In a boxy brick house in a drab West Side Chicago neighborhood. Ethel Alesia was late cleaning up the dinner dishes. As she moved around her kitchen one night last week, she half-listened for steps on the front porch—her brother had promised faithfully to be home by 10:30, a good half-hour before the 11 p.m. curfew of his prison parole. For an instant she thought she heard the steps. Then, unmistakably, she heard another sound she had also been half-listening for: the harsh roar of shotgun fire. She rushed to the front porch, found two men twitching in a gumbo of blood. One was her brother Roger ("The Terrible") Touhy, 61. notorious survivor of Chicago's Prohibition gang wars, who had been paroled just 22 days earlier from Illinois' Stateville Penitentiary; he died* an hour later on a hospital operating table. The other man, critically wounded, was Walter Miller, 62, a retired police sergeant who was Touhy's friend and bodyguard.
A $100 Wreath. In the thunderous heyday of Prohibition gangsterism, Roger the Terrible was the jaunty cockalorum of northwest Cook County. After leasing a few trucks to rumrunners, he abandoned a $50,000-a-year automobile business for bootlegging—and thereupon set in motion a relentless procession of events that led to his death. With a partner, Matt Kolb, he carved out an empire of suburban speakeasies, controlled a big slot-machine franchise, sold 18,000 bottles of illicit beer each week, boasted that he made $1,000,000 a year. He also made enemies: to Al Capone and his henchmen, Touhy was a natural rival and a menace. To Police Captain Daniel ("Tubbo") Gilbert, often called "the richest cop in the world," he was fair game in the Chicago guerrilla war. But Roger got along until Matt Kolb was murdered by Capone bullets (Capone sent a $100 wreath to the funeral). After that, Touhy began to live in heavily armed fear, hired guards to protect his suburban home.
But Touhy was removed from the scene in quite another way. In the summer of 1933, John ("Jake the Barber") Factor, a professional swindler and crony of Capone mobsters, was stopped as he drove away from a roadhouse by seven gunmen in a Duesenberg and two other cars. Twelve days later he reappeared in suburban La Grange, with a luxuriant beard and the story that Touhy and his mob had kidnaped him for $70,000 ransom. Tubbo Gilbert seconded the accusation, led the police investigation (along with the FBI's Melvin Purvis). Thomas J. Courtney, bright young state's attorney (now a Chicago circuit judge), directed the case of The People of the State of Illinois v. Roger Touhy, and won Roger Touhy's undying enmity. Through two long, sensational trials and until his death, Touhy claimed that the kidnap rap was a frame-up by the Capone gang and corrupt officials to put him away permanently. His sentence: 99 years.