago.
Roger "Terrible" Touhy was pretty much a creation of sharp public relations, his own. As far as the entire underworld had it figured, the Terrible TouhysRoger, the boss, and his five brotherscontrolled all booze operations in the Chicago suburban area of Des Plaines and had their empire backed with such firepower that they were impregnable.
Press coverage indicated the Touhy Gang to be about the most vicious in the Midwest. Yet Touhy was a middle-class bootlegger, one who employed no more muscle than necessary to convince all the speakeasies and saloons in his area to handle Touhy beer and booze exclusively. Indeed, firepower was less a reason for Touhy's success than his ability to handle the fix as well as any figure in the underworld. Not only was Touhy the master of the fix, but he knew how to supplement cash payoffs with fringe benefits that meant so much. He rewarded the local politicians and police brass with bottled beer brewed especially for them and often bearing their own personal labels.
Perhaps Touhy's reputation as a ferocious gangster was sealed by his lookskinky-haired, beady-eyed, with a hawklike face, clearly a man to be feared. And Touhy knew how to act the part, forcing even Al Capone to back down to him. Touhy had once sold the Capone boys 800 barrels of his superior beer for $37.50 a barrel (his cost of production was $5.50 at most), and Capone then tried to short Touhy with $1,900 in the payoff, claiming that some of the barrels had leaks. (Capone always pressured people that way.) Touhy came back with his regular routine. He assumed his famed hard stare, and said softly, "Don't chisel me, Al." Capone paid the $1,900.
Roger and his five brothers had not started out as criminals. They grew up in respectable circumstances, the sons of a policeman. In the early 1920s, the Touhys went into the trucking business, "strictly legit," at least by Touhys word. Business, however, did not boom until they started filling the trucks with beer. The Terrible Touhys raked in a fortune.
Roger Touhy took control of the Des Plaines area in the northwest section of Cook County. In those days a bootlegger was hardly an unpopular figure, and Touhy found ways to increase the esteem in which he was held. He kept out lowlife criminals and especially clamped down on brothels. Whenever a group of mobsters tried to open a roadside whorehouse, Touhy would relieve the local police of the need to take action. He sent in his own enforcers to wreck the joint. Even when Capone personally noted that Des Plaines was, as he charmingly put it, "virgin territory for whorehouses," Touhy's response was his hard-eyed stare, which convinced Capone to drop his plans.
Whenever rivals made noise about wanting to move in, Touhy would invite them to his headquarters for a visit, where they were greeted by what appeared to be an armed camp, the walls lined with submachine guns. What the visiting hoods didn't know was that the weapons had been made available by cooperative local cops just for a good show. While the gangsters were conferring with Touhy, underlings would come rushing in for weapons, mumbling something about having a great chance to rub out some party. Touhy would nod his head slightly in assent and return to the dialogue as though the matter was of minor importance. When Touhy's visitors left, they were fully convinced they would be the loser in any war with the Terrible Touhys. At various times such Capone gunners as Murray "the Camel" Humphreys and Frank Nitti were so shaken that they reported back that Capone would be facing a terrible bloodletting if he tried to move in.
Still the Capone gang tried to get Touhyeven after Big Al went to prison. Deciding violence was out, they resolved to use another method, helping the law get something on him. Suddenly Touhy found himself in big trouble with the FBI. It is unclear if the Chicago Outfit had anything to do with the first incident, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility. Touhy and several of his henchmen were arrested for the kidnapping of William Hamm Jr. The FBI announced it had a strong case against Touhy, but a jury thought differently, finding him not guilty. Later, the FBI switched the charge to the real culprits, the Barker-Karpis gang. By coincidence Alvin "Creepy" Karpis had long been close to the Capone Gang.
Next the FBI arrested Touhy for the alleged 1933 kidnapping of Jake "the Barber" Factor, an international confidence man with ties to the Capones. This was despite underworld grapevine information that indicated the abduction was a fake masterminded by Factor and the Capones. Special agent Melvin Purvis announced that his arrest of Touhy in the Factor snatch was a landmark in the art of detection. "This case," he said, ''holds a particular interest for me because it represents a triumph of deductive detective work. We assumed from the start, with no material evidence, that the Touhy gang was responsible for the crime."
Touhy's first trial ended in a hung jury. He was convicted the second time around and was sentenced to 99 years. Touhy went to prison screaming frame-up while the Capones swarmed into Des Plaines.
In 1942, Touhy escaped from prison but was recaptured soon and saddled with an additional sentence of

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